Kitegang's original motivation in working along the Chad-Sudan border was primarily outreach; seeing so many refugee children fleeing the horrors of Darfur motivated us to take action. Consequently, the Darfur Kite Festival was born as an annual project to help inspire and support the children of Darfur in the best way we knew how. Working together with SOS Children's Villages on this project, we have been pursuing innovative psycho-social programming on the front lines, attempting to help children both with special needs, as well as those children simply yearning for a bit of fun, recover from the emotional trauma of fleeing Darfur. After helping thousands of children build, decorate, and fly their own kites, we're hopeful that by expressing themselves and seeing the power of their own creativity, more children will find increasing reasons to smile at the future, while slowly coming to terms with their past.
Yet now with the Darfur Kite Festival becoming more established, Kitegang is also increasingly looking to expand its support of refugees by manufacturing a larger percentage of its kites within the refugee communities of eastern Chad. Being light in nature and requiring little training to make, we feel that manufacturing kites is a perfect income generating activity to assist the refugees in the camps, (where the population is often both highly transient, and under-employed). Consequently we look forward to both expanding such economic efforts in Chad to support the daily needs of at-risk families, as well as continuing our original efforts to encourage curiosity and hope in the children of Darfur, no matter how far removed they happen to be.
