More than a simple drawing

Aldeas Infantiles is currently accompanying 509 Haitian children in the SOS installations in Port au Prince. They are offered shelter and home-cooked meal three times a day, but there is a lot of work else to be done. At this stage it is vital to give them psychological and emotional support.

Dolyin Lymarie, a psychologist who works with traumatized children of Haiti, stays in Port au Prince to do what she calls "emotional recovery activities" with a group of children from 6-10 years.

In these activities, the children sing, play and learn. It gives them space to express themselves and learn about their own body parts, so that they have the vocabulary to explain where it hurts. It is also important to give children a sense of self-worth and to make them feel part of the Aldeas Infantiles community.

Among the activities there is also a drawing workshop. Angie is nine years old and has no problems to express how she feels about the face of a yellow bear, which Dolyin calls Wilky, in a piece of paper. Other children have some difficulties and are more interested in the time of the snack.

Lymarie says that "Before, the children who came to the village were younger, but now it is different. These we see now are often older and have more violent experiences, which sometimes manifest in aggressive behavior when playing with others. We try to work with all children individually and make a psychological profile of each. They are observed individually and in groups, and this allows us to adopt the method that is best for each child."

Reynald Laguerre is another psychologist who participates in this work. In a tent, not far away, he has asked his group to draw a picture of a person. It is a simple exercise that can tell a lot about each child. Laguerre says "if ten pen lines are firm and have been painted by hand pressure, this may be a sign of aggression; and if the lines are thin, nearly invisible, the child may suffer from low self-esteem and being weak." He adds that if the child decides not to use the color could be due to the lack of affection.

Laguerre has analyzed the pattern of Clothilde, 11. "The drawing is at the bottom of the paper and does not cover much space. It is a sign of an introverted personality. If the drawing had been in the top of the paper, it would have been the opposite, an outgoing child," he says. The person in Clothilde’s drawing has no color, no clothes and does not portray anyone she knows. "A picture of a family member says a lot about love and this particular child is shy and not as outspoken as others," says the psychologist.

After the great catastrophe, one might expect many pictures of houses collapsed and lost family members, but psychologists do not see a lot of destruction in the paper. "The children of 9-12 years are often inclined to draw what they fear, but what we see is that once children reach SOS Aldeas Infantiles, the experience of safe place is enough for them to adapt and stop the concerns," explains Reynald Laguerre.

The authors of "Developing the creative capacity" Viktor Lowenfeld and W. Lambert Brittain, analyzed the creative stages of children as a process of organization of thought and representation of the environment, thus allowing to understand their mental development.

For the child, art is a means of expression. Children are dynamic beings; art is for them a language of thought. A child sees the world differently and, as he grows, his expression changes. Each drawing reflects his sentiments, intellectual ability, physical development, perceptive ability, implicit creative factor, aesthetic taste, and even the social development of the individual. In the drawings we can see how a child changes as he grows and develops.

Lowenfeld and Brittain suggest that there are six main stages in the development of artistic abilities in children from 2 to 17 years, areas that are parallel to the stages of intellectual development studied by Piaget (sensomotor period, preoperational period, concrete operations and formal operations).

All refugee children on the premises of SOS Aldeas Infantiles, will be meeting psychologists who will determine their status and help establish guidelines for future development.

Image: Illustration of a child after the tsunami in 2004