Reflecting on Spirit  

Stuff happens. Every day. Good stuff, even great stuff, and challenging stuff. Caring for children sets us up for the positive, but it does not exempt us from the negative. What makes it possible to stay the course, as we do the most important work in the world, is focusing on what really matters: children. Centering ourselves every day and every moment on what is happening for children is specific, grounding, uplifting and overwhelming. Some of the children in our communities only know beautiful childhoods, where the ups and downs have manageable boundaries. But for growing numbers of the world’s children, each day is profoundly worse than anything we can imagine. So here we are, focusing on children, facing the issues, protecting our hopefulness, doing everything we can envision to nurture a childhood of possibilities for each child—this is what we have chosen.

What each of us adults attempts, or even perceives, is based on what we know, what we learn to do, where we are, who we are and who we know. We need each other to grow professionally, to be informed, to be effective and to be, ourselves, nurtured. This is why the focus on CHILDREN has been chosen as one of the values of the World Forum Foundation. CHILDREN are why the World Forum was created and where Exchange magazine began. CHILDREN, their realities and needs, guide our work and our thinking. And we need each other in order to be our best and strongest selves.

Bonnie’s Global Café is an online community where you can come to be fed and nurtured as a professional and as a human being. BGCafé is where you can share your stories to inspire, inform, and challenge others. We have selected three stories from BGCafé to share that help all of us better understand the lives of children, right now, in different situations in the world.

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Contribute to the impact of Bonnie’s Global Café by sharing a story about the children in your community. Come often to the BGCafé to meet colleagues and feed relationships. Share what you find valuable through social media. We really need each other in order to be what children need us to be.

Current Specials at the Café

Children Living in Conflict Experience Loss of Trust

Najeebullah Musafirzada, Afghanistan

Children growing up in a conflict situation cannot think of the future. Najeebullah shares that children in this situation are pessimistic and without hope. It is difficult for them to trust others and this fear affects not only their childhoods, but who they become as adults. Family plays such an important role in giving children a loving base from which to make sense of the world.

Relationships and Early Intervention Are Key to Hope

Rojena Tatour, Palestine

It is easy to fall into the habit of using labels to define people. People are homeless or disabled, dysfunctional or gifted—the label defines, then, who this person is. Rojena is a Palestinian woman, working to help children and their families in crisis in Greece. She reminds us that being a refugee is the situation in which a person finds him or herself right now. The situation is not the person—each person has so many complex and fascinating aspects and stories. Being a person who is a refugee right now is temporary; there is, or should be—if we as a global community are living our responsibilities—hope. And that hope depends on early interventions and the building of respectful and authentic relationships.

 

Play is Essential to Human Development

Martha Llanos, Peru

World Forum representative Martha Llanos emphasizes that play is essential to socio-emotional development. As a lifelong advocate for play and peace, Martha shares her great enjoyment of play as an adult and her deep respect for children and their abilities to learn through play. “It is our role as adults to try to understand children better, rather than assuming preconceived ideas, whether we have learned it in books or whether we have learned it in experience, but just to observe a little bit more and listen.”

https://worldforumfoundation.org/2019/10/17/peacebuilding-play-martha-llanos-peru/