Innocence and horror

The poster of an exhibition of children's drawings outside Caraffa Stores is deceiving: It shows a child wearing spectacles, one lens of which shows a vision of a cheerful jungle scene and the other a black and polluted factory scene.

But this indication of the negative things that children view as their world does not even begin to capture the bleakness depicted in some of the drawings. Many of them moved me to tears, racked by guilt at our inability to stop the horror that these child artists know as their world.

The visions of 191 children were chosen by the Geneva World Association to mark the UN's 60th anniversary. The exhibition opened in December 2005 and was brought here by the Malta Council for Culture and Arts, its first stop on a world tour.

The drawings were done by children aged between six and 16 and chosen from 3,200 submissions.

Some of them show the type of childhood we all want for our own children and grandchildren, full of rainbows and happy families and smiling suns. But others - predominantly but by no means uniquely from Africa - stop you in your tracks.

Look more carefully at one picture of children playing on the swings under a rainbow: On the left, a soldier is shooting a child. One house seems to have a strange thatched roof until you realise that the child has shown it in flames. And the planet being shown in another is made up of heaped corpses with the words "Is it worth it?" carefully written above them. There are far too many guns and soldiers, far too many crosses, far too much blood.

It is one of the most thought-provoking exhibitions I have seen in a long time... Don't miss it.

The exhibition is open at Caraffa Stores, at Vittoriosa Waterfront, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends until December 17.