Colour our children's world

I was just commenting in the KAS wish list about some of the items including the Scrap Books. It made me consider what these books could really mean to the children.

A great friend of ours, Gay and her husband Jens spent some time in a tiny village on the South African Coast called Hamburg. Gay was there to contribute to the amazing craft sewing organisation that has been set up by the Keiskamma Foundation, to engage women who have been infected or affected by HIV AIDS.

Jens used some of his time to teach the folk in the village about farming food in an area the size of a door (permaculture I think it is called). Here in Australia this would be easy to achieve. You dig an area the size of a door and half a metre deep, and then fill it with newsprint, old magazines, leaves, manure, straw, bits of vegetables from the kitchen and other composting materials. It may take some weeks, but at the end you have a rich soil to plant in.

Jens was amazed at how difficult this was. There just wasn't any spare anything. No spare newspapers, magazines or kitchen waste. EVERYTHING was used for fuel, or to eat or for shelter.

The point is, in a world where we are just so used to the printed image, where old magazines have no value for us other than to pass the time of day in the doctor's surgery, we easily forget that imagery from all around the world is not always readily available to these folk and especially the children.

As briefly mentioned in the last ezine, there is much evidence to suggest that lack of visual stimulation among other things inhibits brain development in pre-school children. We cannot know just how much visual stimulation the children get in the urban areas. Much of what they see and witness is, by default, drab and dull.

I scoured the photographs of the little creches we delivered blankets to last year and was greatly touched to see the efforts the carers had gone to to create some colour and imagery for their little charges.

'These books are important. We believe they are so valuable we are including a full activity around them in the developing KasKids School Program. But in the meantime, ask your children or their children to cut up bright and pretty pictures of their world and make scrap books to colour our children's world.

Sandy

PS Doesn't this give another dimension to the importance of our beautiful warm hand made blankets. So much colour and texture in an otherwise dull world.