maplove

The beginning of  this project required a lot of brain storming. We first interviewed the kids at the orphanage to find out what their hopes and dreams were, as well as their likes and dislikes. We held the interviews in bilingual groups some students translating english questions into French. We then went back to the classroom to discover imagery the orphans could relate to through the interview results. Through a system of tiered voting, students created  compositions and then chose which ones they liked the best in the end. We then rook the winning idea and recreated it as group to make it more appealing. The final result looks like this:

Assigning buddies to my students has helped them teach the children what they are doing the whole way, one on one. After painting the wall white the students created a grid which helped us transfer our drawing using blue chalk lines, rulers, and pencils. We then labeled the grid boxes to match our drawing with numbers and letters. We had a few hiccups, causing us to shorten the drawing to fit the wall but kept moving.

Then we photocopied and blew up the gridded drawings to hand out as guides to the children and my HS students. Helping us transfer the large scale drawing in an hour and a half we had time to spare for playing hand games in a large group.

Last week we began painting. And in all honesty I was impressed with the ease my students had teaching the boys. There is one orphan, Vincent who speaks English, he acts as head honcho and translates all of my instructions. My students all speak at least a little french and have no problem communicating. The orphans think my broken French is ‘giggle worthy’ causing me to use it more often.. They love standing on the ladder. If one person gets off to get more paint, in a flash, there is another boy climbing to take their spot.

Each day when the boys are finished I ask them to “laver les mains, si vous plait”… maning in my terrible french please wash your hands. Instead they all proceed to take all their clothes off and jump into their communal bath/ pool thing. Every time, no exception, since we’ve been going. Its pretty hilarious, diving and jumping and inadvertently splashing all my freaked out students.

We got a great start and we go back today to continue working … more updates to come in the future!

Tags: Art, Cameroon, colorful, murals, orphanage, teaching abroad, West Africa