Seven year-old *Rima’s father was a soldier in the Syrian army. One day a militant group in their home town of Daraa stopped him, took him to the desert and shot him.
What a privilege, encouragement and a challenge to listen to Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia, speak at the RISING Forum, a peace conference in Coventry’s beautiful Cathedral this morning.
There’s a measure of tragic irony in the fact that, for years, we’ve had to explain to people that even though we’re called Global Care we are about children, not the environment… and now we are learning that caring about children also, increasingly, means caring about the environment.
*Micha’s father already had ten children by his first wife, when Micha and her brother were born to his second wife. Massive tension between the two women meant the family home in the slums of Kolkata, India, was a place of quarrels and strife.
The odds were stacked against *Reina, who was born with sickle cell anaemia in a desperately poor family in northern Uganda, and then experienced the trauma of being displaced by rebel insurgents at the age of seven.
This summer I led a team of four UK teachers to Soroti, Uganda to undertake three days of intensive special educational needs (SEN) training for teachers and playworkers from SEN settings across central Uganda.
What a beautiful group of people! It took us almost three days to reach Kabompo, in rural north-west Zambia, but we were met with an extremely warm, sung welcome and over the following week the joy from the children kept coming.
