KELOWNA – Kelowna resident and artist, Cherie Hanson, is now back in the comfort of her own home but says she narrowly missed being caught in the middle of the gunfire during the Paris attacks.
Hanson was in Paris for a conference. She was staying in an apartment building just two doors down from the Bataclan Theatre. After a long day at the conference, she felt tired and decided to stay in that night.
“I would have been coming down that street or I would have been at the cafe where the other shootings took place,” says Hanson, who witnessed the carnage first-hand. “I heard some yelling, some shots then explosions as young men blew themselves up. We could almost feel it, it was so close and it was really loud.”
The photos she took are a grim reminder of the violence. She describes seeing pools of blood on the street the day after the terrorist attacks. Memories hard to erase but Hanson says she’s not dwelling on the horror.
READ MORE: Kelowna woman recounts terror attacks in Paris
“If we live in a state of fear, it leads to a continual cycle of hate and thinking that it’s okay to kill a certain person but not another and we can’t live like that,” she says.
Hanson says the attacks shouldn’t foster increased fear of letting Syrian refugees come to Canada.
“They have been sitting in a camp for two years, they’ve been vetted by the UN, they’ve been vetted by security agencies around the world. We are actually safer with those refugees than we are with somebody coming into our country on a visa,” says Hanson.
She is now focusing her work on children traumatized in war zones.
“I know now that what I need to focus my writing and my art on is to awaken people that we need to take care of these children.”
Out of tragedy and violence, the artist and writer has found a new calling in life.
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