SUMMER CAMPS

Tomorrow morning, the Children's Work in the Country will bring to Boulogne-sur-Mer, to direct them then to Dover, one hundred and fifty children from the liberated regions.

Unfortunately, not all parents have the leisure and the means to take their children to the countryside for the holidays. In the great majority of cases they are kept in town by their work.

What to do with the child, now that the schools are going to close? Keep it at home? You don't have to think about it. Let him roam free? Few people resign themselves to it. Board him out in the country? But the budget of all French mothers cannot lend itself to such an expense, which is added to the others, already heavy. And then, we always fear that the toddler is little or even not at all supervised, that he is badly cared for, by people who do not know his little habits. What apprehensions does a mother not form?

It is to respond to this state of affairs that summer camps were created. Closely supervised, city children can, thanks to them, lead the life of movement and play in the open air which their reunion favors and which suits their age, without their families having to worry about their fate.

More particularly tested than the others, the children of the liberated regions have an imperious need to leave, for 2 summer months, their often still temporary shelters. They need to recover the strength they have lost as a result of undernourishment. prolonged and perpetual anguish where they lived their first years. Above all, they must change their horizon, forget for a while this soil whose wounds are barely healing.

A beautiful work

Since 1920, the Children's Work in the Countryside, founded in 1904, and whose dedicated secretary general is Mr. Joël Gradel, has been organizing convoys of children from the Denain region, in particular to England. On July 31 of last year, one hundred and fifty-three children met at Amiens, where the centralization of the colony was taking place, and the next morning landed at Southampton. In groups, they were then directed to Portsmouth, Bromley, Bath, Exmouth, Aldershot and Dover, where they received a warm welcome from the English works and the population. For a month, this little world experienced the pleasures of gambling, walking, excursions, even motoring. On their return, notes Mr. Joël Gradel in a documented report, the children had grown very noticeably – the girls especially – and their weight had increased by an average of 4 kg. 740. The secretary. General rightly remarks that to these physical benefits was added an invaluable moral and intellectual enrichment in these little ones, in contact with a humanity unknown to them.

Continuing its noble task, the Children's Work in the Countryside is once again organizing a summer camp. Tomorrow morning, one hundred and fifty children from the liberated regions will embark at Boulogne-sur-Mer for Dover, from where they will be divided between the towns of Eastbourne, Maidstone, Astford, Manchester and Kendal.

The colony will be received by the French War Charities Society, whose founder, Mr. Henry Bronnert esq. is of Alsatian origin, and will stay for a month in comfortable schools, under the enlightened supervision of French teachers. Mrs. Joël Gradel, director of the work, will accompany the children and will stay with them. Nothing will fail them, neither food, nor fresh air, nor care, nor enthusiasm. Twenty years' experience, better still, the absolute devotion of the organizers of Children's Work in the countryside, are the best guarantee. — P.S-P