Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Norwich, Norfolk discovered that a mother and daughter team from Cambridge had set up a school within a refugee camp in Southern Bulgaria, about 20 minutes from the Turkish border. Gil and Sadie Clasby used their previous experiences in child care and teaching to help the Syrian refugee children who had gone through a great deal of trauma and hardship.
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Church members in the Norwich area launched an appeal to generate supplies for this school for the children to use. After just two weeks a significant quantity of material had been donated. The donations weighed 107 kilos and they were subsequently packed into 18 boxes before being shipped to the Harmanli Refugee Play Camp in Bulgaria.
The school provides children between the ages of 4 and 14 with a range of activities and lessons to develop maths, science, art and English skills, knowledge and understanding, as well as opportunities for personal, social and emotional development. The school is a centre for play-based learning and play therapy. When the school opened in 2014, there was little sanitation, no heating and very little food. The project has been a great success and the school now accommodates up to 200 children at a time. As Bulgaria is a poor country, the school has relied on the generosity of people in countries across Europe.
A spokesperson for the school said, “This is one of the best donations, if not the best that we have ever received! Just perfect! I can’t stop smiling!”