I Drew in a Bunker at 12. Now I Bring Art to Children in the Same War.

I was twelve years old the first time I drew in the dark.

Our family had moved into my grandfather's cowshed, converted into a bunker with deep stone walls to muffle the explosions above us. Thirty family members. Rugged ground. Complete darkness except for the slivers of daylight that crept down the steps at dawn.

I sat cross-legged with a sketchpad on my lap and drew blind, pressing pencil to paper without being able to see what I was making. Only in the morning, when I crept up the steps to where the light reached, did I discover what I had created overnight.

Those sketches were my escape. Not from reality, but into a version of it I could hold.

What I Did Not Know Then

I did not know that what I was doing had a name. I did not know that making images under stress is a documented form of emotional regulation, that it engages the nervous system differently than just sitting with fear, that the act of creating something, anything, shifts the body out of a purely reactive state.

I just knew that the hours I spent drawing were the hours I felt most like myself.

That knowledge stayed with me across every country I moved to afterward: from Lebanon to Las Palmas de Gran Canaries, to Texas, to a backyard I have been painting for the last decade. The medium changed. The question stayed the same: what does making art do to the body? And why does it work?

Revive Baladna

In April 2026, working with Tatweer Baladna and Education Unbound, I helped launch Revive Baladna: a humanitarian art initiative bringing guided creative expression workshops and personal Recovery Art Kits to children displaced by conflict in Lebanon.

Phase 1 reached approximately 100 children between the ages of 6 and 14 across three schools in Mount Lebanon: Bchamoun High School, Ain Anoub Intermediate School, and Aramoun Official Intermediate School. Each child received a Recovery Art Kit with painting materials, a sketchbook, notebooks, and creative tools.

I know what it means to have those things when the world around you is loud and frightening. I know what it means to have a blank page and something to fill it with.

What We Found

The facilitators who ran the workshops observed things that were not abstract at all. Shy children came forward. Aggressive interactions in one school dropped when the group started painting together. Children who had been withdrawn started talking.

Two hours of coloring saved us from conflicts between the children.

You helped my son integrate with the others.

At the two-week follow-up visit, children were still using their kits: painting in shelters, sharing materials with siblings, continuing drawings from the sessions. Several had saved their drawings and asked the facilitators to keep them safe.

That last detail stayed with me. A child in a shelter, asking someone to protect their artwork. That is not a child who has given up on the future.

Where the Research Comes In

Phase 2 of Revive Baladna is expanding to additional locations across Aley, Chouf, and Beirut. It will also include a preliminary longitudinal study, in collaboration with a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, to measure whether guided creative expression produces real, measurable reductions in stress and improvements in wellbeing among displaced children.

This is also the core question of my NeuroArts research at the University of Texas at Dallas. What does art do to the stressed nervous system? Can we design experiences that reliably produce that shift? Can we measure it?

The backyard in Texas and the schools in Lebanon are not as far apart as they look. The question is the same. The body is the same. The need is the same.

How to Help

A $50 donation provides one child with a personal Recovery Art Kit. A $100 donation covers a full workshop experience: the kit and a session. $3,000 sponsors a complete workshop for 30 children.

All donations are tax-deductible through Education Unbound, a registered 501c3.

If I could give a twelve-year-old in a bunker one thing, it would have been exactly what we are putting in these kits. The chance to make something. The reminder that the future is still worth imagining.

Weeda Hamdan