Full Time Diploma Program Graduate

2006 – Beirut, lebanon

After finishing my VATI program, I started working in a refugee center in Montreal. A few months later I decided to go back home...Lebanon.

VATI had given me a lot of confidence in my skills and my self. I was prepared to face the world with my paint brushes and my home-made play-dough! But nothing could ever prepare me for what was waiting for me at home. A couple of months after I went home, in the summer of 2006, an Israel attack on the South of Lebanon and Beirut suburbs was launched. The war lasted 33 days, but I lasted only 7 days, and I then became a refugee myself. The war flipped my life upside down and inside out. But it has also taught me a great deal on trauma and healing. I couldn’t stay too far for too long and I came back and started working with an NGO as an art therapist in the South of Lebanon. It’s been a life changing experience. I have learned so much from the children I have worked with about resilience and healing. It was amazing to see their art change: paint missiles slowly changed into spring flowers; destroyed homes changed into new homes; messy paint explosions became colorful pictures; and armless children in the art got back their arms as they gained back a sense of control and power.
What has inspired me the most, working with the children of the South, is their hope, their strength, and their playfulness. War for them is not something that happened to them in July 2006. War is part of their culture and their history. It’s all around them. It’s in the stories their parents tell them, it’s on the daily news, it’s in their games and it’s in their art. And yet they can still look at their experience, without being overwhelmed by it. Yes there is a lot of anxiety and a lot of distress, but there is also a lot of hope and a lot of resilience. Art is such a flexible medium that it has helped them tell their unique stories.

VATI has helped me be a respectful witness to those stories. And I would like to thank my VATI teachers and colleagues for being witnesses to my own journey, the journey that has brought me here today.


- Rinade Ballan

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