| |
|
|
| |
|
Growing up in a time of AIDS:
A children’s radio-documentary project
Helen Meintjes, HIV/AIDS Programme |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
"When I heard people saying, like perhaps when we were playing, they would say the dead one is watching her children and then I would cry. When they spoke about my mother it felt as if I could see her very close to me." Lindokuhle, 11 years old
During the course of 2005, a group of children attending Okhayeni Primary School in Ingwavuma, northern KwaZulu-Natal, were facilitated in a participatory process to produce a series of radio-documentary programmes about their lives as children growing up in a time of AIDS. This collaborative project between the Children’s Institute, Zisize Educational Trust and Okhayeni Primary School was designed to contribute to developing public awareness and appropriate responses to children in the context of HIV/AIDS by providing children themselves with the opportunity to depict their lives for a broader audience.
Not all children who participated are ‘directly’ affected by AIDS, but all are affected by virtue of the fact that they live in a neighbourhood where antenatal HIV prevalence is at least 35%.
Over a period of six months, the group wrote and illustrated books about their own lives. The process enabled the children to develop oral-history skills, and to explore personal narratives from which they could draw when making their radio programmes. They subsequently participated in a radio-training workshop in which they learned about interviewing, sound, technical radio production skills (including the use of recording equipment and the elements of producing radio programmes) and recorded their personal radio narratives. In the process, they named themselves 'Abaqophi basOkhayeni Abaqinile' – the 'Okhayeni Strong Recorders'.
The project has had a number of positive outcomes. These include:
- the improvement in the confidence of some of the most troubled children involved in the project, and much enthusiasm and pride on the part of all the children who participated;
- the children developing skills in story-telling and interviewing techniques, a range of art techniques, and in the production of radio recordings;
- the demonstration of how critical it is that children’s perspectives be made accessible to adults. At the end of hearing the programmes for the first time, the children’s parents and caregivers reiterated one after the other the crucial lessons they had learnt from their children through the programmes (and in particular, how they had never realised how important it is to talk to their children about the illness and death they are experiencing around them);
- initiatives on the part of the school to introduce more participatory methods in the classroom and into after-school club activities;
- the school encouraging parents and caregivers to come forward with information about children who are sick, or who are experiencing other difficult circumstances at home, so that the school can better support them; and
- the development of a relationship between children and their school, and children and support organisation Zisize, that did not previously exist with such depth or trust on the part of the children.
In early 2006, the Abaqophi basOkhayeni Abaqinile were trained in further radio-production techniques, and they have started producing programmes that will be broadcast on a regular basis on their local community radio station – Maputaland Community Radio. In addition, the collaboration between the Children’s Institute, Zisize and Okhayeni Primary School is continuing to develop children’s radio – and child reporters – in the area by repeating a similar process with a new group of Okhayeni learners.
Programmes produced by the children are available on CD-ROM upon request or can be downloaded from the project page.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
