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Artists Without Borders

by John McGee

Hector Sierra, founder of Artists Without Borders, and 8-year-olds at Kurihara Kita School in Adachi-ku make Christmas cards for New York kids (Images courtesy Artists Without Borders)

What's Artists Without Borders? "It's a Colombian guy teaching Japanese culture to Chechen kids in Russian," says Hector Sierra, the founder. He started Artists Without Borders (AWB) to give children affected by war "food for the soul," noting that NGOs like Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) offer food or medical assistance but nothing for the heart. "We give them some hours of entertainment and fun to at least forget for a moment. It's very cathartic for them," he says. 

Sierra first encountered ethnic conflict as an exchange student studying film in Ukraine and Georgia at the end of the Soviet era. Over six years from Brezhnev to Gorbachev, he witnessed long-suppressed animosities re-emerge in the fragmenting USSR.  

Sierra came to Japan in 1994 to continue his film studies as a Mombusho Scholar at Nihon University. AWB came out of a trip Sierra made to Kosovo to finish his graduate film. When he saw the fallout of the civil war there, Sierra knew he had to help. He started AWB, packed boxes of crayons and origami paper, and returned to the refugee camps and schools in the divided city of Kosovska-Mitrovitsa three months later. 

Lucas Zheng, age 7, New York

Over the last three years, Sierra and AWB have conducted eight missions to troubled areas like East Timor, Chechnya and Serbia. In each location, Sierra leads the children in two main projects: drawing and origami. When asked to draw "my city," most kids recount the recent horrors they have experienced—tanks, bombs and massacres invading their lives. On his recent trip to New York, many kids at PS 89 and PS 234, both about a block from where the World Trade Center towers fell, drew the twin towers in different stages of destruction. 

A "dream city" drawing session usually follows. The results would seem banal—a simple house with two windows, a door and a chimney—were they not created by displaced kids living in tents or other temporary shelters. As for origami lessons, Sierra says that folding paper into hopping frogs (which are very popular) or inflatable cows empowers kids and builds confidence by teaching them how to make their own toys.

Ideally, Sierra would like to set up permanent missions, but AWB lacks funding. Each trip's shoestring, ¥500,000 budget covers airfare, accommodation and living expenses. With no regular sponsors, Sierra relies on sporadic donations, cooperative airlines (Austrian Airlines helped him get around the Balkans and Georgia), periodic fundraisers and his own Spanish- and English-teaching jobs. He is also working with a major Japanese publisher to produce a book of children's drawings from his missions by the end of the year. (Besides donations, people can help by volunteering. For more information, visit www.artwit.org.) The business side of AWB may be a struggle, but for now Sierra seems content to be making a difference. "War is a tornado of intolerance, so at least I have to try to help the victims of the strife...I really feel like this is what I was meant to do," he says. 

©2006 John McGee

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