Pupils link in to refugees’ stories
They say pictures tell a thousand words – but this time the words of five Syrian refugees have been turned into 119 pictures.
Imaginations ablaze, paint brushes at the ready, five Island Bay School classes listened closely to the stories of refugees who had each recently celebrated their first year living in New Zealand.
‘‘What Is Home?’’, the collaborative art project between Make Foundation and Island Bay School, is creating illustrated storybooks to raise funds for Syrian refugee children in Lebanon. Each class had one refugee’s story, each pupil had one section; working together to create five coherent storybooks.
Katia Restomagha lived
in Damascus, the capital of Syria, before forced to flee, aged 14.
She writes about how she used to enjoy going into the town square, visiting a cafe and listening to the tales of old men.
It became too dangerous to go there after demonstrations against the government started.
‘‘My friends and I decided to go on the march, too. We were all 14 years old.
‘‘The secret police came to school and wanted to arrest me because I wrote that I needed freedom on the school walls with my friends.’’
The head teacher refused to let the Mukhabarat – the Syrian military intelligence service – take the girls, so officers went to their homes later to arrest them.
But the head teacher had already phoned home, warning the parents to keep the girls away.
Katia went to her grandmother’s house for two weeks.
‘‘I felt so scared.’’ After those two weeks, she went to Egypt with her parents and lived in a camp near Cairo.
She left Cairo for Mangere, in Auckland, in January last year.
Now 18, she has lived in Wellington with her parents for a year and attends Wellington East Girls’ College, and plans going to university next year.
‘‘Now I am in New Zealand, I am safe and happy,’’ Katia said. ‘‘I feel peaceful here.’’
It was ‘‘really cool’’ to have her story depicted in paintings by New Zealand children, she said.
Pupil Samantha McCallum, 6, drew the house Katia lived in with her parents in Syria.
‘‘I didn’t really know what her house looked like, so I tried to just make it look like a house,’’ she said.
Teacher Lizzie Waipara said the project had helped the children become more civically engaged.
‘‘And really thinking about their community, what their community means, and what home means.’’
Michelle Carlile-Alkhouri and Michel Alkhouri started the Make Foundation six months ago, linking children to the issues of today.