Children's Drawing Workshop
1 day in August 2002

This was a spontaneous workshop with the neighborhood children.

We sent out a call to the neighborhood children to come to Aba House for a drawing session. It wasn't difficult to get participants. Because there is so much activity at Aba House and because we want to keep track of who's there and what they are doing, we are constantly struggling with the problem of how often to let the neighborhood children come in. If we don't have some kind of control, there would be dozens of them at any given time, so it is not unusual to have children sitting at the edge of our property waiting for an opportunity to participate in a workshop. We organized this impromptu class because Barbara wanted to have an exchange of drawings between some Ghanaian children and the children she teaches in the USA. She also subsequently went to a Ghanaian school and had a class draw some pictures also.

Barbara asked the children to visually show life in their neighborhood. After passing around crayons and colored markers, she prompted them to concentrate on things that are ordinary to them, but wouldn't be to the American children, so they drew women carrying things on their heads, goats in the street, everything we could see by looking out the window. I had expected that since they live in a fishing village, there would be a lot of fisherman and boats in their drawings, but this didn't happen. The Nungua children are always a pleasure to work with. I don't expect any of them to become professional artists, but it always makes me smile to see them concentrate so hard on their art work and to be so proud of themselves.

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