Workshop: a full circle made in junk

I am sharing with you (in good faith), images of a workshop I have done with school children a couple of years ago, in a neighbouring village to the capital city of my country, INDIA (New Delhi, being the capital).

I formulated a workshop where, I went to the village with my own share of junk material (that I’d collected from my neighbourhood shops, just by asking them, what they would like to give me for free that they have no use for, and that, something that is taking a lot of needed space in their shops).

A very nice lady has a beautiful farm, on the side of which, there is a small school.…

I went down to the village for the weekend, and on the first day of the workshop, the children were excited about all the things I’d brought with me. I took a walk with them, through some fields and tree trails. The fields and tree trails helped us to find funny looking leaves and sticks and dead butterflies and other things. But the real challenge of that day for me was to explain to them why I’d brought in so much junk. To play with, didn’t really sound like a good enough explanation with this audience. Some of the kids were confused, for rag picking and playing with junk is considered wrong for them, morally, as they themselves were skipping that by coming to school instead. Some of them found it a relief to finally have some play time with seemingly non-valuable, unnecessary junk. Bottles, boxes and other wasted things. I promised them a surprise by the end of it all.

So, we came back from our walks, feeling weirdly like winners, because we had such a big amount of dried old compost worthy material with us. The kids were confused. I knew that if I didn’t break this feeling, they would not be freely talking to me for the next few days. So I told them about me. Where I’m from, what my school was like, and what were the things I loved about school, and also all that I hated about growing up.

With this session, I also started a story telling trail for them. Where each of them would say a line and engage in a story made by all of us together. And while they were doing that, I was telling them to stick all the sticks and leaves and flowers and hay and dirt and stones that they had collected from the fields. And surely enough, some beautiful stories were stuck on paper. (by the way, the glue and paper, was sourced from a photocopier who had a lot of one sided waste paper and an insane amount of glue that he wanted to get rid off).

The day was done, and everyone got on to the tractor to go home. The caretaker made food for me, and I went ahead to sleep that beautiful evening, thinking about all the things that happened that day.

The next day, was a whole new day. The caretaker of the school and I applied a cow dung lep (layer) on one of the walls of the school. Then we got all the treasure out, and created the masterpiece, the photos of which I’ve attached with this email for your perusal.

It’s a story about a snake who travels a great distance (from the hilly villages to the other side of the giant tree to eat a glowing fish in a pond.

By the evening, they had not taken over just the wall, but a lot of other places around the school (painting with brushes and paints I had brought from my own house). They made trains made with shoe boxes, and bottle caps; they made straw pipe aeroplanes, they made a lot of unexplainable toys, and they no longer saw it just as junk.

The kids understood the meaning of this workshop, and have since then taken the challenge to create/ recreate/ and use everything they can in the process of making something fun and useful.