Transforming Education through Art

Shree Bhimsen Elementary School, a small school with a deep commitment to education, is situated in Indrawati VDC Mule, about 20 minutes by vehicle from our Conscious Impact Camp in Takure. Last month, our team had the privilege of working with the school to paint beautiful and educational designs on the classroom walls. The goal is not only to beautify the classroom, but also to enrich the learning environment for its students. 

Wheeling2Help volunteers from Greece unlocking their inner artist :)

Shree Bhimsen Elementary School was built in 1988, but was destroyed in the 2015 earthquake and then rebuilt by the Asian Development Bank. This public school serves as a beacon of hope for the seventy-six students and six dedicated teachers. The painting project took us three days, and over the course of the three days our volunteer team devoted themselves to the task of transforming a blank wall into a vibrant masterpiece. 

Preeti Maharjan, the painting project lead

The project was led by Preeti Maharjan, an incredible Nepali artist who has been working on this project with us for the past two years overseeing our painting program. To make things simpler for everyone, she provided the guidelines and directions and made the initial sketch. Her vision was to create a classroom where children not only learn but also feel inspired to explore their own creativity and imagination.

While painting the classroom, our volunteers had fun with one another by painting each other's faces and playing with the local students. Engaging with the students through games and painting sessions brought so much joy. The laughter and friendship shared during these moments reinforced our belief in the transformative power of art to bring communities together. The kids were so excited to see the transformation of their classroom and so were the volunteers to see the impact they had made on the local school. 

The volunteers celebrating after completing the painting

After completing the project, we stepped back to admire our work. We all remember our classrooms growing up, and now these students will remember a beautiful and colorful place. Our hope is that the colorful walls left behind will serve as a constant source of inspiration and joy for generations to come. We look forward to more new painting projects to come, and we invite you to join!

A Holiday Youth Program

This October, Conscious Impact held 6 sessions of our inaugural school holiday program, “Chutti Macai Bhutti”. Chutti Macai Bhutti is a Nepali phrase meaning, ‘we’re on break; let’s make popcorn!’. Schools in Nepal are closed for about one month during the festival times of Dashain and Tihar, the two largest and most celebrated festivals of the year. During that time, we invited children of ages 4-15 to a holiday youth program at our camp. We had more than 60 children attend our program!

Local youth use bottle bricks to build a new table and bench. Photo by Ankit Tanu

Building upon our bottle brick program from last year, we chose the holiday theme to be waste management and natural building. As Nepal does not have a nation-wide waste management system, trash is often left on the side of the road or burned in and around the home. Our goal is to raise awareness of the dangers of burning plastic trash and alternatives to throwing trash on the ground through the youth of the Takure community.

Our Youth Empowerment team explains the importance of collecting trash in the community and how we can use bottle bricks to build sustainable structures. Photo by Ankit Tanu

What are bottle bricks and why are they important?

Bottle bricks are a great way to deal with plastic trash in areas where there are not proper waste management systems. Bottle bricks are created by tightly stuffing plastic bottles with small pieces of plastic trash. When the bottles are stuffed properly, they are incompressible and can be used as material in building projects. We have used bottle bricks in the creation of interior walls for our toilets and the benches around our bakery area. In March of 2019, we began offering a recycling program to the local community. We offered to pay youth for properly stuffed bottle bricks, paying from 5-20 Nepali rupees (0.05-0.20 US dollars) depending on the size of the bottle. In two months, we collected 194 bottles from the children of the local community. It turned into a family affair with many children telling us the trash was collected and stuffed by their parents and grandparents. We have resumed the bottle brick program and have already collected dozens more.

Children stomp in the cob (a mixture of sand, clay and straw) during the holiday youth program. Photo by Ankit Tanu

During the Chutti Macai Bhutti program, we chose to focus on a building project with the students where they would be able to build with the bottle bricks many of them had collected and stuffed. We used the bottle bricks along with cob to improve our oven and baking area. Cob is a mixture of local clay soil, sand, water, and straw. It’s a natural building material we use in and around our camp. The most fun part of cob is that you get to mix it with your feet, and no matter your age the feeling of squishing mud in between your toes is magical.

Bottle brick bowling! Photo by Jonathan H. Lee

A school holiday program can’t be all work, so we divided each session into two blocks of activities. We spent half of each session working on the baking area with cob and bottle bricks and the other half of the sessions were games, games, and more games! We played a mixture of games from Nepal and abroad, all incorporating our theme of waste management.. Having a community of volunteers from around the world gives us the unique opportunity to share games of various origin. After group discussions about the various types of trash we had trash sorting relays and bottle stuffing relays. A huge hit with the kids was bottle brick bowling!

A local student and participant in our Chutti Macai Bhutti holiday program, makes her own pizza for the first time in her life. Photo by Jonathan H. Lee

We ended our two-week program with a baking extravaganza in our newly remodeled oven area. We baked chocolate chip cookies and made PIZZA! The children helped prepare the cookie dough, chop veggies for pizza toppings, and then each had the opportunity to help assemble and create a pizza. There was lots of dancing and laughing along with bellies full of pizza and a cookie to top it all off. It was a wonderful ending to a successful program.

To learn more about our Youth Program, donate to support this project, or sign up to volunteer with us next year, visit www.consciousimpact.org.

A little fun and games with the kids :) Photo by Ankit Tanu