Keeping up with Katsikas
There’s been many changes at Katsikas camp over the years – good and bad – but as always, we are striving to make changes at Katsikas moving towards a happier future.
We’ve opened our new, smarter free shop, equipped with a waiting area. Our volunteers have also been working hard to help free up space to enable residents to have more say and influence over their communal areas.
Another area on-camp that has undergone more change is our new, fully-functioning classroom. Previously a men’s boutique, a perfume factory, and then an office, this new classroom is dedicated towards helping adults and kids learn Arabic, English and Greek. These language skills are vital to enable people to move on and integrate into new communities.
Change in Cyprus
Change and new beginnings has also been our big focus at Cyprus – where we have just started operating – over the last few weeks.
This week, we’ve been putting together comprehensive care packs to help kids who are having to embrace scary changes. When unaccompanied refugee kids in Cyprus turn 18, they are moved out of care and have to fend for themselves.
But to help make this unavoidable change more comfortable for kids, we’ve compiled 25 packs to get them off to a good start as part of an ongoing Unaccompanied Minors support service. They are a vulnerable group, but thanks to our donors and volunteers, we can fulfil a big gap in what they need.
Each will include:
1 sheet, duvet, duvet cover, pillow, and pillow case
3 plates, 3 bowls, 2 glasses, 2 mugs, 3 piece pot set, and 2 sets of silverware
2 towels
1 Ikea duffel
For future packs, we will no longer need to spend vital funds. Thanks to the wonderful people at CARE UK this week, they have packed a container full of vital resources above, bicycles for our upcoming bike project (keep an eye out for more news about this), furniture for our new Dignity Centre and many items that other NGOs have asked us for.
Celebrate new beginning with us!
The Dignity Center, We Circle, and the Agora Project invite you to an evening of good food with good company as we launch a new tradition, and celebrate the opening of the Dignity Center!
Meet the Refugee Support and We Circle Team at the first of what will become reoccurring event designed to bring refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and the community that supports them together around food.
Everyone is welcome, and all food is free. We are preparing enough for 200 people, but you are welcome to bring a dish! Our first meal will be delicious African cuisine provided by New Genesis.
We’d also like to celebrate the success of our first ever Refugee Support Book Club meeting, and to invite you to the next one in London on 3o May.
Our first meeting discussed War Doctor – the incredible biography of a trauma surgeon who saved many hundreds of lives in war zones and miraculously managed to survive himself.
Come to our next one in London on 30 May, and at the beginning of July the book club will feature author Dina Nayeri talking about her new book The Ungrateful Refugee.
We hope you’ll be able to join us.
Thanks for reading!
Please contact us today at info@refugeesupporteu.com if you’d like to find out more about supporting refugees in Cyprus and Greece.
Refugee Support
