The start of the school year has been hugely successful for Friends Not Foes. The arrival of a lot of new faces, coming along with new ideas brought a refreshing motivation to the group. We continued to build on our past successes whilst undertaking a number of new challenges to benefit Colchester’s Refugee Community. Here is a brief overview of our achievements during these two first month!
Homework Club and Driving Theory Lessons
Every Friday, we have had the pleasure to welcome 4 young students from nearby schools to our weekly Homework Club. Friends Not Foes offers to help them complete their school work, and also provides reading comprehension lessons to help them improve their English.
Since the beginning of the school year, we have also been helping a young Afghan refugee study driving theory. As a result, he has done immense progress, especially with complex English words related to driving. As a reward for his efforts, we have offered to raise funds to pay for his driving lessons.
Refugee Action-Colchester’s Pop Up Café.
The Pop-Up Café are events set up by Refugee Action-Colchester in order to raise money to support their most needy clients. On Saturday the 19th of October, a team of refugee chefs gathered at Firstsite to prepare dishes from their home countries, Sudan and Syria. A group of us came along to help in the kitchen and at the till, and by midday, the meals were ready to be served to the impressive amount of people who came to discover the wonderful food.
Bowling Reward
As an ‘Half-Term Present‘, but also to congratulate our hard-working students, we decided to treat them with a bowling night !
On the last day of school, we gathered at the TenPin bowling, where we played two games of bowling with the children, before sharing dinner with them.
The kids had a lot of fun and were very grateful for the evening. It was such a nice event that we are hoping to organise a new one in the near future !
