KITCHENER — These kids are making toys out of garbage, just as they did in the refugee camps and streets of the countries they came from.

A colourful “bouncy ball” that fits in your palm, fashioned from layer upon layer of burst balloons. A kite made from a few sticks and a plastic bag. A toy car of wood and cardboard, covered with flattened tin cans that gleam in the sunlight.

The toys, made by students at A.R. Kaufman Public School in Kitchener, will be on display starting today and throughout March break at the Cambridge Galleries in downtown Galt.

The students will visit the exhibit today. For some, it will be the first trip to an art gallery they have ever taken.

“I want to show people the stuff we made in our country,” said a cheerful Ousmane Kromah, 14, as he rolled the torn balloon pieces around each other with deft hands.

“I love making toys.”

Kromah came here from Liberia, on Africa’s west coast, six years ago, after living in a refugee camp for two years with his mother and brothers. He described how he and his brothers would go out looking for bits of torn balloons on the street to make the balls.

He doesn’t feel sorry for himself, though. Instead, he’s proud of his work — so proud that he made an extra ball for Robert Thody, the education officer at the gallery.

“I want to give him a gift, said Kromah. “He’s kind enough to let us use the gallery.”

The 24 student-artists are in a couple of special classrooms especially for immigrant children who need extra help. Because most have lived with wars, fled persecution, or called a refugee camp their home, their education has been seriously impaired. Some can’t read or write in their own language, never mind English.

But these two classrooms, for students in Grades 5 to 8, have just 12 students each — and teachers who are dedicated to moving them forward as fast as possible.

“We push them and they respond really well,” said teacher Alex Martell, who works with fellow teacher Kim Cavanagh.

For a few days this year, the students also have an artist-in-residence, Sandra Phillips, who suggested that the children re-create the toys they made in their homelands.

Phillips, who spends 10 days with the two classes as part of a national art education program, heard from the children that they had made their own toys with whatever they could find — mud, paper, plastic bottles.

Some said they had traded those toys for food.

Parisa Abdulkholiq, 13, made a kite of bamboo sticks and a plastic bag tied to the sticks with bits of balloon.

“It reminds me of my dad,” she said.

Her father is dead. He was killed when a truck overturned on him, she said. And after he died, the family became very poor, without money or work. An uncle helped them leave Afghanistan and then they were accepted to this country.

“We were so happy to come to Canada,” she said.

So was Kromah. He misses his friends from the refugee camp in Liberia. He has lost touch with them since the camp closed.

But “Canada is a good place to live,” he said.

He still remembers how the government gave his family clothes and shoes, and the school gave him a video game and other toys, when he and his family first arrived in this country.

“My first Christmas was the best!”

ldamato@therecord.com