Gaza Gazette
Culture

In Gaza, young survivors turn to drawing

Sixteen-year-old Maryam is among those using art to step outside the war.

صورة أرشيفية من Gaza
Archive photo — shows the place, not the eventPhoto Ramez Habboub · licence CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Maryam, aged 16, sits over a blank sheet of paper with a pencil, and as she begins to draw her attention shifts away from the destruction around her.

For a few hours the paper becomes a different place.

Structured creative activity is used in psychosocial support programmes because it gives children a way to work through experience they cannot easily put into words.