Healthcare in Sudan

OMB continues its focus on Sudan in the post-referendum vote days in an effort to help keep pressure on the US government and the international community to PAY ATTENTION to the on-going process in the country(s).

With violence in South Sudan, Darfur and Abeyi continuing, we began to think about how people hurt in the fighting were to be taken care of.  That led to other questions of healthcare — pregnant women, children, and the elderly.  How do vulnerable people in these areas, anyone in these areas for that matter, get the healthcare they need? The fact is that many of them don’t.  Healthcare statistics for South Sudan are appalling, and very, very sad.

These two links offer a picture of the challenge South Sudan has before it in terms of creating a healthcare system.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june11/sudan_01-03.html

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/africa/110209/south-sudan-health-care

Independence offers many opportunities, among them building a healthcare system that meets the needs of people who have been long neglected.  But to be in a position to do that, the international community must support the transitional period during which South Sudan is planning for its emergence as a new nation. Call your representatives and remind them that Sudan is still in need of our vigilance and our support. 

Thoughts on Making Bones from a Non-Visual Artist

Guest Post by Susan McAllister, Project Manager of One Million Bones

Last week, I participated in OMB’s Fourth Sunday Bone Making event with Richard Garriott-Stejskal.  Now, as Project Manager, I’ve attended all of the events since the beginning, but mostly I’ve found myself introducing artists, thanking volunteers, passing around sign-in sheets, lending a hand where it’s necessary, those kinds of tasks.  Last week though, I put that all aside, and hesitantly, I made bones. 

You have to understand, I’m not a visual artist.  I don’t draw, paint, or collage, and I certainly don’t work in clay.  But we’ve set a goal of 206 bones (the number in a human body) per workshop and I decided I wanted to help reach the goal.  Usually my inner critic voice stops me before I get started.  I expect some of you know that feeling.  But this was different.  Really.  As soon as I let myself stop thinking about what my bones looked like, if they were realistic, if they looked as good as other people’s, and started thinking about why I was making them, I had a complete epiphany.  And here it is: This is about being part of something larger than myself, making a short term impact with my donation and a long term impact by making bones for the installation in 2013.  This understanding made my 16 bones beautiful, even to my eye. 

Furthermore, our workshop centered on a discussion on the situation in Sudan and the conversation that took place while we were all working allowed me to really pour my heart into making the bones.  Thinking about the struggles that the Sudanese and Darfuri people deal with every day, the uncertainty of just about every aspect of their lives, I realized that there was no place I’d rather be and nothing I’d rather be doing than offering my support to the collective process that is One Million Bones.  2013 seems a long way off, but when the bones I made are placed on the National Mall, I will know that the time I spent making them let me be part of making a difference in the world.  I hope you’ll try it whether you think of yourself as an artist or not.



Making the Impossible Possible

Laying Down the Bones Chicago: January 2011                                                                             Guest Post by Ames Hawkins:  Associate Professor of English, Columbia College Chicago

In order to reach its goal, One Million Bones needs to collect an average of one thousand bones a day for the next three years.  When stated so simply, the goal may seem impossible. How can we possibly accomplish this goal?  How can we make it happen?  I don’t know the specific answer to these questions, but I do know that teaching a college course on art activism is what has convinced me that the impossible can be possible when we work together, when we collaborate.

My relationship with art activism began in 2007, when I learned about the art activism project, The Cradle Project.  At that time, my friend and colleague Joan Giroux (Department of Art and Design) and I collaborated on the creation of a course titled Art Activism Studio Project.  The goal of the course was to provide students with a specific opportunity to engage with the theory and practice of art activism, to experience for themselves the intersection between political consciousness and artistic process. 

Last year and this year—and next year as well!!—Joan and I have made One Million Bones our focus for this course.  This year the course accepted the invitation by One Million Bones to focus on creating our own “Laying Down the Bones” performance. On January 14, 2011, about fifty people attended our rendition of “Laying Down the Bones,” one that was choreographed, produced and executed by a class of fourteen students from Columbia College Chicago. 

A primary focus of this course—a tenant of art activism in general—is the importance of collaboration.  Students were asked to collaborate with each other; they were invited to understand that they were and are collaborating with all the other poets, performers and artists involved in past and future “Laying Down the Bones” performances, in One Million Bones overall.   

Students in the class were organized into three working groups: PR, Event/Documentation and Performance.  The PR group was responsible for PR and created and distributed a poster, created a Facebook event and submitted press releases.  The Event/Documentation group set a schedule, organized the purchase of food, set up the bone-making station and communicated with the videographer.  The Performance group created a vision for the performance and ran rehearsals for the entire class.   

The Performance Group Report describes some of the essential elements of the staging that focused on choreographed movement and the holding of ceramic bones as students read aloud creative prose that was inspired by survivor stories, genocide research and art activism theory:

      When our audience entered, they took a bone. Passing out a bone to each audience member was our way of putting the issue of genocide in his or her lap. Holding onto a physical object while being moved by the creative pieces was an effective means to communicate the severity of the issue. The sense of holding on to something physical and then adding it to the pile on stage, gave a connection between the bone and the person. After the heavier pieces of creative nonfiction were performed which emphasized mourning, the audience was invited to participate in a ceremony to place their bones upon the monument, to let go of them. After discussing hope, the future and a proposal for action, audience members were finally invited to make a bone, and to give it to a cause larger than them.

         Row by row, the procession of the bones was initially for the audience members to get a tangible feel of moving forward, and of honoring the past, saying goodbye. After the procession of laying the bones to rest, we picked back up with creative works about hope and how to move forward after devastation. We didn’t want to skip over the memorial aspect of genocide even though the One Million Bones project is hoping to focus largely on an idea of hope and moving forward. We wanted to touch hearts, and provide a window into a world that is very far away from people, but propose that the view of that window can change, and that you, the audience member, has the power to help change it.

Producing “Laying Down the Bones: Chicago” was an amazing feat given that in addition to executing the event itself, students read over three hundred pages of academic and lyrical prose on the larger subjects of art activism and genocide, collectively wrote nearly two hundred pages of synthesis and reflection, created over 550 bones, and raised hundreds of dollars.  The class itself was only nine days long.

Over the next few months, this blog will feature the words of these students, the creative pieces each of them read as emotional and political offerings to the larger cause to end genocide. 

As soon as one is ready, we will post a brief video that documents our particular version of “Laying Down the Bones.”  In 2012, Joan and I will repeat this course for the third time and connect it to a larger campus-wide bone-making drive at Columbia College Chicago in the Spring of 2012.     

If you have any questions about how to get your classes/campus involved with One Million Bones, if you want to be a part of making the impossible possible, please do not hesitate to contact me: ahawkins@colum.edu.   

Special thanks to The Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media for enabling Naomi Natale to be in attendance at our event, and Critical Encounters: Image and Imagination Mini-Grant Funding which allowed us to purchase clay and food for our event: (http://www.colum.edu/Academics/Institute_for_the_Study_of_Women_and_Gender_in_the_Arts_and_Media)

http://www.colum.edu/criticalencounters/

Laying Down the Bones

Recently a handful of poets came together in Albuquerque to record themselves reciting poems they wrote that were inspired by the stories of Sudanese refugees living in Chad. The works were also in response to bones they created for the project which connected them to these stories.

This is a new initiative we are launching called Laying Down the Bones that we hope will catch on with poets and performers all around the world as a way to tell refugee stories and connect activists with survivors and other activists.  Our goal is to collect these video testimonies from people all over and post them on-line to share with everyone in our community.

Through this initiative we are committed to laying down the bones, the stories, and the substance of what makes us human and what connects us as individuals to a larger global community.  Like this project, this initiative strives to be a reminder that we belong to each other; the bones and the stories serving as a testament to our common humanity.   We call on you to be a part of this initiative and to share with us your activism and your inspiration, and to highlight a survivor story that needs to be heard.

The poets were connected to these refugees through I-ACT which is a program of Stop Genocide Now and whom we have partnered with to bring survivor stories to bone-making advocates on our website. Survivor Stories

Later this month I-ACT will be traveling to Chad where they will show this video to these refugees and record their response to the poems and the project.

This partnership means a lot to us and we are excited to find out what these particular survivors make of these bone-making advocates who were inspired to tell their stories.

Soon we will post these video recordings on-line but until then I wanted to share with you a work by Don McIver that was inspired and written for Adef, who is living in Chad with his wife, Achta, and four children.



Virtues, Bones, and Tolerance

This blog has been a long time coming.  At our last meeting I made a promise to the One Million Bones (OMB) team that I would start blogging from a personal perspective about the project.  Tonight, finally, I will start.  My name is Naomi Natale, I am the artist who came up with this idea.  I work with an amazing team who volunteer so much of their time and skills because they believe in this vision, and I am humbled and honored to work among them.

Last Friday, Noel and I went to East San Jose school in Albuquerque.  Noel is our awesome Education Coordinator.  There we spoke to over 200 4^th and 5^th grade students in 6 classes.  The experience was truly moving. 

For the past few weeks the students had been studying their virtues under the guidance of their teacher, Amy Sweet, who loved our project and wanted to bring it into her classroom.  We began the lesson asking the students about their virtues.  Which ones they possess, which ones their friends posses, and inquiring what acts they do that show them off. We then went on to question how do we find the virtues in people that we don’t really like.  What can we do to find them and to seek them out in these people.

We decided that our virtues are very much like our bones, that though we cannot see them we know that they exist and that they make us who we are.  We also decided that EVERYBODY has virtues just like EVERYBODY has bones.

We talked and shared about what happens when we do not see or look for the virtues in others. How that can lead to name calling, bullying, fighting and conflicts.  We talked about how this played into our own lives and in our stories we described how people get hurt, bones are broken, families are broken, communities are broken.  One young boy shared a personal account about how his father had been killed by a family member when he was eleven months old.  At a recent family event this family member asked if he forgave him and the young boy said he had.  Forgiveness is truly a heroic act, and we have much to learn from our youth…

One of my favorite stories that came out of the day was from 2 young girls who were sitting next to each other in our second class.  They explained how they didn’t like each other at all when they first met but were forced by another classmate to get to know each other.  Now they are best friends, and their love for each other is very visible.  When one of the girls became emotional recalling a personal account of intolerance, her best friend wrapped her arms around her and held on for a long while.

I left the school very moved and inspired by how much these children offered from their lives, how many personal and overwhelming stories of pain and courage and compassion were told.  At the end of each lesson we invited the students to make a bone for those all over the world whose virtues were not seen or valued in their communities or by their governments.  We promised that we would bring their bones to Washington so that world leaders could bear witness to their actions.

On behalf of all the 4^th and 5^th grade students at East San Jose… To all the children in Sudan, Congo, Uganda and Burma we offer you these bones, these stories, and our voices.  Your virtues we hold and do not forget.