13 July 2020
The long weeks of lockdown were difficult, especially for children. The impossibility to access playgrounds, or to do team sports, strongly affected their daily lives. Summer and the holiday camps proposed by the Luxembourg Red Cross should allow them to spend their energy with activities that corresponds better to their needs and desires.
The Red Cross adapted its activities with the aim of enabling the youth to enjoy the most pleasant and safe holidays possible, in a secure environment, as of August.
We will implement health safety measures during transport and on-site. In this endeavour, we rethought the organisation of our summer camps to comply with the hygiene and social distancing recommendations of the Luxembourg Ministry of Education, Children and Youth (ministère de l’Education nationale, de l’Enfance et de la Jeunesse, MENJE).
Our youth team leaders also received a specific training by the National Youth Service (Service national de la jeunesse). Finally, the Reinert company donated us 800 re-usable masks. All these adaptations made it possible to welcome the children back in our summer camps.
In total, we are confident in our ability to maintain 6 summer camps: 2 in Neihasgen in Luxembourg for children aged from 4 to 7 years old, 3 at the seaside in La Panne in Belgium and 1 in Kell am See in Germany. Most of the participants, who registered before the lockdown, were happy to confirm their participation to the camps.
After the authorities had declared a lockdown in the Grand Duchy to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the Red Cross cancelled all its planned summer camps. As a follow-up to the re-authorization of summer camps by the Luxembourg MENJE this mid-June, the Red Cross teams re-considered and maintained some of the camps, on the locations where they could implement the necessary sanitary measures. The Red Cross usually welcomes more than 600 children on its various summer camps.