Working with Children

COVID-19 is the last nail in the economy of Peshawar, Pakistan. It has forced hundreds and thousands of children into labor as a cheap and manageable resource. Driven by financial need, boys work in shops and workshops, while girls work as domestic helpers doing housekeeping […]

Nine-year-old Joseph has been living on his own since he was seven, when his parents were killed by soldiers in an attack on his village.  He recently came to live in a refugee camp in Uganda, where he is fed and educated by community workers, […]

Asad’s father is a daily wage laborer without any skills. Every morning he goes to the city center after dropping his seven-year old son off at the machine shop where Asad works. The city center is the spot from where people hire unskilled and semi-skilled […]

Syed Wajid has a round face and a trim white beard and a smile that lights up his eyes and warms the hearts of his companions. Child labor is a huge problem in Pakistan, he tells us. Some provincial governments have passed laws forbidding the […]

This book, co-authored with Nina Papadopoulos,  documents the training of teacher trainers in the IRC’s Female Education Program (FEP) in psychosocial wellness models. and the development of teacher training materials for IRC refugee teachers in 2002. A reflective process was used to raise awareness, to […]

When communities are in distress, whether because of war, natural disasters, political upheavals, or economic dislocations, we know that children suffer. Focusing in the context of community wellness can help communities discover culturally meaningful ways of alleviating the suffering of their children. For example, we know […]