site.btaArms Wide Open Association Reports on Support Given to Migrant Children over Last 3 Years

For the last three years, the Arms Wide Open association has been helping refugee and migrant children, mostly from Ukraine, to integrate more easily in Bulgaria. In the Sofia regional centre for contemporary arts Toplocentrala, the team of the association presented their activities in partnership with the Oborishte urban district.

The project is funded by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism.

Nataliya Todorova, programme director of Arms Wide Open, said that the association has been providing training for Bulgarian language teachers, carried out together with experts from the regional education department in Sofia, who prepared a special programme for teaching Bulgarian to foreigners.

Among the project's activities are weekly workshops for children from 1st to 10th grade, as well as art therapy, dance classes, and music activities.

“We've organized the Arms Wide Open Summer School three years in a row. Last summer, 121 children aged 7 to 17 attended summer school classes. We toured museums and galleries throughout the city, had walks in the mountains, visited the mines in Pernik,” said the programme director of the association.

Oborishte deputy mayor Milena Alexieva told BTA that the project provides support not only to children from Ukraine, but also from Syria, Iraq and Russia. “The programme is extremely good because it has created friendships between the children and taught them to understand and be tolerant with each other. We, from the Oborishte district, have provided an apartment in the centre of Sofia, which we have renovated and turned into a comfortable office and training centre for the association, which will allow the activities to continue after the end of the project,” Alexieva said.

She added that the project involves mainly Bulgarian language teachers, but also mathematicians, physicists, chemists, psychologists. “Many of the families continue to live in Bulgaria, a very small number have returned to Ukraine, which shows that the project is successful because these are people who have accepted our way of life, have adapted and like Bulgaria,” she said and congratulated the Arms Wide Open team who, in her words, have put their heart and soul into the integration of refugee children in this country.