Chicken, fox and coca cola cans

Transcription

1 Final report Chicken, fox and coca cola cans Piotr Chmielewski Polska Akcja Humanitarna C Training Youth in Various Form of Media Kenya, Nairobi Mathare Youth Sport Association

2 Summary Internship took place in eastern districts of Nairobi in Kenya. GLEN participants were working with children from Mathare (one of the biggest slums in Nairobi), Eastleigh (Somalian immigrants district) and Komarock and Kayole (middle class districts). Because of poverty, social exclusion and cultural diversity of that area it was quite challenging surrounding of work that gave GLEN participants a lot of valuable lessons. During some periods of internship there were strong political and social tensions between some parts of Kenyan and Somalian societies but they didn t affect work or safety of GLEN participants. GLEN partner in this project was Mathare Youth Sport Association (MYSA) that for the past two decades has been helping young people in their social life and sport activities. In MYSA young people from eastern districts of Nairobi are involved in leadership training, environmental clean-ups, HIV/AIDS awareness programmes and other community service activities. GLEN participants participated in Shootback photography and filmmaking project of MYSA. Their responsibilities included providing training of visual media (film, photography, animation) for children with difficult social background. GLEN participants also participated in documentation of MYSA events and activities and helped MYSA with visual PR materials. Main result of project were two shortfilms, one photo exibition and one stopmotion animation movie. GLEN participants also managed to bring back to life darkroom in MYSA headquater. Staż miał miejsce we wschodnich dzielnicach Nairobi w Kenii. Ta część kenijskiej stolicy jest stosunkowo uboga, w szczególności, gdy zostanie porównana z zachodnimi rejonami miasta. Stażyści GLEN pracowali z młodzieżą z Mathare (jednego z największych slumsów Nairobi), Eastleigh (dzielnicy somalijskich imigrantów) oraz z Komarock i Kayole (dzielnic klasy średniej). Z uwagi na zjawisko ubóstwa, społecznego wykluczenia i duże zróżnicowanie kulturowe tego rejonu praca w nim stanowiła spore wyzwanie, które wiele nauczyło stażystów GLEN. Podczas stażu zaostrzył się konflikt pomiędzy kenijskimi i somalijskimi społecznościami wschodniej części Nairobi, ale nie wpłynął on na pracę i bezpieczeństwo uczestników GLEN. Partnerem projektu było Mathare Youth Sport Association (MYSA), które od 20 lat zajmuje się pomocą młodzieży w jej społecznych I sportowych zajęciach. Poprzez MYSA młodzi ludzie ze wschodnich dzielnic Nairobi uczestniczą w szkoleniach z zakresu pracy zespołowej, ochrony środowiska, kampaniach informacyjnych dotyczących HIV/AIDS oraz szeregu innych projektów. Stażyści GLEN byli częścią Shootback filmowo-fotograficznego projektu MYSA. Ich zadaniem było prowadzenie warsztatów z zakresu filmu, fotografii i animacji dla dzieci zagrożonych wykluczeniem społecznym. Stażyści GLEN uczestniczyli także podczas prac związanych z dokumentacją działalności MYSA oraz wspierali działalność z zakresu PR tej organizacji. Głównym rezultatem stażu były dwa filmy krótkometrażowe, animacja poklatkowa oraz wystawa zdjęć. Stażyści GLEN zdołali również przywrócić do życia ciemnię fotograficzną znajdującą się w siedzibie głównej MYSA.

3 The situation there (political, environmental, cultural). After post election violence in 2007 inhabitants of Nairobi seemed to be very careful to not let happened such a situation again. In many talks that we had about upcoming presidential elections people were emphasizing need of peace and multiethnical cooperation. Nevertheless during our internship there were strong ethnical (in Kayole) and national/religious (in Eastleigh) tensions and fights with several deaths. Eastleigh district of Somalian emigrants, is main area of Al Shabaab attacks. This paramilitary Islamic group is showing their protest against Kenyan invasion in Somalia by terrorist attacks on churches and public transport. Every attack increases Kenyan-Somalian tensions that very often end in public riots. Very shocking for me were also public mobs when several thiefs were killed by angry crowd. East part of Kenyan capital is quite poor especially in comparison with west lands of the city. It is said that is dangerous because of high crime level but during our internship there were no single situation that I felt that my health or life is in danger. In every part of Nairobi people behaved very friendly to me and gave me a lot of their attention. The hosting organisation and its work. MYSA is very big, recognized and experienced Kenyan organization. As a GLEN participants we were not so much involved in its main activities football campaigns and publics cleanups, because our job was connected with Shootback project. In my impression this part of MYSA activity, that several years ago brought that organization international fame and recognition, now got low priority. Such a politics of MYSA results in lack of finance support for Shootback that currently is based on volunteers and has only one paid worker. Shootback tries to document MYSA main activities such as football tournaments, organize film festivals and filmmaking and photography workshops for children. Leader of this project and its interns have a lot of interesting ideas and they are full of good intentions but in my opinion Shootback miss coherent strategy and evaluation of its work. There were many projects that got stucked in the middle or their results lacked proper exposition. Nevertheless Shootback create a lot of space for creative work and can give many possibilities for implementation of artistic and social ideas for people who are taking part in this project.

4 The process of your internship, the co-operation with your contact person and your GLEN partner. Before our internship we received detailed information about our future job, although sometimes it took some time to get answers to our all questions. After our arrival we had meeting with our contact person and supervisor Peter Ndolo who listened to our expectations and ideas and gave us advices and his opinion about work that was waiting for us. We decided to divide our internship into three parts to have workshops with different group of children in each month of our internship. We also took decision to work separately to reach higher number of children and to let outcome of our work to be bigger. Nevertheless, as GLEN team we were giving each other support and during my stay in Nairobi I never felt alone or lack of backup from my tridom partners. We were in close contact with Peter Ndolo, our contact person and supervisor of our programme. Communication wih him was frequent and without any problems. He was taking care of us, both during our work and our leisure time and In my opinion he played very good role as our supervisor. Peter Ndolo was open for all kinds of our ideas and opinions and he was always giving us support when we asked him for it. On the other hand he left us a lot of freedom in implementing our own ideas that for me created perfect system of work. We felt quite integrated into the daily work of Shootback, our department, but we feel a little bit aside the things that are happening in the entire MYSA. This is probably caused mainly by the fact, that the Shootback itself is at the moment perceived by MYSA staff as a low-priority project. During my internship in Nairobi I was a tutor of three different workshops. Topic of the first one was camera obscura and pinhole photography. Due to lack of founds and photographic equipment, together with children we decided to construct our own cameras from empty boxes and cocacola cans. Thanks to photo-paper, chemicals and fully equipped darkroom that we found in MYSA headquarter it was possible for us to develop our pictures. To be honest, final effect of this workshops surprised even me. We managed to take several very interesting pictures, developed them and held photo exhibition in one of local restaurant. Second of my workshops that took place near Mathare slum was about stop-motion animation. Children were asked to tell local popular legends and stories that they know and to chose one that they want to animate. They decided that our animation will be about meeting between chicken and fox where clever mammal discovers unconventional way of hunting. We constructed puppets from wire and clay and started to animate them with hundreds of photos. Final effect is possible to see on YouTube after tipping kuku na fox. Topic of my third workshop in Eastleigh was timelapse. Together with children we wanted to introduce local district and workshops participants by using technique that allows to animate reality. Unfortunately because of lack of time we managed only take photos editing them into time lapse was a task that I had to do at my own after coming back from internship.

5 Beside workshops I also cleaned and managed to reestablish a Shootback darkroom, which was not being used for several years in MYSA headquarter. That gave us an opportunity to make an analogue photography lessons. During free time from our main activities we tried to inspire and teach local youth to take and develop pictures in traditional way but this part of our work didn t finish with spectacular success. Problems, challenges and solutions. The biggest challenge during our internship in Shootback was lack of founds. We didn t get any money for organization of our workshops and that situation brought us many difficulties. We had to buy materials for workshops and pay for transport on our own. Usually our workshops took place during all day and during lunch break we felt responsible to buy food for participants but doing that every meeting was beyond our financial possibilities. As a solution of this financial problem we tried to organize cost-free workshops but it wasn t always possible. We had also some problems with system of our work it was not possible to have workshops during week days because most of children had to attend to school. That is why our proper working time was limited only to weekends that didn t allow us to use all potential and ideas that we had. My biggest defeat was connected to darkroom. Shootback has a lot of equipment and photo paper that allows to work with traditional photography without any cost for several months. Despite that I didn t manage to find anybody who would be interested in systematical work and who would take care after darkroom at the end of our internship. I think that main reason of this situation was chaos, inefficiency and bad structure of work during my extra workshops in darkroom. Definitely it was a task that I didn t expect to be so challenging. Results, learning effects and experiences We completed series of the workshops in Komarock, Eastleigh and Mathare. We did filmmaking and photography workshop resulting in a short fictional film, videoclip and series of photo stories. We also realized a camera obscura workshop with the outcome of an photo exhibition and stop-motion animation and timelapse workshops with result of one animation and one videoclip. Besides our work during workshops, we also helped MYSA staff with various tasks, for example evaluating girls football tournament, writing fundraising proposals and preparing graphic materials for MYSA events.

6 We learned a lot about working in completly different cultural enviroment and because of that we could have reflection about our style of work. I hope that we learned a lot from Kenyan culture and that experience of working in slums will help us to shape our personalities and choose best priorities in our lifes. Conclusion & perspective In my opinion internship in Shootback project is extremely valuable and creative experience and it gives a lot of space and possibilities to implement own original ideas for work with children. Nevertheless interns should know in advance that they will be working in an extremely low-budget project, so fundraising before coming is highly adviced. The other possibility is creating a working plan of cost-free workshops or to let one of the interns to be focused only on marketing and fundraising. For our Global Education Activity we would like to make a heavy use of visual media materials that we took in Nairobi, both with our workshop participants and on our own. That means we are thinking about organising a photo exhibitions, film screenings and making a visual media workshops in our home countries. We can also write articles for various newspapers and magazines or organize a public lecture about our work in Kenya. I would like to repeat stop-maotion animation workshop in Poland and other countries and create a website where children from different parts of world could present their local legends in stop-motion technique. After internship in Nairobi slums I feel really inspired by this way of work and I m seriusly thinking about connecting my future with this kind of job.