Inside Outside Project

Anonymous from Syria Drawn by a Syrian refugee girl in a tea garden in Reyhanli. A family in the snow.Topic for session: Draw the future you hope for.  

Anonymous, 11, Syria Topic for this session: Scary bad things in two colors. Khalid recalls: she is a very sensitive girl who thinks before she speaks. When she speaks, you like to listen to her. She is sweet, calm, and polite. You feel she has something inside, but you don’t see it… you feel like you need more time to discover it.The girl said, the black stands for fear, the red stands for blood. The monster has a knife, there is blood on the knife, and he wants to kill the girl with the knife.Ezgi asked, what was your feeling while drawing? Fear, said the girl.Ezgi asked, what did you feel after talking about this? The girl said, I feel better and more comfortable because I spoke about it. Ezgi asked, do you need anything about from the group to feel safer? The girl said, I ask them to not lie to each other. (Then the group said, we promise!)

Anonymous from Syria A drawing of “bad things” by a Syrian refugee child in the Free Syria School. The class was taught by David Gross. The exercise involved quick drawings, of 2 minutes each, in three parts.The first step was a pencil drawing. The student drew a symbolic border, then added elements that were “bad things.” Next, the bad things were colored, to give them “life.” David led the students through a fast, yogic stretching movement to add the physical experience of openness. Finally, the student painted over the bad with “good things,” in bright colors, giving the experience of replacing the bad with the good. The students told him that they loved the experience, especially the stretching exercise!