Can you help?

• By donating any new or second-hand writing and / or art materials.
• By offering to help occasionally with packaging.
• By giving a substantial discount on a service e.g. transport.
• By acting as a collection point for your area and/or art society. We can then arrange to collect directly from you.
• By organising a venue and group of 50 to 100 plus for a talk presented by Ronald Swanwick on his travels around the world as an artist. Ronald will give his time free, so, with tickets sold at £5, each event should net between £250 and £500.
• By helping to advertise and promote what we are doing.

• Tanzaniza Report 2007
  
  On the 13th of January I flew to Tanzania for my annual month long adventure with my good friend and travelling companion Michael Cotton. We chose Tanzania this year as we had both had a long held ambition to climb Mt Kilimanjaro (which we managed) and it fitted well with my interest in Art Aid. It so happens that Art Aid had given seven suitcases to an organisation called ‘Tanga in Touch’ which is a link organisation between, Tanga, a large industrial conurbation in the north-west corner of Tanzania and Bromyard, a small market town in Herefordshire.
  
  

  I had arranged before we set off to be in Tanga for the second week of our trip to run a course for the teachers to help them to teach the children to draw. It turned out to be an eye opening experience in many ways.

  
  

  The school chosen as the venue for the course was the best in the group as far as the quality of the buildings is concerned but this is still extremely basic relative to a UK school. The classrooms are bare but for some very poor desks and a blackboard. This school had a computer room, with very old computers, but this we discovered is an exception. All the other schools we visited had no computers, the staff room had just a few tables for the teachers to work at and there were only three cupboards in

  the whole school but in one way this is not surprising as the biggest difficulty for all the schools was a lack of materials. Even the basics of pencils and paper where in short supply. I went out and bought a flip chart a ream of paper and some pencils to use for the course.

  
  Swahili is the national language but there are also over fifty tribal languages. English is taught as a second language but the books they are working with are very poor. Therefore I would like us to start collecting children’s story books for all ages so that we can start building a library in each of the schools.
  
  

  We visited three of the five schools in the group. Each had about ten classes and each class had a minimum of forty children with one or two as high as eighty in a class. So I recon there is between two and half and three thousand children between the ages of six and seventeen in the schools.

  
  

  It’s interesting that we all like to see photographs to illustrate things but in this instance the photos come no where near giving the correct impression. The children are all smiling because they are basically happy. They do not know anything different so they have very little expectation.

  
  

  Pictures of the buildings do not show just how basic they are. They often smell musty because the climate is very humid and so the walls are in desperate need of a coat of paint and the floors need a covering or redoing because the concrete is breaking up. So having said that I did of course take some photos (as shown through the report).

  
  I am happy to report we have sent the first lot of money to the Jagorani Chakra Foundation for the desks. As soon as they have got the first few installed they have promised to send some photos to us.
  
  

  An interesting addition to the teachers in this group was Michael, who is a plumber working in and around Tanga but he is also an enthusiastic artist. He heard about what we were doing and approached me to ask if he could join in, I asked the organisers and he was welcomed into the class. The main reason being was that he, for no reward, gave informal classes to quite a few children in the area where he lived. I think this is a perfect example of the fact that people in any culture love to draw and paint.

• Following last years successful attendance at the 'Art Materials Live' show at the NEC, Birmingham we have been fortunate to be invited back to a free stand donated by the organisers ICHF.
  
  Please bring along any materials you wish to donate, and don't forget to ask at your clubs or societies.
  
  We will also be asking for donations to the 500 desk fund at the show as last year proved to be a very good launch of the fund with a fantastic 50 desks donated.

  
  

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• Art Aid was on stand AM78 at 'Art Materials Live' show at the NEC, Birmingham in November 2006 (This stand was kindly donated by the ICHF).
  
  

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• Art Aid has identified a project, which we have called the '500 Desks Fund' in Bangladesh where a group of 24 schools who are supported by an NGO called 'Jagorani Chakra Foundation'. These schools are for children of very poor families who cannot afford to pay for them to attend main stream schooling. The buildings and facilities are very basic and the children have to sit on the floor to take their lessons and so the project is to provide 500 desks. The most economic and environmentaly sound way to do this is to have the desks made in Bangladesh by local crafts men. Each desk will cost 550 Takka (£5) and we are looking for 500 contributors at £5 each to buy a disk for the children in Bangladesh

Our first contributor to the '500 Desks Fund' at the 'Art Materials Live' show at the NEC 2006

• Project in Tanzania - Art Aid has made a connection with a group of schools with 2000 children of all ages in western Tanzania. We have supplied 7 suitcases full of materials, brushes, watercolours, pastels, pencils, assorted pens, paper and acrylic paints. The materials were delivered to a depot in Herefordshire to be loaded onto a container containing many other items needed in the area such as medical supplies and computers. This is all organised by a church group in Leominster and along side collecting donated materials volunteers regularly visit Tanzania to run teaching workshops, as part of this effort Ronald Swanwick has volunteered to go and run a workshop in January 2007 to teach the teachers how to help the children with their drawing and painting skills.

• Some of the photographs on this website show some UK guides who went to Brazil and whilst there ran art workshops for over 100 children from the slums of the Capital (Brasilia). Art Aid provided paper and an assortment of pencils for each child which the Guides packed into their luggage for the trip.

• Other photographs show classroom activities in 1 of 20 schools in and around the city of Jessore in Bangladesh. Ronald spent 10 days working in one of the schools training one of the teachers in order that he could pass on the skills to other teachers in the group. Arrangements are being put in place to supply art and writing materials to all of the schools in this group. We have found a very good NGO to work with in Jessore the main problem has been how to transport the materials out there.