The Seminar on Education in Emergency Situations and Humanitarian Responses – which took place from October 30 to November 3, 2019, in the Light-Community of Figueira – was an event that gathered together educators, people and institutions, in order to create a space for raising awareness, exchanging, training, and the construction of proposals for humanitarian action in the field of education.
Various round tables, conferences, workshops, and discussion groups contributed to the training of the participants, including those who are already active in humanitarian response. Agroecology and agroforestry, arts, earth paint, body expression, non-violent communication, and emergency psychology were some of the various topics covered in a theoretical and practical way.
We wish to emphasize the richness of the discussion groups, where the participants reflected on and went through a simulation of real situations inspired by the experiences of missionary groups of the Fraternidade – International Humanitarian Missions or by the team of Emergency Education in different parts of the world such as Colombia, Brazil, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Turkey.
Besides that, they were invited to develop an intervention project in the educational field as a proposal for application in a humanitarian mission: a stimulus for seeking solutions and making challenges into opportunities for breakthrough.
“What would you do in the face of a situation in which it is necessary to take care of children and adolescents, members of dozens of Mozambique families that have lost all their belongings and homes during a hurricane, and who today are living in a gymnasium improvised as a shelter? The school of the neighborhood is destroyed and there is no provisions for the classes to return.
And what would you do if you had to develop a task for taking care of Syrian children and adolescents with post-traumatic symptoms from the war, in a small room of an NGO in the Turkish capital, Ankara?”
These and other situations of acute vulnerability and humanitarian crises were the focus of the reflections developed, that brought about 15 projects full of creativity, presented at the end of the event.
This experience generated very rich material for anyone interested, is active in or wishes to be active in the field of teaching and education concerning the emergencies that the planet and humanity have gone through.
Material for study, reflection, and raising awareness, available for download in PDF, has been put together with the intention of easing the suffering generated by natural catastrophes or by humankind itself.
The seminar was done by the Fraternidade – International Humanitarian Federation, through its affiliate Fraternidade Missions FIHMin partnership with the Brazilian team of Emergency Education.
There is still much to be done. The more we unite, the more we will manage to contribute to easing the suffering of people in immigration and humanitarian crises, for as was said by Reinaldo Nascimento – representative of Emergency Education in Brazil and speaker at the seminar – “…the world is just one and it is for the whole world.”
Download the material in PDF, share it… And tell us about your experience!
