The Greyton Farm Animal Sanctuary is so much more than just a safe haven for orphaned, neglected, sick and retired farm animals. It also runs a humane education programme, through which learners and educators of the Emil Weder High School in Genadendal painted a large colourful mural on a school wall.
“The humane education programme is funded by VegFund, a US-based foundation,” said Nicky Vernon, founder and chairperson of the sanctuary. “We started in September 2022 and the project should go on until the end of this year. Marshall Rinquest, Gabby van Heerden and I are involved in the project teaching the teachers.
“We take six teachers, one from each school in the area, every two weeks for two hours on a Saturday morning. We help to open up their compassion and empathy through art. They are learning to express themselves through art. We look after them and shower them with love and respect and we honour them for what they are doing for the children.”
She said the purpose of this is to help educators teach with more empathy and compassion so they create more caring classrooms that are more conducive to learning.
“We follow up by going into the classrooms with the teachers and teaching the children about kindness to animals. It’s like a foundation to set up the class and children to be more open, to learn about kindness to animals, to each other, to themselves, to their families and to their school and teachers. We try to build a less violent society.
“It’s a bit of a pilot project,” says Vernon, “but we are hoping to get enough evidence through monitoring and evaluation in order to get the Western Cape Education Department to help us roll it out further afield and possibly to get something like this into the curriculum in future years.”
Vernon said a spin-off from this was that Anthea Adonis, principal of Emil Weder, was so impressed by the impact the programme was having on even one teacher at the school, and how in turn this was affecting the school, that she asked whether the teachers and some of the learners could paint a huge mural featuring animals.
“Seven kids came forward and painted the mural in two days,” Vernon said. “A further spin-off is that we are now raising money to teach 12 to 14 particularly talented children in weekly art workshops with Gabby van Heerden. The aim is to help them build up a portfolio to obtain a bursary to art college to study design.
“It’s a gift that just seems to keep on giving. As the teachers are more engaged and see the value we are asked to do more things. I am running around trying to raise funds to help them to build more compassionate schools.”
Said Adonis: ”It was a blessing to experience so unique an atmosphere. Even though each person was working on their individual artwork on the mural, we were working together on a bigger picture, a larger vision. It was a truly beautiful experience… learners and educators on a level playing field creating something so beautiful together, it makes me smile every time I pass it by.”
Dala Paint supplied the colour paint and Vilco the paint for the base coat.
