AIN ZEBDE
IBSAR - JULY 11 2010
GREEN HEART MOSAIC BENCH
The site is a triangular piece of land, a garden to be used by both the municipality and the church visitors, but lacks a seated area, that is from where the idea of mosaic benches came from. The boys and girls in Ain Zebde are in love with their village, they have been doing nature related activities on several occasions but mostly religious feasts - planting trees with IBSAR is one - and other community service activities. The new municipality welcomed our proposal and instead of one bench they decided to build two hopping to build some more in the future. July 11 - 2010 the date we set for the workshop, I arrived in Ain Zebde at 8,30 with a boy from ACS (the American Community School), a girl from the St. Marry Orthodox School, a volunteer, and six students from Ain Zebde and three adults were waiting for us. The first hour I explained how to safely use the tools, the nippers, knifes and the broken tiles. The participants started placing the tiles around the green heart that I designed previously and the work started to take shape as the silent kids were really involved whole heartedly with minimum intervention from my side; it was a test for timing and perseverance, could we cover the area of 2 meters by 80 in one day and do the finishing the next day? I was not sure. Only 4 people can work on the bench at the same time with 4 helper’s maybe to get them the tiles and cut the shapes and then they would alternate. It was amazing the indulgence the kids found themselves in, silent moments of concentration and collaboration among one another, 80% of the bench was finished and that was due to not being able to do the third side that was too close to the wall. On the second day, some of us started working on the unfinished top trying to fill the gaps between the tiles while I and two of the kids started working on the grouting, mixing and filing the 2 sides, this part was really fun, a 5 years old and a 45 years old came and wanted to help. What was fun as well is the fact that, few minutes after we finished we could use the bench so everybody was sitting there to take a picture.
One participant taking a break from the hard work of tiling the bench
Having fun gluing the tiles to the bench
A few participants waiting for the instructor’s remarks on their tiling
A young girl carefully placing the last few tiles
Focusing to make sure the tile is glued on as it should be
Carefully listening to our trained professional’s instructions on how to cut the tiles properly