What do children’s drawings say after the earthquake?
– Sujan Shrestha
It is said that the children can’t express their emotions through words properly like adults. That is why art is seen as the effective method for expressing their emotions especially in the times like now, the post crisis situation. Our team, psychbigyaan was with the children at tudikhel camp today and we were giving the children the materials to draw free willingly. All the children were pre-adolescents. We thought it would be a good past time for the children. But we were quiet surprised by seeing the drawings at the end.
There was starkingly commonness in their drawings. Out of the 18 sample drawings we found that almost 11 drawings had a picture of a home in it and 7 drawings had a dharahara in it ( 2 had both dharahara and a house). 13 drawings were drawn in the backdrop of the hills and the shining sun. And most of the houses are one or two storied typical Nepali styled thatched roof house.
I am not trying to deduct anything from it. But it would be good to know the findings of the drawings from other camps as well and then compare the result. The one obvious reason for the similarilty of the drawing could be that the children copied the idea from each other as they were seating close to each other. Or it could be due to that the the two things dharahara and their own homes were prominent in their thoughts so they drew them. I wish there would be some kind of proper research in such expressions of the children.
Look for yourselves some of the sample drawings:
(The writer is an editor of the blog )
