As part of their activities with hospitalized children and adolescents, the Dames de Lenval initiated a writing workshop after organizing several drawing contests.
This project is in line with many other projects combating illiteracy, particularly the one by the Caisse des Dépôts, which has been supporting the Lenval Foundation for years, and the one by the City of Nice under the direction of Raoul Mille.
About forty young patients participated throughout the school year in this writing workshop, under the guidance of teachers, on the theme of the sea.
“We proposed to the teachers of the hospital school, under the leadership of its director, Sylvie Lagrange, to manage this workshop within the framework of hospital school time, leaving the young patients free to participate, knowing that their only true reward would be the publication of their texts and poems.
We were all moved and amazed by the outcome, and we presented these published notebooks thanks to the support of the Caisse des Dépôts.
Didier van Cauwelaert kindly and enthusiastically agreed to sponsor this initiative and dedicated the notebooks to our young patients,” explains Christiane Scoffier.
In his preface, Didier van Cauwelaert shares his emotion with us: “While reading these children’s texts, I found myself carried away by their dreams, fears, joys, the suddenness or the careful work of their talent. I got to know what is strongest in them. I listened to them, understood them, loved them from afar. I dreamed within the echo of their dreams. Sometimes I put faces to their words, names to their pains. I remembered being hospitalized like them at their age, in front of this sea that nevertheless gives us wings when our legs betray us. …
I know, dear readers, that all these poems you are about to discover are paths to healing. It’s up to you to take them, to feel better, enriched by the hope or the distress they express; it’s up to you to transform your reading emotions into beneficial thoughts, directed towards these young poets of the Lenval hospital, because dreaming is the medicine of the soul. A remedy without side effects that makes the treatments administered to the body more effective and less painful. A medicine of love that heals just as well the one who receives it as the one who gives it.”
