As an adult, I became an educator. To me the National Mall in Washington, DC always seemed a perfect venue for an international children's festival. The problem then was how to accomplish this feat. The ChildArt magazine is the educational publication of ICAF for children, ages 8 to 80. We have come to rely on words as the medium of communication.
Children have the ability to communicate without words.
After all, a child starts to scribble before uttering a word. Art came before language, as evidenced in cave paintings. ICAF's international children's festival takes place every three years, and in the previous one in 1999, we assumed that children from the participating countries would team up according to their languages. We were wrong. The children made friends based on what they saw in each other, not because they had a language in common.