Dans nos obscurités allume un feu

Great news!!

On Monday, wonderful children arrived to Rhmeileh and we started our core work at the Fratelli Association’s socio-educational summer school there, which we enjoy a lot. Already after three days, we have beautiful stories to share!
And yesterday, five angels came to visit us and we managed to fix a lot of meetings with youth groups for the upcoming weeks! Our previous worries of not managing to contact youth groups and communities well enough vanished within one evening.
We are extremely happy and thankful about both of these developments. But today, we want to share our experiences of the three first days we spent with refugee children at the Fratelli project.

Fra, fra, Fratelli!

Welcome to the international team that supports the brothers to welcome refugee children!

About 450 children come to the Fratelli center every day.

The brothers, teachers, and volunteers that collaborate within the Fratelli Association welcomed around 450 children from Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon on Monday. Divided into a morning and an afternoon group (we are there only in the mornings), these children are going to spend every day at the old school in Rhmeileh that three brothers from Spain and Mexico rebuilt with great effort after its destruction during the war. So, on Monday, we travelled to Rhmeileh very curiously about whom we were going to meet. And we met wonderful little people! During the last days, we have been able to get first impressions about them, and will now share some of them with you.

Apart from two general gatherings every morning, the children spend most of their time in groups of around 20, according their age. In a first block, they speak about a different value each day before different workshops and activities take place in the second block. Together with a teacher, Florian and Jonathan take care of a group of mostly 9 year-old children (the "lion" group). Friedemann helps in a group of 11 to 14 year-old adolescents (the "leaders" group) with another volunteer from Burkina Faso and a teacher. We enjoy the different activities a lot. There is always a lot of music and dance, we laugh a lot, and the atmosphere is very positive in general. It is beautiful to see that so many people try to organise a beautiful time for these very special children. And we are so thankful that they became our friends within such a short time, and although often not understanding anything we say to them.

Preparations in a classroom.

Gathering of the different groups in the morning.
Out of respect for personal rights, we do not show you children's faces.

At the beginning of the day, we speak about values. Here, the oldest group repeats the general rules for our common life that we have agreed on the day before: Let us eat well and not play with the food that others have prepared for us with their time and love, ...

... hitting hurts - let us try to love each other, ...

... we do not tear each other's hair out, and many other ...

How should a good leader be? This is what the children said.

During general assemblies, there is a lot of music and dance. Here, a Mexican volunteer and a Mexican brother are presenting a traditional dance.

Especially for the small, the animations during assemblies with all the other groups are very exciting!

Sharing about the first day's experiences.

We noticed great differences between the children’s way of being. Some children seem very stable while others are very sensitive. Most children seem healthy and relaxed, others definitely don’t.
It is quite hard for us to discern to which extend these differences are similar to differences in every group of children you can find in the world (everywhere, there are more and less stable or sensitive children; in every group, children do cry from time to time), and how much of these are due to the fact that many of the children we encounter here have experienced highly traumatic events. Because we don’t speak about private issues such as children's personal histories, their families or their experiences of war and of fleeing from their homes (the only biographical information we have are probably their ages and their nationalities), we cannot easily understand whether a worry or a sadness they might have is connected to their experiences of war and migration or not. So we want and need to be careful overinterpreting certain feelings we see.
Nevertheless, we see shocking things that we cannot misunderstand: Several children have scars and others’ faces seem marked by something (in a way that is not easy to describe). But what we realise most is that some children’s eyes seem empty (or: full of something they need to concentrate on so intensely that they cannot interact with the others in the here and now). We do not want to be dramatic: Most of the children seem ok (from outside). But every single little soul that suffers, and we are sure to have seen more than one, is definitely one too much.

Hope

In this context of suffering, we want to share two moments of hope with you:
Florian and Jonathan have one such girl with seemingly empty eyes in their group. For the whole time, she did neither participate, nor did her face express any kind of reaction. It seemed there was a wall between her world an ours, and that we would not manage to overcome it. But at one moment, during a break, a little boy was crying in the courtyard. Volunteers and teachers had tried to comfort him, but he was still troubled by something. When the girl we spoke about earlier saw this boy, her face suddenly seemed to defreeze. She approached him, comforted him, gave him a little kiss on his cheek, and managed to calm him down. We don’t know if she had known the boy before, whether or not she is maybe his sister. But maybe this is not important. What impressed us was that, obviously dealing with a horrifying experience herself that disabled any contact with other children and the caretakers, she was able to see the suffering of another person, and consoled him.
On Monday, a boy in Friedemann’s group was very sad for the entire day. When he was asked to present himself in front of the group, his crying became still stronger and he seemed very desperate. The (great!) teacher went outside with him to speak with him, and he came back, a bit settled but still seeming helpless. When this boy did not appear on Tuesday, we were very worried about him and became sad because we had the impression of not having been able to help him in his trouble. We were sure there had been experiences in his life that we didn't know about and that had taken away self-confidence and joy from him. He seemed afraid about everything. But to our surprise, he returned on Wednesday. And then the group discovered something: He is an estonishingly talented dancer! This very boy danced in front of us like as if he'd never done anything else, and it looked so beautiful! So, when this same boy who had been so desperate in the beginning of the week was suddenly in the middle of everyone’s attention, when he danced, when he led the group, when everyone cheered him, when fear and despair had disappeared from his eyes, and when he visibly enjoyed it, everything that remained was hope.