A white liberal baby-boomer rose to protest the trend: ‘We are proud of our diversity in this school, but we don’t want to have too much diversity!’

‘You can be a child living with a family member and still be completely alone.’ This conviction is what drove Camila Batmanghelidjh to set up the charity Kids Company's therapy centre under a pair of derelict railway arches on a deprived south London estate near Brixton eight years ago.

The two women, from the US and Sierra Leone, quickly found they had shared concerns. Kamara told White-Baughan about her work with a grassroots community organization in Sierra Leone called Children’s Learning Services (see FAC April-May 2003). ‘She added that the children could not seem to learn due to trauma from the decade of civil war that had just ended,’ says White-Baughan.

Prof Richard Whitfield argues that we must get our relationships right if we are to give the next generation a fair chance in life.

Einar Engebretsen drove his teachers to despair. 30 years later he discovered why.

When a group of Ugandan children was asked to put on a play, they chose war and reconciliation as its themes. Mercy Mirembe Ntangaare worked with them.

When she was 14, Karin Peters' uncle died of cancer. 'It felt like a bomb had been dropped on top of my world,' she says.

Few countries have seen more changes in the last century than Russia. Anastasia Stepanova traces its history through the lives of three generations.

The Johannesburg Earth Summit highlighted the urgent need of many countries to secure greater freshwater supplies. Alan Ervine talks to Kenneth Noble about what can be done to turn aspiration into reality.

In recent years LFL has turned its attention to 3,500 Afghan refugee children - girls and boys - living in and around Peshawar. As the two million Afghan refugees in Pakistan begin to return home - a process which is expected to take at least two years - LFL aims to expand into Afghanistan itself.