Soon hopefully official

The project continues as normal. Every weekend we renew our bond with the kids and we are approaching. In order to increase the identification with the group as well with the project in total we are soon going to produce an project song including some of our kids singing as a choir. The latter will be realized with the Rwandan Superstar and friend of the project Mako Nikoshwa. Everybody who is interested in listening to some of his nation wide hits in advance, is welcome to visit his page on ReverbNation (http://www.reverbnation.com/control_room/artist/3330712/songs).

In this weekend´s program we just undertook little changes. As we had difficulties to reserve the football pitch of the “Croix Rouge” here in Kacyiru, originally purposed to be a shelter for refugees, we moved to the terrain of the S.O.S Children Village which even offer a much nicer playground.

Unfortunately, the “Children´s Corner” conducted by the Goethe Institute and focusing on Reading and Storytelling could not be conducted because of the Kigali´s new city planing which forces the German Cultural Institute to move places. Bad news, but today we will negotiate about the future collaboration.

Much more gratifying is the process of the registration which is now being accelerated. I think the most important assignment will be done in just a view weeks! Than IriCreArt (The Color of Development creates Art) will be finally official.

Unfortunately, we forgot to take photos this weekend, therefore more will be presented in the next article on this blog iricreart.blogspot.com.

Professional traditional dancers as role models

A show with traditional dances and music instruments being played enriched the weekend´s program of the Atelier this time. Thanks to a partnering project, a professional performance had been showed to our children this Sunday, hopefully serving as a motivation for the kids to improve the own dancing skills. At least the young dancers were impressed.

Besides that, we continued the garden project in order to supply Environmental Education. Flower-beds, interrupted by little soil paths, were laid out and marked by wood sticks. Now it is still a question of time to see the first results.

Moreover, our theatre teacher was able to study a new sketch with the kids. That rose a lot of attention among the kids.

The female dance teacher for our girl group, which was recently added to our former boys group and is still growing, taught the girls a lot of new steps. Unbelievable, but the girls seem to learn much faster then all the other groups, they were able to show a quite sophisticated show in the end of the weekend.

We also continued singing lessons for everybody and guitar lessons for chosen students being tall enough to handle an adult guitar.

Concerning our groups, I have to announce that we grouped the kids by age now:

Group 1: Girls from 6 - 10

Group 2: Girls from 11 - 14

Group 3: Boys from 6 - 10

Group 4: Boys from 11 - 12

Group 5: Boys from 13 – 15

We undertook this division to be able to concentrate better on each individual and mostly in order to have groups of kids with the same mental skills and maturity.

At hand some pictures to described activities of IriCreArt (The Color of Development creates Art). 

 

Embellishing the Atelier by a kitchen Garden

This weekend our cooperation with the Goethe Institute started. From now on the Goethe Institute will supply our children with Reading and Storytelling lessons on Saturdays from 8 to 10 am.

As in Rwandan schools pupils are not to much integrated (approximately 50 pupils sit in one class in average), we see our newly added program point as quite useful to animate and interest our kids for books and give them the possibility to read out aloud to a larger group.

Another innovation is the kitchen garden we laid out this Sunday with the help of Adrian, a German volunteer who works for the environmental NGO ACNR and carried out other gardening projects, for example in the S.O.S Village des Enfants. With the garden we are trying to implement “Environment Education” and also, as it is an kitchen garden, “Health Education” in our work. We are looking forward to see the first sprigs growing, to accompany the growth period, to harvest the vegetables and finally to prepare a healthy dish. Our motto now: Patience and tender care! Find photos of the action attached to his article!

Apart from the two mentioned news, we continued the regular program!