Each Thursday after school, the community centre – where I work as Community Connector – opens their Community Pantry and provides a warm space for games, activities and a cooked meal for local families with primary aged children.
This week, I made a big batch of blue playdough (taking me back to this time last year when I used to make a weekly pan of playdough for my reception class). I couldn’t find the playdough tools in the community centre cupboards, but we made do with cutlery and glue sticks.
One of the children comes with his mum and younger brother each week. It was his 11th birthday on Thursday. The family are Ukrainian and they have been in England since the autumn. I could see the birthday boy was absorbed with the model he was creating and I stood by and watched as he moulded the playdough into strips, and then used the glue stick to cut each strip into pieces.
With the help of his mum’s translation, I learned that these pieces depicted sandbags. He didn’t yet have the vocabulary to describe the scene in words, but through hand gestures, his mum’s English and a little help from Google Translate, I came to understand that his work portrayed his memories of Ukraine: sandbags, grenades, landmines, a bunker, a gun holder…
His mum told me how they had escaped the war, leaving their home behind them – a beautiful house, where they had finished carefully decorating each room in the style they loved. She shared with me how their friends were going in to check their property from time to time, but there was no guarantee how long the house would remain standing, or whether the family would ever be able to return.
I silently remembered how the Community Pantry had given out Christmas crackers in December. The boys’ mum had asked me if she could change the red crackers I had given her for gold ones, which matched her decorations. In the rush of moment, I’d felt a bit irritated. I’d swapped the crackers for her, but I recalled thinking, “I’m giving you a box of free crackers, what does it matter about the colour?”. Listening to her speak of her beautiful, abandoned house pricked my conscience, and my eyes were opened to how important it had been for her to coordinate the colour of a box of crackers for her family’s first Christmas in an alien country.
Her son’s playdough sculpture left a deep impression on me. He handed his work of art to me at the end of the session. I am hopeful that the gift of time, a safe space, and a lump of homemade blue playdough supported this young Ukrainian man by allowing him to process and express his memories, thoughts and feelings at the start of his twelfth year.
Read with Julia 