Day 6. Syrian Elite School, Istanbul. Part 1.
( I have skipped the weekend for now, I will get back to that, it makes better sense in my head this way !)
Wow what a day ! Myself, Suleman and Kine taught art to 100 children ! yes 100 ! in one day ! It was crazy, but good crazy.
We had some troubled souls that day, too.
Kine and Sul hadn't yet been to the school, so Besher, Rosa's brother came with us to translate. Mr khalad told them all about the school and how he had set up. Just a re cap if you haven't read my previous posts.
Mr khalad is an incredible man, he put all his life savings into this school, which was never even meant to be a school. He started off by setting up a refuge for Syrian refugees fleeing the war, soon enough the children wanted to learn, they had 10 children in the first class. Everyone started hearing about this wonderful man, putting families up, feeding them, looking after them, and most importantly, giving these innocent children an education. 3 years on, mr khaled now has almost 400 students and has a few families living at the school, he even cares for some orphans, more on that later.
We set up our first class of 40 children. We gave them all masks, pots of paint, glue, glitter, sequins and pom poms.
We had one little girl who was a real character at the front of the class. Shes paralyzed from the legs down and is in a pushchair, not a wheelchair. We gave her the mask and the paint etc, and she just stared at it, looking totally unimpressed. Besher asked her if she knew what to do and she nodded. 10 minutes later she still hadn't done much, so I picked up a pot of yellow paint and paced it in front of her, she wasn't happy, and told me matter of factly to get it away from her and clean her hands, they were covered in paint. Eventually she warmed up to the task and painted a mask with some sequins and pom poms and started to laugh with us.
I noticed a young boy, around the age of 5, staring at his white mask. He hadn't even attempted to pick up a paint brush. I picked up the brush and showed him how to paint, he was so shy, and nervous. I slowly encouraged him, with the help of suleman, to paint my face, which he did incredibly gently, he soon relaxed and painted his mask green.
At the front of the class, sulemans favorite boy, and my favorite boy. They were mini me's of us. Mr OCD, as sul nick named his boy, and mr messy, aka anastasia, I nicknamed mine. The two boys couldnt of sat in a worse place. One was extremly neat and tidy, washing his hands every few minutes, getting stressed if paint went on his part of the table, and neatly arranged all his sequins. He was a mini suleman. The boy next to him, my kinda boy, used the biggest brush he could find, loaded it with paint, and splashed it all over his mask, all over the table and all over himself. He reminded me of me. He continued to cover his mask in so much paint, then the table. He then went on to stand on his chair and bend over his table in order to paint. This boy was me, that's how I paint !
The rest of the class were getting on beautifully, creating unique masks to take home, to wear proudly, carefully putting their sequins where they wanted them and giggling together, checking out each others masks.
Part 2 coming later.
Have a good day !
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