The 'Explosive and Suspicious Objects' Children's Activity Pack
Featuring the Fun Team Against Mines
One of my friends is a support worker at a centre for Internally Displaced People in Zaporizhzhia. She showed me some of the activity books and games produced for Ukrainian children this past year.
The ‘Explosive and Suspicious Objects’ activity pack contains multiple books, aimed at different age groups. I’ve translated a little of the content. You are welcome to take any of this material for your own use.
For the youngest, the booklet Magpie and Pony. In Ukrainian this is SorOK and PoNI. Everything SorOK does is OK, while everything PoNI does is a no-no (as ‘ni’ means ‘no’).
For the next age group up, A Walk with Patron, who is famous in Ukraine as well as abroad, and Adventures without Harm, an activity book and straight-up advice respectively.
For pre-teens there’s the Super-Team Against Mines.
This includes a comic strip about a team of skater/scooter kids who become local sports champions by obeying the rules - which in this case are to be aware of your surroundings, look for and avoid damage, stay in touch and don’t panic.
There are even stickers, but the main point of the Super-Team ones is to advertise UNICEF.
(To be fair, the morning after preparing the above, I finally saw signs of the physical presence of UNICEF in Ukraine. A small tent had appeared in the centre of one of the central squares, labeled, ‘Children’s Point Together’ and containing a few plastic chairs and shelves with leaflets on them. It was closed and deserted.)
The Safety Quest Colouring Book
Brought to you by the Danish Refugee Council, this tells a story without needing words.
This book comes with some stickers that I don’t seem to have photographed, but that you can apply to illustrations of familiar scenes from daily life:
What an inheritage of hurt is being left behind. Mines will keep exploding for decades, and the wounds to young souls are as bad as those to bodies.