Page 38 - MY Book - My Voice

Al Bas Family guidance centerThree workshops, carried out at Al Bas center 2015–2016.The rst time I met the children from Jall al Bahar-gathering, it was based on a misunderstanding. I didn’t know anyone from the gathering, and I didn’t know that they were coming. I had planned a workshop for children living in Al Bas and Rashedieh camps and had designed exercises on drawing houses and the children’s homes in the camp. I know the camp well and know that the houses are built tight, with narrow alleyways between them. The houses are not always easy to draw because you see just a part of it, notlike a house standing solitary. I hadn’t decided if I would collect the drawings in a book, or just glue the drawing together to make one long piece to hang up on the wall, I wanted to meet the group before I made a decision.The rst thing I noticed when the children arrived, was that the group behaved di erently to what I was used to. The children were completely unstructured, they were noisy and had a lot of energy they didn’t seem to know how to canalize. It seemed like it was the rst time ever they were in a workshop. That actually turned out to be the case.After some warming up exercises sitting together on a long table in totally chaos, the social workers reorganized the children in smaller groups. We hoped that would help to calm down the atmosphere. When I asked the children to draw their own house, they were all drawing small, one-story houses, with a glimpse of the sea between them. I couldn’t understand why they were drawing like that, when the houses they live in look quite di erent and don’t have a sea view. I asked the sta to make sure that they had understood the task. Then I nally realized that the children actually live by the sea, in a gathering, not in the camp as I had planned for. It was funny, and I was amazed about how much information the children gave about their life and living condition through the drawings. I learned a lot.It turned out that Al Bas center had just started working with this group of children. They came once a week to join in on the activities at the center, and were still not quite adapted to the situation. The activities were organized in two shifts in order to manage the big number of children. Every Friday morning the activities start with a group from Jall al Bahar, followed by a new group, from Al Bas camp. After the activity, the children are served a hot nutritious meal.The drawings were not suitable for making a book, and there were no time left to make a nice presentation of the drawings. When the children left, I immediately started to think about the next workshop, how to improve it to meet the special needs of this group and plan the workshop tailored for them.Two months later, I was ready to do the second workshop with the group, and I wanted to try to do a proper My Book, My Voice-workshop. All the children would draw and write and make their own book with hard cover. It was an ambitious plan, and I hoped it would work. I had simpli ed the bookbinding technique, and we were going to make an “accordion”-book that didn’t need any sewing, just glue and tape.I wanted to continue on the topic from the rst workshop and concentrate on the fact that the children were living on the beach. Since the kids the rst time had mentioned their fathers shing, I had brought photos of local sh-species that the children used as reference when they were drawing. I also brought images of local trees. Each child got a long and narrow piece of good quality paper and started to draw36