Don't stop the music!

Update from Stave House in the Sahara!

For the last two weeks in October, one of our partner organisations, Olive Branch Arts, are in the Camps to run their new photography and music training programme ‘Sand and Vision’. They are working in Smara and aim to build the storytelling and creative composition skills of young participants so they can tell their stories in new ways. You can find out more information about their work here. One of their team, Matt King Smith, is a musician and he is gathering the sounds, music and voices of Saharawis of all ages and musical abilities to create some tracks documenting the team's time in the Camps. We are lucky to have Matt working with both our Stave House in the Sahara groups on two different days of workshops. ​

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​This week, Matt led our young people through a series of rhythm and soundscape exercises and will return next week to record some of the sounds and music the young people can make with their voices and bodies and the instruments we have in our classroom. Take a look at the videos below to see what they got up to. Olive Branch Arts' Creative Director (Dramatherapy), Becky Finlay Hall, brought us some letters from children in a school in London and we will be writing some responses to them as soon as we can. The team also brought us some gifts of classroom resources so we are incredibly grateful to Olive Branch Arts for all their support and wish them loads of luck with their project - very much looking forward to seeing and hearing the results!

Meanwhile, Beccy Allen has continued to teach English to the children on a daily basis. Their​ activities this week involve learning through action and using circle time to ask each other questions and slowly build to be able to talk about themselves and other people in more and more detail. We hope you like watching a little of what we do in action.