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 September 2006, the NY students began 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.
Okok Secondary School is in a rural area near 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.
As a result of this project, the students not only gain such skills as photography and creative writing, video, maskmaking, but then use them in such a way as to celebrate their cultural heritage and communicate it to youth in another country.
In addition, youth in the US are exposed to and learn to understand and appreciate the arts and social issues of another culture. For some of the participants, this is the first such exposure. Future plans include video conferencing between the youth, an actual student exchange between the two schools, and expansion of the project to more schools, both in the US and other countries.