Malak Shahine hugs a friend and is delighted by the bright orange and yellow stripes that now run from end to end of the park in her Hartford neighborhood.
The two young girls walk over a piece of art that is part of a new permanent exhibition called “No Guns, All Play” to raise awareness of gun violence in the Park Street area where George Day Park is located.
The installation – commissioned by Real Art Ways, a local nonprofit – comes after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently declared gun violence a public health crisis due to the high number of shootings across America. Neighborhood children are invited to help create this art exhibit by writing down the names of people they know who have been affected by gun violence.
9-year-old Malak took a flat brush and wrote a memory on the artwork.
“BJ, we love you,” she wrote.
Sujata Srinivasan
/
Connecticut Public Administration
Her neighbor BJ, she said, was shot and injured in the hallway of her apartment.
Malak’s mother, Joumana Shahine, was also at the park and was happy about the expansion.
“When this beauty is in the area, it will change your mood, your opinion and your thinking,” she said.
Shahine and her husband emigrated from Egypt to seek a better life in America, but she said her husband left her and she raised her three children alone.
However, Shahine is convinced that the decision to move to the USA was worth it: her eldest daughter is studying medicine at UConn and her teenage son wants to study computer science.
Still, raising her children in this neighborhood was not easy.
Her car had been shot at three times, she said, pointing to patched holes just below the window. “I taped it up with some stuff,” she said.
Sujata Srinivasan
/
Connecticut Public Administration
Getting in the car early in the morning to go to work is a daily risk.
“I have to look around to see if anyone is coming,” she said. “And I have to run from my house to the car. I don’t feel safe, but I’m the only one taking care of my children, so I have to do it.”
Steed Taylor of New York City designed and created the vibrant curves from one end of the park to the other.
“It’s a childhood thing. You want your kids to have fun playing and doing things,” Taylor said. “You just can’t do that when you’re dealing with something like that.”
Steed is referring to the fear of guns that parents and children in this neighborhood have.
In southwest Hartford, where Park Street is located, there were eight shooting victims with nonfatal injuries in early August. There were 18 nonfatal shootings in the neighborhood last year, according to Hartford police.
Jim Haddadin of Connecticut Public contributed to this report.
