Bosnia Pictures
I believe art can help people begin to heal emotional wounds by opening doors of communication. When creating, people can start to "say" things they never could before. ArtReach has these same beliefs so when I was asked by Susan Anderson, the director of ArtReach to conduct an art therapy workshop in Bosnia I was very thrilled. The ArtReach idea was to introduce art therapy techniques to teachers, counselors and other adults.
To the right is the school where we taught.
This is me and Hajdi, my translator with the class of teachers. In the first week I meet amazing people, who were open to any ideas that might help them help their children. In the end I believe they left with a better understanding of the pain they endured and were then able to help others even better than they could before. These adults felt a great responsiblity to be strong for their children and even for the world. It was extremly inportant to them that "we" thought of them as the intellegent, capable and independent people they are.
"ART IS THE SET OF WINGS TO CARRY YOU OUT OF YOUR ENTANGLEMENT" Joseph Campbell
In the second week the adults I worked with brought children to the school. They used art therapy ideas to "talk" with the children. It was beautiful to watch as adult and child communicted through the child's art work. I felt truly blessed to have had the privledge to share in such great moments. In the picture on the right you will see some of the kids holding up their hand design for their group mandalas. In this project the students created the mandala as a group and then traced their own hand and designed it to represent them. They then cut out the hand and put it on the mandala and told something they brought to the group.
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