It is a great joy to see our friends and partners serving orphans in different European countries come together to share their knowledge and experience with each other! Alliance for Romania Without Orphans organised a TBRI (Trust-based relational intervention) Camp for children and their parents. YWAM Ukraine and Poland was invited to participate as well as teach about Emotional Intelligence at the camp. Ukraine Appeal Fund was able to support three Ukrainian participants to join the event. Read below their thoughts after the camp.
"Our experience at the camp was very enriching and productive. We learned how to purposefully create age-appropriate empowering experiences for vulnerable children, teens & their families which will help them learn skills of connecting and social skills for children. It was also great to teach Emotional Intelligence classes to different age groups of kids and to parents which empowers their communication and connecting skills.
What impacted us strongly was realising how important it is to have volunteers who are trained in trauma care. That way the volunteers can understand the needs of kids and parents. The camp was planned in a way that there was a good balance between fun and learning for both children and parents.
During the camp we connected with like-minded ministry leaders, exchanged experiences and resources, looking for opportunities for further partnerships. We are talking with a ministry in Warsaw about doing together a family camp for the refugee families whom they serve. We definitely can use our Romanian camp experience to make this camp not only restful but also useful for developing children's and parents' closer relationships. Together with volunteers from Warsaw we also plan to regularly visit Ukrainian orphanage in Poland. We will make appropriate training for them, using experiences from the camp.
One of our group members serves orphans in Ukraine. Each week she visits children at the orphanage to spend time with them, to teach them Bible stories and some life skills. The time she was able to spend at the camp in Romania was very useful. She saw in practice how to apply the knowledge that I had received during working with traumatised children, as well as ideas for spending time together with kids and making it beneficial and useful.
On the way back, we made a detour as we found out that a 1.5-hour drive away was a Ukrainian orphanage. We stopped there to hang out with kids, did a program for kids, and shared about God's hope with them and their caregivers.”
Some camp activities:
