* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
This last summer, under a light rain of a Wednesday morning, I traveled to Tédjou, a town not far from the sub-prefecture of Tissi, in the region of DarSila, eastern Chad. With its mix of arid and green landscapes, this little town is home to some 50 000 Chadian and Sudanese refugees and returnees.
I was there as part of a production team of the UN Children Fund (UNICEF). Our objective was to explain to a group of students' parents in Tédjou about the 'Dance4Peace' project, initiated by the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO) in order to seek their agreement for the participation of their children to the dance project.
The project, part of the EU Children of Peace initiative, invited children from affected countries around the world to participate in an original music video on peace. This video collage joins together each of the projects and aims to draw attention to the children – the most innocent of victims and often the hardest hit by conflict. This was also the case for the children of Tédjou, who were forced to leave Darfur to take refuge in southeastern Chad soil as a result of intercommunal clashes in 2013.
After presenting our music video project to the chief of the village, we were greeted by a group of Arabic-speaking teachers at the school center – on the day of our visit, we found a deserted school, due to the holiday season. A few minutes of discussion with the teachers were enough to explain the practical details on how the filming would take place and how we would teach the choreography of the Dance4Peace song to the children and adolescents.
