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Home / Healthcare & Medicine / Care / Caring for Children Moving Alone: Protecting Unaccompanied and Separated Children / Encouraging children not to abandon alternative care

Encouraging children not to abandon alternative care

Video showing an emergency centre were children stay for a short period of time
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My name is Joyce Garamalos. I am a trainer or animator in this compound. I teach different courses for these students that come from Eritrea. That means refugees. They want to change their lives by different means. And from these activities we are doing about teaching students by different means, like that of emergency education. From this and also CFS, which means telling stories or reading different stories, real stories. I see that Lwam, is only 12 years old and she was influenced by her friends to leave. Let’s face it, It was her own plan to start with she only left because her friend and her classmate left. I think that is not a good decision for me. What should she have done?
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I think she should live on her own terms. She should have paid attention to what her friend told her. What we are learning from this book is about a child named Lwam, she was attending school and she noticed the number of students in her class was dropping and as a result of that she chose to leave via illegal migration. She started her journey by going to her grandmother’s place. She went away by saying that she wanted to visit her grandma. She had no one to help out in there with her plans. She soon realised after going there that there was no one there. Therefore, then, she decided to flee via illegal migration. Please answer the question by raising your hands.
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Our class is about reading real stories about an immigrant student who is called Salam, and Lwam. There is letter from Salam to Lwam. It is a real story about illegal immigration and its cost and its consequence. What does it cost to emigrate from their countries, and what is the consequence behind all of this? And this story tells about the relationship between Salam and Lwam. They are friends, but Salam can emigrate by illegal immigration to Europe. And it gathers different impacts in order to go into Europe. So Salam sends to Lwam about the consequence and the impacts of illegal immigration to her friend.

In course step 4.9 we saw a short film about a Refugee Children Residential, Learning and Recreational Centre in Northern Ethiopia. Unaccompanied and separated children stay in this centre for a short period of time while they are registered by UNHCR and found alternative care placements or reunified with family members. In this video we will revisit the Centre. Although the children only spend a very short time in the shelter, it is an opportunity to provide them with information about risks of onward movement.

In this video, we see young girls in the shelter who crossed the border from Eritrea into Ethiopia as unaccompanied and separated children. They are being encouraged not to move on alone – what is referred to in the film as secondary migration. The main concern is if these girls choose to abandon any care setting they are placed in, they may face many risks.

We see Joyce Garamalos – a teacher employed by Innovative Humanitarian Solutions (HIS) in the Emergency Centre using materials you can find on the website facilitated by UNHCR called ‘Telling the Story’. The children are reading the story of Lwam, a 12 year old girl living in Eritrea and the terrible experiences her best friend faced after she decided to travel alone. You can find the story book they are reading here.

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This content is taken from University of Strathclyde online course
Caring for Children Moving Alone: Protecting Unaccompanied and Separated Children
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Caring for Children Moving Alone: Protecting Unaccompanied and Separated Children

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Caring for Children Moving Alone: Protecting Unaccompanied and Separated Children

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