Providing safe space for children in emergency

“My house fell into a hole” says five year-old Mersed. “It was this big!” he spreads his small arms as wide as he can, wanting to show the size of the hole. “Can a car fall into a hole?” he asks as if trying to understand how holes work. “What about a jeep? What about a truck?”

For the past three weeks, Mersed and his family have been living in the collective center together with around 100 other people from their village. They lost everything one spring morning during record-breaking floods that hit Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mersed’s village got caught in a landslide. Or in a “hole” as Mersed calls it. They have nowhere to return. Their home is now a tiny room in the collective centre that is also an army base.

Adults are passing their times sitting on the wooden terrace of the collective centre’s barracks retelling the tragedy that struck them and worrying about the future, while children roam around dusty road in front of barracks.

Seeing that children do not have a safe place where they can learn, play and get some sense of the “normalcy” they had before the disaster happened, World Vision decided to establish the first Child Friendly Space in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Child Friendly Spaces are widely used around the world as mechanism of protecting children from risk, as a means of promoting children’s psychosocial well-being, and as a foundation for strengthening capacities for community child protection capacity.

 “Our aim was to see what we can do for the children and how to provide them space for comfort and relaxation,” says Maja Tursunovic, World Vision Bosnia and Herzegovina Area Development Programme Lead. “We were informed that [the] collective centre wants to fix one area where they would like to open space for children,” adds Maja who immediately agreed that World Vision would equip this space. “At that moment our main thought was to create an area where we could give these children a little bit of warmth of a real home.”

Maja got in touch with the nongovernmental organization “Viva zene” in order to establish a network for psycho-social support for people traumatised by losing their homes in floods. “Our aim in the upcoming period is to organise structural work with children of different ages. We also want to improve the structure of Child Friendly Spaces in cooperation with parents and youth from the local nongovernmental organisations.”

As the first Child Friendly Space opens its doors, children who lost everything were thrilled with the opportunity to have space for themselves. One of the mothers says, “My daughter likes this space so much that she would like to sleep there too. As soon as she opens her eyes, she wants to come here.”

Around 40,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Around 3.000 people are accommodated in collective centres. World Vision plans on opening an additional ten Child Friendly Spaces for children in flood affected areas.