I didn’t really notice the chairs at first. I saw the students carrying them across a field between buildings, but I was focussing on the throng of students. I wasn’t thinking about the chairs at all. I assumed carrying chairs between buildings was a one off occurrence. No one ever mentioned anything about not having enough chairs.
Neither was I terribly surprised to see the students carrying their chairs to the church, nearly half a mile up a dirt track, through long grass and tiny farms, to SolarAid’s Solar Cinema*. Why would the church have enough seating for a hundred kids and teachers? BYOC: Bring Your Own Chair.
It wasn’t until I was editing that I noticed this BYOC phenomenon wasn’t restricted to one school, or one day. There was footage I hadn’t noticed from other schools. In fact, the image above is a different school from most of the chair carrying footage in the movie.
“From the time we received the solar facility from SolarAid, we have not bought any litre of fuel – not even a drop of fuel – in school. That means that the school has able to save some good money which can be diverted to other areas – need areas – in the school. We can use the same money to books for the students.” – Habil Malika, Headmaster at Mbakalo Secondary School in Kenya:
Or chairs. Solar power saves money that could be spent on chairs.
To me, chairs say ‘need.’ The need is obvious if you don’t have something as fundamental as enough chairs. Obviously books are more essential to learning, but I just can’t help but take chairs for granted. (It’s undoubtedly a sign of how sedentary I’ve become, spending so much time sitting in front of computers, sitting on trains, sitting in cars. I imagine my body will conform to the design mistakes of my office chair, which will slowly distort my skeleton and ultimately cripple me, and I’ll end up confined to a wheel chair ;-)
It occurred to me that it might be a good idea for a school to avoid buying chairs on purpose, as the heavy lifting would help meet the children’s physical education requirements. Perhaps that’s why the school board chose rigid, heavy, hardwood chairs instead of something lighter, like the white, plastic moulded patio chairs one finds scattered across the planet, more prolific than McDonald’s. What are the relative economics? What’s the environmental impact? What’s the physiological impact?
On the one hand, learning begets schools which begets buildings and desks, and desks beget chairs. On the other: you don’t sit around a campfire in a Corbusier lounger.
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*SolarAid’s sole vehicle in Kenya is a van painted like a fireball with a large solar panel on top which powers a mobile solar powered cinema, or Solar Cinema. We’ll have a movie about it soon.
It’s been a while since we posted here in the Glass Workshop. We’ve been giving our PURL mailing and video a bit of time to mature. But it’s time to start sharing some early results.
We’re getting close to the business end of this experiment… where we send out our first video to donors. And I’d like to invite you to take part and see how it works exactly as SolarAid’s donors will.
