Working at the PTO

The artsco booth at the PTO picnic was face-painting, tie-dye and hair braiding. While I didn't do braiding, as I'm really not very good at it, i was doing face-painting, helping the kids out with tie-dye as well as supervising for the entire 3 hours. The tie-dye was really fun, we had looked up some designs beforehand and it was really cool how most of the shirts turned out. Costumers would buy a white t-shirt, we would then help them tie it up into a cool design with ruber bands and let them color it. All of our costumers seemed really pleased with the outcome! Face-painting was much more stressful, as it takes pretty long to give a child a full face make over, turning them into a tiger, a pirate or a butterfly, and the lines were always really long. However, it was also really fun, especially since all of the kids were happy with their new selves and happy despite how long it sometimes took! We made about 12,000 shillings from this event, which we will use for our service projects, buying paints and supplies so it was very successful.

Mural Painting in Kibera

We had quite a good turnout for the trip to Kibera and i think it all worked out really well. The design for the mural was based on the idea of good/bad aspirations, so we had people who were drunks, addicts, criminals, etc. in black and white with red Xs over their eyes and people who were doctors, athletes and students in colour and happy. It was really really fun and it was nice to see the reactions of the SODAS foundations members, as it really seemed like we were helping them and giving them exactly what they wanted. They helped us translate slogans about drugs/alcohol and sexual health into kiswahili and so overall the mural just looked really good. We're planning on going back to paint the inside walls Wednesday as well collaborate with them even more in the future!


On our second trip to Kibera to paint murals we designed a four panel mural which would show the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly as we thought it was a nice symbol for the youth that would be trying to recover from drug/alcohol dependency in the SODAS program. It was really fun to see how well the members responded to the message and they also liked how we were able to make their dreary white/gray walls beautiful and welcoming to the community. Art is meant to bring a message of unity and to teach through symbolizing so i think we really managed to accomplish this in our mural painting!