It was a summer of creativity, with projects ranging from drawing to photography and writing. Offices were replaced with classrooms, and Internet access was less frequent in West Africa. It was a rare summer opportunity for five Brandeis students who traveled to Ghana for their summer internships.
The students spent nearly 10 weeks in Ghana as interns at the Attukwei Art Foundation, co-founded by Jessye Kass '13, who began working on the project in 2010.
A non-governmental organization in Ghana, the Foundation focuses on "schools lacking in funds, urban slums and street children to find cathartic means of expressing themselves through art," according to its website.
Though this was Kass' fifth summer in Ghana, it was the first summer that other Brandeis students worked as interns at the NGO.
"I've known Jessye since we were mid-years and I've known about her organization in Ghana since it started," said Breanna Beberman '13, who was one of the five students in Ghana this summer. "I wanted to help and do what I can, travel and see Ghana, have the experience and be in the schools with the kids."
For Emma Balmuth-Loris '14, the opportunity was the perfect summer internship given her hope to work in developing nations doing NGO and non-profit work after graduation. Malika Imhotep '15, who toured Ghana for a brief two weeks when she was 13, decided to become an intern after discussing her interest in anthropology in Africa with a professor who suggested she get in touch with Kass to discuss her organization.
Alia Goldfarb '13, a friend of Kass, is interested in theater and used her skills to create a theater project at the AAF for the schoolchildren in Ghana.
Once in Ghana, the girls lived together in the home of the son of Kass' original host mom. They worked five days a week and visited three different schools each week, working with students as young as two years old in some classrooms and as old as 20 in others.
"We had themed weeks, so we did a lot of self-portraits, autobiographies; we had an animal week; we had a crafts week where they made backpacks and visors [and] the little kids made crowns," Balmuth-Loris said.
As part of one project, Beberman gave a classroom of students their own disposable cameras to take pictures of people with animals. A pre-veterinarian student, Beberman studied the ways Ghanaians relate to animals and the diseases they transfer back and forth as part of her summer project.
"None of the kids I gave the disposable cameras to had any photography experience or had ever used a disposable camera or anything like [it]," Beberman explained of their excitement for the project. "I had to spend almost an hour teaching them how to use the disposable cameras, so that was definitely really exciting for them."
Beberman is now working to form a collection of both her pictures and those the students took to tell a photographic story of Ghanaians relating to animals.
Imhotep, who is majoring in Anthropology and African and Afro-American Studies and minoring in Creative Writing, worked to incorporate poetry and writing into her work with the students.
"When I asked a class of 12- and 13-year-olds to write about what they thought was beautiful, one of the girls wrote that she thought obroni were beautiful. 'Obroni' is the word for Westerner or foreign person or white person."
When the volunteers realized they wanted to have more of an impact after their first three weeks, they began a leadership group after school for girls ages 10-18 and asked them what they wanted to learn.
"They wanted to know about politics, culture, personal hygiene and how to take care of themselves. They wanted to know about love and all these different things," Balmuth-Loris said.
In response, the Brandeis students arranged a personal hygiene week, focused on educating the girls and answering any relevant questions they had. Nervous about cultural differences, they met with a group of Ghanaian women they were friendly with to discuss a long list of questions the Ghanaian students compiled.
"I didn't even realize the impact that we had until our last day at one of the schools," Balmuth-Loris said of the experience. "There was a very small class and we got to be really close with them because most of the classes were 40-plus and they were only 17. When we went to say goodbye, every single kid was crying."
"They really enjoyed spending time with us, playing games with us [and] doing the artistic activities," Beberman said of the kids and young adults they worked with during their time in Ghana. "The schools would complain if we went to one classroom one day and hadn't been to another classroom in a few days. They missed us and wanted us to come back."
Balmuth-Loris described the kids as unforgettable. "The kids there love life to the fullest," she said.