"We created something new together with love"

It is a big privelege to be reading and illustrating children's stories from two very different contexts this year, Armenia and Ukraine, where conflict has forced children to re-imagine home and build lives in new places. As an artist, seeing how children imagine their characters, and the landscapes of their inner worlds, is very important for the co-creation of their stories into illustrated children's books.

These lines from a child in Artsakh, Armenia, really stay with me:

“Dedo, this new house is very similar to our old house,” said Babo.

“Dear Babo, because we created something new together with love and if it wasn’t for the help given by the mountain, we might still be homeless.”

For a child in Armenia, two statues, Dedo and Babo, are each other's heroes, finding a mountain to help them. In our project in Poland with Save the Children, Ukrainian children told the story of two dogs, Bantyk and Fantyk. They built their home in the forest with the help of new friends, a river and a bear. A common understanding, that seems to transcend both stories, is that safety comes from supportive communities.

I look forward to this illustration process, the next stage of our project in Armenia, very much.