Featuring: Risa.Today

Article
By Tom McGrath
09/07/19

Subtitle

Digital Romanticism in an African Tribe

Contents

1. Backstory

2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Team

3. The Maasai Tribe

4. RISA Primary School

5. Risa.Today Education Program

6. Maasai + VR + Google + Instagram

7. What About Money?

8. Future Plans

Risa.Today: RISA Primary School children

Hooking up an Internet connection in the African savanna, setting up virtual reality for the nomadic Maasai tribe, teaching Kenyan school kids how to ‘Google’ the distance from Nairobi to Paris, building a cinema and an art studio in a classroom–all of these things became a reality thanks to three young people from Ukraine.

Subtitle

Digital Romanticism in an African Tribe

Contents

1. Backstory

2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Team

3. The Maasai Tribe

4. RISA Primary School

5. Risa.Today Education Program

6. Maasai + VR + Google + Instagram

7. What About Money?

8. Future Plans

Hooking up an Internet connection in the African savanna, setting up virtual reality for the nomadic Maasai tribe, teaching Kenyan school kids how to ‘Google’ the distance from Nairobi to Paris, building a cinema and an art studio in a classroom–all of these things became a reality thanks to three young people from Ukraine.
1. Backstory

Risa.Today is a Digital Art education program for teachers and school kids in Kenya, and we spoke to one of its co-founders, Alice Yakubovych, to find out how it was all possible:

“Around four years ago I began to develop an interest in African culture and I spent a lot of time searching for volunteer projects join. However, all of the projects I found on Google were focused on humanitarian aid, and I couldn’t find a single one focused on education. So in September 2018 I decided to go on an expedition across Kenya.

Whilst out on a safari one day, I asked the driver if there were any schools nearby that weren’t spoilt by visits of tourists and hand-outs from Europeans. I really wanted to get at a peek at the real East Africa. The driver, Pita, smiled sarcastically and proceeded to take our group to the African savanna–a gaunt landscape full of giraffes, lions, scorpions and without a single trace of civilisation.

Risa.Today: The Africa Savanna

Following our tour of the savanna, Pita kindly fulfilled my request and took us to a nearby school named RISA. On the way, we managed to buy an entire box of compasses as a gift for the school. When we handed them over, RISA’s Maths teacher, Joel, started jumping up and down and crying with joy. Metal costs a lot in Kenya, so Joel was forced to teach draftsmanship with just his fingers to rely on. Even ballpoint pens are considered a rarity. The children instead were writing with pencils, as this way the notebooks could be wiped clean and reused the next year.

Immediately after seeing this completely untouched field and meeting the incredibly pure people, I realised that this was precisely the volunteer project that I had spent the past 4 years searching for… even if it didn’t exist yet. I made a firm decision there and then to return and bring back more stationery for the school. (Back then I had no idea we’d end up building a cinema, art studio and computer class!) We exchanged WhatsApp contacts with head teacher James, and so our six-month long correspondence began in September 2018.

Risa.Today: RISA Teachers

Risa.Today: RISA Teacher

2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Team

As a New Year present to myself, I bought tickets to Nairobi for the following February, and posted a picture of my future container home (a tin can with no electricity or toilet) on Facebook. I shared that I was planning to integrate into the tribe, teach the school children art and digital skills, and asked if anybody could donate their notebooks and perhaps, even travel with me.

My long-time friend and film director Pasha messaged me shortly afterwards saying that the trip sounded like a dream come true, and that he was ready to pack his bags and go.

Dima is my best friend and talented designer. Like me, he also had an interest in East African culture and was already in the process of dreaming up a name for the project (which had to be based on the schools name, RISA), building the Risa.Today website and creating the rest of the visuals for the project. Pasha and Dima had never met before the launch of this project, and they only met each other for the first time once we all arrived in Africa.

And so that was our team and the 3 co-founders of Risa.Today: Pasha (Film director), Dima (Art Director) and me, Alice (Art Curator). We were united by 3 things: we all came from Kyiv, we all worked in the creative sector, and we had never done an ounce of charity work in our lives.

Risa.Today: Alice, Pasha and Dima

3. The Maasai Tribe

Before we move on to talk about the school, there's one more very important thing to add. All of the teachers, students, and parents come from the same tribe, the Maasai. The Maasai is a nomadic tribe, they live in houses made of cattle droppings, cook food on an open fire and travel depending on their livestock's needs. They move from one area to another in search of grass and water for their animals, hence not having permanent homes. For the same reason, the Maasai also hadn’t attended any educational institutions for a long, long time.

The tribe itself still practices circumcision and arranged marriage. Once a girl leaves school she may not return, as her father may sell her to an old man living in the next hut. All of the members of the tribe that I have met are Christians (Protestants). They believe in the Triune God and go to church on Sundays. Despite this, they still practice polygamy, meaning a man can have up to 12 wives. The tribes only contact with any kind of creative or artistic practice comes through their woven jewellery that they make by hand using beads.

Many of the Maasai, and Kenyans in general, are crazy football fans. Great Britain, which ruled Kenya as a colony from 1920 for more than 40 years, certainly left its sports imprint on the country. Many of the tribes members know all of Manchester United's players names. It’s no wonder they loved Pasha (a semi-professional footballer) as soon as he had a ball at his feet.

Risa.Today: Maasai Tribe member

Risa.Today: Teacher with Manchester United scarf

4. RISA Primary School

RISA is located within a 30-minute drive from the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, and 200 km from Nairobi, the Kenyan capital. Nairobi is one of the most developed cities in East Africa, but all of this development has spread no further than the city limits.

The nearest first aid post is 52 km away (a one-hour drive across tricky terrain). The nearest shop is 40 km away. You have to walk a kilometre to get water. And for washing, students have a single 1.5 litre bottle of water to share between five of them.

RISA is home to 507 students ranging from 4 to 16 years old, with just 12 teachers in the entire school. The state provides 5 of them and 7 are hired by parents. There aren’t enough desks or chairs for all of the students, so children move them from room to room between classes depending on their schedules.

All of the teachers and the senior high school kids live on the school premises. Many of them have to share beds with each other as there are only enough for half of them. Returning home after school is a long and dangerous journey.

A stroll after 5 PM could cost you your life, as the school is located within a 10-minute ride from the Amboseli National Park, which has no fencing whatsoever. Animals roam the savanna freely, and begin hunting just before dawn. I will never forget how we encountered a pride of lions just 200 meters from the school. Thankfully, we were in a car.

Risa.Today: Collecting water

The soil in this part of the African savanna is dry and infertile and it rains only once a year, typically in November. For this reason no fresh food can be grown, and a diet of rice and beans is served on a daily basis, making it impossible for children to get their required nutrients. Any kind of fruit or vegetable here is just as rare a delicacy as caviar is in Ukraine. For the same reason, there are just 3 trees on the school grounds which offer some shade for students to hide under between classes.

The schools curriculum includes Mathematics, Swahili (a second language spoken by tens of millions in three of Africas Great Lake countries: Kenya, Tanzania, and the DRC, where it is an official or national language), social studies and PE.

Classes to prepare grade 8 kids for their exams can go on until 10PM, and it’s no surprise to see children studying without the supervision of a teacher up until 11PM. A church service is also held every Wednesday at 8 AM. However, amongst all of this, there is not a single subject containing even a hint of development of creativity in the children.

Risa.Today: RISA School Teachers

Risa.Today: RISA Students

5. Risa.Today Education Program

Before arriving at RISA, I phoned every single art critic, journalist, designer, marketer, and programmer that I knew from London, Los Angeles and Kyiv. We created a program with illustrations, examples and over 200 pages worth of homework. The printouts cost a lot and filled most of the suitcase that I brought with me.

On the very first day at the school, it became clear that these printouts had absolutely no connection with African realities. Simply because there wasn’t a single room with a reliable electricity supply to hold classes in. We couldn’t even charge the computers that we’d brought. We had to throw the entire program in the bin. By the way, we even had to buy the bin.

Pasha, Dima and I turned into supply managers. The first order of business was to call an electrician to repair the power sockets and connect us to Wi-fi (for $400), order in new desks and install bars on the schools windows. This took us in total around 2 weeks, and only after this transformation could go ahead with the program we had planned.


Pasha and I enlisted the help of a local carpenter to build a screen for the cinema and installed a speaker that we bought in Nairobi. We then rounded up all of the teachers and the older students after class to show them the film Interstellar. None of them had access to TV and they had only listened to football commentary on the radio. This was the first time in their lives that they had ever seen a film on a big screen. I don't know who was more shocked, them or us!

Risa.Today: Setting up

Risa.Today: Setting up

The scale of the project simply grew and grew. Aljosha, a visual artist known for conceptual installations and sculptures based on ideas of bioism, biofuturism and bioethical abolitionism, traveled from Düsseldorf to the small Kenyan village. We weren't acquainted, but with both of us being from artistic circles, we followed each other on social media and I admired his work. Right in front of the children, he created a 5-meter installation from pigmented acrylic glass.

Aljosha also put on painting classes for the students. The children had never seen watercolours or held a paintbrush in their lives. This is perhaps why the first thing they did was to start smelling them. We held several lessons on abstract art, and we thought it would be a great idea to hang these paintings on the walls of the classroom. And that’s exactly how we organised the first modern art exhibition in Kajiado County, named Maiolo, which when translated from the language of the Maasai tribe means “Unexplored”.

The exhibition presented works created by the students, Aljosha's installation: "Predisposed to be in the supreme state of well-being", a documentary film about various cultures that Pasha brought on a flash drive and my Polaroid photos.

Parents from neighbouring villages left their cattle to come and see what their children were learning from these ‘mzungus’ (a term used in the African Great Lakes region to refer to people of European descent). It was sensational! No doubt about it.

Risa.Today: Aljosha Sculpture

Risa.Today: Students Painting

6. Maasai + VR + Google + Instagram

We understood that showing by example was the best way of teaching the children. Head teacher James changed the entire school timetable in order to insert Art into the official curriculum. We connected all 16 computers to the Internet, and held the first lesson on effective internet use. Switch on, switch off. Children moved their fingers across the keyboards as if in slow motion.

We plotted our course from RISA to Paris on Google Maps. And then we told them that they can type anything into the search bar. 8th grader Pita googled: “The main reasons of global warming”.
Pasha started a series of lectures on storytelling, while Dima and I gave lectures on visual art.
We immediately skipped the history of the Middle Ages and fast forwarded the children into the digital romanticism of the year 2019.

We showed them works by Jonathan Castro for Nike and moving images by Traum INC. We gave them the opportunity to paint in the Fractal Fantasy audio/visual platform. We launched Off White runway shows on the big screen.

"It all felt completely surreal."

It all felt completely surreal. We were living in tin containers without water and electricity, with mice, cockroaches and holes in the ceiling, all whilst we were showing 3D art by make-up artist Ines Alpha to the children of RISA.

Perhaps the most shocking experience was with VR. We let both the teachers and the students see oceans and snow loaded from National Geographic, and let the students experience diving. At first the children threw the mask away in fright, but quickly asked for it back. They set off on an expedition through an unknown world, albeit in virtual reality. But if we’re being realistic, there's no guarantee they'll ever have the opportunity to see the ocean with their own eyes.

Many believe that it's irrational to bring VR to a place without water and reliable electrical supply. Just like my granny considered FaceTime inapplicable compared with letters written on paper, right until we started making calls every day.

Risa.Today: RISA Teacher using VR

Risa.Today: RISA Student using VR

7. What About Money?

Each of us has an active audience on social networks. We set up PayPal and bank accounts in UAH, RUB, EURO, and announced this everywhere we could. People from various countries responded and donated bit by bit, some $10, some $1,000.

These were mostly people from Ukraine and Russia. The very same Jonathan whose artworks we had showed to children even made a donation after seeing the project. The total sum of all the initial donations came to about $6,000. It’s not a lot, but it’s been enough for us to get started.

8. Future Plans

Whilst we were at an inter-school competition, we noticed that the RISA school students were running marathons in their socks! So Pasha wrote to Puma Ukraine, and they kindly donated 14 pairs of trainers for the children. We are currently at the stage of sending all this stuff from Ukraine to Kenya. The point is, so many sub-projects appear quite out of the blue. It is really exciting.

We have plans to create a 2-week creative camp program, which will be taught by guys just like those we mentioned earlier. People from all over the world will be able to buy a trip that will include one week of voluntary work at a school and one week of workshops and finals. All of the funds will be spent on RISA. The school's first necessity is a dorm especially for the girls in order to protect them from sexual slavery.

We also want to create a permanent studio where exhibitions and workshops can be held. Of course, all of this requires big investment, and we’re open to collaboration with major brands. However most importantly, the tribe is open to this too. They’re interested in immersing themselves in art and learning new technologies.

This knowledge can go on to help promote general development in the region, support the local culture, develop small businesses and help students find work in Nairobi. We’re not interested in changing the culture or destroying the ecosystem. What we are interested in is development. Mutual development. This is why Risa.Today is about a mutual cultural exchange and not just one-sided lecturing.”

Risa.Today: Alice and a Maasai Tribe member

We want to say a massive thank-you to Alice Yakubovych and the rest of the team at Risa.Today for sharing their story with us. Programs such as Risa.Today are hugely important in restructuring and rebuilding the connection between the developed and under-developed world. Modern technologies, creativity and most importantly education should not be limited to those of us who are fortunate enough to have been born into countries where we can receive it.

You can follow the programs progress via their Instagram (@risa.today) and donate to their cause via their website: Risa.Today. We can’t wait to see how Risa.Today evolves and we are excited at the prospect of working alongside this amazing young group in the future.

  • Featuring: Risa.Today

Bibliography

Risa.Today Website (risa.today)

Social

Risa.Today (@risa.today)
Alice (@alicescope)
Pasha (@pableneu)
Dima (@deeeeeemone)

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