Mental health, finding balance, developing teamwork, and preserving one’s own resources during group interaction are extremely important aspects of every person’s modern life. With this in mind, the other day at the Vilshany Orphanage, the project coordinator of the Medical Aid Committee in Zakarpattya, Dr. Tetiana Hoydash, conducted a training for the staff of the institution.

Thus, the team joined an art therapy exercise aimed at establishing communication links, gaining balance and a state of calm, improving mood, activating creative skills, etc. Everyone started with introductions, and it turned out that the extremely unexpected bad weather had affected almost every participant of the meeting. So everyone had the opportunity to test the real effectiveness of the methodology chosen for the training.

The participants were divided into random groups and given the necessary materials. Armed with brushes and paints, the participants began to draw – they reproduced their initials on large sheets of paper. Drawing became a kind of guide, because the patterns were created in complete silence, but quite harmoniously and in a coordinated manner. Then each person had to fill in the drawn shapes with paint formed by the intersection of wavy lines at their own discretion. As a result, all the groups received unique canvases, in the color ensemble of which each contributed their own mood, vision, conscious or subconscious combinations of shades. But the main result of the meeting was the improved mood and overall emotional state of the women. This means that the methodology worked!

Such a necessary activity in our time took place within the framework of the project "Improving the Protection of Children in Emergencies in Ukraine by Providing Safe Shelters, Food and Non-Food Items, and Psychosocial Support", which the Medical Aid Committee in Zakarpattya is implementing with the support of "terre des hommes Deutschland e.V." and funding from the Federal Foreign Office of Germany.