EDITORIAL

Minors: voice and peace for tomorrow

Promoting peace and equality values among children and teenagers, as well as encouraging them in terms of self-confidence and critical attitude, are essential instruments for them to become masters of their own destiny and agents of social change.

Under the protection of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, subscribed by the UNESCO in 1959, the whole society should stand for the possibility that minors can have a “happy childhood and enjoy, for his own good and for the good of society, the rights and freedoms”. Fostering among the youth their cultural and educative development is necessary for the promotion of democratic values. These are the goals appointed in the celebration of the Children´s Day every 20th of November.

The efforts of Movement for Peace are focused on providing children in Middle East with resources and instruments in order to stimulate their creativity and critical attitude, always under the perspective of peace and new future opportunities. In Middle East we are working in three geographical areas: Lebanon, Palestinian Occupied Territories and Jordan.

In Lebanon we organise recreational and free-time activities for teenagers, using games to encourage social involvement and cohesion. In the refugee camp of the Bekaa Valley we support social inclusion for disabled Palestinian children, certainly more vulnerable within this crisis situation. Another action is oriented to the creation of workshops with young mothers to make toys. These all actions have an incidence over 2.000 children and 7.460 teenagers.

In cooperation with other NGOs and local youth clubs, many activities based principally on supporting non-formal education and communication as a development factor are brought off in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. One of the most interesting activities focuses on the organisation of workshops to improve the communication between parents and their teenage children.

It is also a priority the consolidation of young groups and their cooperation networks as an instrument of multiplication of their social action. We devote specially to libraries, cooperating closely with playful activities promoted by libraries to encourage reading as an attempt to foster peace and social cohesion.

In Jordan, aware of the marginalization of many teenagers and children, refugees in Baga´a, we are doing a project of strengthening the education and culture of Palestinian refugee children, for them to achieve their real insertion in the social framework. We have created a special area for childhood named “child to child”, with music rooms and other free time activities. Through awareness actions and the support to the lack of material resources, we expect to improve the quality of life for children and teenagers from this refugee camp and to prevent them from a soon dropping out of school because of lack of motivation and opportunities.

In the different actions developed by Movement for Peace in Middle East (a long-term conflict area), we stress the importance of working with the youngest through promotion of their own capacities and focussing on the transmission of values such as mutual understanding, compromise and solidarity. We try to contribute, together with other NGO, to make possible the hard and necessary task of building peace in a territory where conflict is the everyday life.

We are conscious of the many obstacles in this aim, but we also believe that only through a committed effort by coordinating the transmission of peace values with the improvement quality of life, we do walk in the right direction.

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