Red Cross Blogs

The Artist Within

By Anna Carter
November 23, 2009 at 4:51 pm

Things on the south coast have been a wee bit frantic of late. What with humanitarian citizen nominations for two groups of young people that I work with, weekends spent disturbing the tranquillity of the Hampshire countryside (and learning lots too), school speaker training, standing in for Laura (youth representative for the UK at the international delegate conference) at the gala ball and preparing for World AIDS Day there has been hardly any time to sit and document the goings on for the blogosphere.

Monday is the day when Steph, an intern on the HIV project comes into the office and works her magic. As well as restoring what little sanity I have left she coordinates the school speaker project- at the moment it is all hands on deck for world AIDS day preparations. While I leave all that in the capable hands of Steph, a small window of blogging opportunity opens.

A little earlier in the week I swapped office stress for a foray into the calming world of art…

 This week at the project that I run for young refugees we were joined by Kev Munday. Kev arrived in Portsmouth on a particularly wet Wednesday evening, suitcase in tow and, much to the delight of all of the boys at the project, began to unpack some heavy duty canvas and some spray cans. I grabbed some newspaper and began to cover the floor in it. Kev delivered an amazing workshop that allowed the boys to express themselves in a new way. Many of them created their own ‘tag’ using colours, shapes and designs that represented themselves in some way. Kev demonstrated how to create different written effects-in Dari, Arabic and Kurdish.

Kev’s help was enlisted after my work with the Sierra Leone Red Cross. Inspired by their work with young people in the CAR project, I wanted to allow the boys the opportunity to get involved in a creative project. One of the most common frustrations that the boys have is not being able to express themselves. Language is often a barrier but so too is judgement and misunderstanding. Many of the boys have spoken of racist remarks being directed at them and a general lack of understanding of their situation and why they have travelled to the UK. Using the paint they were able to express themselves in a language that did not require words. The highlight of the evening for me came as the evening drew to a close and the boys moved around the hall to admire the work that the others had done.

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Tags: art, graffiti, hampshire, humanitarian cititizen awards, interns, refugee, young people

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