“Watch out for fire ants,” said artist and teacher Debi Carson last Thursday,handing paint rollers to three girls who used to be her art students in East End.
“Some of us have been getting bites.”
But the girls were undaunted by the prospect of being bitten.
Dipping in their rollers, they began adding geometric shapes all over the walls of the Benjamin Romney Recreational Park and Basketball Court in West End.
It was all part of a partnership between Ms. Carson’s organisation, Art Without Limitations, and two others: GoBeyond, an international youth service organisation with a branch in Sopers Hole, and Blue Ocean Caribbean Enterprises, a project launched by Curt and Nancy Richardson, owners of Little Thatch Island.
Ms.Carson, a painter and interior architect,founded AWOL
before the September hurricanes as an outlet for VI residents to help their community by expressing their artistic sides.
However,she said,“Knowing the amount of devastation in the community, I knew it would be needed more than ever.”
On her iPad, she demonstrated the look of the finished design for the walls of the park— a riot of geometric shapes in pink, yellows and greens.
“We chose this because it looks cool, but also because it’s
easier to cover up mistakes,” she said with a laugh, adding,
“My goal, especially after the storm, is targeting teens, preteens, kids. Obviously, they’re the ones who can’t always express what they’ve gone through, but this gives us the opportunity to come together
and let them express frustrations. Art can help heal
them.”
Projects at hand
Her first large project in the territory was a wall mural at Bregado Flax Educational Centre, which was completed with the
help of students and other volunteers. “At first it was the older kids, but then when they saw us painting, all the little
kids were like, ‘Can we paint, too?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, no.’
They got paint all over their uniforms, but of course they
loved it. They had a blast.”
Now, children, including those recruited from the Youth
Empowerment Project in East End, were trickling into the West End park to help. But painting was just one aspect of
what was going on.
GoBeyond project manager Elliot Evins took a break from power-washing the basketball court to explain what his teen volunteers had accomplished over six days.
“The joke is that we hate trees,” he said.
They’ve been ripping up tamarind trees from the court, as well as digging up old light poles and repurposing them into
benches.
“We’ve completely revitalised the structure of the bleachers,” he added, and pointed out where they’d painted the walls and fixed the top of the gazebo.
They had hoped to accomplish even more.
“The basketball poles got
held up in the port,” he explained.“There’s
so much to do; we could spend a couple months here just doing it every day.
We’ve been doing really long days, but it’s been worth it.”
Since 2003, he added, his organisation
has been bringing young people from all over the world to the VI, where they engage in sailing and diving programmes combined with environmental and humanitarian work.
Helping rebuild “This is exclusively aimed at
the storm and rebuilding,” he said of this year’s projects.
“Last September,we weren’t sure there
were going to be boats available, so we set up this programme: something that we knew we would able to do. It’s a fun way to give back to the community that we operate in every year.”
Last Thursday was the last day of a 21-day trip his young
volunteers had taken, and it was focused on letting the teens from abroad interact with community members to complete their project.
Meanwhile, Christine Nissen, manager at Blue Ocean Caribbean Enterprises,was busy helping children mix paints.
Although Blue Ocean has led other community projects, including the annual school supply drive in West End,she credited GoBeyond with being the impetus behind this one.
“They’ve been diving headfirst into this basketball
court,” she said. “It’s their initiative to do whatever they can to help the community. We’re jumping onboard.”
Blue Ocean is helping out with equipment rentals for
the project, donating all the paint and supplies for the
painting day and “just tacking onto what GoBeyond is already
accomplishing,” Ms. Nissen explained.
“There’s nothing like getting together and helping your
community grow,” she added.