The world community has recently marked the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. Ukraine was not on the sidelines here since there are about three million handicapped persons in the country.
The Ukrainian House hosted a special exhibit dedicated to this day and the Kyiv Children Art Academy held the arts festival “Let Us Believe in Ourselves” for children and youngsters with physical disabilities. This was a kind of gala concert at which the patients of Kyiv’s rehabilitation centers demonstrated the skills they have acquired during the year. They sang, danced, and displayed pieces of their art, including embroidered pictures and pillows, glass paintings, clay sculptures, and salted dough and corn seed appliques.
The authors of the best works were awarded diplomas and valuable prizes. The winners were selected by the respectable jury, which this year, besides the experts from the Kyiv Children Art Academy, included Honored Artist of Ukraine Anzhelika Verbytska and the staff of our newspaper.
The winners were chosen in the areas of singing, choreography, art, variety show music, and literature. The nomination “Arts and Crafts” proved to be the most difficult to judge because the jury had to choose from among the works made of natural materials, threads, paper, beads, clay, as well as embroidery.
The exhibit displayed more than 200 works made by 70 participants. All of the works boasted bright colors, jolly characters, and positive emotions. Can one possibly not like a nice-looking Cossack wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat made of salted dough or sunflower seeds laid out to make a church? However, contests are for selecting the best of the best. And the organizers of the festival are quite convinced that the participants need public attention more than prizes.
“Handicapped children can attract public attention only by means of their creative activities. But what they strive for is not compassion but appreciation of their success and achievement,” noted Liudmila Kviatkovska, the leading specialist of the Obolon District Social Service Center for Family, Children, and Young People. “When they perform on stage or show their artwork to visitors. you cannot tell them from other children: the same joy, the same emotions, and the same happy faces.”
This description perfectly fits Maksym Sharenko, one of the festival’s participants, as seen by The Day: smiling and cheerful. Accompanied by his mother, he studied the works of his friends displayed at the exhibition, and took time to show us some of his own. Despite suffering from infantile cerebral paralysis, which makes it difficult for him to use his hands, the boy has been doing photography for over four years (taking pictures all by his own), and composing pictures of natural materials, usually of watermelon seeds, millet, coffee beans, and even pasta.
“Three of Maksym’s natural material compositions and several photographs were selected for the exhibition. He took these photos at a Eupatoria resort. The initiative as to what to photograph is always his. Since he always carries his camera on him, he sometimes takes unexpected and interesting photos,” says his mother Natalia, demonstrating the images of a dolphin with a ball, a bug on the sand, and some people sunbathing on a beach-those selected for the exhibition.
“I try not to interfere with his creativity process because this makes him more independent and confident. Every Wednesday the Kyiv Territorial Service Center for the Handicapped takes him to the rehabilitation center. Maksym always looks forward to this day, even though it means that he has to get up much earlier than usually-but his friends, teachers, and his favorite activity wait for him at the center.”
The Obolon Rehabilitation Center follows the rule: if a child goes in for art, it does not mean that he or she should be given only a brush to paint. For painting you may use, for example, a dishwashing sponge, which is good for putting paints on canvas. There are several such works at the exhibition this year. Kvyatkovska explained that children painted stencils using sponges. It seems to be somewhat simplified art but it cannot be done without artistic taste or style.
Another contestant, Maryna Mart’ianova, realized her talent in quite a different area: she writes prose. She says that she started to write at the Youth Technical Creativity Center, where she joined the journalism section. It was there that she tried her pen for the first time.
The girl is dreaming of a journalist’s career and uses every opportunity to write a report, an interview, or an article. She has presented her more lyric prose at this festival several times, but she has not become a winner yet. As the girl confessed, her favorite topic is soccer, maybe because Andriy Shevchenko is her favorite soccer player since her school years.
She also writes about music because she has been practicing singing in the rehabilitation center for a number of years. By the way, she has prepared the song “Chervona Ruta” for the festival. She has not made up her mind yet as to which area of journalism to join: culture or sports. However, she has a year and a half of studies ahead, as well as training, which she is going to do at The Day. So, time will sort everything out.
Kviatkovska is quite convinced that it does not matter which children to work with: the healthy or the handicapped. The main thing is that children need to penchant for creative work and a desire to experiment, while an individual approach to each of them can certainly be found.
