Sudan: Friendly spaces for displaced children

The first time Micha De Winter walked into a child-friendly space in a camp for displaced people in Darfur in March 2005, he found 150 children crowded into 25 square metres, supervised by one animator holding a stick in one hand and a whip in the other. "What I found was quite awful. Animators received very little training. There were no materials, and the numbers of children were so huge that hardly anything meaningful could be done in terms of psycho-social support," De Winter, a child psychologist, said.