BEIRUT — The children running around Sarvam Yoga's studio in Beirut breathlessly explained to visitors the meaning and inspiration behind the photographs and drawings they had made. For most of them, the event organized by Mishwar, a Lebanon-based Scottish NGO, is the first time their artworks had been displayed and their creativity acknowledged.

“The Kids of Mishwar,” an exhibition held April 13-14 and sponsored by the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, provided a platform for predominately Syrian refugee children to showcase their creations, which reflect the depth and complexity of this often stereotyped and misunderstood group. Nearly half of the nearly 1 million registered Syrian refugees currently live in Lebanon, and they are largely marginalized.

Mishwar, founded in 2016, runs a variety of cultural workshops and activities for some 250-300 Palestinian and Syrian children living in refugee camps across northern Lebanon and the Bekaa, with an underlying focus on mental health.

“We work on creative projects with kids as a form of psycho-social support,” Tony Collins, founder and director of Mishwar, told Al-Monitor. “There is a link between art, music, yoga and sport because they are all geared towards letting kids become free and to relieve them of the stress they lived through.”