Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter

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*Adolescent Kit for Expression and Innovation*

UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund. Adolescent Kit for Expression and Innovation. 2015 2821

UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund. Adolescent Kit for Expression and Innovation. 2015

Two of the items you see here are School-in-a-Box and the Adolescent Kit for Expression and Innovation, both of which were developed by the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF. Both provide supplies for a teacher and up to 40 students—things like maps, pads of paper, pencils and pens, scissors, construction paper and other art supplies. The lid of School-in-the Box, for example, functions as a blackboard. And the goal here is to get children back to school within 72 hours of an emergency.

The Adolescent Kit for Expression, on the other hand, was conceived to help kids express their emotions after suffering the trauma of displacement. The objects that you see would be distributed to individuals upon entering a refugee camp. In a sense, while shelter provides a container, if you will, for living, these items extend that way of living past the most immediate personal and familial concerns.