YAD DAY

Every friday, Nikki and I help with the art class held for the youth in Mwanakwerekwe. This event attracts many of the younger children that live in the area from ages 4-12. Kaiza is the art teacher from Zanzibar who volunteers her time to work with the children. It's always the same akward process of initially trying to round about enough kids for the art session. We hangout around the table that's set up outside to attract the kids attention. Then we beckon the few random kids that walk by the table to come join the session. There's two reactions. Either they run away from us or they sit down but look very scared. However, once they start drawing and we help them out, then we're not so intimidating to them anymore! This week we did perspective drawing and coloring with pencil crayons. Kaiza was away this week, so her friend Kiloko was running the class. He worked primarily with the older boys while I was trying to help the younger group of boys. A few of the kids in the younger group had no idea how to draw the object that was sitting on the table infront of them. I tried to help a 4 year old boy named Salu by drawing the object for him. He decided to erase it as soon as I finished!

The art class also coincides when many of the children in the community are finished school. The last two sessions, we were bombarded by about an extra 40-50 boys and girls. By that time, there's only 30 minutes left in the art class. So we end up giving the rest of the kids blank pieces of paper to draw whatever they want. Usually everyone draws the same thing: fruits, houses, cars, and people. We managed not to have all our pencils and pencil crayons taken by the children. Even though it seemed like utter chaos with the children demanding paper and pencils from us, calling us mzungus in order to get our attention, most of them were very good in returning the art supplies they were using. Trying to monitor all these children is a bit of an overload, especially when you don't know how to speak Swahili to them, but the great thing that comes out of it is that we get a large turnout of girls to these art classes. In Zanzibar, as well as many other countries in Africa, it's a fairly male dominant society which is more visible as opposed to in Canada where there's better gender equity. For many of our programs, a large focus is on increasing female participation. We want to be able to give them more tools that they can apply in order to encourage female empowerment.