Introducing Lina

​Lina is a newly arrived Syrian refugee to London. Married with two children, she struggles with adapting to life in the UK, the difficulties with the language and making friends, day to day life an effort, made harder by her lack of English.  Her daughter is fast growing up and Lina feels the pressure of generational expectations, made sharper by the perceived difference in cultural values between those of Syria and the UK.  She struggles too in her marriage, with the pressures of a husband who travels and has little time to help her take care of her children, whilst Lina longs to join the working world.
 
Lina is not a real person but a fictional character created by a group of Syrian women currently taking part in the ‘Realising Hopes and Dreams’ project run by Scheherazade Initiatives.  The Scheherazade Initiatives use participatory theatre as a tool to empower the potential of migrant, refugee and displaced populations with the self-confidence, personal leadership and teamwork skills necessary to take advantage of the opportunities and overcome the challenges of enforced migration.  Through weekly theatre workshops and performances in the local community, Scheherazade uses theatre games and exercises, storytelling and character creation, role play and scene creation, to explore the issues Syrians and other refugee populations face in adapting to life here.  This particular project, supported by the National Lottery’s Awards for All scheme, also has a focus on helping the women to improve and practise their English-language skills, to enable them to better adapt to their life here.
 
Says Terez: This course is great and we are benefiting a lot from it. We get opportunities to speak, even if we make mistakes. And we can also learn from our friends’ mistakes as if we were one family. And we learn in a beautiful and beneficial way! Sometimes by singing and dancing, and by acting the new vocabulary is memorised and activated in a more powerful way. We hope to continue the courses to help us integrate quickly and to become active members in our second home.
 
By creating the character of Lina, participants are able to explore the range of different issues experienced by refugee women arriving in the UK and use her as a proxy for all that they themselves are experiencing.  Role play and a technique called Forum Theatre allows participants to experiment with ways to solve some of the challenges they face in their everyday lives and creates a space and context to come together with others to build friendships and supportive bonds in their new home.
 
The workshop has been especially helpful in enabling the women to practise their language skills and make sense of their new culture.
 
Rana: Thank you very much for this beneficial course. Indeed, this group is making us benefit in a fun and entertaining way, completely different from the college method. It is helping us to communicate our ideas through many ways to further enhance the learning and not to forget it, for example through repetition, acting, writing, and participating in games and dialogues, and memorizing. These methods are capable of supporting and focusing the main topics and help us remember it. Thank you very much for your efforts and we hope to continue with these courses in future!
 
We tend to find that by using theatre, we are able to bring alive how language is used in context and the feedback we get is that this is far more powerful than learning language in more formal settings.  Additionally, the opportunity to meaningfully bring together both refugees and local volunteers, aids in building cross-cultural relationships that have the added benefit of bridging the cultural gaps and decreasing the sense of isolation that many newcomers feel.
 
For Farah, “The style is very flexible and fun. And the most wonderful things is that in any sentence we say, even if it has a mistake, we don’t face objection and surprise.  On the contrary,  [the facilitator] tries to correct it in a polite way and without making us feel embarrassed. And this enhances our self-confidence which I feel it is getting weaker in this country because of the language barriers and not being able to communicate with others.”
 
Scheherazade’s work is part of not only the innovative theatre-for-social-change movement but also the growing work in creative education, fuelled by the necessity of creating new models for education that cope with our fast-changing society and the pressures faced by populations all over the world increasingly on the move.  By combining a ‘practical’ skill such as learning a language, with an arts-based or creative methodology, individuals are able to develop the creativity, the resilience, the personal leadership and capacity to overcome challenges and work with others that enables them to feel confident in their new surroundings and contribute to society.
 
As Kamar said, ‘I wish it was more than once per week’!

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