Canadian artist Jean Bradbury has strong ties to Jordan; she’s been working with a women’s craft collective in Ghor-al-Safi along the southern Dead Sea for over twenty years. (See our story about that craft guild and their unique products, here.) In 2012, when Syria exploded into civil war, Jean contacted the Canadian Embassy to see how she might use her art teaching abilities to help in the relief effort.  So began her annual pilgrimage to Zaatari Camp, where – armed with unsinkable energy and donated art supplies – she holds week-long workshops for residents ranging from toddlers to teens.

Bradbury organized her last visit specifically to teach techniques for sharing stories in a graphic novel format. I was lucky enough to tag along as her paper-cutting, ink-pouring assistant.

The men and women who took part in her workshop were members of an all-male English language class and an all-female cosmetology class who took a break from study to try their hand at art. None was a professional artist, although one young man had been an art teacher in Damascus. Many were drawing with pen and ink for the first time.

After she explained the process of setting up page format (here, arranging story blocks right to left, as per Arabic writing), using time sequences to let a story unfold, and the need to add text or thought bubbles to supplement each scene, the group went silent as they dove into their drawings.

“I chose to teach young adults because they seem to be particularly under-served in the camp. Too old to take part in art programs for children and often at loose ends, at a time in their lives when they ought to be making their way in the world. Their frustration and despair is palpable,” said Bradbury, “I hope that, by giving them a creative voice, they will find solace, have some fun, and be able to direct their energy toward something positive and life-affirming.”

The artwork proved her point. She urged everyone to write and draw small moments from their daily lives in the camp – but deeper messages emerged. Once everyone got comfortable with the tools of the trade, their tales flooded reams of blank paper. The focus was intense.  At times the tent where we gathered went silent, except for the noise of the power generator and the wind whipping against the fabric walls.

Translated from above: “I hope to return to our country soon. I wish I could have a child. Life is unbearable without plants and trees.” 

Bradbury told Green Prophet, “I chose graphic novels because I wanted to give voice to some of the otherwise voiceless young people in Zaatari Camp. Using words with pictures enables the refugee to tell his or her story in a much clearer and more engaging way than if they were to use words or pictures alone. The stories that emerge are deeply personal and intimate. It’s therapeutic for the artist and incredibly moving for the reader.”

She took her idea to a donor in Seattle (where she lives and works) who agreed to pay for workshop supplies. He was particularly interested in providing a therapeutic activity for young men who – in their despair – might otherwise be drawn to violence.

She added, “Comics are suitable for situations where there are no art supplies, all that’s needed is a pencil or pen and a piece of paper. I took old-fashioned nib pens to the camp and taught the class how to make ink from pomegranate rinds and iron – anticipating that the donated art supplies would eventually run out.”

Translated from above: “My life in the past was filled with sadness, death and tears. But I moved on, and now all I want is to live in the future and take care of my children.”

Using a comic book format to tell a serious story became popularized in the mid-1960s.  The genre rose to critical and commercial success in the 1980’s with publications such as Art Spiegelman’s MAUS which recounted his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew during World War II and the holocaust.

In 1996, Joe Sacco published Palestine, a graphic novel based on his several months of research in the early and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip where he conducted over 100 interviews with both Palestinians and Jews in the 1990s.

His resulting two-volume set won an American Book Award that same year.

Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi told about coming of age during and after the Iranian revolution in Persepolis, a graphic novel published in four installments between 2000 and 2003. Named by Newsweek as fifth on their list of “10 best books of the decade”, it was adapted for film in 2007.

Perhaps one of these giants in the genre will tap the stories of Syria. The potency of the pictures made by these amateur artists guarantees a blockbuster.

Translated from above: “I feel sad because I know that a lot of kids and young people die daily in my country and I cannot do anything”

Translated from above: “I dream to be a war man to protect my country”. When we asked the artist who he wanted to fight against, he saidDaesh (local term for the IslamicState of Iraq and Syria, a/k/a, ISIS).

Studio Syria always distributes enough supplies to enable workshop participants to go home and continue their artwork.

Want to be part of this beautiful initiative?  Donate directly through her NGO Studio Syria – website link here. If you are in Jordan and able to provide art supplies, drop her an email. And – a nudge to professional graphic novelists – contact her directly if you’d like to take this project to the next level.

All images from Jean Bradbury and Laurie Balbo

The post Syrian refugees share their graphic stories appeared first on Green Prophet.

In Ireland we know about cold bones. This is a story about how we started collecting hats in Ireland for cold kids in a Syrian refugee camp.

I confess! Not all of the previously mentioned “4,000 hand made hats” that we sent to Syria for kids were actually hand made. It is true that more than half of the donated were lovingly knitted and crocheted by local crafters in Ireland and around the world.

But several hundred warm hats were collected and rescued from the depths of drawers and the bottoms of bureaus to be repurposed from forgotten to fantastic!

It all started with an innocent email from a friend, Green Prophet contributor Laurie Balbo. She was volunteering at Zaatari UNHCR Syrian Camp and felt the cold of these children in her bones. She asked for help. My name is Virginia. My partner Brian is a writer for Green Prophet.

Laurie emailed me to ask if I could manage to gather around 200 hats for her husband to carry back in his suitcase?

In Ireland we know about cold bones. The rain and the damp of an Irish winter will chill the hardiest souls. So, we hoard hats. But we might not have known about this particular need if it weren’t for Laurie’s first-hand experience at Zaatari. People who’ve never been to Jordan often imagine the entire Mideast as a place of eternal warmth and sunshine. They forget that the winter nights in the high desert can be colder than even the worst Irish winter.

So, I told a few friends, who told a few friends, who told a few friends. Parenting networks, School groups, charity groups, children’s clubs churches and private business owners all asked their friends and members and clients to donate “hand made and gently used or new hats” for Syrian Refugee Children. A Facebook page was created.

The first donation of 19 children’s hats came in the same day from a mom in my six-year-old’s school with five children of her own, who had sorted through and found all the hats her kids had outgrown. She was delighted to see them go to good use, and personally asked her friends to do the same. Small children were handing me hats in the schoolyard for the last four weeks.

A local teacher told her teenage students and 296 hats were quickly collected from Irish homes. A note was posted on the Cuidiu Facebook page, a national Irish parenting network, packages came in the post from all 32 counties of Ireland, with lovely hand-written notes. “This was my daughter’s favorite hat, I hope another child will like it too.”

CGI, the Irish Girl Scouts organization, has collected hats from Dublin to Wexford. My daughter’s local Malahide troop collected 127 hats in two weeks.

A nearby childcare center owner put an appeal out to the parents of the kids in her creche, who donated 96 gently used hats.

The local Presbyterian church put a notice in their bulletin and church members brought in hats in the one’s, two’s and dozens. One church elder donated over a dozen hats from his life-long collection of souvenirs from his many world travels. Each hat had personal meaning to him.

All told, 3229 hats were collected during the 40 day drive. That’s 80 hats per day. The purpose of upcycling is to give an unused item a new lease of life, and to save it from the landfill. Well played Ireland, you Rock!

The hats were sent to Amman, Jordan and were merged with the hats that Laurie had been collecting. They were just delivered to the refugees. For more donations and collection points in the US, Canada, Ireland, Turkey, Jordan and Israel, please email laurie@greenprophet.com. 

The post The Ultimate Upcycle: Saving Syrian Children’s Lives in Jordan, With Hats appeared first on Green Prophet.

Hand-made or store-bought, brand new or gently used: the idea was to cover the heads of as many of the camp’s 60,000 children as possible before winter winds arrive.

Nighttime temperatures in Jordan’s eastern desert drop dramatically and winter can be surprisingly cold.  Unobstructed winds push freezing air through the flimsy walls of this fabric tent city.  Folks who upgrade to uninsulated sheet metal huts fare no better, particularly when it snows.

See a few of the bags of hats we collected, awaiting shipment to Amman, below.

This is a typical housing unit in the Zaatari camp where the hats will be delivered. 

I’d been to the camp before with Canadian artist and philanthropist Jean Bradbury.  She ran a raucous art workshop for kids and I jumped in with some knitting fun with their mothers and big sisters. The women were fantastic. Aside from the setting (ring-fenced in barbed wire, air sometimes chewable with sand and dust), there was no difference from the vibe of my Amman Stitch ‘n Bitch gang. We talked about clothes and food and men and music while swapping tips and techniques on our needlework. Many knew knit and crochet basics and were happy to teach others in the group, but they lacked materials to create new items.

So every day we hauled in bags of donated yarn, and every next-day they’d come back to show us what they knocked off their needles during the night. These chicks blew my (hand-knit) socks off.  Like magical Middle Eastern elves, they made jumpers, dresses, and hand-warmers.  They made scarves in the colors of the Syrian flag.

It’s amazing what you can do when you have no home kitchen to cook in, books to read, gym to workout at, games to play, car to drive or TV to watch…getting a glimpse into life in a refugee camp?  This one is the fourth largest city in Jordan.

The experience solidified our aim to create a steady stream of art, educational and craft materials to the camp to allow the community to continue regularly scheduled classes and workshops.  But what about those who have no interest in arts and crafts? Don’t they get cold too?

We put a call out to our own circle of friends and family.  Thanks to social media (and connections made from our nomadic lives) we soon had people in the USA, Canada, Ireland, Jordan and Great Britain stepping up to collect hats.

No disrespect to hip-hop artists Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock, but it clearly takes more than two to get a thing done right!  We hoped to collect a few dozen hats and some cash and wool contributions.  Instead, within weeks, we received nearly 4,000 hats alone.

US, Canadian and UK shipments are coming by mail and the kindness of people with extra luggage allowances. Our Irish organizer (and Green Prophet Brian Nitz‘s better half), Virginia Nitz, single-handedly collected over 3,000 hats and even arranged for donated air freight to Jordan!

Want to get in on the wooly action? Check out the phenom on a Facebook page created expressly for this project, Save the Babies: Hats for War-torn Syria – link here. And peek at Jean Bradbury’s Studio Syria, the NGO that incited all of this and under whose umbrella the project is being run – link here.

Throw a few bucks (or hats) (or yarn) our way.  If you don’t want to dig around the links for info, send me a personal message for details (Laurie@greenprophet.com). We’ll be posting pictures of hordes of warm headed kids shortly.  Syrian cats in hats – dig it.

All images from Nitz, Bradbury and Balbo

The post 4,000 Handmade Hats Collected for Syrian Refugees by this Green Prophet appeared first on Green Prophet.

Check out these striking tattoos from Japanese artist Kenji Alucky that combine elements of fractal art and tribal tattoos into gorgeous graphics that, if I could control my instinctive cringing, would be the sort of architectural body art I might be tempted to try.

Alucky, master of black ink tattooing, hails from Sapporo-shi, Hokkaido. He’ll be working his needles at New York City’s tatt emporium New York Adorned through November 20th.

Author disclosure: I have no tattoos, for no other reason than I am needle-averse. I think it’s laughable that they are considered an act of protest against cultural or social repression, or a marker of bravery.  Believe it or not, most folks have tattoos and piercings and chemically colored hair not for any deep sociological reason, but simply because they like the way it looks.

My theory was tested last week at Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp when a tiny girl showed off her prettily painted hand.  Her house is a sand-covered tent.  Her school is often closed for security precautions. But her nails were coated in weeks-old varnish and her wrists wore a faded henna tattoo.

Portable beauty is a thing to behold.

Images of black ink tattoos from Kenji Alucky; Maram’s hand by the author

The post The Illustrated Man Could Be a Green Giant appeared first on Green Prophet.

GP:  Pacific northwest to Middle East: how did that connection come about? JB: I first came to the Dead Sea in 1991 to work as an archeological illustrator at a site near Lot’s Cave with Dr. Konstantinos Politis [founder of the Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth].  Soonafter, a group of village women in nearby Ghour as Safi asked if I could teach them some handicrafts that they could sell.

GP: Was Safi your brainchild? JB: The women’s group was already established, but had no arts and crafts training nor real marketing experience. We focused on product development, working with cotton fabric colored with locally sourced and natural dyes like Petra mud, tea, pomegranate juice and iron. I encouraged the women to design quilts and clothing showing images from their own lives. It started with money from my own savings. With no outside funding, we’ve never had to answer to anyone and could explore whatever crazy ideas we liked. Mostly we had fun.  It’s always been important that the women control the project.  We’ve had many “failures”, but that’s part of the creative process, teaching people to take risks.

GP: You’ve got a unique blending of folk art with environmentalism. JB: Sustainability has been my main focus, in specific materials (natural dyes) and in the general way the project runs. Initially, the project was to provide the women with income and a social and creative outlet, too.  We worked closely together for the first three years, but I stopped for about a decade, staying stateside to raise my small children.  I returned in 2011 and found the project not only still running, but really thriving. How perfect is that? This project is truly owned by the Safi women, and I return twice a year to conduct workshops. Recently we’ve been exploring the more artistic side of the art/craft spectrum; we plan to exhibit our paintings at Al Aydi this year.

GP: This goes beyond arts & crafts.  JB: My work has a dual purpose. We make things to sell, but we also experiment and express ourselves. I teach design, not just production. I think the most important lessons are creative and critical thinking, leading to higher self-esteem. That popular word from the 1970s – empowerment – applies best. The project pulls the women out of their homes, into a dedicated center.  I think this social aspect is important and enjoyable for them.

GP: And the group has developed momentum? JB: At first I visited several times a year but, with young children, I could never stay long. Eventually, return trips didn’t fit into my life, but because we’d made sustainability paramount, the group continued. They secured grant money from USAID and built a women’s center where they can meet, work, and teach classes to village girls. We’re now experimenting with painting and sewing market bags and, this year, opened a shop in the museum. They manage their small revenue, allowing them to administer microloans to farmers. The group is much more than my workshops. My involvement is now supported through the generosity of Aramex Jordan who covers my airfare for twice yearly trips.

GP: Do you speak Arabic?  JB: My Arabic was better ten years ago but I’m out of practice. I know enough “art” words and the women seem to understand me. The teaching is visual so that helps. Group leader Nofeh Nawasra translates when she’s available. Otherwise, I just say a lot of “quayez” and “mish quayez” and use gestures. It works surprisingly well. It’s quite funny – we’ve developed a sort of pidgin Arabic.  I think the women understand me, so I’m surprised when I speak Arabic to strangers who have no idea what I am saying!

GP: This last visit also got you involved in the Zaatari Camp for Syrian refugees.  Talk a bit about that experience? JB: Since I was going to be in Safi teaching, I decided to stay longer to help with the refugee crisis in the only way I know how – through art. I collected money from friends and family and bought art supplies hoping to donate them to schools and care centers used by people fleeing the violence in Syria. I also asked around about teaching at the giant border refugee camp, knowing that security is tight and few agencies have time or infrastructure to accept volunteers. I was delighted to be invited by Save the Children Jordan to set up art classes. It was an exhausting, heartbreaking and heartwarming experience for me. I think it brought some color and fun into the lives of the children who made art with me that week, and a reminder that they have a creative voice and the ability to imagine a better world.  I was enormously moved by the response of the women and children I taught, by the dedication and hard work of the staff and by the generosity of friends in Canada, the US and in Jordan.  I wrote about my experience (link here).

GP: What’s on the horizon? JB: My work in Jordan has attracted the attention of some wonderful people from all over the world who are offering to help me to continue and expand my efforts. Back in the USA, my daughter is in college and my son is in high school. When he heads off to university I look forward to spending more time in Jordan. I’m always so busy teaching when I’m there but I’d like to continue to make my own paintings and explore the amazing landscape.

All images from Jean Bradbury

The post How Jean Bradbury Makes a Difference a World Away in Jordan appeared first on Green Prophet.