On the Road Again!

I have been on the road a bit lately. I visited the Gates Foundation in Seattle to open the exhibit, Let Every Child Have a Name, and was at the Western Washington SCBWI conference in Redmond to talk to - and draw with - children's book authors and illustrators, and to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, to speak about measles during World Immunization Week. The first day home I visited the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn and shared pictures and stories with first, second and third graders.
I have been fed and feted, seen such sights as the gum wall in Seattle and the Emergency Control Room at the CDC, spent time with esteemed Lions and Mac Barnett, and admired the drawings of artists aged 5 to... well... it wouldn't have been polite to ask.

And now, tomorrow I am off to India. My daughter, Olive and I will be accompanying the Measles and Rubella Initiative and Unicef on a mission to Uttar Pradesh to observe routine immunizations.
I have never been to India, but have wanted to go for ever. Mark Twain called it,
India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition... the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. 
I can't imagine all the things we'll see, but we'll be documenting with camera and pencils, and I'll try to post some of it here, (and on facebook and twitter.)

Measles Project

I have been working all Summer on a project for the Measles and Rubella Initiative; a series of illustrations based on my trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier in the year. The illustrations are for posters which will hopefully help the movement to eliminate measles worldwide by 2020. It has been wonderful working on these paintings and rather strange to emerge back in the world... my head has been filled with the Congo for months, with images of mothers and babies waiting in long, snaking lines outside tiny huts where health workers vaccinate one child at a time. Images of long, hollowed out canoes delivering the vaccine up the river to remote villages. Images of children holding up their purple-dyed pinky fingers to show they've been vaccinated and are safe from measles.
The project will be launched next week at the Red Cross headquarters in Washington DC. After which I look forward to sharing it all with you.

Day 3 in Bas Congo, Part 2

 

 The thrift store t-shirts we saw on children were often oddly ironic. I saw one man up a tree gathering coconuts, with a t-shirt advertising a Connecticut landscaping company.

 

We watched men playing checkers with bottle caps.

 

I bought some boxes of matches here with Congolese butterflies on them.

 

After lunch we returned to the village from yesterday to see a measles vaccination take place. I can't tell you how hot it was in this crowded blue room; I was curious that the mothers kept their babies bundled up. Everyone was very patient and quiet until the Governor came in and there was a sudden burst of singing.

It was difficult to watch this girl have an IV put in and her little arm bound with packing tape to a splintery piece of wood.

The nurse had her own baby strapped to her back

 In the afternoon we visited other families in Mbanza-Ngungu. The health centers use hand drawn maps to navigate the paths between houses in the clay villages.