A light of hope for Ukrainian children

bloguerouniversal

· 17 Apr 2022

A light of hope for Ukrainian children

#educacin A Sevillian foundation has launched a project to teach Spanish and help the integration of refugees with volunteer teachers from Ukraine, which will replicate 'online' in other communities

“A pen; some pens”. Daria Jaschinska remarks by raising her voice the indefinite articles they are explaining about black-and-white photocopies of Spanish-language textbooks in Ukrainian to a group of Ukrainian children, aged between 11 and 16, and their mothers, all refugees who just a week or two ago arrived in Seville fleeing the war in their country. Most are not yet in school, but they are about. Like Taisia, 11, who hopes to start school in Spain next week. She fills in the holes in the leaves with her mother, while Natalia, her four-year-old sister, runs down the aisle with other children her age. Her grandmother, Ruslana Kujtin, tries to calm her down. She and Yarina Yurkevich, who came from Ukraine 20 years ago, are also volunteer teachers who teach Spanish to the youngest children, supported by David Álvarez, a neuropedagogue, who keeps going in and out putting children who run away to play.

They are all divided into two classrooms of one of the school reinforcement academies that the Ideas Foundation has in Dos Hermanas, Seville. In early March, the organization started an integration and reinforcement project for refugee minors in Seville through a network of Ukrainian volunteers who know Spanish — recruited on social networks — who, accompanied by pedagogues and psychologists from the center, teach Spanish and provide psychological care, both to them and their mothers, to help them adapt to a completely new country, environment and culture in an abrupt and very painful transition. This initiative, dubbed Welcome Ukraine, will soon be replicated in other autonomous communities with which the Ideas Foundation has ties thanks to Megaprofes, another innovative educational program they launched during lockdown to give free online after-school refresher classes to children with problems in the studies and that brings together 700 volunteer teachers.

“I want to learn Spanish so I can understand myself with my classmates and because it is a language spoken in other Latin American countries,” Taisia explains. Her grandmother acts as a translator, although, as soon as her granddaughter assures that her favorite subject is English, she does not need to intervene any more because the girl works perfectly in that language. Taisia smiles, but her grandmother acknowledges that when she arrives home both she and her sister only ask why they are going back to Ukraine and why they are not with their father, the son of Ruslana, a military doctor who is on the front line of battle in Kharkiv.

After a week of not knowing anything about him —” the worst of my life,” he acknowledges, “Ruslana moved to Ukraine to bring her sister-in-law and granddaughters by car. “I learned about this initiative thanks to a Spanish couple and I signed up to teach and help as much as I can,” he explains. She arrived in Seville 10 years ago to financially support her children to finish their careers. She has been taking care of the elderly until Vladimir Putin invaded her country. “I can't anymore, I have to take care of my sister-in-law and granddaughters,” he explains.

Ruslana and Yarina are two of the eight Ukrainian volunteer teachers who teach Spanish at the two schools that Educademia has in Dos Hermanas. Most are women who already resided in Spain, but there are exceptions such as Dariya, 32 years old.

He fled Kiev on March 6 over the Polish border. In Krakow she took a train to Vienna; from there she flew to Madrid and from Madrid a bus that left her in Seville in four hours, where she lives with some friends who have taken her in. The day after settling in, in the morning, she went online to give online classes to her students from the Spanish school Miguel de Cervantes, where she works in the capital of Ukraine. “Some have fled to the west, some have left the country, but others are still in Kiev and when we are in class we hear the sirens, that noise that I will never forget,” she explains, while showing screenshots on her mobile phone where her students are seen watching the computer screen.

Her life has stalled, but those connections in the morning with her students and the afternoon classes she teaches at Educademia to her compatriots serve her, on the one hand, to hold on to an irremissibly lost normality — she herself acknowledges that “it is unusual to continue with classes in the middle of the bombs” - and, on the other, to maintain it busy and not being all the time “watching the news on mobile”. The textbooks with which they teach at the academy are those of their school. “A well-known Ukrainian who lives here told me that they were looking for volunteer teachers and I came,” she says. “It's rare for me to teach adults, because I'm used to being with younger children,” she acknowledges. “I have never taught in these circumstances, to people who don't know anything about Spanish, but I think that in two months they could be able to understand it,” he says

“The registration and schooling process takes an average of two weeks,” explains Guillermo Pérez, program coordinator. “In that period and then, when they are already in school, we believe it is important to accompany children in language learning and support them through the psychology workshop so that they achieve a greater connection with each other and accelerate their integration,” he abounds. For this adaptation process, they have implemented a methodology that has, in all classes, a Spanish pedagogue and, at least, one Ukrainian person who serves as a bridge. They are already in contact with groups from Ourense and Madrid and with the Valencian foundation Juntos for Life to replicate this system and carry out online psychology workshops with them.

Accept and verbalize emotions
From Monday to Thursday the youngest children, teenagers and their mothers teach Spanish for an hour and a half and on Fridays they all attend psychology workshops together. They now work with 30 minors — who come from all over the province — and have room for another thirty more. “The main thing, apart from language acquisition, is the work of group cohesion and social interaction,” explains Clara Santana, a psychologist and educational counselor who works with refugees. “The little ones are noticing the most is that they are not going to school, they are not with their friends They come with a lot of desire to play, to have a good time and it is important to help them in that transit of acceptance of their emotions,” he explains.

In the case of the older ones, “you have to deal with this confusion and misunderstanding of what is really going on, because they can't escape playing like the little ones, but at the same time they have to try to explain to their brothers why they had to leave and they themselves, in their personal aspect, have to assimilate that they had to give up everything back”, indicates. That is why what is being prioritized in the workshops is the emotional accompaniment of adolescents and the work to verbalize their emotions.

A complicated task to which the language barrier is added. For psychologists and pedagogues, this experience is also new. Although the Ideas Foundation has educational reinforcement programs for students from the Cerro Blanco neighborhood, one of the most depressed in Andalusia, and for migrant minors from the two shelters in the town of Seville, this situation is unprecedented. “We are also learning day by day,” says Santana.

In Educademia, Ukrainian kids cross paths with Sevillian students who attend reinforcement classes. Some try to interact with each other by gestures and the little ones, like Viktor or Adrian, seek their complicity as they run through the corridors. They are extremely affectionate with their teachers and they waste curiosity. They come from learning with Ruslana and Yarina the parts of the face.

Ruslana picks up her granddaughters and before leaving proudly shows on her mobile phone an image of her son wearing a helmet and military clothing. “You can only write once a week to say it's okay,” she says. Daria stays in the class. She learned Spanish because her grandmother watched Mexican soap operas on TV. When she is 84 years old, she cannot travel and her parents have decided to stay in Ukraine to take care of her. Daria also reviews photos of her students celebrating Cervantes' birthday on her phone, dressed in flamenco clothes and fans for Hispanic Day. He stops at one that was made at the beginning of the year where they pose with posters with cut out hands painted in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on which they had written their wishes in Spanish. Some longings of which only the shadow of the screenshot remains. A few months have passed, but for Daria “they are memories of another life”.

Source: El País