Steelman · slot B
The case for the workshop as lifeline
A child psychologist working in conflict zones would argue —Children arrive at these sessions mute, hands shaking too violently to hold a pencil, convinced that to speak of what they have seen is itself a crime. What Cleopatra Naeem and Lamees Alsharif built — a "black box," a den, a space where strangers' children slowly built imaginary houses together — is the actual mechanism of recovery: not interpretation, not diagnosis, but safety repeated until the body believes it. The girl who could only play in session one insisted on drawing her skulls by session three. Two boys who had been separated under tank fire found each other again and wept. And the facilitators, themselves displaced and homeless, are held up by the children's return as much as the reverse. This is fragile, unfunded, irreplaceable work.