AKKAR MARCH 2018
Here is a short summary of the fluffy mission project in March 2018. I tried to reduce the photos to a minimum, as nobody has the time to look at a thousand photos. As you know our fluffy missions are primarily about bringing donated fluffy friends to Syrian refugee children in Lebanon. And so I took a plane with all these donated fluffy friends from Berlin to Beirut, which is the capital of Lebanon. A small country right next to Syria.
Luckily me and Miss Stanhope have some friends in Beirut. We stayed at BORFILAT´s home (thank you Borfilat!), who shares a home with a human friend of Miss Stanhope. You can see Borfilat below sitting in his home office. I did not manage to get all the donated friends into one photo, but most of them are in the photo below.
From our base in Beirut we, me and Miss Stanhope, drove up to a local local (non governmental organisation) NGO called MALAAK in Akkar in Miniara. As you can see on the map, Miniara is up in the North of Lebanon. I am very grateful for the Malaak NGO for letting me use their facilities for art projects with Syrian refugee children. MALAAK means angel and was founded by a human angel, Asma Abou Ezzeddine Rasamny. I strongly recommend this NGO, if you are looking for local NGO, that supports Syrian refugees. You can also check out their website: https://www.malaak.org .
Three days for art activities with Syrian refugee children... I was so happy! Lots of time for my paper heart exchange. Those of you following me on instagram will know about the paper heart exchange between German primary school kids and Syrian refugee kids. What you see below are the hearts drawn by German kids from Sambach, Walsdorf, Stegaurach und Bad Staffelstein next to the ones drawn by the Syrian refugee children.
We had lots of fun during our art activities... especially during our stamping activity. It was crazy. The kids took a lot of their prints home, but Miss Stanhope also kept some for an art exhibition she is planning!
On my final day in Akkar at MALAAK I finally united the Syrian refugee children with their (donated) fluffy friends. A big fat THANK YOU to all the donors! Right below you just find a selection of photos, where you can't see the name tags. These are usually the most beautiful photos. For the photos with visible name tags, basically for the donors who named their donated fluffy friends, I decided to divide the photos into three slots A-J . K-P and Q-Z. So, there are always just a hundred pictures in a slot and not 300. Miss Stanhope always tries her very best to take photos with visible name tags of each child. However it sometimes does not work out. For those not working with kids: Excited children are not so easy to control...
FLUFFY MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
:-)
What else did I do in Lebanon? I had coffee with Borfilat, attended an AGYA conference, had Taboule at LE CHEF, worked on my big RUMI project, visited carpet heaven of HADI MAKTABI, had a look at the art work of Negin Fallah and some Beirut graffiti.
There are more pictures in my diary. In case you are wondering when the next fluffy mission to Lebanon will take place... Miss Stanhope would like to do one in fall this year. For now she has to focus on making money with real jobs, so that she can pay our rent and all the chocolate we need in life. Of course you are welcome to donate money for the "tiny" projects we do here in Berlin to educate primary school kids about the life of refugees and the upcoming (tiny) art exhibition of art works by German and Syrian kids.