Dear friends,
Mission Enfance addresses its deep sympathy to the families of the departed of the tragic events that struck Paris.
More than ever, humanitarian action, carried out directly with children victims of war in the East, is necessary to stop this process of violence that is sweeping our world today.
The “refugee” comes from somewhere… This place that currently combines violence, terror, hunger and despair, is also the place where he was born, in the land of his father’s fathers, where he received his child’s dignity.
To counter the “indignity” suffered on the roads of exodus, Mission Enfance has been working for nearly a quarter of a century directly to the source of life… Yesterday as today, we have been educating children in their original country.
Upon their return in 1992, from the camps of Turkey and Iran, we were among the Kurds of Iraq to help rebuild a future on their devastated soil. Since Mission Enfance has never abandoned the Kurd people who welcomes in turn the displaced Iraqi minorities of Mosul, and the Nineveh Plain, as well as the refugees from Syria.
While the Yezidis, Shabaks and Syrian refugees wait under the canvas tents set up to the horizon, Mission Enfance builds educational centres and schools.
In their shelters of the Christian town of Aïnkawa, dozens of displaced Chaldean students from Mosul can attend their schools and their universities, sometimes located more than 100 km away, thanks to the transport organized for them by our association.
In Syria, in order to relieve the people of Damascus, too poor to leave their country, we educate young pupils in a school of Bab Touma district. Others receive our emergency assistance in the centres of Lattaquié, Hassaké, as here, in our clothing distribution …
Further away, in Afghanistan, we are building schools, as the one we are finishing today in Mazar e Sharif, for 1.700 pupils from all ethnic groups of this Northern town. In our secondary school at the border of the Panjshir valley, the young graduates dream henceforth to change the world, thanks to the knowledge acquired during their schooling.
On the high plateaus of the Bekaa, in Lebanon, Mission Enfance organizes emergency assistance and education for those who have fled the madness perpetrated in the cities of Rakka, Homs, Aleppo… So many evocative names of this East where lie the traces of humanity, now symbols of ruin and sorrow.
To educate a child is to root his people in peace !
Thanks to you, we will be able to give him the best of presents for Christmas : our faith in his future on his own soil, by the creation of a new school in his village, his displaced camp or simply by providing the bread necessary to his survival. May you receive our utmost gratitude !
Dear Friends, we wish you, on behalf of all those benefitting from your emergency support, all the best.
