Sports For Peace And Social Change

The recent war in Lebanon has not only caused thousands of deaths and injuries, and destroyed homes and infrastructure, but has also left the survivors daily lives in upheaval in which day-to-day routine has been disrupted. Children and young people are especially susceptible to emotional stress and trauma. Frustration, combined with a lack of reference points and opportunities, creates fertile ground for violence, radical ideologies and instability, and makes them vulnerable to risky behavior, including substance abuse.
Sport and play are a meaningful leisure activity that can help overcome emotional injury, channel frustration and agression, promote physical and mental wellbeing, impart important basic rules for peaceful coexistence, encourage confidence, friendships and relationships based on trust, and promote social integration. Sport and play can also be combined with informational and educational work (e.g. drug and AIDS prevention).
In this regard, Oum El Nour and the Swiss Academy for Development (SAD) are using guided team sport activities as a tool to help children and youth affected by armed conflict in Lebanon to overcome the stress and trauma of war, to facilitate their reintegration into normal life, and to help establish leisure time structures that provide a sense of direction, stability, and normality . The idea is based on the encouraging results form similar projects that SAD has carried out in several parts of the world.