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.

 

Day 3 in Bas Congo, part 1

This is me with our lovely driver, Papa Sebastien.

We began our morning at the hospital as it emerged slowly from the mist. Women were washing clothes in an old bathtub and as always in the Congo people were coming and going, including this beatific mother and child.

We went then to a nearby village to pick up a man whose title was alternately Governor, Activities Coordinator or Mayor. He knows all the villages in the area and passes information to the people, of upcoming immunization campaigns and outreach programs to bring vaccines to remote villages. He rallies the crowd with songs about infectious diseases and how to avoid them. I'm serious.

It's rare that I feel too tall in a group photo.

The village was bustling even at this early hour and I was eager to dart down lanes and peep inside open doors, but we had a busy day planned. We made instant friends with children, and seconds later had to say goodbye.

This mural promotes fidelity as a means of AIDS prevention.

We drove about 15km into the jungle, along barely passable roads. People were walking in both directions, laboring with basins piled high with bananas on their heads, or pushing bicycles loaded with sacks of cucumbers. When they saw the car they'd leap aside, pressing themselves into the head high grass. In the wet season, these villages are completely cut off.

We stopped at a school...

and passed a little market...

This boy kicked an ingenious soccer ball made of rags.

We went to pay our respects to the village chief, as is the custom. What we didn't know was that he had just lost his youngest daughter to the measles. She had fallen sick with a fever and rash. They carried her on foot to the nearest health center, but she died within three days.

This is the chief's house. A colonial relic.

This is one of his older daughters.

 

Day 2 in Bas Congo

Our party of five set off from Kinshasa on Tuesday morning, headed South for the province of Bas Congo. The Measles Project is sponsored by The Red Cross, in partnership with UNICEF, so traveling with me and my companion Ed, were two UNICEF representatives, Charlotte and Medard, and our fearless driver, Papa Sebastien.

We stayed in a Catholic rectory and ate fish, plantains and fufu, which is manioc pounded into flour, formed into large balls and cooked in some mysterious way. I know some of you will be pleased to know the other name for fufu is Boule Nationale.

 

After lunch we paid visits to the head of the health district, and the director of the hospital, to explain our project of researching the effects of measles on their community and to learn about their immunization practices, so that I can make my drawings.

We saw the local hospital, with a central, communal well; a formerly grand colonial building with overgrown gardens, no running water and limited electricity.

Photography in public places is illegal in DRC so I had to sit on my hands for the drive through the extraordinary, teeming suburbs of Kinshasa, through the rolling hills dotted with palm trees, passing cars weighed down with three times their height in bananas and young men planted precariously but confidently on top, passing children wheeling tin plates with sticks, and women with bowls of leaves like big green headdresses. After the hospital, accompanied by the local mayor, we visited our first village, and just being out of the car and on the ground and able to interact with people was joyous. We visited three families with young children who had had the measles, and the parents were emphatic about encouraging others in the village to vaccinate their children. The average number of children in a Congolese family is 6.3. Every doorway of every house has a child peeping out, or so it seems, and their shyness lasts approximately two seconds.

 

Day 1 in Kinshasa

Today was my first day in Africa and I am struggling to file away all the images from the streets of Kinshasa. If I had been able to make pictures on the spot, this is what I would have chosen to draw:

The blue and yellow dented vans crammed full of passengers, patterned fabrics and brown limbs squished against the windows, men hanging off the sides and the roofs.

The men and women and children carrying all manner of things on their heads: cardboard flats of eggs, basins of baguettes, giant bags of ice, bowls of oranges and limes, trays of bananas, a stack of blue chairs.

The women in their fantastic dresses, tending vegetable gardens in a tiny strip next to the rubble and the barbed wire and the high walls of military compounds.

The young women with malaria-feverish babies in the hospital for mothers and infants, nursing under mosquito nets.

The broken down alleyways of rubble and stagnant puddles and threadbare chickens pecking at piles of garbage and planks propped over creeks of sewerage, and picking their way elegantly through it all, women in ruffles and bustles and bodices and nipped waists in cloth the colors of parrots.

 

Street photography is forbidden in the city, but when we visited the hospital for mothers and babies, some of the mothers were kind enough to let me photograph them. Today we head into the field, to Bas Congo. I'll be out of touch for a few days.

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Africa!

One snowy morning in early February, I was sitting on a runway in Cincinnati, Ohio, waiting for the plane to be de-iced before take off, checking emails on my phone. Amongst the mundane messages one leapt out: from Christine McNab of the Measles and Rubella Initiative, the subject line read, "Proposal to travel to the DR Congo/ Illustrate." Through this small device in my hand, I was whisked from the icy Mid-West to Africa, to communities devastated by measles, to children dying in the thousands from this preventable disease. The proposal was very compelling, to visit these communities to talk with families and the immunization workers who travel across the country, often on foot, to distribute the vaccine. And then to draw. To create posters and maybe a book and a video, to communicate the toll of measles and show the ways we can prevent deaths and eliminate this disease.

I could barely wait to get back to New York so that I could say yes. In spite of reading terrible news every day from Central Africa, and in spite of my father's thoughtful links to reports of Congolese plane crashes, there were three insistent reasons to go: 1. I have never been to Africa. 2. I can hear all the news and all the statistics about measles, I can read that 380 children die a day, and yet, as I wave my own healthy children off to school in the morning, I can't possibly imagine the truth of this until I see it. 3. I love my work. I love making pictures that encourage children to turn pages or that cheer up subway commuters, but I've never worked on pictures which might conceivably save lives.

Throughout the past months of conversation and planning, Christine has sent me updates on her work with the Measles Initiative. She has told me about health workers in Nepal who climb mountains to reach remote villages, and immunization campaigns in Myanmar, where the children sit patiently in the shade with circles of bark paste on their faces to cool the skin. Inspired by her beautiful photographs, and because I was itching to get started on this project, I painted this image of a newly vaccinated family.

I have just arrived in Kinshasa and will post pictures and stories from the project on this blog. You can find out more about the Measles Initiative here.

 

 

 

 

Exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library

From now until August 24th, I have an exhibition at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. There are original illustrations and sketches including work from The Crows of Pearblossom, Edwin Speaks Up, Spinster Goose, Wombat Walkabout and the Ivy Bean series. Additional artwork
from Ruby’s Wish, Big Red Lollipop, Pecan Pie Baby, Are You Awake? and many others will also be on display, along with bits and pieces of ephemera collected in the process of making books. There are also some secret messages, some personal revelations and an arrangement of things universally accepted as "exciting". This all takes place in the Youth Wing.
Over in the lobby gallery to the right of the library near the language section, I have original paintings from the project, Drawn From My Father's Adventures, and materials from the making of the MTA subway poster.
There will be an opening on June 7th from 6-8pm and I'll be talking about ink and gruel and Kathmandu (amongst other things) at 7:30pm. Please come!

National Doodle Day

As part of Neurofibromatosis Awareness month, I have drawn a doodle which is being auctioned on eBay, along with doodles by famous types like Meryl Streep and Henry Winkler and either Starsky or Hutch and that guy from the X-Files. The Doodles are available for auction on eBay from May 10th - 20th. and you can bid on mine by clicking on the image above. Please. Right now it's going for five bucks which is just embarrassing. I mean Meryl Streep's is hovering around $300, Rowan Atkinson's is at a respectable $100, The Fonz is inching up at $11.37, but Joan Rivers and I are rock bottom.
From the NF website: "These doodles have a very important aim: the funds they raise will benefit NF, Inc. Network, an organization dedicated to providing support to individuals and families affected by neurofibromatosis (NF).
Neurofibromatosis is a genetic disorder that affects one in every 2,500 births. NF is more common than Cystic Fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy and Huntington's Disease combined. Funds raised from the Doodle Day auction will go to support education, advocacy, coalitions, and research for treatments and a cure."
To learn more about NF, please visit www.nfnetwork.org.

For more information about National Doodle Day, email doodleday@nfnetwork.org

Anatomical Drawing at the Observatory

This past weekend my daughter and I took a class at Observatory, one of my favorite places in Brooklyn. It wasn't the Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class, because I had already taken that one, and it wasn't Organization and Productivity for Creative/Artsy Types, with Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian, because I was too disorganized to put that in my calendar, it was Comparative Anatomy: Animals and the Fundamentals of Drawing with my good friend and excellent teacher, Chris Muller.
I am one those apologetic self-taught artists, constantly surprised when something I draw actually vaguely looks like the thing it's meant to resemble. This class was brilliant. I'm not going to start drawing accurately, (I can hear your collective two or three sighs of either relief or disappointment), but it's useful to know that most people are eight times the height of their head. And that all mammals have seven neck bones. (Or was it eight?)
We also went to draw at the Museum of Natural History, and I sat on a little, floral, (borrowed) folding stool. So...much...fun.

I know there are way too many teeth. But isn't he adorably eager to please?

This may look like a lumpy suit, but is, in fact, a skeleton.

Ivy and Bean Make the Rules!

I have just sent off the last of the illustrations, about seventy in all, for Ivy and Bean book 9. Hooray! It should be out this Fall, for those of you waiting with bated breath. I've said it before, but Annie Barrows is a genius.

SCBWI Bulletin

I had fun doing this cover for the March/April issue of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Bulletin. Every one of their cover illustrations involves a kite in some way. It's the Chinese Year of the Dragon, so this was the first kite to spring to mind.