Happy Kids and Paper Flowers at Joziburg Lane
A few weeks ago, I found myself in the middle of a grade R (the South African version of kindergarten) classroom in downtown Joburg, watching kids have fun with paper, glue, paint, and glitter. The kids were assembling and decorating big paper flowers for the nearby Joziburg Lane market at One Eloff Street. The flowers would be used to decorate Joziburg Lane for its opening festival during the last week of May.
After the madness of the all the flower creation was dying down, I took two Instax pictures of each kid with his/her flower. One picture went home with the child and the other one went to One Eloff.
A couple of weeks later, just before the Joziburg Lane Festival, I met the kids at One Eloff to photograph them decorating the Lane.
Fortunately it doesn’t rain or get very windy at this time of the year, so the wall still looked great when the Joziburg Lane Festival started a couple of days later.
This was a fun project, and I’ll be writing more about One Eloff and Joziburg Lane in the future.
While watching the kids decorate the flowers at the Grow Up and Learn School I had a chat with Girlie Khoza, the grade R teacher at the school. This non-profit school is located in one of Joburg’s tougher neighborhoods, receives little to no public funding, and has very few resources. The kids have no outdoor space to play, the school is short of supplies (the kids were wearing makeshift garbage bags as smocks while they painted), and the kitchen facilities need upgrading.
The guys from Molten Black, who oversee the One Eloff project, have agreed to marshall some resources – construction materials, volunteer time, etc. – to help the Grow Up and Learn School. And I agreed to ask my readers to donate to the school. Molten Black will collect the donations in a special account and then give the money to the school.
If you’d like to make a donation, please use the following account details:
Account name: Buffshelfco 7 Pty Ltd
Bank: Standard Bank Account number: 001 734 970 Branch: Balfour Park Branch No: 009 160
Please type in “Grow Up and Learn” as your reference for this donation.
The school doesn’t have its own website or a donation tool, so for now the donations will be limited to South Africans who can give via an EFT. But if I receive a lot of interest, perhaps we can set up something more formalized. Let’s see what happens.
If you want to check out Joziburg Lane for yourself (I’m sure the flowers are still up), follow them on Facebook for their upcoming events.
Great photos. Your recent photography is on fire, especially your images of young children. Rock on.
Thanks Dad! I’m not sure why I’ve been running into so many kids lately.
This made my day and reminded me of once when I went to see a Christmas show put on at my kids’ school. Since the First Graders had to go home to bed soon, they were on first, and when the curtain opened, there they all were “in a nearly straight line”, knock-kneed and with Santa’s-elf hats on. And with looks on their faces that were a mix of amazement and apprehension. Apparently they weren’t expecting to see the rows of seats all full of people laughing and applauding! Wasn’t like that at rehearsal! Cuteness, indeed.
Haha. Little kids are the best.
Hi Heather and thanks for this post. What about using the Just Giving platform?
Hi Rosemary, yes I did think about one of those platforms but wanted to feel the situation out first. The one problem with those sites is that they keep a percentage of the donations (which they have to, obviously). Anyway thanks for the comment!
Love the photos of the kids with their flowers. And a pop-up ballet performance! That is marvelous. Wish I could have seen that one.
A beautiful idea. And children, flowers, art, yup, all magic and love. xxoo
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