Kamala Azzopardi recalls the reaction of one boy entering Cospicua’s multicultural Summer Club one year.

“I don’t want to be next to the black one,” he said.

After the team spoke to him, he quickly changed his behaviour and happily played with children of different ethnicities.

The retired teacher has been running the summer school for over a decade, bringing  together children who are refugees and asylum-seekers, who are in residential care and who come from different economic backgrounds.

Around 50 children participate in the free summer school, which runs on donations and government funding.

For two months, they learn and play together.

“As soon as they walk into the centre, we show them this a place where diversity is celebrated and they respond to this right away,” she said.

Any prejudices are a projection of what a child hears back home, or elsewhere, Azzopardi underlines, and throughout the programme, she and her team of volunteers strive to immerse the children in a different reality.

“Children will absorb the behaviour of their role models and they sense immediately we are accepting of everyone and are quite happy to be that way too,” she says.

While clashes do sometimes happen, they are superficial, she explains.

“We want to give children a different viewpoint, so whatever their background is, when they go back home they can recall this different way of living where people are kind to each other and accepting,” she explains.

This ‘way of living’ is realised in an approach towards the children, which does not foster competition but rather aims to tap into the potential of each child.

It’s beautiful to see children with a lot of fears open up and become more confident

The programme also provides emotional support and training through drama therapy, silent time and yoga, provided by trained volunteers.

“Children are resilient but,  throughout the programme,  their problems and the suffering they have endured often start to seep through in their behaviour,” Azzopardi says.

This is especially true of the migrant children who have often experienced a lot of trauma, she says. And while emotional intelligence is an important facet of the club, so is healthy eating.

Run by Ananda Marga, a socio-spiritual organisation, the education programme puts an emphasis on compassion towards all beings, including animals and plants.

The children are given vegetarian meals and healthy snacks during the programme and even help grow their own vegetables.

“Some of these children have never seen vegetables and it is beautiful to see how amazed they are seeing a lettuce they helped to grow. We give them some vegetables to take home so their parents can use them,” she says.

Running this programme since 2009, Azzopardi explains the positive changes she observes within the children, especially those who attend year on year, are really “something else”.

“It’s beautiful to see children with a lot of fears open up, become more confident, trusting and friendly,” she says.

The club is hosted at Ċentru Tbexbix and partly sponsored by the Voluntary Organisations projects scheme. It also receives donations from the Association of International Women in Malta and other benefactors.

The team includes volunteers from the European Solidarity corps, whose activity is funded by Erasmus +.