My Journey Home
Altered surfaces · 2017 479 views
Every journey begins with a step, and we all have to start from somewhere. The person in the first panel is taking that step. They are carrying a bag on their back, the way that everyone has burdens that they carry through their life. Now speaking of my own journey, the burden was getting through school. I used to be this dull child. I knew how “ABCD” started, but I didn’t know how it ended. I battled every year with passing to the next class. Most times I was promoted out of pity – when teachers grew tired of me. I remember one teacher who looked at me and another boy, who would also often take last place. He told us that we were the kind of people who were only around to help other people accomplish their dreams. He said we were the stones that people would step on to get to their goals. As a kid, this made me feel really bad about myself. I was burdened with feeling like I can’t do it – like I should quit. My bag was full of failure, anger, stress and disappointment with life, even as a child! Sometimes we feel sure like we don’t have what it takes to go on this journey. I took another step and moved into art. During secondary school I was always drawing and even started painting. Though I was still poor at reading and writing, I had found something that I knew I was good at. Art was what made me value myself again. But the bag was still there. Art in Jos is not such a big business. Artists have a lot of difficulty selling their work. And there were still many things that weighed me down! Finance was a burden. I needed money for paints, canvas, stretchers. But I kept taking steps. Sometimes you when you find something that fits you, you just need to keep taking steps. In the next panels there are two people. Along the journey you meet with different kinds of people. Some of them will tell you you’re on the right track. Many people encouraged me in pursuing art. They saw my journey and believed in me. Others will tell you it’s the wrong path. Some people who learned I wanted to pursue art just thought it was because I was lazy, that I didn’t want to work hard like they did for a living. They did not think art was real “work.” It was a shortcut or something. Other people actually had my best interests in mind and tried to push me in the way they believe leads to success. On the journey you will hear many voices. You hold on to some of their words and take another step. We’ve come to the heart, a sign of love. You reach this stage where you have big love for the journey. Everyone can start to see the path you’ve taken. You and others start to connect all the things you’ve done, things that have happened and decisions you’ve made – to where you are now. More people start to be OK with it. You are more established. You’ve worked hard and you’re beginning to see small fruit from your labour. Like when more people started to take interest in my work, even if they couldn’t buy. Or like when I sold my first big piece. I started selling to hotels, and sending work to Abuja for tourists to buy. You look back at the steps you’ve taken and you realize that none of them were an accident, or a mistake. You are moving. The helping hand is above the heart. You’re not far from where you are heading to and people want to help. The helping hand takes you home. You’ve made it! Your dreams have come true. You are working at what God gave you to work at. Things might not be easy, but you know that you were made for this and you are doing it. The journey doesn’t end here. The world is full of people at different steps of the journey. Kids are still at the beginning, many looking at the rest of their lives with a big bag of expectations, uncertainties, failures and disadvantages on their back. In Jos we have a lot of children who have been displaced by the Boko Haram in the Northeast, and lots of children whose parents just can’t always afford to send them to school. They are just starting but they already have huge burdens to carry. Many of them have a dream about what they want to do – some may even want to be artists! We who are at the end have to go back and bring them along. To be the ones who help them carry their burdens, who give them good advice and encourage them, who celebrate with them when they start to walk their path with more confidence, and who turn back around with them when they too reach home. This is our journey home.
Many peacebuilding and development professionals work from their offices for governments or NGOs. Emerging artist Luka Chohu (also known as Lucho) works out of his own small compound in the community of Angwan Juma’a, Jos, Nigeria. This is a place where people “hustle” from morning till night to provide for their families – a place where art is generally not encouraged as a viable career path. To be sure, this artist does his fair share of hustling. But in between, he finds time to stretch old sheets over hand-made wooden frames to engage in his own form of peacebuilding and development work. From his small studio, Lucho fuses his artistic talent with his passion for social justice, to communicate the joys and challenges of everyday life in Nigeria; promote peaceful coexistence; and develop the capacities of those around him. His interest in art began in secondary school: “I always had a story to tell. But because I was not good with words or numbers, there was no way for me to tell it.” He therefore began using paint to express his own experiences and feelings. Following secondary school, Lucho moved to the capital to understudy Abuja-based artist, Kelvin Ubani. He then began using his new skills to move his art into broader themes of social justice, inter-identity peacebuilding and the beauty of Nigerian cultures. The purpose of Lucho’s work is twofold. First, using various media, his own art beautifully and honestly presents the paradoxes, joys and challenges of everyday life in Nigeria. It acts as means for himself and others to step back from the daily “hustle,” make sense of what is, and imagine what could be. In the end, what is produced are pieces with both aesthetic value and the ability to communicate such realities to both local and international audiences. Second, Lucho dreams of also using his talent to increase the creative and communicative capacities of others, particularly children in Jos who cannot access proper education, either because of displacement or poverty. Through volunteer work with local NGOs and schools, he has begun gaining experience in this area creating programs for internally displaced and local children learn how to use art to express and value themselves. Truly, Lucho lives as an artist, a development worker, and a peacebuilder.
