What is essential is invisible to the eye | Bowspirit Kids - the ship

The above quote from "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry came to the minds of the crew of the Bowspirit Kids when they discussed the recent talks with potential supporters and media representatives.

There are obviously some fixed points in our project where the essentials are seemingly invisible to outsiders, even though they are obvious to us initiators.
In a small series of news articles, we talk about this so that you can also say "I can see rightly not only with my heart, but also with my eyes and my mind".

We have already explained elsewhere that the purchase of an older passenger ferry is not more expensive than the construction of a land-based facility of comparable size.

The same applies to ongoing operations. As a result, the per capita costs per day will not be higher than for rehabilitation measures on shore in Germany.

We are able to judge this because our managing director in his career to date has become very familiar with and evaluated the cost calculations of shipping companies, including individual ship operation, as well as the cost structures of acute and rehabilitation hospitals.

The assumption, often made spontaneously as a result of lack of knowledge or "respect" for a large ocean-going vessel, that our vision is too big or too expensive is simply wrong.

The purchase of the ship and its operation are completely comparable to a corresponding in-patient facility. Only that for therapeutic reasons we do not want to be stationary.

A ship can overcome borders - borders between countries, borders in the mind, but also the border between land and sea.

We would like to offer our little potential guests a very special journey to start into a hopefully healthy future - a new stage in their life's journey, so to speak.

If, on the other hand, this journey would "only" go to a coast, there would be a border - the sea. However our young guests have experienced barriers and border experiences more than enough. Just as we symbolise it with our name, we also want to show that despite what has been experienced, (almost) everything is still possible if the kids and youths learn to trust themselves again with our help and integrate the foul that fate has played to them into their future life.

And anyone who has ever seen a rehabilitation clinic from the inside knows that this is no place to be a kid. As the name suggests, it is and remains a clinic.

A "floating playroom" on which you can get to know and visit areas from bow to stern that a guest would otherwise never see is something completely different.

We want to leave port A and leave what has been experienced behind us - unfortunately we cannot undo it. And we arrive at port B again. And even if they return home afterwards, our guests will be able to view their return to everyday life from a different perspective and return "upright" to their future lives.

This is the therapeutic advantage of a floating recreation camp. In addition, there is also a practical-organisational one. The ship is not an immovable property, which means that we can adapt its location as required and, for example, shorten the journey times for the children and sail towards them, thus supplying a much larger catchment area at the same time.

• Please help so that no seriously ill child and no shadow child on our rich continent is left alone with its burden of soul.
• Please address the gap in our social systems and the offer that the Bowspirit Kids want to offer financed by the crowd.
• It is about children in your (distribution) region and their chance to start again confidently into a healthy future after having survived acute treatment.

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Bowspirit Kids - We want to turn children's tears into tears of joy

The Bowspirit Kids Group was founded in spring 2018 in Lübeck, Germany. Our activities focus on the creation of a maritime holiday and recreation camp that will give sick and traumatised children and their siblings - often called the "shadow children" - the opportunity to have fun and take a recreation from the illness. To this aim, we want to take advantage of the mobility of a passenger ferry to be able to operate outside of the base location in order to present the Bowspirit Kids Group and its work worldwide and to initiate further projects based on the guiding theme of a "recreation from illness".

The group has two companies - the non-profit company Bowspirit Kids gemeinnützige GmbH (www.bowspirit-kids.org) and the commercially managed Bowspirit Management GmbH (www.bowspirit-management.com), which are intertwined under company law in such a way that the profits generated cannot be distributed to shareholders, but are directed towards the overarching charitable objective.

The Bowspirit Kids Group intends not to base its activities solely on classical donations, but also to raise financial resources through social events and business sponsorships. In the fourth quarter of 2018, the campaign "The world's largest floating pinboard" was launched as kick-off event.