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Children's Community Art Classes and Empowerment |
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Breathing the Creative Spirit into Our Daily Lives
By Leslie Temple-Thurston
 Very few people realize exactly how powerful and transformative art training is for pre-school and elementary school children. Of course, it is also profoundly helpful to offer similar art training geared towards older children. But the most effective way to facilitate truly helpful development in a young child, development that lasts a lifetime, is by making an early start in various forms of art experience with the little ones.
Teaching children art teaches them to use their right brain, balancing it very nicely with the left-brain. The children grow up far more balanced in every possible expression and direction of their future lives, not just around making art. But perhaps the main blessing that art training gives a child, a gift that keeps on giving throughout their lives, is that children who have art experiences in early childhood realize very early on that they are not empty inside. They are well set up to discover, as their lives unfold, that they have vast inner resources to use in their future.
Without that early training, even well-educated children and teenagers are in danger of ending up as adults who feel empty and uncreative—a universal syndrome in our current world. This is such a simple solution to what becomes, in effect, a truly huge problem for someone later on who tries to go through life without feeling that they have inner resources to draw on.
In short, when the art training begins as soon as the child is able to start, it is such a simple and fun solution to facilitating their best and most unselfconscious, creative development. It is such a simple solution, which pays huge dividends through out their life.
Seeds of Light sponsors a weekly art class for children in the village of Rooiboklaagte in Acornhoek. We offer opportunities for volunteer art teachers to visit and share their particular artistic skills with the children, bringing in new ideas and energies, and having fun with the kids as well.
We are also hoping to extend this service to the children of different villages in Acornhoek when we have enough teachers to make that possible.
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Thembalethu Home-Based Care |
 The Thembalethu Home-Based Care project, which has been operating since July 1999, serves 13 villages near the southeast corner of Mpumalanga Province in South Africa. Their mission is to support the poorest of the poor and, in particular, to respond to those families affected by HIV/AIDS infections in one or more members of the household. Specific attention is paid to establishing a support infrastructure for the growing number of children at risk, who are primarily orphans. The project was founded by Sally McKibbin and Bridgett Moyane, who, along with over 250 women care-workers, go out daily to homes in rural villages to visit and assist patients suffering with AIDS and AIDS-related diseases. The organization provides weekly training for the care-workers, and acts as a community focal point for many levels of support. It is a hive of activity and its grounds hold everything from carpentry and glass blowing shops in rented space, to an arts and crafts center and retail space to provide employment and skills training to unemployed locals, to a thriving vegetable garden providing food for the community. Thembalethu serves as a model for others in the surrounding areas.
Their work is quite extraordinary in its reach and stature and has grown in many new directions since their inception. In the beginning we represented them on the web, and now they have their own beautiful and informative website.
Seeds of Light is proud to provide support to this organization that is so critically important to the people of the Nkomazi region. Please visit Thembalethu’s website for more information. |
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