A helping hand to children in Gaza
1,000 children in the Gaza Strip are at risk of losing trauma follow-up and day care facilities. Join Quaker Service Norway in ensuring their days are filled with play, learning and security.
The people of the Gaza Strip are once again, for a short time, living with the eyes of the world on them. Their desperate situation deserves an effort from us all, both in a short-term and long-term.
For 28 years, Quaker Service Norway (QSN) has supported the Palestinian Early Childhood Education Program (PECEP), which runs twelve kindergartens for 4- and 5-year-olds in the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. More than 1,000 children attend the kindergartens, and the kindergartens provide work for more than 70 people, primarily women. As part of everyday kindergarten life, the children have also received follow-up trauma treatment from skilled professionals in the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, who also provide training for staff and parents in helping to strengthen mental health.
But this year, the Norwegian Agency for Development (NORAD) have withdrawn their funding to QSN as part of a strategy in which smaller organisations have a lower priority. Kindergartens are in danger of being closed down, and PECEP is now actively working to find a basis for continued operation. Precisely in this current crisis, children need a stable few hours each day to be just children, with competent educators and carers around them.
In addition, there is now an urgent need in Gaza for help in the desperate situation after the bombing. Both employees in the kindergartens, the children and their families are affected by violence. In the short term, PECEP needs funds for emergency assistance to the affected families and for trauma follow-up for the children, who are severely traumatized after the violence.
QSN is determined to find new opportunities to continue the support and cooperation that they have enjoyed in Gaza through years of joy and sorrow, but right now they appeal for your help.
Can you help?
Donations can be sent via one of the EMES bank accounts – details on the EMES donations page. Please mark your donation ‘QSN Gaza Appeal’.
QSN works for and with people living in conflict areas. Together with local grassroots organizations, it is involved in building peace and strengthening human dignity and equality. In 1993, the year of the Oslo agreement, QSN took over the responsibility for following up the kindergartens from American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) with the help of NORAD, Quaker organisations, yearly meetings and individual donors.
