Barzinjah

Okay, little recap: we are painting murals in three different sites to enrich the child-friendliness of the area.

FIRST PROJECT: Barzinjah

Barzinjah is a village in the mountains east of Sulaymaniyah, halfway to the Iranian border. 

There, Kurdistan Save the Children put in place a refugee camp for Arab Iraqis who fled the ISIS invasion. 

It's really hard not to fall in love with all these kids, they emit such a positive energy despite all the hardships they've gone through. Such strong hearts and brave souls. And they're so freaking adorable!! "Miss! Miss! Picture, picture!" They were born for the camera 

We selected a wall in the camp to paint with the children. This will brighten up the site and teach the children how to conduct manual work properly and effectively (importance of applying primer before paint, cleaning your brushes after work, etc.) 

Angèle seems happy, but inside she's actually crying because our work area was a complete dump. But never say never! Let's paint this wall.

STEP 1: Clean and brush the wall.

 Yay team!

STEP 2: Apply primer.

We had little spectators (too young to hold a brush) supervising and making sure everyone was on task. Good work little pals!

STEP 3: Paint the wall.

What we did was select the children's sketches that they drew on paper and enlarged them on the wall.

Okay, so for this step, things got kind of messy. By 'kind of', I mean kids were going free-style on the wall and splashing colors everywhere. Long story short, I had to put down my camera and help the kiddos paint. But I promise they did the work! This is the "after" pictures.

Original drawings:

Original drawings:

So here ya go. Project #1 completed! 

Go community involvement!