Keeping more than 20 children between the ages of six to 11 away from mischief and trouble is one tough job but YMCA chairman and board member Jean-Paul Mifsud, seems to have found one way to go about it.

At a gathering held at the YMCA centre in Valletta, the media were greeted by 17 children from Valletta, who explained that the project they were going to start working on, until next week, consisted of going individually around Valletta accompanied by a guardian taking pictures of what they deemed beautiful, abandoned or interesting.

Mr Mifsud told the media that the concept was born when he was looking through old photographs of Valletta with his son Jacques-Paul and the latter expressed an interest in going around the city taking photos with his father. This was the spin-off to outreach others on the initiative.

When the children were asked what they found ugly in Valletta, they mentioned crumbling facades, broken windows, ruined pavements, smelly dustbins and people throwing rubbish on the streets. The children also mentioned the need for a playground in Valletta as they did not have anywhere to play.

As to beautiful sites in Valletta, they mentioned old churches with particular reference to an angel at the side of the Valletta Jesuit church frontispiece and the President’s Palace. The children also said that the Upper Barrakka gardens were beautiful but expressed dismay at the fact that animals are not allowed there.

An exhibition of pictures taken by the children will be displayed online and one of the children even mentioned that the project could benefit the whole Valletta community if some of the photos of abandoned sites managed to draw the attention of Valletta local council.

The YMCA contacted Hewlett Packard (HP) and courtesy of their local distributors, Systec Ltd. 10 cameras were sponsored for the project.

Mr Mifsud told the media that one of the YMCA volunteers and guardian accompanying the children on their venture is a Russian child psychology student who comes to Malta frequently.

The children also asked The Malta Independent and The Times of Malta photographers, Ben Borg Cardona and Darrin Zammit Lupi whether they could pass on to them some of their own photographs of Valletta for inspiration. Needless to say, the two accepted without cavil.