I never knew this before but working on a public community mural (with kids no less) can be really tricky! I’ve only ever facilitated mural-making teaching inside the classroom where you’ve got a certain degree of control over the environment, and can kind of manage the pace of the work and assist kids with thinking about composition and details.
This is a whooooollllle different ball game.
First, we are working on a fairly trafficked and often noisy street. It’s not like the constant type of background traffic type noise you find in NYC. It’s like short clips of relative quiet pierced with the REALLY LOUD BUZZ of the frequent motoconchos (motorbikes) and trucks grinding by. So loud that you really can’t hear what the person next to you is saying. On top of that, all of the kids in our class plus practically every kid that walks by wants a chance to paint, and it’s really had explaining to a 6 year old whose language you don’t speak very well that there’s “Just no more space at the moment but if you come back Saturday I promise you can have a chance then.” I am beyond thrilled that the children in the neighborhood are so excited about the project- in fact I hoped exactly that would happen, but managing so many kids painting all at the same time has it’s challenges. We don’t really have much set-up time because as soon as the children see us pull up in the car they get so excited, they immediately round up all their friends and before you know it we’re practically swarmed with kids eager to look, see, touch, grab, do, etc, etc. Getting the children involved in the set-up is something we are trying to get better at, but the seasoned teacher (me) is still learning the language, and though the laid-back musician does the best he can things easily get lost in translation, and as all teachers (and plenty of parents) know- timing is everything when organizing large groups of kids.
Did I mention that Renzo is related to almost everyone on the block in some way? Well, it’s pretty easy to recognize the guy with the funny hair, and despite the fact that we can have a mob of impatient children waiting for paint, or needing a paintbrush, or we finally have them all listening to instructions, every so often someone passes by and decides that it’s the absolute PERFECT time to catch up and have a conversation with him about his studies, the weather, the meaning of life, & what have you. I kid you not but he’s actually been handed a beer while we were teaching our class!
LOL.
So when we met up with the children yesterday evening, it was just kind of par for the course that there was a dark gray rain cloud kind of hanging over our heads the whole time. We assessed the cloud situation (being the rain experts we are now having lived in Santiago for a few months) and just said let’s go for it and hope for the best. We got lucky and the weather held out enough for us to work for a good 40 minutes or so before we had to do a mad rush to pack everything up before the rain came down.
It was pretty chaotic with about 12-14 kids working at the same time. It definitely wasn’t the way I would have preferred to structure the activity (laughing at the word structure here) but the kids who showed up had been waiting since Saturday to paint, and with the impending rain there wasn’t time to rotate small groups so we had to wing it. We focused on painting trees (matas) and flowers (flores) and a sun (sol). Despite the craziness I’m happy that the kids enjoyed themselves and love the work they did. I know this is how murals grow..in little layers and spurts.
It’s just a start, but here are some pics:
Our next session is this weekend and we are almost definitely going to have an even larger group show up. (When we were painting on Tuesday lots of new kids passed by and expressed interest so we just told them to show up on Saturday). Don’t laugh- but I have a plan to have kids sign in then give them give them a number. Numbers 1-6 will paint for the first 30 minutes, 7-13 the next half hour, and so on. The great thing is that they all live so close by that if they’re scheduled for a later painting group they can easily go home and come back when it’s their turn, and we don’t mind being there all day if need be. I have no idea if this is going to work…but it’s the only way I can think of to accommodate all the children without having total chaos. I know for sure the smaller groups will make for a more enjoyable experience for everyone.
Can’t wait to see what happens at our next class!
xo A
