January 2022 – Aid for refugees in Austria concluded

After a long, utterly exhausting, and life-threatening escape from their home in Syria, a family with five children finally reached save grounds in Austria. The family had lost their house and all of their wealth in the war. Together with other refugees the family was initially received in an emergency shelter in a village close to Eisenstadt. The aid organisation Burgenland covered their care. Furthermore, several of the villagers offered voluntary services and care, such as educational help and language courses. The essentials were quickly organized for the families. The network of helpers, which was established at that time is still very active today. Since then, the family was officially accepted by the town and a house was rented to them. This way it is now possible for the family to build new roots in safety and start to work on processing the trauma of their escape.

When Anna and Gertraud got to know the children at a birthday party, they were moved by their story and decided straight away to offer the support of Moving Child. Since then, Moving Child has supported the children continuously by enabling special language tutoring and training. Since 2016, Moving Child has been helping the small family by financing afternoon care, helping them find apprenticeships, and various small educational offers. In the meantime, the family has settled in and developed in such a way that no further support is necessary.

It is very impressive to see how, within a few years, this family has proactively and successfully found their way into a new every day and professional life. Both parents are now working. While the father works in a bakery, the mother is employed as a cleaner in the nearby hospital. The independence that comes with working gives both of them a lot of pleasure and allows them to make many new and supporting contacts. The oldest son in the family has already completed his apprenticeship as a car mechanic and continues to work in his training company with great pleasure. The second oldest son has also completed his training as a dental technician and is now moving to Bregenz to continue working as a dental technician, which he really enjoys. The middle daughter successfully passed the Abitur in the summer of 2021! Subsequently, she started studying chemistry at the University of Graz. But since her deepest wish is to become a doctor one day, she will apply for a place in a medicine program in the coming year. Her younger sister is still in middle school but would like to attend vocational school soon and train as a kindergarten teacher. The youngest son of the family is now also in the second grade of high school but would prefer only to play soccer all the time. And he has great talent! Who knows, maybe he’ll go to a soccer academy after graduating from high school? One thing is certain, the family has gained a foothold! The parents are happy to continue living in the village with their two youngest children and are often visited by the grown-ups. We are touched and moved to have been part of this development in recent years. We wish the family good luck and the children much joy in shaping their lives independently.

2021 end of term report: A delightful review

The year is drawing to a close, candles and colored lights illuminate the windows, and it’s time to reflect on the past year. The corona pandemic still had the world under control and although great progress was made in many places, there were projects whose work was made very difficult or even impossible this year. Nevertheless, we are happy to report that most of the projects that we supported have still managed to implement their work in a motivated and successful manner. We can also proudly report that Moving Child is supporting seven new funding projects in 2021, just like last year.

In this end of term report we would like to briefly report how the situation in our various funding projects has developed and give a little insight into our work.

In Munich

  • The Netzwerk Geburt und Familie e.V. (Network Birth and Family Association) was, at least in small groups, able to resume its physical activities for long-term unemployed women and to carry these out continuously during the year.
  • The planned dance theatre presentation by the association mitSprache e.V. could unfortunately not take place due to the pandemic restrictions during the rehearsals, but plans for next year’s presentation are already in the making.
  • In the international Montessori school Campus di Monaco, more than 90% of the students in the 10th grade were able to successfully achieve the intermediate level of education despite the additional challenges.
  • The Child-Life-Specialist program of the Care-for-Rare Foundation, which focuses on providing psychological and social care for inpatient children with rare diseases, could continue to be implemented this year despite considerable difficulties in view of the corona pandemic.
  • The work of the Stiftung Ambulantes Kinderhospiz München (Munich Ambulatory Children’s Hospice Foundation) was also able to be carried out with restrictions this year. Their Crisis Intervention Service (RUF24) in particular was contacted a lot during this difficult year.
  • This year Moving Child also started supporting the Initiative krebskranke Kinder München e.V. (Initiative for Children with Cancer in Munich), whose aim it is to help cancer-stricken children and their families with a wide range of offers – during the acute illness but also in the following years.
  • Since the beginning of this year, we have also been supporting the AETAS Children’s Foundation, which offers professional child crisis intervention and cares for children and young people after a traumatic event.
  • Furthermore, we have included the Bildungs- und Kulturverein e.V. (Munich-based Education and Culture Association) in our funding scheme, which very successfully offers free soccer training with an integrative approach for girls with and without a migration background.

In Berlin

  • The Quinoa Bildung gGmbH, a private school in Berlin-Wedding, was able to carry out its work successfully this year. The school operates with the important aim that all young people in Germany, regardless of their social and cultural origin, should have the chance to successfully graduate from school. The project “integrative learning therapy”, funded by Moving Child, was able do initial evaluations and create individual support plans for a number of pupils.
  • In spite of the restrictions this year the association against sexualised violence, Wildwasser e.V., was able to go on a summer trip with the girls in their care.
  • Moving Child supported two projects of the association Save the Children Germany this year: 1) “Save back to School” in Yemen; where the prolonged state of war, Corona, as well as the destruction of many schools lead to the permanent drop-out of school and educational training of many children. “Safe back to School” establishes contact with the children, distributes learning materials, and supports the children’s return to school. 2) “Corona Help in India” takes care of the urgently needed medical and social care for the children in India. Children were particularly affected by the consequences of the extremely high number of infections in May and June 2021 in India. Many children were orphaned and contact persons were afraid to visit or care for them.

Furthermore, in Germany

  • Unfortunately, the Migration Bildung Kinder e.V. (Migration Education Children Association) in Freising was not able to offer all of their German language courses during the lockdown, as the technical requirements for online participation could often not be met. However, as far as possible, the program was maintained throughout the year.
  • The Frauen Gesundheit Familie Zukunft e.V. (Women Health Family Future Association) in Neunkirchen-Seelscheid had similar problems. Due to the corona pandemic and the restrictions derived from it, only a few consultations could take place this year.
  • An exciting new project from Moving Child is the Paulihof – Kinderhilfe gGmbH (Paulihof – Child Aid) in Kühbach. The Paulihof is an educational-therapeutic living group for traumatized children, which has its approach in animal-assisted education through which it promotes physical, emotional, and social development in the children and animals.

Our foreign funding

  • Globally, Moving Child continued to support two international schools. The Kiettisack school in Luang Prabang (Laos) and the Kajonkietsuka school in Phuket (Thailand). Both schools were subject to months of lock-down due to Corona. This year, Moving Child designed a questionnaire to improve communication with the parents of the supported children, which is intended to closely follow the development of the children. The first results of the questionnaire were very gratifying. All six supported children were successful in school, satisfied with the lessons, and were looking forward to the next school year.
  • The small, local Phoukoun school in Luang Prabang (Laos) organized a fundraising event in April 2021. As part of this event, income was generated for the procurement of school uniforms and materials, bicycles, and food for the pupils.
  • At the Laos Friends Hospital for Children in Luang Prabang (Laos) the work was largely continued as normal. The training program for Laotian doctors, financed by Moving Child since the end of 2019, continued well despite the Corona situation. Many teaching units were carried out online and the results of the first learning evaluations were very satisfactory. The continuation of the project seems very promising in view of the positive training results and increased autonomy of the Laotian doctors in the children’s and neonatal ward.
  • The situation in the Annapurna children’s home in Nepal, organized by Hands with Hands e.V., was still difficult this year due to the ongoing wave of corona infections. All of the children in the home were infected with the coronavirus this year, but luckily, they all recovered from it. All educational programs took place online for months. This was a great challenge; not only for the 40 children in the home, but also for the teachers. Despite the months-long lockdown, construction work on the new earthquake-proof Annapurna children’s home was progressing well. The situation in Nepal was exacerbated by a strong monsoon this year.

This year, Moving Child became operatively active on a larger scale. “Feldenkrais in Schools” is a project directly initiated by Moving Child. The project is mainly inspired by and in collaboration with an Israeli project that Moving Child has supported financially for several years. The project in Israel is led by Dr Eilat Almagor (Feldenkrais teacher and neuroscientist) and has been successfully implemented there since 2015. The Feldenkrais method, named after its founder, the physicist Dr Moshé Feldenkrais, is a body-oriented learning method that helps people learn to perceive themselves more consciously. The physical access of Feldenkrais can contribute to professional and social learning. Through the mostly unfamiliar movements, children learn to perceive themselves better and to find alternatives to their usual behaviour, independently and in their own rhythm. Our idea is to realize Feldenkrais’ original vision of integration and to incorporate features of organic learning into school-based learning. Under the pandemic conditions, the start of the project was delayed, but Moving Child is happy to still have found motivated, competent, and enthusiastic Feldenkrais teachers.

About the internal Moving Child developments, it can be reported that managing director Dr Ella Lattenkamp received the official foundation manager certification from the German Foundation Academy (DAS) in April of this year. The addressed topics were e.g., foundation law and tax law, accounting and balancing, investment, and general foundation management. This year, Moving Child implemented many of the suggestions from the course in a motivated and committed manner. An investment strategy was developed, a mission statement was drawn up, and guidelines for the management were stipulated. In addition, there is now an informative catalogue of funding criteria on our website and our application forms have been structured in a more impact-oriented manner and expanded to include the topic of project sustainability.

It was an exciting and eventful year, and we are grateful to be in contact with such amazing people and projects. We are very pleased to be able to contribute to the exciting work of our funded projects and thank all projects for the wonderful cooperation this year. Of course, we would also like to extend our thanks to all donors for their trust and support!

We wish you all a good and healthy start into the new year!

Sincerly, your Moving Child Team

Anna, Gertraud and Ella

September 2021 – Developments in Nepal

Hands With Hands is an association of international and Nepalese friends who work on a voluntary basis on the vision of solidarity with one another. They support Nepalese people and organizations and initiate and finance projects that promote empowerment of the local people and communities. The self-sustaining Annapurna children’s home in Pokhara is the association’s main project at the moment. Read more about the idea and orgins of the project in our blog post from last year.

The situation in Nepal and in the Annapurna children’s home continues to be difficult in the persistent corona situation. The children at the home all caught the corona virus, but thankfully also all recovered from it. In the end Sharada, who had cared for weeks for the sick children, fell ill as well. It was a long infection and she recovered only slowly over 6 weeks. Mercifully, the children and Sharada are now back on their feet. The vaccine rollout in Nepal is very slow. This is partly due to widespread misinformation, which generates scepticism in the population, and also due to the low availability as Nepal received only small supply of surplus vaccine units from America and China via the limited COVAX system.

For months all education has been online. This has been a huge challenge not only for the 40 children at the home, who have to try to continue to keep their studies up under such difficult circumstances, but also for the teachers. Hands with hands has offered teacher training to help the teachers to understand and use the available online tools and forums. While this works with a lot of discipline and effort in the Annapurna children’s home, especially the very poor children in Nepal were not able to attend online classes for months. This lack of education will have dramatic long-term effects for the population. Girls in particular are unlikely to return to school, once it would be possible again. Hands with Hands is planning to generate incentives for the children, especially for girls, to go back to school when the schools reopen (which is not likely to be before April 2022). Small scholarships, school uniforms, materials, and books could be offered to motivate a return to school.

Despite the month-long lock-down the construction on the new earthquake-safe Annapurna children’s home is progressing and the work is now already working on the roof of the second story. However, the 2nd Delta wave is starting to hit Nepal and it is not possible to predict how the expected new lock-down will affect the construction. Hands with Hands hopes that the construction work will be able to continue throughout the lock-down, but that depends on if the building materials can be acquired before the lock-down.

The situation in Nepal is further aggravated by an extremely strong monsoon this year. Luckily the children’s home was not affected too badly by the monsoon, but a school (in the East of Nepal, Sindhupalchock district) was hit very hard by the flooding. Hands with Hands supports this school as well and it was sad to see that a river, which was re-routed by the drastic increase in volume, took out part of the school (6 classrooms!). The courageous efforts of the locals, who build a wall to re-route the water (while standing in the river themselves!), saved the rest of the school. Reconstruction of the school will need efforts and resources in the next couple of months and the monsoon is still scheduled to continue for a couple of weeks.

Despite the dramatic situation, the mood of the people is surprisingly undaunted. Nepal has been hit with such disastrous events, especially in the past 10 years, that the people adopted an accepting good attitude and in the face of catastrophe maintain an optimistic view of the future. And indeed, at least the harvest in the Annapurna children’s home was good this year. The food for the children is secured and 5 new children were taken in care this year. Excess food was given to the poorest in the community. Food care packages were prepared to help especially mothers with young children.

Hands with hands needs donations in order to continue their important and incredible work in Nepal. The donations are needed mainly to acquire building materials for the new children’s home, but also to rebuild the destroyed school and continue to support extremely poor families with food.