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Lockdown Week of 11-17, May 2020

Dear Friends,

I hope you are all doing well. I’m still finding it hard to concentrate, but this week was very busy!

On Sunday, I participated in a wonderful seminar with the poet, David Whyte who spoke so beautifully about ‘vulnerability’ and helped us understand the creative edge that vulnerability brings us all. Here is the poem, Just Beyond Yourself, that was the focus of the seminar.

Most of us are feeling vulnerable right now. Maybe this will mean an explosion of creativity? What do you feel about this and if creativity has been sparked for you? By this I don’t mean that we are embarking on HUGE, life-changing creative projects, just that maybe a feeling of vulnerability has led us to do something more or a little differently, in a way that is rewarding – ‘just beyond yourself’. Send us your stories or suggestions for books, films, poems etc. that are helping you though these times.

 

COVID-19

Yes, our list of Covid related resources continues to grow! This week we have added a link to the work of the Children’s Radio Foundation (see #6). From this link, you can listen to young people in Africa talking about their experiences of lockdown.

We read an interesting paper focussed on the social and behavioural science that can be used to support the pandemic response.

We have been chatting with our dear friend Emma who is creating online music lessons for families in lockdown with babies and young children. Here is her website and next week we will have lots of her content on our website for you to enjoy too.

 

ORAL HEALTH

Although we mentioned this last week, just another reminder that we have this new poster for you to download. We needed to make a few important corrections; thanks to Amy for spotting them! Click below to download the poster.

 

ADOLESCENT NUTRITION

It was great to participate in two meetings this week about Adolescent Nutrition. The first a networking event organised by ENN with people and organisations all over the world involved in research and programmes. The second meeting was to help a team from USAID design a ‘hub’ of resources so that anyone involved in adolescent nutrition programmes have a place to go to access good resources. See our nutrition messages now or our nutrition poster.

 

BEN and MIN are our STARS of the week!

This week, young friends of ours BEN and MIN made an audio track of one of our story books, Everyone Counts. Ben (aged 11) was the reader and Min, his older sister, was the editor. I have also been able to recruit a video editor to make a narrated story for YouTube. I expect to get links to this next week. It is BEAUTIFULLY read!

 

ON THE BLOG

This week we have published…

  1. A report on our field work in Mozambique. This links to two language versions, English and Portuguese. Your will see many photos of children working on health activities and their action plans. We are currently communicating with their teachers using WhatsApp as they are all out of school now due to the pandemic.
  2. A post setting out ALL our nutrition related resources. It was exciting to get them all in one place and realise HOW MUCH work we have done in this area and how much we have to share.
  3. Quite a lot of people have taken a look at our LifeSkills Handbook mentioned in last week’s newsletter. Here is this week’s post on session 26 from the book. It focusses on the risk we take and why! See more single lessons in the LifeSkills section of our blog.

 

100 SUPPORTERS

We are building up to appeal to our friends and community again to help us add more supporters to our 100 supporters group; 100 is our ‘goal’. If we can get 100 supporters donating at a modest level every month, we should be able to make it through this year despite all the funding opportunities we have lost. If you think we are doing useful, valuable work and you want us to carry on donate now and help us read 100! UK taxpayers can also add gift aid.

Keep writing to me and stay safe!

Clare