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Children's World
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Children's World |
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Children of the TsunamiChildren's World September TourThis is the text of a letter that is being sent to people, organisations and businesses interested in helping those in need. Please regard it as being personally addressed to you!CHILDREN'S WORLD INTERNATIONAL IS PLANNING TO TAKE A PERFORMANCE, WORKSHOP & PLAY TOUR TO VISIT SOUTH EAST ASIA IN SEPTEMBER 2005, TO WORK WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE TSUNAMI. WE DO HOPE THAT YOU CAN HELP US! Children's World International (Registered Charity number 1079546) is currently setting up a Performance, Workshop and Play Tour to visit South East Asia for 4 months later this year, to work with children who have suffered from the Tsunami. Sri LankaThis first Tour (which will hopefully be closely followed by another 4-month Tour, to Sumatra in February-May 2006, and hopefully more tours thereafter) will visit Sri Lanka, where more than 31,000 have died, where more than 500,000 are still homeless, and where many children have been traumatised or left as orphans.There will be 2 full-time Children's World International Team Leaders on the first 4-month Sri Lankan Tour, assisted by at least 2 CWI volunteers at all times. All personnel, including volunteers will be performers, playleaders and/or experienced workshop leaders (all of whom will, of course, have been police-checked). The Team will be able to go into schools or any place where children can be gathered (orphanages, already existing playschemes, programmes run by other charities, camps, village and town centres, etc.) and run clowning, juggling, mime and acrobatic performances, circus skills workshops ( enabling children to make their own juggling bean bags and learn to juggle, stilt-walk, throw diabolos, manipulate devilsticks, spin plates, balloon model, etc.) and run a variety of large-scale co-operative games using parachutes, etc. We plan to take extra equipment (badge machines and badge components, facepaints, large play parachutes, etc.) so that we can train up local workers and volunteers in their use and leave them with equipment - so that the fun can continue long after Children's World International has left. Children's World InternationalChildren's World International was set up in 1999 as the Sister Charity of the Children's World Charity (Registered Charity 282743, founded in 1981 by Arabella Churchill, grand-daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, which runs more than 12,000 child-sessions of varied workshops each year, providing educational, creative and social benefits for children at schools and special schools in the South West of England.)We set Children's World International up in 1999 as we wished to take performance, workshops and games to the children of Kosovo after the war. A very successful Kosovan and Albanian Tour was run by Children's World International in the autumn of 1999, providing performances for more than 5,000 children, circus skills, facepainting and badge-making workshops for more than 2,000 and large-scale co-operative games sessions for more than 3,000. Our credentialsBoth Children's World and Children's World International have a strong management team and a good track-record of high quality work, and we are confident that, as long as funds are forthcoming, we will be able to undertake the proposed tour, and undertake it well, to the benefit of very large numbers of children.I enclose the approximate budget for the first 4 month tour to Sri Lanka, which totals £18,000. We already have £7,200 of this in hand and wonder if we can encourage you (...) to donate or grant-aid us some of the remainder, so that large numbers of children and families can have a smile put back on their faces and start to see some hope for the future. I enclose some notes that will give you background information about the whole project. If you have any queries or questions, do please ring me on 01458 832925 - if you think you might be able to help us get this innovative and exciting Tour on its way, I would be delighted to come and meet you to discuss the whole Project in more detail. Frivolous?"Fun" and "Play" may seem frivolous in the face of the devastation that the children of South East Asia have suffered, but we strongly believe that "fun" and creative play are powerful tools in recreating confidence and in inspiring hope for the future, and we feel they are much needed after traumatic events, when children and families are trying to pull their lives together again. Many of the parents and grandparents we met in Kosovo would come up to us at the end of a session, with tears in their eyes, saying, "Thank you, thank you, I never thought I would see my child smile and laugh again!" We do so hope you can help us help the chldren of Sri Lanka.With best wishes, and with fingers crossed, Yours sincerely, Arabella Churchill, Director. APPROXIMATE BUDGETCHILDREN'S WORLD INTERNATIONAL'SPERFORMANCE, WORKSHOP & PLAY TOURTO SRI LANKASEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2005
* This sum of £2,000 assumes 4 return flights - 4 volunteers coming out, 2 for the first 2 months and 2 for the second 2 months, thus making a team of 4 at all times. If sufficient funds are raised, we would prefer to have 4 volunteers joining the 2 main workers at all times, so this sum would double, and the living costs sum could double. (We are currently estimating the living costs @ £100 per week per person - but we believe it will actually probably be considerably less than that, especially if we can find a house to rent as a base and the team can do their own cooking most of the time.) We will be investigating whether Sri Lankan Airlines (??) might give us reduced-cost flights as we will be undertaking humanitarian aid work. It is also quite probable that we will find volunteer performers and workshop leaders who will manage to raise the money for their own flights and living costs, from family or friends or by staging fund-raising benefit concerts. + This sum is to purchase quite a large quantity of badge machines, badge components, facepaints and parachutes, so that not only can we use this equipment with the children, but we can also train up local workers and volunteers in using them, and train them in large scale games, and leave equipment with them so that the fun can continue long after Children's World International has left. (The Director of Children's World, Arabella Churchill, is donating her time setting up the trip free of charge, so that there are no admin costs for the present at least.) BACKGROUND NOTESON CHILDREN'S WORLDAND CHILDREN'S WORLD INTERNATIONALTHAT WILL EXPLAIN THE PROPOSED PROJECT FURTHEROur originsChildren's World International was set up in 1999 as the Sister Charity of the Children's World Charity (Registered Charity 282743, founded in 1981 by Arabella Churchill, grand-daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, which runs a wide range of workshops providing educational, creative and social benefits for children at schools and special schools in the South West of England. Please see our website atChildren's World undertakes more than 12,000 child-sessions of workshops (drama, music, video and creative play workshops in special schools and many workshops in mainstream schools under the PSHE banner, addressing bullying, peer pressure, transition, problem-solving, inclusion, integration, etc.) in Somerset and (what was) Avon. KosovoWhen the war in Kosovo took place in 1999 we were very touched by how much distress and suffering the children were going through, and we wanted to take some of our workshops, performances and play facilities to them once the war was over. The Children's World Charity's charitable remit does not include work overseas, so we set up a Sister Charity, Children's World International, to undertake the Tour.We managed to raise approximately £14,000 from friends and family and by running fund-raising events, and during September and October 1999 we visited Kosova and Albania, providing performances for about 5,000 children, circus skills, face-painting and badge-making workshops for about 2,000 and large games sessions for more than 3,000. It was a difficult trip - our living conditions were often extremely basic and overcrowded, and some of the stories we heard were heart-rending. Most of the children we worked with were very poor and needy, and many were extremely traumatised by the experiences they had been through. But the Tour was a great success - under the auspices of War Child Holland, Balkan Sunflowers and Save the Children we undertook work with a very large number of children, and brought smiles to the faces of many children and families who had not smiled for a long time. Our teamThe members of Children's World who had undertaken the Kosovan and Albanian Tour returned to England and to Children's World's special needs and mainstream workshops in the West Country, but one of the team members, The Clown (aka "Devilstick The Clown", a juggler and great devilstick manipulator, clown and story-teller) had caught the "bug" and returned to the Balkans several times in the following years to work with large groups of children in Mines and Weapons programmes which toured schools and in other projects. In 2004 he spent 5 months with Circus to Iraq, running performances, games and workshops in Baghdad.Since the Kosovan and Albanian Tour, Children's World International has been largely dormant, save for running occasional integrational cross-community workshops with schools and special schools in Northern Ireland under the auspices of Contact A Family. All our funding efforts have had to go into maintaining Children's World's schools and special schools work in the South West of England. The present tourThe Clown (Devilstick The Clown) came to see Arabella in the autumn of 2004 and said he would like to do more work under the auspices of Children's World International if possible, anywhere where children were having a rough time. It had long been a dream of Arabella's that Children's World should undertake work in Africa in areas of need, and especially where children were suffering in one way or another from the Aids epidemic. We therefore started contacting people and organisations including Save the Children.Then on Boxing Day the Tsunami struck, and, as the days progressed, it became obvious that there had been a really monumental loss of life and that there was, and was going to continue to be for some considerable time, immense suffering. We thought particularly of the children who would be suffering in so many different ways. We immediately decided that we wished to take a Performance, Workshop and Play Tour to South East Asia, once the immediate chaos was over and we would not be "in the way". Our plansAs long as we can raise the £18,000 we need to undertake the first tour (£7,200 of which is already raised), we intend to visit Sri Lanka in a first 4-month tour from September to December 2005. We would like to continue fundraising and, if possible, take a second 4-month Tour to Sumatra from February to May 2006. We are currently in discussions with Save the Children and are hopeful that we can work with groups of children that Save the Children are already caring for, as a starting point before we make more contacts with other groups on the ground.We are confident that we can run this Tour extremely well, and believe that it is an extremely cost-effective way of giving a great deal of much-needed fun and pleasure to very large numbers of children, who desperately need to smile again and see hope for the future. Many of the performances will be for children and their families, as we found this was extremely beneficial in Kosovo - having the chance to laugh together, as a family, is a very important part of regaining a more normal life. In orphanages and other places where children may have lost their parents we intend to run longer workshops and work more closely with the children, giving them interests and circus skills that will entertain them and their friends. Save the Children and Children's WorldWe are hoping to meet with Save the Children shortly, and hope to work in conjunction with them in Sri Lanka, as it is far easier to work with large numbers of children when they are already part of a group, and we are very keen to work with them and other charities on the ground in Sri Lanka, and also hopefully later in Sumatra. (We achieved far more in Kosovo when we went to the Areas of Safety run by Save the Children, as a leader the children already knew could organise them into different groups for the different activities, and explain clearly what was going on. For times when we are not working directly with another charity on the ground, we have included some expenses for the costs of hiring someone who can translate for us.)We already have £7,200 in hand - £5,000 being donated by the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, and £2,200 being raised by ourselves - so we only need to raise a further £10,800 to make the trip possible. (We are very hopeful that once the work on the ground is actually happening, and there are lots of photographs and details on our website, that people will really see how beneficial this project is, and that raising monies for future trips will become comparatively easy.) We have our Chief Team Leader, The Clown , ready to leave in September, and we think we have found a very suitable female performer/w,orkshop leader to be the second full-time member of the team. Under another "hat" Children's World and Children's World International's Director, Arabella Churchill, runs the Theatre and Circus Fields at the Glastonbury Festival and we expect to arouse a great deal of interest and support for the project among the 1,000 performers booked for the Festival this June, both in terms of financial support and in terms of finding really good volunteers to join the project (many of whom may well pay their own flights and expenses). That's where we are at the moment. All this will be going up on our website shortly (go to Cheap and excitingWe do so hope that you are interested in this small-scale, relatively cheap but very exciting project, which we believe will give enormous fun and benefit to very large numbers of needy and traumatised children. (More than 31,000 have died in Sri Lanka, more than 500,000 are still homeless, and there are many, many children who are either traumatised or who have lost their parents - there is a real need for the sort of unique help we can give, unusual though it may be.) If there are any questions or queries you have, or if you feel able to help us in any way, do please telephone Arabella on 01458 832925.Donations may be sent by cheque, made out to Children's World International, to 2 St. Edmund's Cottages, Bovetown, Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE. |
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