Art for Gorillas

Category: Art of Conservation (AoC) | Date: Jul 02 2009 | By: Julie

This blog is the first in a three-part series showing how the children and teachers at AoC’s schools are using their newly installed rainwater tanks to stay healthy. The past few weeks AoC has been working with the schools to teach the students and staff proper maintenance and use of the tanks so that the water collected stays clean and fresh and is used only for the purposes of maintaining good hygiene and cleaning the school facilities.

To emphasize these lessons, we asked the children to paint watercolors illustrating how they use the rainwater tanks to stay healthy. Here is a selection of art and photographs from our lesson about hand-washing.

Illustration of a student using the locally made handwashing stations.

Where there is no running water or electricity, one must make do with what is available and affordable and also sustainable and ecologically friendly. At the two schools we work with, locally made hand-washing stations that use water collected from the rainwater tanks made the most sense.

Hand-washing stations are placed outside of each classroom so students can wash their hands before entering.

A mosaic of some of the children’s hand-washing paintings.

After receiving months of instructions about staying healthy and foundational art lessons taught by AoC instructor Eric, the children were ready to put together their new skills. When asked to illustrate hand washing, two girls went outside of the classroom to sketch the water tanks on their drawing boards. I was thrilled to see them taking this initiative and observing each other using the station so that they could make their depictions more lifelike.

More pictures done on small pieces of watercolor paper.

Tags: one-health, staying healthy