moments

Recreational activities combined with yoga in Gaza help children recover a sense of normalcy despite war, teacher says.

Gaza City – In northern Gaza, a Palestinian teacher has transformed a tent into a small space for yoga classes, offering children moments of peace from the hardships of daily life in the besieged enclave.

The idea to bring the practice to Gaza City came from Hadeel al-Gharbawi, who has been working on finding ways to help children cope with trauma. Through simple movements and breathing, the class offers moments of calm, safety and joy.

Children sit cross-legged on a thick mat, eyes shut. Some concentrate, while others fight back shy smiles, sneaking sideways glances to see whether their classmates are following the teacher’s instructions, amused by the unfamiliar exercise.

“I wanted to expand the activities I do with children beyond drawing and colouring. I searched online and discovered that yoga can help children recover from trauma,” al-Gharbawi told Al Jazeera.

“Since yoga isn’t widely available here in Gaza, I decided to learn online and practice it with the children. Through yoga, they can release stress and cope with the difficult life around them.”

Children in Gaza have been exposed to continuous cycles of violence and trauma, profoundly affecting their mental health, according to a report by the World Health Organization.

The constant bombing, displacement, loss of family members and physical pain of Israel’s two-year war on Gaza have caused emotional distress, social withdrawal and grief, among other symptoms, the report says.

International organisations have been warning that the conflict will leave a long-lasting impact.

“All children in Gaza require mental health, and psychosocial support services after two years of horrific war, displacement, and exposure to traumatic events,” the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said earlier this month.

This is why yoga classes are more than physical exercise in Gaza; they allow children to step away from fear, release emotions, and feel in control, even for a few minutes, the participants say.

“We come here to do yoga, to learn and to do art,” Suwar, a displaced student, told Al Jazeera. “These activities allow us to forget, even for a short time, the war, the harsh weather and the queues for water. Yoga, in particular, gives us a moment of calm and helps us feel safe and happy.”

Alongside yoga, the tent offers educational and recreational programmes that al-Gharbawi said aim to activate the children’s imaginations.

“Combining learning with playful and therapeutic activities helps the children deal with trauma and regain a sense of normalcy,” al-Gharbawi said.

What’s your favorite sighting heading into the long weekend?

A rare red fox outside Yosemite? A 3-year-old gray wolf roaming Los Angeles County, the first such visit in nearly a century? Or Kiké Hernández returning to the Dodgers after a long offseason spent waiting for him to resign?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope newsletter and the guy answering all of the above to this newsletter’s initial question.

Let’s spend a little more time with The Envelope’s latest cover star, “Sinners” scene-stealer Delroy Lindo, this week.

Cover story: Delroy Lindo

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

Everyone loves a surprise or two on Oscar nominations morning, and this year gave us the gift of Delroy Lindo, 73, finally earning his first Oscar nomination for his standout performance as bluesman Delta Slim in “Sinners.”

Some people are still smiling about the news. Lindo certainly is.

Lindo and I talked about the lessons he has learned as an actor over the course of a career that has spanned a half-century. He recalled the self-doubts that plagued him when he first played the lead in “A Raisin in the Sun,” the story of a struggling Black family dealing with discrimination in 1950s South Chicago, and how he overcame those fears when he revisited the role three years later.

“This was an absolute period of growth for me as an actor all because I learned the most important thing: preparation, preparation, preparation,” he told me.

But even when you exercise that level of care, you still deal with doubt. Actors will be the first to tell you that they’re needy, neurotic.

To play Delta Slim, Lindo read books on the blues, listened to Son House, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and immersed himself in the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Musicians helped him hone his harmonica and piano playing. He was ready.

But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t use a little affirmation for a final boost.

Lindo says there were two such “seminal moments” for him while making “Sinners.” The first came when they filmed the scene where Lindo stands as his car passes a chain gang. Delta Slim exhorts the prisoners to “hold your heads.”

“[Director] Ryan [Coogler] was very nervous,” Lindo says. “He didn’t want any accidents.”

Shortly after shooting the scene, the movie’s unit publicist, Anna Fuson, emailed Lindo’s agents, telling them how his work had moved her and the crew.

“That doesn’t happen,” Lindo says, his voice cracking with emotion.

Later they shot Delta Slim’s monologue, in which he recalls the lynching of a fellow musician, ending with Lindo breaking into a guttural humming and drumming, expressing pain that transcends words. That night Zinzi Coogler, Ryan’s wife and a producer on “Sinners,” wrote Lindo telling him how much that scene had meant to her.

“Those two moments gave me a grounding,” Lindo says quietly. “It let me know this work is impacting people. And you can’t put a value on that kind of thing.”

Lyndon J. Barrois Sr. always knew he wanted to be an artist, even as a child.

From crafting figures out of chewed gum stuck underneath the pews at his Catholic school’s church after he was forced to scrape them as punishment from teachers to collecting his mother’s discarded gum wrappers, Barrois felt a creative itch to make something out of nothing.

“I had seen too much art [and thought to myself], ‘Someone had to be doing this, why not me?,’” Barrois said with a chuckle. “I always dreamt of doing this. Other kids played with Play-Doh. I made stuff with anything I could get my hands on like clay, aluminum foil and discarded phone wire.”

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Now the 61-year-old New Orleans native is debuting his latest project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “Fútbol Is Life.” It depicts some of the most iconic plays and political moments in the 95-year history of the FIFA World Cup, coming to L.A. this summer, with “humble” gum wrappers.

Barrois and LACMA curator Britt Salvesen assembled 60 works, including 40 vignettes from past World Cups and four animated short films, among them the movie “Fútballet,” which re-creates 21 famous scenes on a 50-inch soccer pitch.

Suspended artwork of Brazilian Swedish footballer Marta Vieira da Silva, known mononymously as Marta, made by Barrois. He made a conscious effort to feature women’s contributions to soccer.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

A large-scale projection of a miniature of French footballer Kylian Mbappé hangs on the wall. Two life-size replicas of Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Brazil’s Marta Vieira da Silva hang from the ceiling, the first of their kind for the artist, who has done miniatures of NBA legend Kobe Bryant and NFL star Patrick Mahomes.

The exhibition is laid out to resemble a playing field.

“We really wanted to create that environment that you feel like you’re in a separate world, and my colleague Darwin Hu took a personal and creative interest in this,” Salvesen told The Times. “He did a bunch of visual research on soccer fields in schools and prisons, where fields were improvised in whatever spaces were available. We wanted to wrap the lines up the walls and have the turf. Your sense of the space changes when you go from a hard floor to a softer floor.”

With a suspended Lionel Messi at right, Noa Carter, 4, and dad Darius L. Carter of Pasadena get a preview of artist Lyndon J. Barrois Sr.’s LACMA exhibition, “Fútbol Is Life.”

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Barrois’ 1-inch tall “sportraits” are carefully painted to capture even the tiniest detail. The majority of the installations include a mirror, allowing the viewer to see themselves as part of the moments “frozen in time,” he said.

A total of 325 individual mini soccer and football players, including Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, are included in the show.

“I had so much fun making the sculptures that when I was done, it was like hitting a wall after all that adrenaline,” Barrois said. “Now we get to hang it. Install it. You just start to see all the things we envisioned just come to life. I love this s—.”

Before sculpting, Barrois did “tons of research, a lot of reading, [looking at] photography and video.” He and a friend rewatched the most famous plays and examined the history surrounding the World Cup, stretching back to the 1930s, and before the Women’s World Cup started in 1970.

A “Sportraits” work shows the German soccer team highlighting migrant workers’ rights ahead of the 2021 World Cup. “I chose moments that I personally thought would be important, there’s a lot of politics involved,” Barrois said.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“I just wanted to tell a story with the politics involved, like in 1938, the German team was all Nazis, and they’re doing the salute, and by 2022, the German team has human rights on their T-shirts,” Barrois said. “We also had the Iranian women project. All these things happened on such a huge platform. So it was a tough editing process to bring that down to 40.”

Barrois spent seven months completing his pieces.

Curator Sandra Jackson-Dumont, former director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, applauded Barrois’ use of gum wrappers.

“I like that Lyndon is using materials that are a part of our everyday lives that we take for granted and we discard,” Jackson said. “He’s using those materials to make something creative.”

Barrois was surrounded by family and friends for the exhibition’s preview, most of whom grew up with the artist. Dany Wilson, who went to elementary school with Barrois, said he was “proud of him.”

The exhibition also features works from scientist Harold Edgerton and photographer Eadweard Muybridge that explore the history of motion studies and time-lapse photography.

Though we’re solidly into 2026, a trend has emerged on social media: Reminiscing on the year 2016.

Through throwback posts, people have been traveling back to the year when dog and flower crown Snapchat filters, Instagram eyebrows, the mannequin challenge and the Chainsmokers were everywhere.

But why, you may ask? On social media, 2016 is remembered as the last carefree era, a time when people posted whatever they wanted without overthinking it, when folks actually danced at parties instead of pointing their phones at the DJ booth to “capture content.”

2016 also brought many cultural milestones to L.A., from Kobe’s final game to the rise of selfie culture to all things Issa Rae. In the spirit of nostalgia, we’ve rounded up 16 moments that bring us back to that time. So let’s crank up Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” album and take a ride down memory lane, shall we?