Every Wednesday, about a dozen children, meet up at Vertical World, an indoor rock-climbing gym in Seattle. A few weeks prior, they were living in places like Africa, India, or Afghanistan. Now, as refugees in America, new to the country and often even the English language, Stone Masters, a program of Vertical Generation, plans to dangle them from an indoor cliff — 50 feet in the air.
That may sound a bit crazy, but the idea behind the program is to use “rock climbing as a way to teach and enforce strengths, like problem-solving and learning how to deal with adversity.”
The eight-week program doesn’t intend to make world-class climbers out of their protégés. Instead, they hope that by learning to conquer the crag, they will take the calmness, strength, and smarts they learned from rock climbing and apply it to the challenges they face in daily life. Plus, it gives refugee children the chance to make new friends in this foreign place.
