A MESSAGE FROM BELFAST TO BELSAN

"To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows." - Jean Anouilh in Antigone

A MESSAGE FROM BELFAST TO BELSAN
Siobhan Fitzpatrick, executive director of NIPPA in Belfast, Northern Ireland shares this message:

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
More anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned"
The Second Coming (WB Yeats 1928)

The 1st September for all us is normally a day of new beginnings - the summer over, schools re-opening and children starting out on the new journey of formal education. For all of us, parents, teachers, adults and children the 1st September will never be the same again after the terrible tragedy of Belsan, Southern Russia. We watched with horror, not believing that a school community could be brutalised in such a tragic fashion. We were horrified by the fear, pain, grief and trauma evident in everyone who had been caught up in the horror of the school siege.

We in the early years community in Northern Ireland knew a little of the sorrow our friends and colleagues in this small Russian town were experiencing. We are moving slowly from our indent past where children. families, communities have all been affected by violence, where school children have been used as a pawn in sectarianism and cultural conflict.

Beslan and other horrific incidences of violence which are occurring with such a sickening regularity make the Working Forum Belfast Conference, Building Bridges - Healing Community through Early Childhood Education even more relevant. The World Forum Foundation and NIPPA - The Early Years Organisation will redouble our efforts to ensure that the conference will help us learn and share powerful lessons on peace making and peace building and through our effort with the very young build a more peaceful, inclusive world.

To learn more about Working Forum Belfast, go to http://mail.ccie.com/go/eed/0399