Kids in the Spotlight
By Jessica Harbert The Afro News Seattle –
Kids in the Spotlight – Kenya edition: Preparing to embark on a life changing excursion is no small feat. Especially when organizing a group of 11 people to venture into an entirely different culture to bridge language barriers and search for the human connection that in the end brings us all together.
Local program Kids in the Spotlight (KITS) is partnering up with Partners in Community Transformation (PiCT) to take the established workshop halfway around the world for a new experience in hopes to better the community abroad.
What is Kids in the Spotlight?
Kids in the Spotlight (KITS) is a long time running program, since 1987 to be exact, which brings together kids from varying ages and backgrounds to collectively spend five days working on one end goal: the creative and interpretive production of a musical. Through eclectic costumes and interpretive scripting, leaders in their late-teens and early twenties work with kids to open their creative minds and with each child’s individual strengths to develop a place for every single person who is involved. Each program is never the same as the last, taking on characteristics of those children and leaders involved. For this installment of the program, the group will perform Les Miserables.
The KITS program sees approximately 150 children each summer, running five programs at The Haven, a workshop resort in Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada. The children participating range in age from 3 years old to 19 years old.
Another branch of the Kids in the Spotlight program is the youth intern program. This program organizes the youth interns who lead the KITS program through the musical production. The program pushes the participants to explore their own creativity and creates an engaging learning environment while working with varying levels of child development and personal learning. Currently the youth intern group is 40 individuals and these interns range from 17 to 28 years old.
Founder of Kids in the Spotlight, Denise Goldbeck created these unique programs for children and teens with the hopes that participants could gain knowledge about their own personal growth and development while participating in a creative arts experience and utilizing other s to understand interpersonal relations and boundaries.
The inspiration for taking the program abroad was a combination of bringing the project to different communities and cultures and offering a challenge to the youth interns who have been putting on the project for years, giving them a new experience to benefit their own personal learning and growth.
“For several years now I have wanted to do more and to provide a great opportunity for the young leaders I have brought up,” Goldbeck said. “I also hope that we can develop young leaders in Kenya who can teach other children the leadership that the program provides so that they can improve their future and the future of the world.”
With a background in the performing arts and developmental psychology, Goldbeck took her past experience and cultivated the KITS program to work with children.
“I began teaching dance to children when I contracted rheumatoid arthritis in response to a rubella vaccine and could no longer see dancing or rehearsal directing in my future,” Goldbeck said. “My ballet master, Morley Wiseman, said to me “You can wield the masses – Teach! Dance is a big world – there will always be room for you.”
As a result, she began teaching dance in the Queen Charlotte Islands in Northern British Columbia, where she lived at the time. The area lacked organized creative activities for children, Goldbeck said, and being bored with the typical recitals, she began taking on more complex ballets and her work evolved to include acting and singing.
“Also I found it practical to teach classes of mixed ages rather than teaching one class of 6-8 years old and one class of 9-12 years, etc.,” Goldbeck said. “Soon, I discovered the magic of having mixed ages learning together.”
Establishing a connection: Partners in Community Transformation
The organization was founded in 2007 as Pamoja, meaning “together” in Swahili, and it was re-named Partners in Community Transformation (PiCT) in 2010. Based out of Kenya, the non-profit organization works primarily with the villages in Kit Mikayi and Kiala, near Kisumu city in Western Kenya. The organization’s area of focus has a total population near 13,000. The group began when a handful of rock climbers who frequented the area began to take notice of the struggles in the community, primarily for the basic necessities to survive. The ultimate goal of PiCT and it’s grass-roots method is to not impose unwanted cultural approaches on the communities it works with, but to work closely with the people in the community to find out their priorities and help work towards those goals.
Along with KITS, the organization facilitates many other projects in the area, including HIV education, working with children affected and infected by HIV, safe water programs and sustainable livelihoods programs.
After spending time researching potential international venues for the program, Goldbeck began talking with her nephew, Jeremy Penner, who is the treasurer and co-founder of PiCT. He has been working in Kenya for the last six years, and Goldbeck made the connection between his organization and the KITS program. His work in Kenya is primarily with a group Faces working to establish medical clinics in remote areas. Without PiCT, the KITS program would not be able to complete this project, Goldbeck said. The organization has provided the majority of the logistical planning and ground work for such a program to exist.
For the first program of KITS, PiCT has already recruited 44 children to be involved, along with six adult community leaders, including teachers, who will help with the program and two field officers from PiCT will accompany the KITS members throughout their stay in Kit Mikayi.
“That is pretty outstanding for our first workshop,” Goldbeck said. “I think that shows that we have really got something going on and we’ve got something pretty cool.”
Challenges faced with KITS adventure abroad
Among many challenges the group will face traveling abroad, such as potential illness, with a yellow fever vaccination required to leave Kenya and return to Northern America, charting unfamiliar territory in culture and lifestyle and a language barrier, Goldbeck still speaks confidently of the benefits she feels this program will bring to the community and its children.
“The bottom line is that children are children and I believe that there are some things that are universal among the development of children and adolescents,” Goldbeck said. “There are the essential aspects and these are the essential aspects needed to understand the development of a person. On the other hand, we are planning on taking a little more time to do the workshop than we do in Canada because we want to learn more about their culture and learn about who they are.”
Although there are five schools in the Kit Mikayi area, the first year of the program will focus on working with two schools under one roof, Kit Mikayi Elementary School and Kit Mikayi Secondary School. The program hopes to expand to incorporate all the schools in the community.
Typically in Kenya three languages are spoken: the local tribal language, Swahili and English. The ages of the children who will be in the program will likely still be learning the English language therefore a language barrier will be pose an apparent challenge in communicating with them throughout the program.
The KITS group will immerse themselves in the Kit Mikayi and Kenyan culture, learning basic phrases in Swahili to attempt to forge the language barrier, arriving equipped with mosquito nets and bug repellant to battle the foreign insects and be prepared to not drink the water in efforts to avoid any potential illness that individuals travelling from North America could face as a result of not being acclimated to a different lifestyle.
Understanding KITS’ role in the lives of those involved
First attending a KITS program in 1995, Elisabeth Edelen brought her two children, who were 5 and 10. She continued taking her children to the program, driving north every summer from Seattle, Washington. Her son, Jack Harbert, continued on to be a young leader, involved in the organization and execution of the program. Both will be traveling in Kenya to participate in the KITS program abroad.
“My role in helping KITS go to Kenya was to help envision the possibilities,” Edelen said. “I have also traveled in Kenya many years ago and wanted to get back. When I heard of the possibility of the program I knew I wanted to be involved in helping it happen. I think that kids’ learning other cultures firsthand is most meaningful. To read about something in a book, or to watch a movie or TV show is interesting, but to experience another culture-that’s the best!”
After participating in KITS for nine years, Harbert had fully experienced the positive benefits and joy the program brought to him as a child, and as a result truly understood the benefit of participating in the youth intern program affiliated with KITS.
“Every year my excitement in going to Gabriola Island (for KITS) has been equated to other children’s excitement in traveling to Disney Land,” Harbert said.
He will work with KITS in organizing the youth interns and looking after the children participating in the program to be sure they are gaining the desired experience from the project. Along with that role, Harbert has been working with PiCT to organize the logistics of the trip to Kenya.
“I believe that the KITS program is beneficial in that it gives children experiences they wouldn’t have in their everyday life,” Harbert said. “I know that in B.C. the main experience like that is that of a large family. Many children in Western culture don’t have the positive effects of having a large family with many different aged children around them. There are so many lessons that are lost when this age range is lost.”
But despite Harbert’s years of participation in the KITS program, taking the program to Kenya will pose new learning curves and an entirely first-time experience of the program that has been familiar for most of his life.
“This is our first international experience and we’re not sure exactly the benefits that the program will have,” Harbert said. “What I think we will bring to the community is helping the children learn a lot about themselves and their mental processes, as well as starting to bring out the natural leaders that may not have been cultivated before.”
As the group prepares to head to Kenya, Harbert has thought of his hopes for the program.
“I’m hoping that I’ll get insight into the lives people live in developing nations as well as helping children be able to look at themselves and their surrounding with more awareness,” Harbert said. “I’m hoping that KITS will be able to help Kit Mikayi as well as we hope it will.”
Future hopes for the Kenya project
This trip and the taking the KITS program to Kenya this year will establish a relationship that will continue to grow and hopefully flourish. With plans for the future of KITS in Kenya, Goldbeck said she plans on a five consecutive year plan to establish a group of 40 functioning leaders from Kit Mikayi and the surrounding area to continue the program within their community. The hope is the program will eventually stand on its own, without the support from Goldbeck’s presence, and the young people of Kit Mikayi will be able to utilize the leadership skills learned in the KITS program to further their own personal growth and the development of the children and the community in the village in Kenya.
The group will be spending nearly two weeks working with the community in Kit Mikayi. The next issue will include a story sharing the outcome of the group’s journey abroad in Kenya and the program’s implementation in Kit Mikayi.
For more information, check out the organization’s Web sites.
Kids in the Spotlight: kidsinthespotlight.ca
Partners in Community Transformation: pamojapamoja.org
NOTE: Jessica Harbert, the author, will be traveling with KITS to Kit Mikayi, Kenya. This article is a part of a series of three, detailing the group’s experience and the program’s achievements.
