Bringing war to Hong Kong: Red Cross experience aims to show local youngsters the horrors of violent conflict

Child soldiers and war orphans may be a distant thought for most Hong Kong youngsters, but they will be able to get a taste of their plight when Asia’s first war-themed “experiential” education programme is launched in the city by the Hong Kong Red Cross in May.

Pupils will be thrust into the throes of war in a 3,000 sq ft space at the Humanitarian Education Centre at Red Cross headquarters in West Kowloon, where they will negotiate darkness, machine gun fire and electricity outages in a mock wartime classroom complete with wooden crates as chairs and an old dirty chalkboard.

The centre is mainly targeting students in Primary Five and above, who will see how war orphans are often forced to flee the fighting or join it.

“Children ... in a world of communication, they know about war,” said the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer. “But they don’t have any explanation [of it] ... Here, they can experience, learn, and talk about it.”

Maurer said war and conflict isn’t that far removed from our lives, with violence taking place in cities around the world, broadcast and shared, and easily accessed on the internet.

The programme spans a few rooms of the 5,000 sq ft centre and consists of multiple wartime scenarios, said centre manager Szeto Kin-tat.