International Day of Education
In brief
Imagine if your children came to school with necklaces made from bullets!
Often the children came to school wearing little necklaces made from bullets and cartridges they had made holes in!
Education isn’t only a fundamental right for every child, it can also save lives. On International Day of Education, we recognise the work done by our mine risk education teams to teach children, living surrounded by landmines and explosives, how to stay safe.
Rosa Amelia is a teacher at Sekyi School in the Cauca region of Colombia. The school is very special as it preserves many of the cultural practices of the Nasa Indigenous people who have lived here for generations.
But the lives of Rosa’s students were being put at risk. Explosives, bullets and landmines, left behind by Colombia’s of conflict, still litter the roads and surrounding countryside. Not realising the danger, the children would collect them to use as decoration or to play with.
Thanks to funding from donors, including Grupo Energía de Bogotá, HALO’s risk education teams were able to visit the school. In a series of workshops, they used specially designed games and cartoon characters to teach the children about the dangers and how to stay safe.
Since the lessons, Rosa has seen a massive change in her student’s behaviour.
There is no need to tell them to be careful, when a schoolmate goes off the beaten track, where there could be a risk of landmines, they tell them to remember the HALO people. The workshops have worked!
In Colombia alone, we have held over 1,100 mine risk education workshops, ensuring more than 23,000 people know how to stay safe from the dangerous items left behind by the country’s conflict—lessons that save lives.
