Volunteers to help children-returnees from Syria to Dagestan

The adaptation to peaceful life of the children returned to Dagestan is undertaken not only by state bodies, but also by volunteers, who help to bring the returnees' knowledge up to the level of their peers.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on September 7, four children were brought to Russia from Syria. The parents of three of them had left for the Middle East from Chechnya, and those of the fourth child – from Dagestan.

The return of a group of children, natives of Chechnya and Dagestan, from Syria on September 7 became possible after the conclusion of agreements by Anna Kuznetsova, the Children's Ombudsperson under the President of Russia, with the leadership of the Syrian Republic. Earlier, there was no such agreement, and the return of children from Syria was complicated, Marina Ezhova the Dagestani Children's Ombudsperson, has noted.

Since this summer, Dagestan has launched the project "Knowledge Volunteers" intended to help the children returned from the warfare in Syria and Iraq. The authors of the project intend to help them fill in the gaps in education that have arisen due to missed lessons, and thereby contribute to their social adaptation to peaceful life.

"Initially, it was assumed to help children from low-income families. But as the project began progressing, we saw that children-returnees from Syria and Iraq have educational gaps and face adaptation problems. We help them with their studies and bring their knowledge closer to the level of their peers," Tamerlan Buganov, the project author and the head of the non-commercial organization (NCO) "Knowledge Volunteers", told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on September 14, 2019 at 06:59 am MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.