Education

AFSC Uses Art To Connect Bay Area Students With Displaced Children in Colombia

Young Afro-Colombians displaced by the country's civil war.

Traditional Colombian music, dance and food accompanied a recent teachers' workshop at Berkeley's La Peña Cultural Center hosted by the American Friends Service Committee. The event launched the organization's "Kids to Kids" program, which offers a curriculum and class project designed to link 8th- to 10th-grade students in the United States with Colombian children displaced by the country's decades-long civil war.

"Colombia ranks second in the world in numbers of displaced citizens, and fighting often forces entire communities to move three or four times to escape violence," explained Carlos Mejia, director of AFSC's Emergency and Material Assistance Program. "More than a 'campaign,' this is a silent effort to help children rebuild their lives in conflict."

As part of the Kids to Kids project, Bay Area students will collect supplies for art kits that will be sent to Colombia. Kits include spiral notebooks, colored pencils, scissors, construction paper, drawing pads and tape. Students are also asked to include a personal note or photograph. Relief workers will use the kits to help children work through the trauma of displacement through artwork. AFSC expects to distribute over 35,000 kits.

With the classroom project just under way, AFSC has sent kits to schools in San Francisco and Marin and to after-school programs in the Mission District. Five Colombians have signed up to be resource people for the classrooms, in additon to ASFC staff members who have traveled in the region.

Kids to Kids is part of a larger AFSC campaign started in 2000 that seeks to reduce the tensions of the current civil war in Colombia while raising money for food and medicine for the more than two million displaced people of that country. AFSC has already raised over $10,000 for this campaign.

The campaign is connected with three different types of affected communities: internally displaced people in Buenaventura, Northern Cauca, and Mocoa, Putumayo; communities along the rivers of southwest Colombia and in Northern Cauca who are peacefully resisting displacement; and asylum seekers living in parts of Panama and Ecuador.

Those who wish to be involved with the Kids to Kids program are encouraged to collect donated art supplies, make kits, host a classroom speaker about the situation in Colombia, or simply spread the word.

A non-sectarian Quaker organization that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947, AFSC has been working in Latin America for more than 60 years. The art project runs through June 15.

For more information or to obtain educational packets, contact Paula Stinson at pstinson@afsc.org or (415) 565-0201 x14.