By: Mahgan Farhang
During CIFEJ Days in Zanzibar, I and Nafiseh (as my assistant) hosted the children with special needs. It was a very exciting and unexpected experience.

The positive point was that they were accompanied with their teachers. We gave each of them paper and some colored markers. Some of them had the ability to communicate and to understand what I told them. I asked them to think about one thing and draw it. We had to give some of them some clues about what to draw for example a car, sun, fish and... But some of them couldn’t understand and couldn’t communicate with me. So I decided to use an easy way for painting. I asked them to put their hand on paper and draw a line around it.  However some of them couldn’t even do it but those who could draw their hands became so happy to see the picture of their hands. Then we helped them to draw fish, sun, tree and their own hands. They were excited and were clapping all the time. They were looking at each other’s painting and were willing to draw another ones.
-They were interested about taking photographs or filming with cell-phone and camera. I started to let some of them to take photo by my camera.  When they pushed the button of the camera and hear the sound of “click” suddenly, I could see their smiles and they became so happy. Unfortunately we had a limited time so we used the fish and sun to make them move. It was just a simple movement of two happy playing fish. We took photo from each movement and after that we showed the series of movements to them from my cell-phone. So they could see how their paintings could move. We made 3 animations with their characters titled: “The Sun and The Fish “, “The Fish and The Island” and “Our hands, Our world”.
I have had the experience of teaching art and painting to disabled children, but I think that this experience was much different because it was my first time to teach making animation to these kind of children. The movement of the different shapes that they had created by themselves was so interesting for them. Moreover, this happiness of children was so precious and valuable for me.