Art for Gorillas

Category: Art of Conservation (AoC) | Date: Jul 18 2009 | By: Julie

Hi! My name is Danielle Boyd. I am from Sugar Land, Texas. I attend Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas where I will be finishing up my last year as an Early Childhood Education major.

This is me at Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge in Kinigi last night. This is the area where the schools with Art of Conservation are located. I am here for three weeks.

My prior experience to this volunteer job has been at home teaching K-5th grade. I also volunteered in Thailand for a month planting trees and teaching a third grade class English. Every project is different and I always learn something new from every experience.

This is me working with some of the students from Rushubi Primary School on the foundation of the rain water tank. This effort is to promote healthy living to the children and the community. Muhawenimana took a strong interest in what I was doing, so we decided to pair up and work together to finish my part. I thoroughly enjoyed working with all of the students. Their concentration during this activity amazed me. Not one child left their mural until they had perfected every detail. They each took pride in their art work which to me reflected a lot about their drive in another aspects of their lives.

Here I am helping Innocent (one of the staff members at Art of Conservation) learn different computer skills. Since he does all of the assistant work, he has taken a special interest in improving his computer skills.

Taking a break from the project work visiting Group 13 in the Volcanoes National Park. This was a very new and eye opening experience for me. After working with Art of Conservation for the last few days I had learned a wealth of information about the gorillas and other animals. However, being able to see these amazing creatures in the natural habitat really struck me deeper than I had expected. No one can really describe what it is like seeing these fantastic creatures interacting with each other. It is something that I feel everyone must try to experience for themselves.

Here is Group 13 playing, resting, and eating during my one hour viewing time. After watching them for a few minutes they moved up towards the top of the mountain. It was quite a challenge viewing them but it made the experience even more memorable.

I will be blogging more during my last two weeks in Rwanda.
Danielle

Tags: children, conservation, gorillas, mural, one-health, painting, rwanda

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Category: Art of Conservation (AoC) | Date: Jul 07 2009 | By: Julie

As part of our series of lessons on staying healthy, AoC is teaching students about the importance of eating a varied diet that balances starchy carbohydrates, protein, and vitamin-rich vegetables like spinach and broccoli. In Rwanda, most people’s diets are very heavy in starchy carbohydrates like potatoes and cassava, foods which provide energy and are cheap and easy to grow but are nutritionally poor. Unlike other African countries, we rarely see starving children in Rwanda but we do see a lot of undersized and weak kids who have most likely suffered from nutritionally-poor diets most of their lives.

While AoC can’t change the habits of our students’ parents, who are ultimately responsible for their diets, we still feel it’s important to educate the children about good nutrition so that the kids can make smart decisions when given a choice about food. We also encourage students to share the lessons with their parents in hopes that the whole family may develop healthier eating habits.

A selection of watercolors showing children eating a variety of foods, especially fresh vegetables.

A second collage of watercolors.

One student’s art work showing healthy foods including leafy vegetables, beans, fruit, meat, and milk.

Students view each other’s paintings, which are laid out on a table to dry.

Tags: one-health, staying healthy

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Category: Art of Conservation (AoC) | Date: Jul 04 2009 | By: Julie

Brush Teeth at Least Twice Daily

For the third and final blog in this series, here are photos and art work by the children depicting how they use the water from their rainwater tanks to brush their teeth at least twice per day.

A collage of watercolors illustrating tooth brushing.

This painting clearly shows the use of water in tooth brushing to rinse the mouth.

Another watercolor collage. See how some drawings try to show that the act of tooth brushing should be done at least twice per day, once in the morning and once at night.

Students work on their paintings in class.

Tags: one-health, staying healthy

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Category: Art of Conservation (AoC) | Date: Jul 03 2009 | By: Julie

Cleaning Classrooms, Toilets, and the Rainwater Tank

For the second blog in my Staying Healthy Where There Is No Running Water series, here are photos and art work by the children depicting how they use the water from their rainwater tanks to clean the school facilities.

School teacher Michel hauls an arm full of brooms with red bristles donated by AoC. These and other supplies will be used to clean the school facilities.

It is customary in Rwandan government run schools for the students, as opposed to the teachers, to clean the classrooms and toilets. The illustrations above show everyone joining in the cleaning.

Illustration of cleaning toilet stalls with a mop and a broom. AoC has suggested that the schools also drop ash down the toilets to reduce the odor and help in decomposing fecal matter.

I paint numbers on all brooms and other supplies to indicate which classroom or toilet stall each belongs. After doing an initial inspection to see if teachers are following through with the numbering system it’s clear it will be a challenge. Unfortunately, I think in situations where people are used to receiving a lot of aid, the ethic of shared responsibility is weak.

We ask students to illustrate their acts of good hygiene to stress that these simple habit forming activities for staying healthy are not just folly. The students creating these paintings must surely be grasping this reality better.

Beautiful buckets, jerry cans, and locally made soap are marked with the schools name and classroom number. I go out of my mind with how some school supplies simply ‘walk off’ and disappear. We are definitely trying to discourage that!

Tags: one-health, staying healthy

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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

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Category: Art of Conservation (AoC) | Date: Jun 12 2009 | By: Julie

For 2009, the “Year of the Gorilla”, Art of Conservation wanted to make sure to make our presence known at Kwita Izina, Rwanda’s annual naming ceremony for the year’s new baby mountain gorillas. Over the years, Kwita Izina has grown from a small grassroots event to an international celebration of Rwanda’s most treasured natural asset.

Art of Conservation, which has its core mission the goal helping the people who live near the gorillas to live healthier lives so that both the human and animal populations can be healthy, want to stress the interconnectedness of the gorillas and the Rwandan people at Kwita Izina.

Art of Conservation has been working on a song and dance performance with our 150 school students called Mu Birunga (In Virunga referring to the home of the gorillas the Virunga Massiff) which serves to deepen the understanding of the connection between people and mountain gorillas.

Our students recently auditioned to perform Mu Birunga in the June 20th Kwita Izina ceremony. District leaders watched the kids perform and were impressed enough to invite them to participate.

Since then, the kids have been working hard to perfect their performance for the big day.

Girls at Nyabitsinde Primary School practice the routine. Photo by Molly Feltner.

Julie demonstrates the dance steps. Photo by Molly Feltner.

District leaders are pleased with the song and dance. Photo by Molly Feltner.

Students practice entering and exiting the stage. Photo by Molly Feltner.

Tags: Kwita Izina, mountain gorillas, one-health, rwanda

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