We spend a lot of time arguing about what has and hasn’t changed since November 4, 2008. For me, one lasting change has been my sense of community.
Let’s face it, New Yorkers are often guilty of feeling like they have nothing in common with the rest of the country (and we in Brooklyn are guilty of feeling we have little in common with Manhattan – or, as I like to call it, "The Big Island"). But in 2007-08, we New Yorkers knocked on doors in many other states, and met people who were our neighbors in the larger sense. Of course, there was – and remains -- plenty on which we and our newly discovered neighbors differed. But we came together as a community to do an intervention for our country.
This past January, our global neighbor, Haiti, suffered a catastrophe we can still barely comprehend. People who understood international relief work advised that sending money was the most efficient way to help, so we sent money. But as much sense as their arguments made intellectually, hands-on work always FEELS more like helping.
So at Brooklyn for Barack, we were looking for a way to do something beyond writing checks. One of our stalwarts, lawyer and journalist Alice Backer, was traveling to Haiti to report for Global Voices; we quickly amassed the medical and other supplies she put on her wish list. But that was a few days’ work. We wanted to do more. Something for the kids in Haiti?
While we were mulling this over, a friend pointed out that the Haitian community right here in Brooklyn (Haitians are 9th-largest immigrant group in New York City) was suffering both from the loss of friends and relatives and from a sense of helplessness at the catastrophe that had befallen their country. What about doing something for their kids?
Our response quickly took shape: arts workshops with a therapeutic component. Alice Backer introduced us to the wonderful Brooklyn-based organization Haiti Cultural Exchange, which was already offering Haitian arts programs for children on a small scale, and even before the earthquake had been planning to offer a larger youth arts program centered around Haitian Flag Day on May 18th. When the earthquake hit, they knew they wanted to combine these activities with some form of art therapy to help the kids express what they were feeling at the loss and upheaval in their families and community.
Together, we began to reach out to our extended communities: Obama volunteers, teachers, artists, art therapists, Haitian and Haitian-American artists living and working in New York. Everyone wanted to help. Before we knew it, the project had blossomed into four Saturdays of workshops, 10 workshops each Saturday.
We had poets and printmakers and painters and choreographers and drummers and drama therapists and art therapists and people who just wanted to come and help pack lunch bags and register the kids. They came from all over the city, and from Massachusetts and Connecticut and New Jersey. They donated art supplies and snacks. We started getting calls from students at local high schools who wanted to volunteer.
Haiti Cultural Exchange's vice-chair, the indefatigable Regine Roumain, wrote a proposal to the newly formed Hope and Healing Fund of the Brooklyn Community Foundation, and was awarded a grant to help cover the basic costs of the program.
Now we just needed a location. One of the Obama volunteers who had come with me to Philadelphia several times in 2008 happened to work for the Deputy Mayor for Education; she found us a wonderful school to host the program: 40% of their students were Haitian or Haitian-American; they had taken in 30 children directly from Haiti after the earthquake.
The photos you see below come from those four weeks of workshops. They’re just a beginning. As the principal said at our closing ceremony, these kids are hungry for art. And while part of me balks at the fact that volunteers must step in to provide what our school budgets should be covering, the realist in me is grateful that there are volunteers willing to do it.
The school where we held the workshops was right around the corner from:
The youngest children had storytelling time, music time, and art time:
Some of the work with the older children had an explicit arts-therapy focus, like the Mandalas:
Several drama therapists came and worked with the kids:
House and home were a big theme. In one workshop, the kids created their own superheroes and heroines. Not surprisingly, one had the power to rebuild destroyed houses. In another workshop, kids envisioned homes for the new Haiti and then built architectural models:
They made their own dolls -- and homes for the dolls. Note that volunteering is clearly HARD WORK:
Some of the workshops were just for fun -- a way for the kids to cut loose after all the sadness. They learned to make felt jewelry:
They made Suncatchers:
They learned how to make blank books -- and then filled them in:
They made their own stamps to decorate t-shirts:
My father discovered that a fellow student in his Italian class was a children's choreographer, so he recruited him to come teach ballet:
The workshops were also about cultural pride. In the drumming workshop, kids learned about the drums of the different regions of Haiti, how they're made and how they're played.
In Haiti, kites are known as "kaps," short for "monte kap" (capable of rising), a notion that easily becomes symbolic after a national tragedy. This kite-making workshop was taught by Kossack SuzeNYC.
Our Massachusetts volunteers taught kids to make marionettes based on the characters from a Haitian folktale:
Haitian artist Nyrvah Richard taught the students to paint on silk, and assembled their creations into this incredible wall hanging:
Some of our volunteers, seen here with the silk paintings in progress, came from a young Haitian women's organization, formed since the earthquake, called BelTiFi. They provided invaluable Kreyol support for the non-Haitian workshop leaders.
Over the course of the four weeks, the kids worked on two murals. The first was done on sheets of oaktag. I envisioned this one as a series of giant "Get Well" cards for Haiti.
For the other mural, under the guidance of painter Vladimir Cybil Charlier, the students traced one another's outlines on canvas and then filled them in. Each child was depicted holding a tool to rebuild Haiti. This mural will travel to Haiti next month with volunteers from the International Children's Art Foundation as part of their Hope and Healing project (their project director, art therapist Chantal Antoine, volunteered all four weekends, and worked with the kids who had experienced the earthquake directly).
On the final day, we had a celebration of Flag Day that included the singing of the Haitian national anthem and a reading of poetry by one of the students (I only got a quick translation of the Kreyol, but everyone in the room was bowled over by his talent):
Students from the school's Haitian dance troupe performed:
I'll close with a Kreyol saying that speaks to all of us who volunteer:
Let's all continue to
lend our hands to Haiti
and to our Haitian neighbors here at home!