Les Oursins* – Enfants du trottoir created in Manila , the first games library for children from streets and slums in the world. Now closed for safety reasons for the team, a new game library will open soon.
A games library is a preventive , educational and recreational therapeutic space . Play therapy allows each child to express what he carries , his obsessions , his psychological and physical trauma . The game is an expression of his condition, the witness of its development.
Play therapy is an ideal tool to enable children to traumatic past , often unstructured , to rebuild harmony. The game takes place in an essential way in the creation of the personality as well as the communication between the child and his environment. A child playing a child is being built.The library of Manila offers new insight of life other than the streets, slums or the prison and foundations. A games library ,allows to play without interruption and without regard to performance .
We also offer fun activities, arts, culture and education outside the framework of a games library. Often we find that children are lack of dreams.. They are never out of their slum, are surrounded by images of poverty and have never had any cultural activity!
When the budget allows, and when some escorts are available and especially when we see the morale and energy of children fall we try to make them dream …
Indeed, even in a life of misery there are days or weeks more miserable than others : alcohol, violence, lack of food, impossible to sleep because of the noise … So, it is sometimes hard to imagine another life, struggling to find the motivation to keep going! Then a 3D movie that you can almost grasp, a play, an afternoon at the aquarium … so many ways to let escape a few hours to make sure they go to sleeping with head full of dreams, but also to remind them that if they take the right path their future may be a bit because of these dreams!