Over the past few weeks, some of the village kids I work with on literacy have been helping create a few Scrabble boards. I really wanted to support the company and buy a few, but the number of boards I would need to keep the kids from fighting over them and high cost made it prohibitive. So we got some wood scraps donated from a local wood shop. A couple hours later after I cut it up with their saws and bought some sandpaper, we got to smoothing everything out. We marked up 500 little letter tiles and are putting grids on a few game boards. We have 2 games ready to play and 3 more under way. Scrabble is a great way for the kids who need help with phonics (yeah, there are quite few) and to help others expand their vocabulary through creative letter assembly.
I'm also very excited how our lil hand drumming group is coming together. Our village has wanted to see drumming and drama come back. Sadly, as previous posts detailed--we haven't had much support to get the steel pan back up and running. It is 'on hold' for now until resources can be allocated for it. The original idea was to use hand drummers as our back-up rhythm section. However, hand drumming seems to be a more likely start-up venture. Who knows, perhaps with hand drumming success down the road, we could fund our steel pan revival.
But for now, we have been working with a person from a nearby village. He is a vibrant member of a development and cultural group who remembers well fond memories of working with a volunteer that lived in his village of Rose Hall. Working together, he has agreed that his group would become a mentor organization to help foster drumming, drama, and dance activities here in Spring Village. He is a great drummer and comes here once a week to help us out. He brings drums for us to practice on and I've managed to get the Ministry of Education to order a few for our school.
As our group is nurtured into a performing arts organization--we are hoping to reinvest into the education of our community. In order to make our group a strong reality, I need to mobilize adults in Spring--a slow, but gradual process. I find we have several people who drummed or were part of a drama group in the past. Now, I will seek to overcome the obstacles they provide as reasons not to participate. We will grow. We have the history and new potential.
Oh yeah...following up from my last post...I don't know how, but the ninja dogs we have here managed to get into the box I was keeping that goat skin until it could be picked up. Some dog is very happy, or at least was.
I've always been into drumming, but have very bad musical rhythm. Maybe I will get it this time around.
Good things to follow.
Stay happy and well,
ciao tutti,
~your local wannabe jedi
~Shawn
1 comment:
What a great post! Incredibly inspiring. Great job. I wish I had your woodworking talent.
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