Walking Into the Light

So entering the second week in Godawari. Getting used to working with the girls now, even if the ones that I worked with last week were the Mosaic Girls, ie the girls who are employed to make mosaics, not the Project Girls, who are the newer girls that I am supposed to be working with. Anyway we had fun and they worked very hard, producing some lovely things. I am now working with the Project Girls, I am trying to introduce them to the difference between 2d and 3d. Also to the idea of creating shapes in a more abstract way, rather than always copying things. Some of them have responded really well to this. Attention spans are short and we will have to work on developing things. This seems normal for girls of their age though. We keep trying to take them to the Museum in Patan to do some drawing, but as there is a severe fuel crisis here at the moment it has not been possible. The other challenge is to teach with a minute amount of Nepali, and a tiny bit of Hindi, a lot of sign language. However teaching by example seems the best policy anyway. I have some company, or I should say some one to speak English to, not just bad Hindi/Nepali. Lexa, another volunteer from the UK has joined me. She will be teaching ceramics. It does mean, that with a trip to Kathmandu at the weekend, I have not been thinking a great deal about any of my own work. However, today, I have started to teach the girls to make sculptures starting with a proper armature. As some of them had made figures and wanted to put some mosaic on them I decided to show them some photos from the Nec Chand Rock Garden in Chandigarh. As I had hoped they were very exited by the idea of making sculptures with broken bangles on them. As I have been thinking about the Bangle sculpture I would like to make I think that we may collaborate to make a large sculpture in the garden here.