The Real Story - Inspiration Behind 'Sara, Hana and Their Three Wishes'
21 Sep every year marks the International Day of Peace. It never makes headlines - no frills, no public marches, no shareable socials to draw attention to its importance. Instead, I learned that every year it is marked with a minute of silence before the Peace Bell Ceremony, when the Bell is struck once and rings out in what sounds like a single, deeply sonorous, stripped back, simple, naked echo. But it is a gently powerful echo that reverberates on the inside.
After our first three stories, we spent quite a number of years considering how and when we might embark on our fourth. Since 2014, the world’s conflicts and crises have not abated. On the contrary, there are more and more protracted crises that persist, exacerbate or simply hang in limbo with no resolution in sight. But we know that conflicts never hang in limbo – not if you’re really talking about the people who are caught in them. They do not exist in a limbo. More children today are forcibly displaced, affected by war or the effects of it, than ever before. More are being added to a lost generation of children everyday – one that loses out a childhood and all the basic rights of a child.
Humanitarian projects I’ve worked on in different capacities since 2014 include the Syrian crisis, West Bank and Gaza, Rohingya crisis in Cox’s Bazar, Afghanistan after the transition of power, the Ukraine crisis, and others. The stories of children I either met or came to know of through the work have always stayed with me – like a tapestry of experiences that should never be for any child, for anyone.
Children tell us – anyone who would listen – that they can recognise the sounds of war planes and bulldozers – they can identify the model of the war plane just by the sound it makes as it flies overhead and so they play games like “Guess the Plane”. They tell us that their moms no longer let them play more than a minute away from a basement or safe shelter just in case they needed to run back to safety. They tell us about their houses being set alight, about the fires and smoke that they could see all around them as they fled. They tell us about hiding for days on end until it felt safe again. They tell us about playing close to fences which encircle their camps where they now live. They tell us about their friends, their parents, their siblings. They draw with chalk and crayons in child-friendly spaces, letting their doodles ground them with the things that bring them comfort. Sometimes they stay quiet.
So there it was. We hoped to tell the stories of children caught in conflict, searching for a way to sound the Peace Bell gently, keeping the integrity of its echo. Our fourth story, “Sara, Hana and Their Three Wishes” is a tapestry of those experiences.
This is an ode to all children caught in conflict worldwide. It draws inspiration from real conditions of some children in various conflict zones who we had encountered or served. We do not downplay or discount the degree of pain of wounded families everywhere and acknowledge the complexities of each experience.
Most critically, we tell this story for a single purpose: as a reminder for each of us that through our children, for our children, and together with them, we can choose to hold steadfastly to the things that matter most – love, peace and common humanity.
