Mentoring Matters: Reaching Out to Community

Each handprint on the colorful mural is a pledge of sorts, a commitment. “All Children Deserve to be Safe, Stop Sexual Violence,” declare the words among the handprints.

The anonymous signatures, in red or blue or yellow or light brown or gray, are those of boys who are being held at a juvenile detention center about a five-hour drive from Livingstone, Zambia. They are just boys, about 12 to 15 years old, and some are there because they were convicted of crimes of sexual violence, explained Mentor Kangwa Yombwe of the GSGC-sponsored Friends of Change, formerly Wayi Wayi Boys Club in Livingstone, who headed the mural project.

Last month, the boys left their handprints as the culmination of an eight-week program about eliminating sexual violence. It was led by Undikumbukire Project Zambia, a nearly 10-year-old community-based program that provides legal representation, social support and advocacy for a restorative juvenile justice system in a country where youths, ignorant of the law and their rights, are often left to defend themselves. In the local Chewa language, Undikumbukire means “remember me.”

UP Zambia, as it’s known, turned to Mentor Kangwa when the lessons were finished and the mural phase emerged as it did two months earlier at another juvenile detention center near Livingstone. He was recommended by someone who knows his work; in early 2022, Kangwa won the Cynthia Zukas Young Artist Award competition sponsored by the Lechwe Trust for Visual Artists in Zambia. While UP Zambia had set the theme and paid for the paint and Kangwa’s transportation, the mural’s design was his.

First, the exterior wall needed a facelift. Old paint was scraped off, and the surface was washed and primed. Then the boys sketched the mural free-hand and started painting.

“I tried to get them involved as much as possible,” said Kangwa, extending his mentoring to troubled youths outside of his club. “I said let’s do this work together so it’s all our responsibility to be sure the wall remains clean (of graffiti).”

Then each of the 25 boys who live at the center, and their teachers, dipped their hand in paint and pressed it to the freshly whitewashed wall. “As each child put his hand there, it was a commitment,” he said. “They were saying, OK, this hand I’m putting, it’s to say I’m part of this and I’m stopping sexual violence.”

Photographs of the boy’s faces were not allowed. Maintaining the boys’ privacy and eliminating any social media involvement were crucial. But the boys, Kangwa said, enjoyed the project, and adults liked having a positive message in the middle of a detention center, which operates more like a boarding school. 

All the while, Kangwa was thinking beyond the wall in front of him.

Now, he is awaiting word from the Livingstone City Council after requesting permission for Friends of Changeboys club members to paint similar messages on available vacant walls around the city. 

“It doesn’t have to be in the middle of town, but we could do some positive messages about stopping sexual violence or gender-based violence or something about girls’ equal rights,” Kangwa said. “We could do it with the boys club and in the streets where people could read. It would be a way of reaching out to them.”