Agencies Teams Up to Help Refugee Children in Chad
Christian Children’s Fund (CCF), in cooperation with Medecins Sans Frontieres-Belgium (MSF), is running Child Centered Spaces in two refugee camps in Northeastern Chad
Christian Children’s Fund (CCF), in cooperation with Medecins Sans Frontieres-Belgium (MSF), is running Child Centered Spaces in two refugee camps in Northeastern Chad adjacent to MSF feeding centers to provide solace for refugee children.
The Child Centered Spaces, CCF reports, are located in the Touloum and Iridimi Refugee Camps and provide refugee children with a place where they can play and participate in structured activities while they wait for their daily therapeutic feedings at the MSF clinics for the most severely malnourished of the refugee children and their siblings. The centers, which are part of the psychosocial healing process for children, also give an opportunity for Sudanese children to tell their stories, revealing the atrocities that have made them flee their homes for refugee camps in Chad. Through that, CCF provides psychosocial interventions to help them heal from those experiences.
According to Davidson Jonah, team leader for CCF’s emergency response team, “Without the CCF Child Centered Spaces, these children have nothing to do, while they wait between therapeutic feedings. Now they can play, engage in structured activities and begin healing from the psychological and emotional wounds of war.”
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In addition to the Child Centered Spaces in Touloum and Iridimi refugee camps, CCF has opened two new centers in the villages of Iriba and Guerada located next-door to the refugee camps. Jonah reports that it is a first-time effort to provide children in the Chadian villages with an outlet for structured activities to help ease the growing tensions between the refugee camps and nearby villages.
CCF is planning additional programs in Chad refugee camps for youth and women including skills training for girls ages 11-18 and income generation activities and training for women who currently have no source of income.
