See more photos from The Memory Project along with Ugandan orphans’ drawings on our School News Blog at www.journal-news.com/go/hamiltonschoolnews
ROSS TWP. — In her premiere broadcast as the anchor of CBS News in September, 2006, Katie Couric ran a report from Nicaragua about the Memory Project.
Based in Wisconsin, the Memory Project pairs up American high school art classes with orphanages in Third World countries. The high school receives photos of children in the orphanages and then paints or draws a portrait from it. Then the art work is shipped back to the child in the orphanage.
When Ross High School art teacher Patricia O’Brien saw the report, she jumped on it as something that would be of great interest to her students.
“Ross has such little diversity,” she said. “We have very little contact with other segments of our own society, that I thought this would be a good way to humanize them on a peer-to-peer basis.”
The Memory Project portraits go to O’Brien’s first semester advanced drawing class, and last week, they received photographs of their Ugandan models posing with their portraits, along with some drawings the Ugandan students made depicting their lives, some showing the violence they have witnessed and some showing scenes from hunting or from village life.
“The portraits were delivered to them at school, classroom by classroom,” wrote Memory Project director Ben Schumaker in an e-mail. “No doubt it was one of the most exciting days of the year. The adults described it as a festival. By the end of the delivery the entire school yard was crowded with kids running around to show the portraits to their friends – an explosion of colorful images.”
In previous years, Ross students have created portraits of students in Burma and El Salvador.
O’Brien said that she has geography teachers at Ross come to the art class to talk about life in the those countries and what kind of future the children there can expect.
“It was kind of intimidating,” said senior Allison McGinnis, who worked on the Burma project last year. “I was afraid of drawing a picture for someone who would be keeping it forever.”
But if the idea behind the project is to create some empathy for people of the world who have less wealth and privilege, mission accomplished.
“I knew they had hard lives,” McGinnis said, “but I didn’t know it was that bad.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
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