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Learning Adventure Soetwater Interim School on Wheels

“Education is critical to protecting displaced children and youth, enabling them to contribute to the sustainable peace and recovery of their societies upon return, resettlement or reintegration.”
Camp Management Guidelines

On 23 May 2008, refugees began streaming to places of safety around Cape Town in response to the wave of xenophobic attacks that was sweeping the country and breaking out in poor communities all around Cape Town. Lootings, rapes, murders and assaults led to a panic-driven exodus of these African refugees to makeshift camps. The xenophobic attacks found people from Angola, Rwanda Burundi, Mozambique, Malawi, Kenya, DRC Congo, Congo Brazzaville, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Tanzania and Somalia sharing these camps.

One of the tragically inevitable outcomes of this disaster was the gap it left in the children’s education. From the start, ESST became involved in assisting with disaster relief primarily through education, giving children improved nutrition and identifying those in need of, and assisting in, trauma counselling.

From the outset Soetwater Refugee Camp has been a temporary place of safety. The Learning Adventure Soetwater Interim School was set up to ensure that the basic right to life with dignity was upheld.

The Soetwater Camp was consolidated with all the other camps and sites of refuge into three main refugee camps in September, 2008. The educational needs of these children still needed to be met. To this end, ESST was invited by UNICEF to coordinate, monitor and facilitate the access to education of the refugee children in all three camps. We are currently engaged in this process.

Reintegration and Education of Displaced Refugee Child Victims of Xenophobic Attacks

This project was carried out by ESST at the invitation of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as a result of the work we were carrying out in the Soetwater refugee camp in 2008. After all the refugee sites were consolidated into three camps, ESST was asked to do the following in all three camps:

We established interim education activities onsite in safe zones for children. We enabled children to be reintegrated, repatriated and assisted in their access to education. We assisted the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) in monitoring children’s access to schools and education, monitoring in addition for psycho-social trauma, and referring them, where necessary, to appropriate community-based agencies.

Further to this, we assisted the onsite WCED teacher and assistant with management of resources, transportation and sourcing of materials, monitoring and assessment. We then identified schools and areas to which children and families would be returning; and sensitised principals, teachers and children in schools. We devised secure, effective transport strategies to schools across the three sites, and continue to ensure that these children are not ostracised or bullied while in transit or in the school environment. We set up after-school care facilities, i.e. homework area, resource library and a play zone, and identified responsible volunteers to assist with extra homework and literacy classes in the afternoons, as well as extra-curricular activities such as art, music or sport. Using a voucher system, we also provided uniforms and stationery to the children.

For those children unable to return to school due to WCED capacity, language or special needs barriers, or because they await repatriation, we maintain onsite education. This project ended in March 2009.