The Azalea Village is a small refugee community that the Clairmont Presbyterian Church maintains and offers to refugees. I worked with Caitlyn Delano to organize this event. Caitlyn and her family serve as community developers- a kind of local missionary who lives with her family in the Azalea Village.
Caitlyn’s vision is to create an arts space in the basement of their house to serve as a community-building creative common ground. I helped clean out the basement and envisioned a project to create a community mural. In doing this we hope to generate the interest of the church community to invest in the arts space.
Present at the class was a group of families from the community and Clairmont Presbyterian Church. We came together to experience creativity as an act of devotion. The group was diverse and we all began from different contexts and from different perspectives, but upon making the mural together we began to see the similarities in our expression.
Our discussions were so heartfelt that many in our group experienced true emotions and we all left feeling inspired and more cohesive as a group. We hope that this event creates interest in the space and art as means of ministering to this community. Art transcends language and can be a common ground to connect cross-culturally.
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