Boys & Girls Club partners with Hopeful School in Tanzania
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER
With a mission to foster literacy and the concept of the global human family, children and staff members of Nantucket's Boys & Girls Club are partnering with students and staff of the Hopeful School in the small Tanzanian village of Sing-isi. The cultural exchange program, it is hoped, ultimately will fund the Hopeful after-school center's operating budget.

PHOTO BY BRENDAN LAWLOR Some students take a break from playing to pose for a photo outside the new classroom.

The program evolved from a volunteering visit to Tanzania by Caitlin O'Connor, a Wheaton College student and friend of Brendan Lawlor, who is coordinating the Boys & Girls Club arts program this year. While in Tanzania, O'Connor met Gebriel Williams, one of Hopeful's founders, and learned of his dream to start a school for his village.

What began in Williams' home as a means to teach his children English grew into a small classroom built by villagers who received financial assistance from volunteers. A larger second classroom was made possible through a Kathryn W. Davis Foundation Projects for Peace grant obtained by O'Connor and fellow Wheaton student Ashley Mott. The grant also helped to purchase school supplies and is being used to launch a fundraising program whereby art produced by Tanzanian children will be reproduced for greeting cards to be sold onin Nantucket and other cities and towns.

On Friday, Sept. 7, art by the Hopeful School's children, as well as art produced by members of the Boys & Girls Club, will be on display at the Atheneum.

Sing-isi is among several villages surrounding the developed city of Arusha. Its residents live in homes made of mud and sticks or concrete with corrugated metal roofs. The school, with a student body of about 50 children, holds a morning session for ages two to six taught in Swahili and an afternoon session for ages six to 18 taught in English.

"The idea is to prepare the students for secondary school," explained Lawlor, who spent the summer in Singisi carrying building supplies for the second classroom and teaching children about the cultural exchange project, which includes a pen pal program between the village youth and Boys & Girls Club members. "Some of the families are very poor. That's part of the reason for the school, because if the family doesn't have the money for transportation to send the children to school they don't go. This is a way for everyone in the village to go to school."

Lawlor developed a curriculum for the Hopeful School project with Boys & Girls Club program director Cory Shepherd that spans eight weeks and includes group discussions, letters, artwork and written statements. Some of the topics covered are technology and communication, imagination and creativity, environment and awareness, interpretation and visualization, hopes and dreams, unity and understanding, sharing and collaboration and growth and realization.

"I think it brought in a world view and they learned about something they knew nothing about," Shepherd said of the club members' first eight weeks of the exchange. "I think they saw [them] as potential friends but also as partners. It was amazing to me to see the kids here jump in. They were automatically interested in it and grabbed the reins when it came to writing the letters and making the artwork. We'd like to stay involved because it's so good for our members here."

In addition to the sale of the Tanzanian art and the greeting cards, Lawlor will release a CD of his recordings of the Hopeful School children's daily songs that will be sold as part of

the ongoing fundraising efforts. I