Drawing on A4 paper

Along the Balkan Route, between the mountains of Bosnia and Europe’s fortified borders, human rights often stop at the barbed wire. Here, thousands of people live in what migrants bitterly call the “Game”: the desperate attempts to cross the border through violence, cold, and exhaustion.

Here we met Fatima. She was only five years old and had already lost her parents, killed by the bombs of the Afghan regime. She walked holding tightly to her aunt’s hand, the only link left to her past.

We had no toys to give her, only a few pens and some coloured highlighters. Yet those simple tools were enough to rekindle a light. Fatima began to draw. She did not choose the war scenes that had destroyed her life; instead, she filled the page with hearts.

She gave them to us with a smile that seemed to challenge the cruelty of the world, to defy every form of barbarity. In that gesture, there was innocence that refuses to disappear, the powerful desire for a just future, and the plea for a world where a child can grow up without the fear of falling or dying under a bomb.

“A drawn heart is the first brick of a world without borders”.