Ukrainian children recover from the war in St. Gallen
Keystone-SDA
Some 35 Ukrainian children and young people spent two weeks in St Gallen recovering from the war in their home country. They were brought to Switzerland by the Red Cross together with accompanying persons. They returned to Ukraine on Monday.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
The children jumping around could be heard from afar. But unlike is often the case in Ukraine, their cries were not a sign of pain. Quite the opposite: anyone visiting the youth hostel above the city of St Gallen quickly realised that there were children and young people here who were letting off steam without a care in the world.
The primary aim of the Red Cross Summer Camp St Gallen was to give children and young people from different parts of Ukraine a few days of carefree fun. On the initiative of the Ukrainian ambassador to Switzerland and with the support of the Canton of St Gallen, the Swiss Red Cross (SRC) brought almost three dozen children and young people aged between five and 15 to St Gallen. Twelve mothers and three other accompanying adults also took part.
More
More
Ukraine wants Swiss help to free abducted children
“When the children arrived in St. Gallen, they were very tired and exhausted, some of them were also introverted, quiet and anxious,” said Lea Krähenmann, the project manager from the SRC in Canton of St Gallen, to the Keystone-SDA news agency. This may have been due to the long bus journey that the children had behind them. But not only that.
Many fathers have died
Some of the children in St Gallen have parents who were members of the Ukrainian national police and died, were seriously injured or abducted during the war were recovering in St Gallen. “You could say that the children were traumatised several times over,” says Krähenmann.
The group did a lot from the youth hostel during the two weeks. A boat trip on the Old Rhine, an excursion to the Hoher Kasten, insights from the dog handlers of the St Gallen city and cantonal police and an emergency helper course are just a small part of the varied programme. Over the August 1 holiday, the group travelled to neighbouring countries to avoid the fireworks.
“We are aware that we cannot heal what the children in Ukraine have experienced in this short time,” said Christian Rupp, Managing Director of the SRC Canton of St Gallen. The aim was to give the children, young people and accompanying persons time to catch their breath and achieve a certain degree of stabilisation.
Psychologists from Ukraine
A pilot project in Schaffhausen last year showed that the children were able to calm down within a few days and were able to draw on their experiences in Switzerland for a long time after returning to Ukraine. “Having enough to eat, sleeping without fear and simply going out to play in the forest without danger are basic needs that we were able to fulfil here,” said Rupp.
Even if the name Red Cross Summer Camp sounds like play and light-heartedness, there is much more to it than that, Rupp and Krähenmann explained. The participants received daily psychosocial counselling. Three psychologists trained in Ukraine were constantly on site to help the children process what they had experienced in their home country.
All of this helped the children to visibly overcome their exhaustion and anxiety. This was also confirmed by a mother who took part in the recuperation programme with three children.
“I noticed that the children were able to sleep in again after two or three nights,” said the mother. During the first few nights, the helicopters that landed at the nearby hospital woke her children from their sleep because they brought back bad memories. Eventually, however, they slept through the night. She also noticed that her children felt happy again.
Above all, she took peace and quiet with her from Switzerland, as she was constantly stressed in Ukraine. And the following moment will stay with her forever: “When we took the cable car to the top, my children said we were going to heaven, where our dad is. That gave me a lift.”
Another mother reported that it made her children especially happy not to see their mum cry every day. She was able to laugh a lot during the two weeks.
The Red Cross Summer Camp in St Gallen came to an end on Sunday. On Monday, the group reached the border with Ukraine again. Meanwhile, the German Press Agency reported again over the weekend about Russian attacks on Ukraine with several dead and injured.
Translated from German by DeepL/jdp
We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.
Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.
If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at english@swissinfo.ch.
