Saving the Batwa with art
Marsha Conn plans to help Batwa pygmies make art for profit. The Batwa need the income because their old ways of making a living have been...
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Seattle Times staff columnist
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Marsha Conn, center, with James Baranga and Mamia Magret from the Kitariro settlement in Uganda.
Marsha Conn plans to help Batwa pygmies make art for profit.
The Batwa need the income because their old ways of making a living have been denied them. Worse, they have to reshape their culture to fit a new existence.
In the early 1990s they were moved out of their homes so that gorillas could have the mountain forests they once shared.
Conn is a retired teacher from Seattle whose acquaintance with the Batwa came about by chance, as is often the case with significant events.
Chance is also the way she became a teacher.
She told me she was approaching graduation from Boston University when her parents asked, 'Well, now what are you going to do for a living?' She hadn't given it a thought. So she took her English lit degree and applied to graduate school. She emerged an English teacher.
Conn taught in Chicago schools for 20 years before moving to Seattle in 1986. She had always integrated art work into her teaching and did more of that here including teaching other teachers how to do it before settling in at Seattle's Hawthorne Elementary School.
She loves traveling and nearly every summer during her teaching career, she would take off to see some new part of the world.
A few years ago, a friend bid at an auction on a trip for four to Bolivia to benefit Renton-based Smiles Forever, which trains girls to do dental work.
Conn went along and did an art project for the young girls.
A show at the Columbia City Gallery of portraits done by the Bolivians sold out on opening night and the
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