"Education is much more than imparting the knowledge and skills by which narrow goals are achieved. It is also about opening the child’s eyes to the needs and rights of others". (The Dalai Lama)
While in the USA, I learnt (via CBS News) about this amazing project from an amazing guy called Ben Schumaker. A couple of weeks ago (and not for the first time) he arrived to a Nicaraguan orphanage with a huge case full of portraits — portraits of the kids, a painting for just about each and every one of them.
Schumaker calls this The Memory Project. The idea is to establish a sense of personal heritage. He started it in college and still runs it out of a bedroom at his parents’ house in Madison, Wis. So far, he’s given out more than 4,000 portraits to orphans around the world.
"They share everything, so they don’t have much they can call their very own," says Jayden Kirn, a director at the orphanage. "I think it will touch them profoundly once they get down and get a private moment to sit and look at that picture." Remember, these kids didn’t have parents snapping baby pictures. Most don’t even have a single photo, let alone a precious painting.
Of course, Schumaker doesn’t paint them all. Instead, he gets someone to take photos of the kids, then sends those photos to high school art teachers across the United States; the teachers assign the portraits to their students. This is where the idea goes from good to genius.
The American kids who paint these portraits have to spend hours staring into the faces of their orphan subjects. Schumaker says that after working on them for so long — after painting their eyes especially — there’s often a real connection. "Every day they come into the art classroom and, bam — there it is — looking right into the eyes," he says. "To be totally honest, that’s the main reason why I do this work."
Schumaker says for every portrait he gives out, there’s a student back home who is now a little more aware of our needy world. That’s why he eventually says he’d like to make his Memory Project part of every high school art class in the country. "And if it can raise the net level of compassion in the world by that much, I’ll be happy," he says.
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