#4mee April 12th day of street child

April 13, 2014

#4mee April 12th day of street child

Since 4 years already, a lot of humanitarian global organisations claim April 12th as the international day for the street children and they lobby at the UN to make this day official. So does Mobile School, the organisation where Jan has been volunteering over the last couple of years and where I'm getting a bit more involved myself this year.

Previous year there was a big awareness campaign on social media #nostreetkidding ending with an enormous chalk drawing on Leuven's major square. For several reasons we decided this year to do something smaller scale yet to fully celebrate & experience 12th of April with the group of volunteers of Mobile School. And maybe next year for the 5th time, we can repeat this scenario on a much larger scale...we'll see.

The idea was simple: we will live & sleep & play on the street for 24 hours. Ok, I admit it, only a core group was outside for the full 24 hours and having a small baby was the perfect excuse for me to sneek home for the night (just around the corner as a matter of fact so it was easy to go back & forth all the time).

We started off with drinks & snacks on Friday evening after work. Then we got a Streetwize training on resilience & agility. Streetwize is the commercial sister company of Mobile School that commercializes corporate training formulas with competencies we can learn from street children. The profits from Streetwize fund currently 70% of the costs of the Mobile School operations.

After the training we skyped with 2 Mobile School colleagues that were on a mission in Nairobi, Kenia to train a new local partner NGO on the implementation of a local mobile school.

After some more drinks I took Kabouter home to a warm comfy bed where I left the others out with their sleeping bags, cardboard & fleeces.

But the next day we were ready again to bring the other volunteers, together with other relatives & sympathising fans, a lovely potluck brunch in the park. With the sun out it was just warm enough to snooze, hang out, eat, play games , discover the different exercises on the mobile school and to #tweetforthechildren.