{"id":341986,"date":"2013-06-01T05:30:47","date_gmt":"2013-06-01T03:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/a-preschool-called-arcoiris-doing-good-in-a-venezuelan-suburb\/"},"modified":"2024-06-06T12:09:26","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T10:09:26","slug":"a-preschool-called-arcoiris-doing-good-in-a-venezuelan-suburb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/a-preschool-called-arcoiris-doing-good-in-a-venezuelan-suburb\/","title":{"rendered":"A preschool called Arcoiris, \u2018doing good\u2019 in a Venezuelan suburb"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Colinas de Guacamaya is a rundown district of Valencia<\/strong>, an major industrial city of Venezuela<\/a>. As in other parts of the world, many parents have nowhere to send their children during working hours.<\/p>\n

Several years ago, Ofelia<\/strong>, a Volunteer of the Focolare Movement, started Arcoiris<\/em> preschool<\/strong> in the garden of her own home. Here children receive personal attention and are given the basics to be properly prepared for primary school.<\/p>\n

There are about 40 children who come to the kindergarten and their ages range from four to \u2026 fourteen! Indeed since, for a whole host reasons unconnected with their own choices, many children do not attend normal school, the decision has been made to offer them the chance to carry on learning within a preschool environment.<\/p>\n

Some time ago there was a shootout between the police and the organized crime gang<\/strong> in control of the district. It was not the first time; six people had already been killed. But this time it was right next to the preschool.<\/p>\n

Ofelia said, \u2018To stop the children being frightened we got them to sing. Then, when their mothers, full of worry and fear, came to collect them I spoke to each of them, trying calm them and explaining that they had to keep control of themselves for their children\u2019s sake. I invited them to pray together for the violence to end.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"And Ofelia went on to say, \u2018The next day the children and I cast the \u201ccube of love<\/a>\u201d and when the face turned up that said \u201clove everyone\u201d, the children asked, \u201cWhat, gang members too?\u201d and \u201cEven the police?\u201d We then asked the children to pray freely and what they said was beautiful in its innocence. A four-year-old girl asked that there should be no more guns in the world and a boy asked God to help him love more and to change the hearts of the criminals.\u2019<\/p>\n

Another area of work for Arcoiris is the relationship with the parents. It is very important because the children are in the preschool only for a few years and so their experience, however positive and rich in values, is temporary. Their parents, on the other hand, have a long time to form them as persons.<\/p>\n

This year the preschool looked at the theme of \u2018How can we communicate with our children?\u2019. In the various workshops activities for the parents were run by the teachers themselves, who had generously accepted to spend a whole Sunday dedicated to this. They were aware that they were making a real investment in the future of their students.<\/p>\n

Arcoiris<\/em> is a small seed of hope in a violent suburb of Venezuela.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A preschool that meets the needs of working mothers. A way of \u2018doing good\u2019 in a suburban district in Venezuela, illustrating the Word of Life for this month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[893],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-focolare-worldwide-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}