Tag Archive for: children

SAMU First Response Supports Hispanic Children in Learning Spanish Literacy

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SAMU First Response, a leading humanitarian organization in the United States, is proud to announce its Escuelita SAMU program, which focuses on supporting Hispanic migrant children in learning to read and write in Spanish. The initiative aims to preserve their connection to their native language and culture, ensuring that they do not lose their linguistic heritage during their transition to life in the U.S.

The Escuelita SAMU program provides structured literacy lessons designed to help children build a strong foundation in Spanish. By empowering these children to develop reading and writing skills in their mother tongue, SAMU First Response is investing in their future. The goal is to equip them with bilingual abilities that will be crucial as they enter the workforce as adults.

Learning both Spanish and English offers significant benefits for migrant children. Being bilingual opens doors to a broader range of career opportunities, higher earning potential, and greater competitiveness in fields such as healthcare, education, international business, and public service. In addition, bilingualism strengthens cognitive flexibility, problem-solving abilities, and cultural understanding.

“Escuelita SAMU is not just about teaching children to read and write—it’s about empowering them to maintain their cultural identity while preparing them for a successful future,” said Marisela Castillo, Outreach Manager at SAMU First Response. “The positive impact of this program goes beyond literacy. It provides these children with the tools they need to thrive academically, socially, and professionally, ensuring they grow up to be bilingual, culturally rich, and ready to contribute to society.”

SAMU First Response’s Escuelita SAMU ensures that Hispanic migrant children not only thrive in their new environment but also maintain strong ties to their cultural identity. The program provides them with the tools to succeed academically and professionally, while remaining connected to their roots and language.

 

SAMU Arrives in Puerto Rico

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SAMU has arrived in Puerto Rico and has launched the program initiative Smile in Puerto Rico. This program is in collaboration with SAMU and Fundacion Atención Atención that is based in Puerto Rico. Two team members from the SAMU team in Spain have arrived in Puerto Rico this past week to replicate a program that is currently in Fundacion Atención Atención that is called La Hora de Juegos or The Hour of Play.

La Hora de Juegos is an intervention program that has been implemented in the public schools of Puerto Rico that focuses on using the form of play to reach children that are facing difficult life circumstances. This initiative works with creating spaces for psycho-emotional recovery in children after difficult events. It also works as a tool of prevention to help children acquire tools of resilience and socialization.

The program is designed so that trained professionals will go to schools around Puerto Rico for one hour a day and use play time and music to establish bonds of trust with the children, while working on processes of personal development, psychological introspection, and healthy socialization. Our team from Spain has been working with three different schools around Puerto Rico to provide spaces of healing. They begin their day at 7:00am where they attend three classes of children until 9:20am. After that, they move to the second school, where they teach two classes from 10:00am to 1:00pm. Finally, they arrive at the third school where they teach two classes from 1:30pm to 2:30pm.

Smile in Puerto Rico is a four-week program with SAMU that focuses on different personal development aspects each week. The first week focuses on creating skills of self-knowledge and self- concept. The second week focuses on establishing healthy social skills. The third week centers around autonomy and the ability for one’s own choices and independent decisions. And finally on the fourth week, concentrating on emotional and mental health. After the four weeks of La Hora Del Juegos, the aspiration is that the children will be able to acquire the tools of resilience and healthy socialization and apply those to their everyday lives.

 

Close to 600 children under the protection of SAMU

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The massive arrival of immigrants in small boats to the Andalusian coast in recent years has put all the social entities involved in this phenomenon on alert, among them the SAMU Foundation, which currently hosts about 560 minors who have arrived clandestinely to Spain without being accompanied by an adult. These are distributed among the 16 different centers available to the organization. On the one hand, the so-called Temporary Emergency Accommodation Units or Immediate Care centers, and, on the other, the Basic Residential Care centers. Most of them come from Morocco, although there are also children from Guinea, Senegal, Mali and Ivory Coast.

Irregular immigration has more than doubled so far this year compared to the figures of 2017, which were alarming then. Spain is already the main access route to Europe, surpassing Italy. Up to the 15th of July, the irregular immigrants who had entered this year in Spain, mostly by sea and on the coast of Andalusia, already numbered 15,686, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior —the European agency Frontex raises this to 18,016 for the same period—, 114% more than in 2017, when the figure had already increased by 170%.

Many of these immigrants are unaccompanied foreign minors. In the first seven months of 2018, some 3,200 unaccompanied foreign minors came to Andalusia through its shores, a thousand of them in July alone, compared to 2,855 in all of last year, according to data from the Andalusian Government.

This year, the SAMU Foundation, by order of the Board, has opened, as of yet, 11 new resources aimed at this group. Two of them are Basic Residential Care centers, and the rest are Immediate Care centers.

The last two emergency temporary shelter resources were opened in August in Guillena (Seville) and Jimena (Cádiz). In addition to these, there are two more in the province of Cádiz open this year and two more in 2017, two in the province of Almeria, and three in that of Granada, all of them active from this year.

In terms of Basic Residential Care resources, which allow minors to remain at the center until children reach legal adulthood, SAMU has three resources in Seville, Granada and Cadiz. The last of them was set up in El Bosque, in the province of Cádiz, at the end of May. It was born from a need of the General Direction of Childhood and Families of the Board to address the needs of minors who arrived in Spain during the year 2017 and were still being cared for in Immediate Care centers. There are 13 people who work here, among them psychologists, social workers, educators, teachers, and edudational technical assistants.

“The key objective of the Basic Residential Care centers is to insert these children into society. Our role is one of social and professional guidance that starts with the task of documenting the minors, placing them in educational centers or in different courses and working with them towards their future emancipation,” indicates Nicolas Torres, director of SAMU minors.

All these resources add up to two more instruments in Motril (Granada), a Center of Social/ Professional Orientation, opened in 2013, and a floor for children who have been under the guardianship of SAMU and who have already reached legal age.