Ten-year-old Sammy from Venezuela wakes up every morning asking if she is going to the ECW-funded Child Friendly Spaces in her neighborhood in La Guajira, Colombia.

She wears her hair in two braids and a polkadot dress. You can see the corner of her eyes perk up as she smiles behind her facemask as she enters the classroom. Sammy is eager to learn. She is the first one to arrive at Save the Children Colombia’s Child Friendly Spaces every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning.

Sammy has always been a dreamer and a fighter.

Despite facing adversity throughout her life, she has never given up. When she was only two years old, her family found out she couldn’t walk. Ever since then, she has spent her life trying to work around her disability.

During Sammy’s long, arduous journey to Colombia with her family, they lost the medical papers indicating that her psychomotor skills were impaired. The loss of these documents posed a barrier for Sammy’s access to quality education. School administrators told her mother that Sammy needed to attend an institution that would focus on meeting her needs and provide her with special education. Without these documents, they said, Sammy couldn’t attend school.

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