In a school in the capital of Ukraine where children are very stimulated to develop the artistic expression, a visual education teacher traces the evolution of their students’ emotional state, through the work they have done since 2022.
Three years after the beginning of the war, the They learned to live with greater anxiety. Authorities record an increase in the number of minors with monitoring in the area of mental health. With the support of the school and artistic activities, there are children who denote improvements in the way they are dealing with war, manifesting in recent times more optimism and hope in the future.
“They used to paint mainly tanks, planes, bombing. Now they paint the sun, the rainbows, the flowers and something beautiful … They want victory, joy, spring and calm, ”Valentyna said in an interview with Reuters.
Valentyna Marraniak is a teacher of visual education at a Kiev school and outlined the evolution of her students’ emotional state through the work she has been doing since 2022.
When Valentyna asked the class to draw the most memorable moments of the invasion, which lasted a third of their lives, Some portrayed trips during school holidays or Christmas celebrations.
Others brought desired memories of peacetime or close people who participate in the war.
During a class, to which the Reuters reporters were in the beginning of this month, Solomiia Karanda, 8, painted a landscape: a plane on a village in the south of Ukraine, where she used to visit her grandmother, who fled due to the war.
“A missile has hit my grandmother’s house, but now it’s being rebuilt,” said Solomiia. “She was afraid and went to live in Romania,” he added.
When they spend three years from the beginning of, This 8 -year -old girl is still restless when she is alone at home during air alerts.
“I usually close the door of my room and go to bed with my toys. It makes everything but scary,” says solomia.
Nikita Bondarenkoalso 8 years old, colleague of Solomiia, He learned to hide behind the thickest of the apartment, with his younger sister, He revealed the boy while drawing a tank inspired by the stories of his father, a military man who fights in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Mental problems have tripled, but school helps to design calm and optimism
More than 50,000 children with mental health problems sought professional help in the first nine months of 2024 – three times more than in 2023 – according to data provided to Reuters by the Ukraine Ministry of Education and Science.
Liudmyla yaroslavtseva, Diretora da escola de kiev, Try to project calm and a positive attitude, knowing how sensitive children are. However, the teacher knows that “they cannot protect them from everything.”
“We talked about things that we may not have discussed with previous generations. Even when it comes to the theme of the Holodomor, we explain to the children showing them a cartoon or some photographs and these children we say: ‘Sorry, but we may be facing this Type of problem again, ‘”Liudmyla told Reuters.
Holodomor It is a Ukrainian term that means “death by hunger” and which has become associated with genocide of the population of Ukrainewhich occurred between 1931 and 1933, during the process of forced collectivization of the agricultural fields of the territory, then under the dominance of the then Soviet Unionled by Joseph Stalin.
