Senior play development worker Yvonne Smillie of the North Glasgow Mobile Childcare Service, who took part in the SINA programme, first came into contact with the young children of asylum seekers when she was working in Sighthill a year ago.
Yvonne says, 'When one country hits the news, for example Afghanistan, you are very aware of asylum seekers from there but you don't realise there are other ones. I didn't realise how many different countries were represented.
It is a huge number.'
She says the first, basic problem was communication. 'Although I am tone deaf I love doing music. But sitting down in a creche with these children, we were doing "The wheels on the bus go round and round", and I realised that the children had no idea what it was about.
'It was a case of thinking on the spot. So I was doing face and body songs, "Eyes, nose, cheeky cheeky chin" and so on.'
She also tried resurrecting her long-forgotten schoolgirl French. 'A couple of the asylum speakers spoke French and they really appreciated the effort.
I learned to use a lot of sign language, and of course you have to make very sure you are not being patronising.'
The mobile childcare service, which is linked to the North Glasgow Community Forum, operates two vans equipped with arts, crafts, literacy and play resources that provide creche support to parents who are attending further education classes, groups and so on.
Yvonne says asylum seeker parents were understandably very reluctant to leave children in creche facilities, and winning their trust was an important element of the work.
She says that the course was a great help in offering practical ideas and in highlighting the sorts of trauma that asylum seekers have experienced.
'You came away feeling very humble and realising that what you had thought were big problems were really not big at all in comparison to what these people have been through. Initially, working with asylum seekers was daunting, but now we have more confidence. We really feel we can help.'
She recalls that one of the first activities on the course was for each delegate to make a chart of the significant people in their personal universe. Family and friends were named in circles radiating out from the centre. Yvonne says, 'We heard about the experiences of one asylum seeker - her children were shot - and in a very stark way we saw how, one by one, the people in her universe chart were scored out. That story really brought it home to us.'
