Krisimisi Ya Bwino (Merry Christmas) at ABCCA

Thursday night the Academy put on a Christmas program. It was complete with arrhythmic elementary music and singing, as well as lots of other enjoyable skits and songs from our lovely student body. Of course, sometimes you are laughing at the kids, and not so much laughing with them, but most of the time it was a lot of fun to see them do their thing.

The main art teacher for the school, one of my best friends in Malawi, Bech Evans came to me last week with the idea of making prints for every family for the Christmas program. Last year they gave out cookies at the end of the program, but this year they weren't going to. So they wanted to give a gift to each family, and hand printed cards turned out to be the perfect thing. So I set out and made three different blocks from cardboard I have hoarded for a linocut style print (relief printmaking). After piles of just plain cheezy Christmas themed designs, I finally blazed a new path and made a couple designs centered on the gift of food, specifically a stove. This year ABCCA collected money to give a new stove and oven to a local orphanage that the students have been involved in. So I thought it would be awesome to commemorate our gift to them as the heart of our Christmas program.

On Tuesday, after a long day of school, Bech and I met up in my classroom, and started printing at 4pm and ended at 10pm. Only finishing half of the 250 required of us, we continued the next day for about 6 hours. We finished with about 270 overall. We made extra in case of poor prints (which there were some), and so we could glean some.

A lot of people didn't get what this was; a bowl of hot food being handed to empty hands.

We had to keep adding more and more strings to my classroom to hang our prints to dry. It ended up looking pretty cool, even though it became sort of a hovel.



This was my favorite print by far. We ended up having half a block fall apart, so we salvaged this half and used it for the last 50 prints or so. This burnt Orange really turned out great. We just used normal oil house paint, and mixed it ourselves. It was a lot of fun, though it was extremely tiring. (Neither of us had printed that quantity before.)

In the pictures below, you can also see the recycled robots we made for International Day. The administration was selling the kids artwork to the parents for a fundraiser. So I had our whole class produce something, instead of individual works and put a higher price tag on it. None of the parents of the upper school kids wanted to pay money to have a 'hunk of junk' in their house; I didn't think they'd get it. Oh well. The kids got really excited about using things that others throw away for the parts of a robot. They turned out really great. I was really proud of my kids.


Here is a picture of the print I made for Beth and my third anniversary. I have really been enjoying printmaking lately. (And no, the two little birds doesn't mean we are having more kids right now, Eli is more than enough.)