YOUTH EMPOWERMENT FOR LIFE
DEVELOPMENT THROUGH ART The artist, Phuc van Dang, joined the Youth Committee of GV and is now teaching children and young people in Ghana how to visualize their everyday life and thereby contribute to their own development. I came to Denmark with my family, back when I was 10 years old. We were refugees who had fled by boat from Vietnam. As a child, my mother always told me to pass on my knowledge and skills to others – and I had drawing skills. I joined the Youth Committee of GV, and the first meeting was very inspiring to me. Members of the committee were very different, but we had a common focus – to be part of a project in Northern Ghana. I thought it was something, I would like to be part of. I am a visual person and asked myself how I could give stories a visual life. I wanted to think ‘out of the box’ and see what such a process might lead to. It was important for me to start with a narrative or a story and give it a visual expression. When I first came to Ghana, I realized that drawing was not at all prioritised in the schools. The teachers were exclusively focused on teaching the children to read and do math, but not at all on drawing. I thought it was a pity that children were not shown other ways to learn. When you visualize your daily life, you develop – and that became my entry to Ghana. I was asked to join the new project; ‘Fighting Child Hunger’, and it was very educative and exciting, also for me. In Denmark, we work with the food pyramid. But can we go to Ghana and use this pyramid? I don’t think so. I therefore created some picture cards before going: Bananas, oranges – very beautiful cards. But the children did not understand my cards – so
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together with a Ghanaian teacher, we had to start all over, and I was really learning something myself. You cannot assume that things you know from Denmark work somewhere else, like ‘this is how a banana looks like’. You need to ask in the context, what is the local fruit and how is it used. Banana is mostly grown in southern Ghana and they do not look at all like the ones we buy in Denmark. It was my mistake that I thought I knew a lot. I then used two days to change the picture cards – to visualize the fruits and vegetables that children in Northern Ghana recognize. And then I thought, we should start over. The GV programme had selected some children that I could work with. They were given permission to paint the whole school. Firstly, we talked about what they eat at home and we painted those fruits. I like to connect things so that art becomes publicly accessible – it could have been street art, but this became wall-art. Everybody can see what it is.
Active and proud children
We took our point of departure in nutrition, and before starting to draw, we talked about vitamins, proteins etc. The children also tried to model the vegetables – in this process, we also used what was available around us. We made play dough out of flour, water and fruit colour. The children told me afterwards, that they had experienced that learning could be fun. It was different from just writing what the teacher shows you. In this process, they were active and at the same time proud of what they did. An art-process like this is for everybody – children and adults, but I like to work with children and young people. I hope that Ghana will include art even though it is a poor country. Using an art process, you may also include pupils with a different learning style and not only those that are good at booklearning. Life is bigger than tests and test results.