Afterschool Program for Children at Risk

The fourth school year has started, during which our project will continue to provide educational support to children at risk. During the summer months we were happy to have face-to-face classes with our students again, after another lockdown. We are currently preparing individual plans to support the children and young people included in our program. Some of them, along with their desire to improve their language skills in Bulgarian, want to learn English. They are especially enthusiastic after the first meetings with our new volunteer from India. The children in our program are becoming more and more curious about other cultures. The creative workshops we do periodically bring together children from Bulgaria, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran. In this way, children are motivated to learn languages and be tolerant of each other. During the summer months, for a second year in a row, the children learned how to ride horses and take care of them as well as curious details about these animals.

After five months of online lessons in the beginning of May we started our face-to-face activities again. Prolonged restrictions due to COVID have negatively affected the motivation of children to study and participate in educational activities. At the same time, they are willing to discuss topics related to emotions, thoughts and feelings, social roles, the right to choose and rights. Therefore, together with our on-going educational program, we offered the children several Self-awareness Workshops. We created a package of materials for different topics like 1) What I like to do in my free time 2) I am happy when I stay with.... 3) The five most important things for me are.... Besides the direct work with Bulgarian children, we also worked on several requests to help refugee children who had had difficulties to deal with some administrative procedures. In order to guarantee their right to access to education and to support their integration, we helped them to resolve various type of problems. The assistance we have provided to refugee children in recent months includes help with school enrollment, referral to legal aid and the preparation of a social report for an unaccompanied child at risk. We also drafted an opinion in defense of an asylum-seeking girl at risk of forced marriage.