Learning from Young People August 2002

Childnet staff recently had a surprise visit from Andrew Green - The director of the Childsoldier project in Sierra Leone. This powerful website allows young people who have been caught up in war to share their experience through words, pictures and even songs.

This project was commended in last year's Childnet Awards and Andrew, who is still at University is now involved in setting up a Computer Access Centre to help young people in the skills to use, service and programme computers. This is an exciting development for the project and Andrew now hopes to build on the success of Childsoldiers.org and develop a Peace and Reconciliation project linking ex-child soldiers in different parts of the world together.

While Andrew was with us he played us a song from the website which he and his fellow students had composed and converted to a sound file. Hearing this song of hope with Andrew sitting right next to us, brought home to us all the enormous power the Net has to bring people together and gave us a new sense of challenge to support those who are using the Internet for good and to continue to spread what we call the "dot hope" effect of the Net.

One of the problems Andrew shared with us was in trying to get a shipment of computers from Computer Aid out of Customs in Freetown. Thankfully we at Childnet were able to help him and he now hopes to get the centre open in the next few months.