Art for Gorillas

Category: Art of Conservation (AoC) | Date: Sep 28 2008 | By: Julie

My buddy Ged of Terra Incognita ECOTOURS recently extended me the chance to go gorilla tracking with him and I jumped at the opportunity. (Please click here to view Ged’s ecotour destinations and my trip to Madagascar with Terra Incognita)

Upon arrival early in the morning at Rwanda’s Parc National des Volcans park headquarters in Kinigi our group of eight learn we will be visiting Kwitonda Group and are presented to our guides, Odile and Olivier.

This is Odile.

Park Guide Odile NYIRAGUHIRWA briefs us, the visitors, before we climb over the buffalo wall to enter the protected area, Rwanda’s Parc National des Volcans.

You may remember meeting Odile as an Art of Conservation guest speaker during the HIV-AIDS awareness, family planning, and personal hygiene unit. Recently, Odile finished university and applied for a guide position with ORTPN, the Rwandan tourism and national parks service, and she got the job!

This is Olivier with a tracker.

Olivier MUTUYIMANA, a park guide in Rwanda for ten years, positions a visitor from the United States with a nearly perfect vantage point of the Kwitonda gorilla family in the near distance - always enforcing visiting humans to be apart from the resident mountain gorillas by 7 meters.

Odile and Olivier graciously accept my request for a short conversation on tape about their roles in conservation.

The day was a quintessential Sunday Walk In The Park - the sun was shining, the paths were hardly muddy or slippery, and the gorillas were perfectly accommodating by emerging from the dense vegetation and plopping themselves down in an opening for excellent viewing.

Kwitonda, the silverback, holds the pose similar to Auguste Rodin’s late 1800’s bronze, The Thinker.

I turn to see another thinker, Ged.

Throwing Dantean and Wagnerian contemplation out the window, three young gorillas occupy themselves with the great act of play as I enviously pine to join in on the fun.

Tags: Art of Conservation (AoC)

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Category: Art of Conservation (AoC) | Date: Sep 20 2008 | By: Julie

Greetings! This is Julie reemerging from a brief time out - visiting friends and family in the US, returning to my Rwanda studio to contend with a horrible internet connection, and then finding our project waylaid by the powers that be! Not always easy here, to say the least.

Art of Conservation is set to establish its conservation learning program through art-based activities into Rwanda’s primary and perhaps secondary school curricula. The groundwork has been laid and now Valerie, Eric and I must put into words, graphs, tables, statistics, and any other form (we’ve got plenty messages through art, but that doesn’t seem to suffice) to convey our project as a meaningful and sustainable partner in conservation.

Classes are postponed until January 2009, which is such a bummer. When we’re teaching the children, Valerie, Eric and I, are certain that our approach to conservation really works - the children are engaged, parents are pleased, we constantly receive requests from other school headmasters for the project to be implemented at their schools.

I’ll try to better embrace the ‘growing pains’ we are experiencing. It is positive on many accounts - the project has filed for its own 501(c)3 status both in the US and Rwanda, we are looking forward to having closer relationships with other partner organizations, and we’re extremely happy about working closer with educators so that our program can be sustainable and still operating in the many years to come.

Please share any comments, criticism, ideas, and/or encouragement which you think may help us improve our conservation learning project and how we may better waltz through the bureaucratic red tape.

A plethora of pictures, profiles of people in conservation, and life in Rwanda is still coming your way - enjoy.

I put this collection of drawings together from our lesson Animals of the Virunga Forest and had it printed as a banner while I was at home in the US. The banner material is durable for displaying the people’s work outside, for instance, along the road leading to their villages and schools.

Tags: Art of Conservation (AoC)

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Category: Art of Conservation (AoC), art | Date: Sep 01 2008 | By: Julie

Fahad is off to Kyamgobo University in Kampala, Uganda where he will begin his three year study leading to his award of Bachelor of Art and Industrial Design.

As you may guess, Valerie, Eric and I are filled with mixed emotions as we say good bye and good luck to Fahad. We feel sad to see him go, but alternately we’re thrilled about this wonderful opportunity he has in furthering his formal education.

Please enjoy the photos below as we celebrate Fahad and his contributions to the project, art, conservation, and laughter.

Fahad is pictured here at the far right with Eric and Valerie.

Fahad’s family was originally from Rwanda but needed to cross the border into Uganda during the 1959 war. He grew up in Kisoro District in western Uganda where he attended primary and secondary school.

Fahad instructs the children how to draw a golden monkey for our Animals of the Virunga Forest art and conservation lesson.

After completing primary and secondary school in Kisoro, Fahad attended Kakungula Memorial School in Kampala, Uganda for two years of advanced level arts.

More lessons on proportion, this time drawing the human head.

Dedicated to his passion of art, despite the many attempts from his brothers to join them in their business ventures, Fahad remains determined to follow the path of art and conservation.

Fahad assists Eric during our color theory lesson. Here, Eric begins with the primary colors; yellow, red, and blue.

I met Fahad after he completed his advanced level arts at the end of 2007. During our first discussion, Fahad expressed his desire to be in Rwanda, his home country, to share his knowledge with his people. Hence, he got a job with the project!

Fahad helps a student with her t-shirt design.

Fahad and Eric - such handsome guys.

Exposing students to a wide variety of artist mediums, Fahad shows his box of oil paints in front of a canvas and easel.

Fahad paints a sign for our ‘Where Do Gorillas Come From?’ lesson.

Valerie, Eric, and I hope to visit Fahad at school in Kampala. There’s a lot more art going on there compared to Rwanda’s capital city and its towns and villages and Fahad promises to show us everything.

Julie

Tags: Art of Conservation (AoC)

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