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March 3 - March 25
• Work of Hands
Ghana
The “Work of Hands” was completed
by library members and adult literacy students of the Osu Library in Accra,
Ghana, West Africa.
In Ghana, everything is done by hand. That’s what the literacy
students proudly announced to me early in my internship, putting me to
shame for my culture’s dependence on machines. It was a theme that
emerged over and over in their conversational and written literacy work.
The literacy class is a group of over 30 adults ranging from 19 to 40
years of age. They have their own stories of what brought them to the
classes and they come from varied backgrounds and parts of the country
— working as seamstresses, house-help, hairdressers, construction
workers, carpenters or traders.
The drawings, paintings, photographs and the collaborative collage and
installation were inspired by words and images from the students’
creative writing and other written class work. What impressed me was the
patience and dignity the students brought to the most labourious, repetitive
daily tasks, and that it was with the same patience, dignity and determination
that they pressed on with their increasingly challenging assignments.
We had a conversation about the importance of practicing literacy skills
everyday to build and maintain them, and they seized on the metaphor of
literacy as a tool, like a hammer or a broom, and that one becomes skilled
at it by using it. It also came out that each of them has a story to tell
that is like a rope coiled up inside of them, and the reason for my ceaseless
questions was that the questions were like the knots on the rope that
I was using to pull their stories out.
A lot of the metaphors we use in speech to describe conceptual work are
drawn from the language of manual labour: tying ideas together like the
tying of cloth; doing some digging refers to reflection and research;
sifting to describe the sorting of facts and ideas; weaving a tale is
like one weaving cloth or braiding hair, and a pile of papers is referred
to as a heavy load. The literacy students intimately know what tying is,
what digging and weaving are and what carrying a heavy load is. These
physical acts grant the doer a certain satisfaction. They carry with them
something positive and hopeful, because they all involve a symbolic development
from chaos to order. Everyday working people in Ghana use their hands
to order and beautify their world.
What does literacy mean to them? In one assignment they observed and
recorded the slogans on the backs of tro-tros (small buses). Among those
recorded were “Not as you think”, and “Open your eyes”.
The students have opened themselves up to a difficult process of learning
and unlearning, of finding out that things are often not as they thought,
like a historic slave castle we visited on a field trip, the correct spelling
of a word that totally changes its pronunciation, or what the map of Accra
really looks like. Literacy, for them, opens the door to a creative process
and a way of thinking. They used this new way of thinking to bring awareness
to their daily tasks, whether it was responding to the sensual beauty
of printed cloth, understanding the punchy slogans on tro-tros, analyzing
the lyrics of a favourite song, or recognizing the beauty all around them
with throw-away cameras. The theme of the exhibit is a celebration of
the hands that made all of these things, the unique individual behind
each set of hands, as well as local wisdom and tradition maintained in
an ongoing process of transformation through literacy.
Krissy Darch
"Work of Hands" is brought to the
MHCGallery by Winnipegger Kathy Knowles and the Osu Children’s Library
Fund. This is the second time the gallery has partnered with Osu. The
exhibition was brought together by Canadian Krissy Darch. Darch spent
the last eight months in Ghana as a Canadian International Development
Agency sponsored Art and Literacy Facilitator for Osu. Osu is a Winnipeg
and Ghana success story. Negative stories from Africa tend to garner nearly
all the attention the West gives to the continent. There are success stories.
We need to hear them, see them. Come and celebrate a significant one.
• into the forgotten heart
& drawin’ together for peace
Democratic Republic of Congo
This exhibit is a combination of photographs (individual photographs,
manipulated photo collages), sand paintings by Pembela and children’s
art. The DR Congo is the third largest country in Africa. It dominates
the heart of the continent. There have been up to 4,000,000 Congolese
war related deaths in the past decade — more than in any other country
in the world. This largely unknown and forgotten country is home to one
of the largest Mennonite communities in the world, about 200,000 strong.
The exhibit introduces viewers to the Congo through the Mennonite communities
in Kinshasa, the throbbing, chaotic capital of 7,000,000; Kajiji, a remote
and beautiful village near the Angolan border; and Kikwit, a city of 800,000
in Bandundu province. The photos are complimented by children’s
art from a Mennonite school in Kinshasa on the theme of peace.
Discover the true heart of the Congo. Discover resilient people, individuals
committed to peace, churches struggling to be positive forces for reconciliation
in a troubled land. Find hope in the forgotten heart.
Remember. For those in our audience inclined to pray,
please, remember the Congolese people in your prayers as the country heads
for its first potentially free and fair elections tentatively scheduled
for late April and June. The elections are a monumental undertaking in
a country with perhaps the worst transportation system in the world, little
infrastructure and no history of free elections. Yet, the vast majority
of citizens are already registered to vote — a positive and virtually
miraculous first step.
Ray Dirks
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