Los Angeles, CA — Thursday, January 19, 2012
After many months of planning and preparing CMH launched our Global Arts After School pilot program at the Boys and Girls Club in Watts/Willowbrook, Los Angeles! We couldn’t have asked for a better start to our incredible new program. Our first CMH Global Arts After School class is Photography with a unique, fresh curriculum developed by a professional art therapist and education specialist, Jennifer Armstrong, who worked closely with the CMH team over the past six months to create a revolutionary and exciting new program. Kids will learn what it means to be an educated global citizen and connect to youth around the globe through the arts. Our pilot photography program will have a focus on photojournalism with guest teachers who are professionals in the field, inspiring students with firsthand accounts of what it’s like to use the art of photography to tell stories from around the world. In our first class, the students were giddy with excitement learning the basics of photography and what it means to have empathy for our friends in Haiti, our focus country, and what it feels like to be a global citizen.
CMH’s amazing founder Lysa Heslov, who makes Global Arts After School possible, worked hand in hand with our eager students! In addition, our great friends at MICROSOFT (Thank you Chris Talbott!) kicked off our launch day with a bang by providing CMH Global Arts After School with 13 amazing lap tops! Chris has been our hero in making it all happen on the tech side of things, this class could not have happened without his brilliant efforts and dedicated generosity!! CMH thanks you thirteen times over… and then some:)

We cannot say it often enough, but a huge thank out goes out to: Lysa for pioneering her incredible vision; Microsoft for the amazing support and technology donations; our inspiring photography teacher, Lizzie Barr; and the Boys and Girls Club of Watts/Willowbrook staff and students! And thank you to our CMH staff program coordinator, Hannah Ford, for all the hard work and dedicated effort getting everything together for a successful and smooth program launch! And finally, a thank you to Alex Mitchell for all the beautiful pictures that captured the event so we can share the special moments with you all!
A great big special Thank You goes out to FUJIFILM for supplying our Global Arts After School class with these amazing FujiFilm Finepix AX cameras! THANK YOU FUJI!
It was an amazing start to an incredible new program. Follow our Global Arts After School Blog and follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay up to date with our program as we work to connect kids in LA with kids in Haiti through art! We can’t wait for our next class this Thursday and will be sharing more very soon!!
If everyone everywhere practiced Global Citizenry, maybe Martin Luther King Jr would still be alive.”
- CMH Global Arts After School Student
When asked what the world would be like if we were all Global Citizens, one child’s response made us all think…



I recently had the honor of working with the beautiful children of
We arrived in Haiti easily enough although we ended up having 37 duffel bags full of supplies for the children, an American Airlines first. It took us an hour and half to reach our hotel. A drive that normally would have taken 20 minutes without chaos, traffic, and piles of rubble. I was amazed by the thousands of people moving through the streets seemingly not to notice that their city that was literally cracked in half at its core. As we pulled up to our quaint little hotel, The Kinam, I was shocked to see an IDP camp directly across the street. The reality, irony and subsequent guilt quickly set in. I immediately realized that I would soon be tucked into my sweet little hotel, with armed guards, running water and cold beer, and less than 20 feet away, people were forced to bathe and defecate in public. The utter and complete loss of humanity is immensely prevalent.
We at Children Mending Hearts wanted purposefully to wait a full calendar year since the earthquake to plan our first trip to Haiti. We had hoped to wait until reality had finally nested. Sadly, that reality is just as ugly as the devastating quake and very little has actually been accomplished over the past 12 months. Only a mere 5% of the rubble has been cleared, and more than a million remain homeless and hopeless. This is why we are heading to the island nation.
I thought news of our event was long over and had been busily planning our trip to Haiti and the workshop in Las Vegas with at-risk youth when I was sent this link three days ago by the NFL who had done a story on one of our kids. Then an hour later, I got an email telling me that the video had been picked up as the lead story on Yahoo and that we had over 17,000 hits. I was
We made our way to the border and easily passed through Customs feeling a sense of enormous relief when suddenly a member of the Congolese military (I happen to have a slightly different moniker for them, which I’ll keep to myself) stopped us and instructed us to take all of our bags from the car and empty out all of our belongings. We tiredly acquiesced, smiled, and attempted a futile effort to charm. After a few agonizing minutes, which felt like years, we were then allowed into Rwanda. Thus began our 7-hour journey back to Kigali.
As we were driving through the metal gates of Panzi Hospital, I looked over to my right and saw five women of various ages sitting on the ground desperately trying to get into the gates. Their eyes were blood red, tears streaming down their cheeks. They had all just been brutally raped. The look on their faces, especially their eyes, will forever be etched in my memory. They had been beaten, tortured and brutalized, and stripped of everything human, sitting on the ground in unimaginable agony, a harsh glimpse into the life of a Congolese woman. 
