A Solidarity Mosaic

After the positive experience of last summer, this year too we proposed, as a summer activity for the boys of the Arsenale, two mosaics to be placed on the steps of the football field. Each one measures 15 meters in length by 1 meter in height, the materials used: colored and broken tiles. A mosaic made by a few hundred hands: everyone left their own piece, their own signature!

After the first panel, it is time for the second. Who knows whom Providence will put on our path and how many hands will still join to make the Arsenale dell’Incontro ever more beautiful and welcoming!

Chiara designed the project, with the drawing and the prints. Then together with the volunteer Vicken and Yara (the mosaic teacher) she went to the industrial areas of Amman and Madaba to look for tiles in the necessary colors. Some people let themselves be involved in this project and helped us by giving us or selling us the materials at a very good price.

The mosaic technique we used is the indirect one, that is, we worked in reverse, as we always do in the mosaic workshop. Only that compared to the stones we usually use – which have the same color on all sides – in the case of ceramic tiles the back is all the same color. So to help us in placing the various pieces we decided to color the back of the tiles to be more certain at the moment of laying them on the drawing. The youngest were involved in this phase: both our children with disabilities and children from a parish in Amman who did a summer camp with us. They were joined by those from the parish of Madaba who came during the summer as teenagers.

Then we began to cut the tiles into different shapes, but since they are ceramic, we also had to smooth them one by one to avoid hurting ourselves when placing them on the drawing. The driver was in charge of cutting and with him several volunteers, including some mothers of our children with disabilities. We smoothed them outdoors, under the trees, struggling against the summer heat, without ever hearing a complaint from our friends about the heat or the dust that “whitened” them. The older ones, both among the young people with disabilities and among the youths from Amman and Madaba, contributed to composing the mosaic itself. Some only for half an hour, some came regularly during the summer and became passionate about the project… and so, piece by piece, we reached the end of the first panel.

In September we met a lady, an expert in mosaics, who helped us fix the tiles with cement, before doing the final step of turning it over directly onto the wall: one Saturday morning under the stage canopy, young volunteers, her, young people with disabilities, all together for the last step, before handing the work over to expert masons who fixed the mosaic onto the wall of the stands. While we were agreeing on the daily price of the masons’ work, a couple of volunteers who were listening told us: “We’ll help you pay the cost of the masons!” and in a few seconds, with a click on the phone, they donated a good part of the work. And the first mosaic found its place.

Shukran
NP November 2025