Painting a Massive Mural

The story of creating the mural is the story of the first seven months of the village. It all began when the kids arrived at Agahozo for the first time. I asked them each to draw a picture of their personal goals, feelings about the village, and ideas about Rwanda. They were a bit timid in those first weeks, not yet a cohesive group, but they found a way to state their nervous excitement in those initial drawings.

Over the next several months we sketched, brainstormed, and came up with a final design for the mural. We developed the biggest paint-by-number system in the world, and began by drawing the outline with the help of a projector at night.

Everyone participated in painting, kids and staff alike. I directed from below, mixing colors and sending paint up the scaffolding with a make-shift pulley. Spots of color started to appear, slowly at first. A blue sky, a purple tree, a pineapple, a person. I spent months covered head to toe in paint- no joke! As the mural came together, so did the village, for what had been a construction site was now feeling more and more like a home and a family.

After every painting session, the kids stood back and marveled at what they had accomplished that day. “When I come back to visit this village with my children one day,” said one kid, “I’ll show them the clouds that I painted!”

Part of the village inauguration on June 23 was held in front of the mural, the perfect backdrop to the kids’ dancing and singing. “Who helped paint this wall?” I asked the crowd gathered at the ceremony. Almost every staff and child of the village raised a hand. It is a big and beautiful expression of the hopes of the village, a testament to what a dedicated group of people, and whole lot of paint can do, and a work of art that will be admired by visitors to the village for years to come.

thoughts waiting on a crowded minibus

kigali
loud
dusty
rain clouds rolling in push me here miss buy a banana I have no hand you have two.
little kids waving hi! Muzungo! White! Black women learning to sew learning to live. Do you know your body is your own - what they are willing to sell for money for the kids glued to their backs bending over sewing machine peddling one stitch after another sweat dripping-
sweet creamy coffee sipping in a café too clean for these streets. Man on an apple computer white woman speaking too slowly. I can understand you I speak English too. White skin shining like a beacon, my white skin, a ticket to a little more room in this crowded minibus, this motorcycle zipping through crowded streets holding tight closing eyes past busy traffic because there’s nothing I can do anyway, and I DO and I CARE because I CAME but how much do my deeds and my words mean in this place with a past so ugly it seeps into every piece of present and future and finally someone else squeezes next to me in the van
maybe not so white after all.

Painting a Lifetime

I got lost in the deep shadows under the squinty eyes creased by laughter. Felt myself trace the long black braids cutting through the swirls of colorful fabric. I’m painting a lifetime, I thought, as I dipped my brush into black ink and moved towards the page.

For me, being an artist is about the space between myself and my subject, in this case fifty-two year old “Maman” Annette*, as we sit across the table from each other, staring, for two hours. As I spread a thin coat of ink across the page to form the smooth skin around her neck, she peers down to see her portrait. Sometimes she smiles, sometimes she breaks into a huge grin and laughs out load, shaking her head. Sometimes her eyes flutter closed, tired perhaps from a late night of caring for the sixteen young orphan teenagers who make up her “new” family. Especially tired because she has been sitting besides the bed of one who is sick. Sometimes she stares off into the distance.

Occasionally we speak. In bits of English, French, and Kinyarwanda, she shows me pictures of her family. She makes a telephone call to her daughter, Nelly*, only a year younger than me, to tell her she is having her portrait drawn. There is one photograph, an old black-and-white one with the year 1978 written on the back, that she cradles tenderly. I learn that it is a picture of her and her older sister who is holding a little baby. She points to the baby and in a mixture of languages tells me it is her son. She writes on a paper four other names. My children. Then she proceeds to tell me where they are. Nelly is in Kigali, going to Kenya soon to study management. The others are dead. The sister, also dead. genocide. I point upwards. Yes, she nods, they are there.

She looks at the finished painting afterward and nods, a smile spreading wide.

Together, we have created more than a picture of a face. In ink and color and line and shape, a reflection of a lifetime.

for LP