Project Abéné: creative community center for children

Hello everybody, my name is Emma and together with Pablo we want to build a community/ art center for the children from the neighborhood of Abéné, Sénégal.

Our goals?

1: To have an inviting and inspiring enviroment to create music and art with children and anyone who likes it.

2. To find and build up a sustainable way based on the needs and knowledge of the locals to boost the local economy.

3. To connect the Western society with the beauty and culture of Sénégal.

Niokko bokk - "we are together"

One love, one heart.

Pablo (who grew up in Dakar and now lives in Abene) plays a very special role in the mental health of a lot of people, as well in Dakar as in Abéné.

He is a Baye Fall who always takes care of others, even if he himself has nothing to give. He always shares his food a drink with every living soul. A truly good person and a community figure. I’ve seen how people become mentally free in his presence, since he himself has the gift of always feeling happy by staying present. No matter the circumstances. That inspires people around, people who need positivity. They always feel better after visiting Pablo. We fit perfectly together, because I love hosting and also have been given the gift of connection and positive energy. We together give a lot of peace and love and that is a very important and beautiful thing. And as we’ve experienced: very welcome.

Why this crowdfunding?

We both have little starter money, so we are asking for your help to get us started on our mission to devote our lives to the local community. We want to do this by starting up two different projects:

1. Setting up creative workshops for children and women and explore how we can develop art and music together, with the goal of connecting with each sharing our cultures.

2. Setting up a local travel agency together with people from the neighborhood to create unique visiting experiences for tourists where they deep dive into all the beauty that Abéné has to offer, stimulating local shops and bars in the process.

What will we do with your donations?

We build a house and an art space in one. A place for the community to visit and create art and music and next to that a place for us to live and run our projects from. We make sure that our art space is filled with good materials and instruments suitable for creation. It's a dream to be able to build something sustainable and self-sufficient together with the people that live here, so to gain more knowledge together and learn the beauty of the local culture.

At the moment we work and live out of 4m2 meters where the children are drawing on the ground with basically no space and in the same place where we cook. With your help we can build a bigger building with an art/ work space where we get to create, get good electricity, a toilet, a proper kitchen, art supplies, wifi, solar panels and a battery, a fridge, a stove with four pits and a solid place in the shade to protect us from the burning sun.

Thank you so much for reading and if you can miss it, for your contribution❤️ It would be a big help to us if you could share this page and expand our circle.

Much love from me, Pablo and our dog Jolie Coeur.