Some years ago I was in eastern Greenland on an research. I was visiting a very particular village, Isertoq, probably housing the last branch of Inuit migratory movements, remained isolated for ages. As an researcher, I usually don't travel without a notepad, where I can take note of my impressions, the people I meet, the places I pass through and everything I want to fix in my mind. It was the time of Iraq war, when televisions from all over the world talked about the flight and the torment of thousands of men, women and children. An inuit child took my notepad and started drawing a sketch of how war was in his mind.
It was the perfect portrait of war, fitted for the land of the great ice, conceived by an inuit child's imagination: the upheaval in a world inhabited by bears, seals, narwhals, reindeers and people peacefully living their lives. And there I started thinking Why don't we promote an exchange network, where children from all over the world can, thanks to the immediate way of the drawing, tell each other their stories, hopes, flights of fancy, and, why not, their ways of living and cultures?
And it was there that the Project Friends from the World, now involving children from Greenland, Siberia, Italy and Ethiopia and followed by the Italian non profit association Perigeo Onlus, was born.
You can read more about "Friends from the World" in depth here.