KIBOKO PROJECTS
Press Release: February 7, 2006
Contact: Jill Raufman or Mark Scheflen
           kibokoprojects@msn.com

Kiboko Projects and Eleanor Roosevelt High School will begin the New York portion of the Youth Project: Kenya/USA in February 2006.  This program, in its second year, is a cultural exchange through storytelling, using creative media, between secondary school students in Kenya and the US .

Kiboko Projects has been sponsoring cultural exchange arts and education programs for youth and adults in the US , Africa , and Russia since 1999, using storytelling between individuals as the first step toward understanding between groups. Our mission is to enable a dialogue between people from different areas of the world so they can share their personal stories with each other using a wide range of creative media. The stories are then channeled into a focus on social issues important in the advancement of global tolerance.  Kiboko Projects designs and implements workshops, exhibitions, and cultural exchange programs for youth and adults nationally and internationally.  Participants have included such groups as students, people with HIV, grandmothers raising grandchildren, artists, and others.  The workshops provide participants professional expertise and access to state of the art technology and creative media, including maskmaking, video, and creative writing.

The mission of Eleanor Roosevelt High School is to create an academically challenging high school that will provide all students with a rich and comprehensive liberal arts education, an education that will enable them to make decisions in the world, to initiate and negotiate change, and to be life-long learners. Through the cooperative efforts of our staff, parents, students and members of the community, it is our goal to provide a stimulating educational environment with enough support from the academic community to provide students with the tools necessary to manage their lives with courage and purpose; to have a range of options for the future; to have the confidence to be creative and self-sufficient while being able to work collaboratively and maintaining an appreciation of the world. Our mission is to teach students to think and communicate with depth, clarity, and expression and to provide students with the joy of discovery.

In order to fully realize our goals, we must be able to infuse the arts into our daily curriculum so that major subject classes incorporate the use of art history, architecture, drama, film, dance and music. Our arts teachers are integral members of our teaching staff, meeting with grade teams so that the arts can be used to support and enhance learning.

In September 2005, 25 students attending Okok Secondary School , Kisumu , Kenya created a collection of masks, books, and videos about their culture, their community, and current issues facing them as youth in Africa that is being presented to students at

Eleanor Roosevelt HS, affording them the unique opportunity of an unfiltered look into the lives of students living in a rural area of Western Kenya .  In February 2006, the NY students will begin viewing the Kenyan work, and then responding to it with their own masks, books, and videos about their own culture, community, and issues facing them as youth in NYC, and, during this process, will learn about these creative media.

Okok Secondary School is in a rural area outside Kisumu that has a high percentage of poverty and has been deeply affected by the AIDS pandemic.  The lives of students there are very different from those of the students in an urban NYC school, and the exchange will be a valuable learning experience for all of the students. Some of the topics that Kenyan students covered in their books and videos include polygamous households, traditional healers, child labor, and a portrait of their daily routines with such chores as fetching water from the river.  They are eager to receive corresponding materials from the Eleanor Roosevelt students, and to learn about life in the US . 

As a result of this project, the students will not only gain such skills as photography, videography, maskmaking, but will then use them in such a way as to celebrate their cultural heritage and communicate it to youth in another country.  They will be working hands-on with these media, and interacting with professional artists and teachers in those fields.  In addition, youth in the US will be exposed to and learn to understand and appreciate the arts and social issues from another culture.  For some of the participants, this will be the first such exposure.

The works of both schools will be exhibited in June at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery gallery.  Future plans include an actual student exchange between the two schools, and expansion of the project to more schools, both in the US and other countries.