Paint murals with 300 Syrian Refugee children

Overview: 

Many Syrians live in desperate conditions in towns and cities (known as host communities) and refugee camps. As they struggle with basic necessities, they also face mental health issues relating to conflict and displacement. This coming summer 2018, we will once again be working in host communities, this time with a specific training element built into the program. Following this, we will be working in Azraq camp and potentially Za’atari as well. Our goal is to train local artists, including some of those who we worked with in the past as well as new ones.

Stories from the field: 

Mohammed, a boy, wrote a long poem about his experience in the camp and wanted to read the whole thing to us while being translated. His strength and questions were a sign of having lived far beyond his years. He wanted help with how to show his emotions through visual images.  He spoke about the feeling that the children in the camp were flowers that were not being watered or being provided with the nutrients to be able to grow. He spoke about how the water for children to grow can only be collected through the opportunity to get an education.  

Children grabbed different objects and figured out different ways of painting them, attaching them and creating a sculpture from nothing. The frenetic energy of these children is emphatic. They scream and jump, laugh and exert more emotion at every second. This memory is something that is out of the ordinary for them, but also is a signal that there may be another life up ahead.

A girl, 6 years old, wanted to help but had a baby in a carriage. So she chose to grab some of the painted objects in one hand that she had proudly painted,  and wheel the baby over the rocky ground with the other hand. When she got to the area that had the sewage, she put down the painted objects. She picked up the baby carriage, put it over the estuary of green muck, and then went back to pick up the objects she painted to bring them across a second time. The kinds of lives that these children have to live on an everyday basis are extraordinarily self-reliant. 

Thank you for helping us transform lives through public art!

Links:

• Artolution