Rising Voices » REPACTED

REPACTED: Looking Back And Learning From The Past

Rezwan — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 21:57:58 +0000

The former Rising Voices grantee REPACTED trained displaced Kenyans (during the 2007 election violence) living in the camps how to tell their own stories online so that their ordeal is not forgotten. They use magnet theater to sensitize and mobilize people and induce behavioral change on certain issues like AIDS. According to a retrospective post in their blog:

More than 1,200 Kenyans reportedly killed, thousands more injured and over 300,000 people displaced and around 42,000 houses and many businesses ending up being looted or destroyed, Bombing, abductions and killing of innocent people by the ragtag militia called Al-shabab kind of became a daily phenomena thereby leading Kenya to taking radical decision in trying to wipe out and end this menace of the al-shabab.

Kenyan men brandish their weapons after Kenya's questionable December 2007 election. Image by Daniel McCabe. Copyright Demotix

This year Kenya's next election will be held. Political stability can steady Kenya's turbulent growth. REPACTED (Rapid Effective Participatory Action in community Theater Education and Development) is now on a mission to make Kenyans learn from the past and not to repeat the same mistakes:

REPACTED has in last few months been engaged in civic education program dubbed ”TUFANYE SOTE BIDII NDIO WAJIBU WETU” a line borrowed from the Kenyan national anthem. The sole aim of the program which is being funded by UNDP Amkeni Wa Kenya is to sensitize Kenyans on their role and holistic participation in constitutional matters pertaining to DEVOLUTION. REPACTED intends to make sure that by the time Kenyans will be going to the ballot box they will have been empowered constitutionally.

Image courtesy REPACTED

Last April, REPACTED hosted a beauty pageant for the high school students of Kenya to provide them a forum to enable them discuss issues affecting their sexual lives. The theme of the event was “Using beauty as a source of inspiration towards behavioral change”.

You can get more updates in their blog and Facebook account.

Blogging Positively: Maurine and Her Activism with Repacted

Eddie Avila — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:20:36 +0000

Longtime Rising Voices grantee Repacted from Nakuru, Kenya continues its work in surrounding communities using magnet theater as a way to engage the community, and youth especially, through dramatic interpretations that present real-life situations involving health issues such as HIV/AIDS and TB. The members of the Repacted team showcase their role-playing abilities in order to provide awareness and education to the community, but also to demonstrate how one would go about making critical life decisions to prevent these health issues.

One of these team members, Maurine, was recently recognized for her work on the Repacted project blog for being “one of the foremost HIV activists in our town Nakuru and its environs.” Nearly seven years ago in 2004, Maurine contracted the virus, and after receiving this information, she saw it as an opportunity to educate others. She was interviewed by Repacted to tell her story of how she learned about her status. Her story was featured in this blog post, when she took the test at a local clinic after a lengthy illness:

She was asked to go collect her results after 2 weeks and to her shocker the medics refused to hand over the results to her insisting that she should be accompanied by somebody and luckily on that particular day she was with her friend who was waiting for her at the waiting bay, so she went back and called him to accompany her and that’s only when the results were handed to her friend but only after her consent. it is Maurine’s friend who first told her about her being HIV positive and I bet this information came into his hands when he remained behind to talk to the Lab practioner and to her surprise her friend told her that he knew what she was going through because he also had been infected with HIV Virus and had lived with it for over 3 years.

Maurine during a magnet theater performance

Prior to being test, Maurine admitted that not knowing her status was easier, since she did not have to face any of the pressures associated with the amount of information related to HIV/AIDS. But once she learned that she was positive, it “was a life-changing moment for her. Her voice came out and it came out powerfully.” It was then that she joined the Repacted team and gained the confidence to be able to tell her story to local communities:

Maurine was able to over stand that she had a story that needed to be told, and with the strong network of peer educators and volunteers at REPACTED she was encouraged and reminded that positive youth need a voice. There is a lack of storytelling among the youth, and this is especially true with positive youth. They feel shame or guilt for contracting the virus and feel that they need to lie about it and not be upfront.

It was these experiences that helped Maurine tell her story and how being a part of Repacted helped her personally:

Speaking really helped Maurine articulate herself as a person. It gave her a new direction to go in — not only is it inspirational to other people, but it inspired her to clean up her life and make something positive of herself. Joining REPACTED has affected her in a positive way emotionally. Maurine is a very strong person now because of it, more educated and more life-experienced than a lot of 26-year-olds because of it. On the other side, she has started feeling more supported and appreciated as she is able to branch out into different kinds of communities. Maurine thinks she is kind of a rare breed she is here with REPACTED to inspire people. “I’m here, I’m a woman, I’m HIV positive, and I’m living my life positively and normally.” It can happen! It can happen.

Rising Voices: 2010 In Review

Rezwan — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:57:27 +0000

2010 was an eventful year for Rising Voices and its community. Théophile Kouamouo, one of Francophone Africa's leading bloggers and the project leader of the Rising Voices grantee Abidjan Blog Camps, had been arrested for publishing a newspaper report and was released after spending two weeks in prison. HiperBarrio from Colombia won the First Community Journalism Award given by Antioquia University in the category of Best Community Web platform.

The community bade farewell to the outgoing Director of Outreach, David Sasaki and welcomed the new Director Eduardo Ávila.

This year Rising Voices, in collaboration with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, awarded microgrant funding of up to €2500 to three Egyptian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to train citizen media to underrepresented groups in Egypt so that they can voice their opinions.

Now let us look at some of the notable news of the grantees community we featured in the Rising Voices website in 2010.

Featured Bloggers:

Throughout the year we interviewed bloggers from different Rising Voices projects and here is a list of those features.

Shinetsetseg (Shinee) Sukhbaatar

Shinetsetseg (Shinee) Sukhbaatar from Nomad Green Project in Mongolia
Olzod Boum-Yalagch from Nomad Green Project in Mongolia
Saki Golafale from Ceasefire Liberia project in Liberia
Nat Nyuan-Bayjay from Ceasefire Liberia project in Liberia
Nora Catalina Urquijo from HiperBarrio project in Colombia
Yesenia Corrales from HiperBarrio project in Colombia
Edgar Andres Yana Lisme from Voces Boliviana in Bolivia
Getutza from Blogging The Dreams Project in Romania
Tahina Rakotomanarivo from FOKO in Madagscar
Ahmed Awadalla from Exploring Taboos project in Egypt
Randa AbulDahab from the Women of Minya Day by Day project in Egypt
Sara Abd Al-Maktari from the Empowerment of Women Activists in Media Techniques (EWMAT) project in Yemen
Award Winning OLPC (XO) laptops Bloggers from Uruguay - Part 1, Part 2

The New Grantees Of 2010:

Barcamps And Conferences:

Otgonsuren Jargal presenting Nomad Green at the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2010 in Chile. Image by Krzysztof Pawliszak/GV. CC BY

The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2010 took place in May at Santiago Public Library in the capital of Chile. Four Rising Voices projects were presented during the two days of the summit. Here is a two part report (Part 1, Part 2) highlighting the presentations and the reactions from the members who attended the conference.

Photo of Catalina Restrepo speaking at BarCamp Santa Cruz. Photo used with permission by BarCampSCZ.

Catalina Restrepo of the HiperBarrio project in Medellín, Colombia was invited to speak at BarCamp Santa Cruz, Bolivia in January. The event also featured Hugo Miranda of Voces Bolivianas from Bolivia.

This year members of HiperBarrio were invited to the Campus Party in Colombia and was told to do something different, use the pin hole camera technique to record the activities of CampusBlog.

Contests:

In February the Best Of Malagasy Blogs (BOMBS) 2009 awards were announced. Several bloggers from FOKO, the Rising Voices grantee in Madagascar, won the awards.

Empowerment Of Women:

With the help of a Rising Voices microgrant, the project “Empowerment of Women Activists in Media Techniques” is teaching blogging to female politicians, activists, and human right workers in Yemen to bring them in global conversation.

Ghaida'a Al Absi, the project leader, says: “EWAMT project is like a candle with other candles, which are lighting up the darkness in Yemen.”

Blogger Ahmad Awadalla of “Exploring Taboos” project conducts sexuality education workshops in Egypt and wrote about discussions about the topic of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) with his students.

Language:

Ruben Hilary of Voces Bolivianas project, with some local volunteers of El Alto, Bolivia, established the virtual community Jaqi Aru. The goal of the Jaqi Aru website is highlighting and spreading Aymara language in internet through creation of digital media contents, which involves translation, use of multimedia and social media tools.

Culture, Travel And Lifestyle:

Bus shaped balloon at the Festival de globos de La Loma 2010

The citizen journalists of the Rising Voices grantee Hiperbarrio shared some photos and videos of the Balloon festival of La Loma (Festival de globos de La Loma 2010).

Nine citizen journalists from Nomad Green in Mongolia visited Taiwan to learn more about Taiwan's social and environmental issues and local cultures and receive citizen media training.

Sustainability:

Hiperbarrio from Colombia finally got its legal identity this year as a nonprofit corporation. This allows the organization to continue to grow as they can be hired by public and private institutions for outreach activities. According to an agreement between the EPM Foundation Network and HiperBarrio from Colombia, citizen media outreach activities in 3 new communities in 3 libraries of Medellín (Villatina, La Esperanza and EPM) were started in 2010.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation awarded Ceasefire Liberia project a $10,000 grant to start a new arm called Ceasefire. This project will focus on creating a citizen media project for African immigrant and African-American youth in Staten Island based on the Ceasefire Liberia model.

Thanks to the bloggers of the different projects of Rising Voices we could read many stories from Liberia, Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Mongolia, Romania, Colombia, Yemen, Republic of Congo, Egypt, Kenya, Bolivia, Ukraine, Uruguay, etc. Some Rising Voices bloggers also participated in and contributed for the Blog Action Day 2010 and the One Day On Earth initiatives. We hope to continue hearing from them. The ‘Introduction to Global Citizen Media Guide' has been translated in Macedonian and Albanian.

We wish the members of the Rising Voices Community and our readers a happy and prosperous 2011.

Citizen Media on World AIDS Day 2010

Eddie Avila — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 16:32:10 +0000

December 1 marks World AIDS Day, which has traditionally become a time when people around the world come together to raise awareness about the impact that the pandemic has had on society. This year in many parts of the world, such as Egypt and Kenya, hundreds of events will take place to bring people together for education and activism.

World AIDS Day 2009 in Singapore. Photo by 24seven Communications and used under a CC license.

Even though the 2010 UNAIDS Global Report released on November 23 provided some promising news, namely that the global infection rate for new cases has fallen by 19% over the last decade down from 3.1 million in 1999 to 2.6 million in 2009, it is still a disease that affects 33 million people. The report found that much of this progress can be attributed to behavioral change and prevention, as well as the fact that now approximately 5.2 million people have access to treatment, which makes it less likely for them to pass the virus to others.

This is definitely some good news, but when the statistics number in the millions, it is easy to think of each of 33 million people currently infected as just a demographical number. And in some parts of the world, the infection rate does not follow the global trend, which is a reminder that the fight is far from over. That is where citizen media, and Rising Voices' focus, can come into play by supporting those projects that aim to put a personal face on each of those cases as a member of a local community and to show that HIV/AIDS continues to be a pressing concern.

More and more bloggers, who are either HIV-positive themselves or who are strong advocates for those affected by the disease, have been joining the blogosphere. A map of HIV-positive bloggers and groups who blog about HIV/AIDS was compiled in 2008:

View Blogging Positively in a larger map

Many of these bloggers, such as Juan Carlos [es] from Ecuador, Hector Toscano [es] from Argentina, and Qi Kuan [zh] from Taiwan, continue to blog two years after initially being added to the interactive map.

In addition, Rising Voices grantees, such as Repacted based in Nakuru, Kenya continues its tradition of supporting the Mr. and Ms. Red Ribbon campaign. The campaign is an annual beauty pageant for people living with HIV/AIDS as a way to “celebrate beauty and fight stigma.” AIDS Right Congo, has been publishing bilingual articles about the disease on their blog. In Ukraine, Pavel Kutsev of the Drop-In Center is another advocate who has written about harm reduction practices that can help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Rising Voices has also been introduced to a number of new projects using citizen media around the world, such as the Key Correspondents. This project is managed by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and HealthDev.net which supports 250 citizen journalists in 50 countries who write about public health issues including HIV/AIDS. Each citizen journalist shares stories about personal experiences or how the disease has affected their local community. For example, the citizen journalist “Fungaizim” from Zimbabwe recently wrote about a firsthand experience at a Voluntary Counseling and Testing Center (VCT) in Harare in an effort to show whether or not the service can use improvement.

The counsellor assigned to me was a woman who seemed very disinterested in the task of counselling. In fact all she asked me to tell her was where I lived, my age and what brought me to the centre for a test. There was no real dialogue being sought here, just the basic facts about who I was, which is definitely not the way to create a safe environment for a client.

[…]

As she asked her questions, I began to question in my head whether this would be the type of counsellor that people, particularly young people, would feel they could confide in. I mean, even if she asked, I don’t think anyone would feel too comfortable divulging their sexual history to a person so obviously unapproachable. Ultimately, the counselling function of the process is about creating a relationship from the beginning of the journey right to the end, by trying to ensure that the client doesn’t drop out at any stage of the process.

And once the results were available, Fungaizim was deeply concerned about how the counselor presented the outcome. It was noted that it was a different counselor than the one who was involved in the pre-test conversation.

As the post-test counsellor prepared to show me my results, she asked me a deeply loaded question, “Are you sure you won’t kill yourself if you find that you are HIV positive today?” If that isn’t the epitome of the very stigma that we are trying to conquer through testing, then I don’t know what is. How can a counsellor speak in that way and even suggest such a negative reaction to a positive test as death?

Other Key Correspondents that write about the issue HIV/AIDS are based in Cambodia, Zambia, Uganda, among others.

This active participation in the use of citizen media to raise awareness, bring personal stories to light, and help reduce stigma about HIV/AIDS indicates that there is growing interest in the use of these digital tools. This is an ongoing interest of the Rising Voices community. In 2008, members of the RV community came together to hold a series of discussions and interactive live chats about how citizen media can help encourage conversations about the disease and its effect on society. From that, a year later, the Blogging Positively e-guide was developed, released, and subsequently translated into four languages.

In commemoration of World AIDS Day, members of this Blogging Positively community will come together on December 2nd to discuss the next steps for the guide and how to build relationships with projects, organizations, and bloggers that hold this common interest. The live chat (Facebook Event) is open to all interested in this topic. Please visit Rising Voices on December 2nd at 4 PM GMT (11 am New York, 2 pm Buenos Aires, 4 pm London, 6 pm Cape Town, Beirut, 7 pm Nairobi, 9:30 pm New Delhi).

Link to the live chat platform.

Repacted: Mr. and Miss Red Ribbon 2010 Walked In Style

Rezwan — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 22:08:57 +0000

A contestant on ramp of the Mr. And Miss Red Ribbon Beauty contest. Image courtesy Repacted

Mr. and Miss Red Ribbon is a charity event organized annually by Nakuru Youth groups including the Rising Voices grantee Repacted from Nakuru, Kenya. As a major build up activity towards World Aids Day on December 1, 2010 this event deals with eradicating stigma and discrimination associated with HIV/AIDS.

This year, after two months of preparation, Mr. and Miss Red Ribbon 2010 took place on Saturday 27th of November at Hotel Bontana in Nakuru. From the Repacted project blog:

MR. and MISS RED RIBBON, an annual beauty pageant with a difference as it brings together people leaving with HIV and aids together to celebrate beauty and fight stigma.

The event attracted a total of 20 model participants 12 of them being positive from various C.B.O that offer support to PLWH. It also attracted 4 guest performances from outside making the total number of participants to 24.

On the run-way were models of different sizes not forgetting age ranging up to 52 years of age all in an aim to fight the ‘beast’ stigma with beauty as the strongest.

Judges of the contest. Image courtesy Repacted.

Collins Dennis Oduor of Repacted writes about the objectives of the contest:

It creates awareness on different issues directly associated with HIV/AIDS stigma and discrimination, positive living, gender based violence, reproductive health and methods of protection against sexually transmitted infections. It also aims at encouraging the public to take a HIV test. As a build up to the world AIDS day, the project will reach out to 1500 people encourage them on the importance of knowing their status.

Build up activities will be organized in the communities around Nakuru town; the activities will include; Community auditions for the models, mobilization for counseling and testing, and workshop for the models.

After the main event, activities will be organized in different settings targeting the general population, the winners shall remain peer mentors in their respective communities, and they will conduct outreaches and participate in health action days.

Winners of the Red Ribbon beauty contest 2010 Daniel Mwangi and Fridah Abio. Image courtesy Repacted.

Around 400 people attended the event and Daniel Mwangi came as the winner of the Mr. Red Ribbon and Fridah Abio was judged Miss Red Ribbon for the year. See more images of the event at Repacted blog.

Here is a Twitter reaction on the event:

mmocharo: attended a miss red ribbon Nakuru yesterday, a huge step in fighting stigma.

REPACTED: Civic Engagement Outreach To Educate About Constitutional Reforms

Rezwan — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 21:50:16 +0000

Post election violence in Nairobi, Kenya in April, 2008. Image by Flickr user ActionPixs (Maruko). CC BY-NC-SA

For the past two decades Kenya has seen more than 5,000 people losing their lives through social and political clashes and in many cases people in power were accused of instigating the unrest. Constitutional reforms in Kenya to strengthen local government and rectify regional resource imbalances have been advocated since long by many quarters.

The harmonized draft constitution proposed by the Committee of Experts was disclosed to public on November 17, 2009. The draft constitution curbs the president's powers and beefs up the Prime Ministers role as the head of Government. It promises devolution to the provincial level - current 8 provinces will be now referred to as regions, it will reform land ownership laws and give regions more control over their affairs. It is expected that these steps will reduce ethnic tensions and protect the country's economy from further unrest and violences like the one that broke out in early 2008 after Kenya's presidential election, killing around 1,300 people and forcing displacement of 300,000 people.

However one issue in the proposed constitution has attracted much controversy. It is the retention of Kadhi court system for the Muslims (10% of population) as it is in the current constitution. Nanjala Nyabola at Guradian Comment is Free provides the background and the cause of debate on the Kadhi court system. Church groups and politicians are opposing the new constitution mainly because of this issue and on the 13th of June bombs were exploded in a rally protesting the constitution, which killed 6 people and injured more than 70.

On August 4, the referendum endorsing the draft constitution is scheduled to take place. This video from Citizen TV Kenya collects the views of some voters on whether they are familiar with the contents of the document and what their expectations are for the august 4th referendum poll.

REPACTED, the Rising Voices Grantee in Kenya felt that they should undertake civic engagement outreaches to educate citizens about the new proposed constitution. The Repacted team has been training displaced residents (after post election violence in 2008) living in the camps how to tell their own stories online so that they're ordeal is not forgotten. They are also using Magnet theater, a forum theater initiative to induce behavioral changes and preventing stigma about HIV/AIDS.

From its new project blog:

The outreaches are not meant to take one side or another, but simply to encourage citizens to make read the constitution and make their own informed decision. Here are some photos from our most recent outreach, in Pondamali.

Here is another slideshow depicting more civic engagement by Repacted in different places.

Here we are also posting a music video of the song ALIKUWA MSEE performed by the Repacted ground arts which is a group within Repacted that use hip hop music as a tool for change among the youths. The song is a story of youths with the potential to make a lot of difference in the community but that is not to be as they fell victim of drug abuse and they are now unable to change the course of their lives. the group comprises of MC Jex (aka Vincent Omondi), Oddie (Eric Wanyama) and Signature (Tony Mwenda):

REPACTED: Mr. And Mrs. Red Ribbon Pageant And Prison Outreach

Rezwan — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:59:55 +0000

We have got several updates from the Rising Voices grantee REPACTED. In last November the Mr. and Miss red ribbon pageant was held in Nakuru, Kenya in an effort to eradicate stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS. This beauty pageants hosts both HIV infected and uninfected models. REPACTED organized this with the help of Voice of Roses and the National Aids Control Council and it attracted more than 1000 youths from Nakuru. The Minister of Special Program Dr. Naomi Shaban distributed the prizes on the World AIDS Day 2009.

Mr. Red Ribbon Peter Okola. Image by Collins Dennis Oduor

Miss Red Ribbin Mary Nyokabi. Image by Collins Dennis Oduor

Collins Dennis Oduor writes in the project blog:

The participants took up to three weeks preparing for the event and undergoing peer education training and care of the HIV/AIDS infected.

The guest speaker of the day Miss Maureen Anyango gave a testimony of her life with HIV/AIDS since her infection at eighteen years of age, the discovery, her denial and her eventual acceptance of her status and the various challenges she faced from the community. She called out for people to get tested in order to discover their status and take appropriate steps to protect themselves. At the end of the event, Peter Okola and Mary Nyokabi were crowned Mr. and Miss Red Ribbon amidst screams, cheers and applause by the audience.

Here are two short videos of the event:

Last year only the two winners of the contest engaged in outreach activities. But this year REPACTED is coordinating an ambitious program that will harness the popularity of the 35 models of the Red Ribbons pageant 2009. As per Collins:

Alongside community outreaches by the models REPACTED will conduct a monthly meeting with the 35 models. Introducing the 35 models to blogging is a process that requires some consent due to the health status of the models. We are thinking of starting with activities aimed at setting a rapport with the models before organizing for a training on blogging.

The main goal of the initiative is to introduce more positive bloggers in the blog-sphere so that some issues related to health and HIV affecting the models can be shared without involving the third party who have always taken advantage of the situation.

The models have opened the blog titled Mr. And Mrs. Red Ribbon where their outreach activities will be posted. Here is an explanation of the Red Ribbon concept:

The Red Ribbon is the international symbol of AIDS awareness that is usually worn by people all year round particularly during the World AIDS Day every December 1st. [..] The Red Ribbon Symbolizes Blood, Danger and Love. The tails of the Ribbon were designed to point down to symbolize the life flowing away.

In the blog Peter Okolo (Mr. Red Ribbon) talks about an outreach effort in Nakuru:

This Valentines Day we made an effort to visit three video dens within Bondeni, Ponda Mali and Free Area of the Nakuru Municipality with a locally produced movie titled “SHUGA”. The movie was free of charge and was graced by the representatives of PLWHA who facilitated the session by giving the audience a small talk on self stigma, name calling and separation and segregation of persons living with HIV and AIDS.

Prison Outreach. Image by Collins Dennis Oduduor

Collins also informs:

To honor the theme of this year’s World AIDS Day “Universal Access and Human Rights” REPACTED in partnership with the Nakuru GK Prisons kicked off build up activities by organizing four days of free HIV Counseling and testing targeting the inmates, officers and their families and the surrounding community at the Nakuru GK prison. Prisoners are people too therefore it is a human right to access reproductive health information including information on HIV and AIDS.

Here is a video of the world aids day build up activities at the Nakuru GK prison:

Hip-Hop as Cosmpolitan Citizen Media

David Sasaki — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:50:27 +0000

Seeking greater social inclusion through new communication technologies is a strategy with a long and accomplished history that has persisted through waves of new inventions including the telegraph, radio, television, satellite, and of course, the Internet. Many such projects are highlighted in Alfonso Gumucio's Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change, which was published in 2001 and features more than 20 case studies of participatory communication projects that use video, radio, theater, and the Internet. Similar projects are featured every week on the websites of the Communication for Social Change Consortium, Internews, The Communication Initiative Network, Panos, and Rising Voices.

But perhaps the most successful experiment in bringing so-called marginalized communities to the attention of the mainstream came not with community radio or the Internet, but rather the cassette tape and the boombox. With roots in the traditions of griots in West Africa, work songs from the Mississippi Delta, and dancehalls from the Caribbean, the birth of Hip-Hop as we know it today is generally credited to the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) who organized parties at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York where he joined two turntables to mix rhythmic beats with funk music. Partygoers were invited to grab the microphone and rap on top of the music as a way to creatively express themselves and show off their verbal dexterity. Those early parties on Sedgwick Avenue helped form the sound and community that would influence what are now seen as the pioneers of hip-hop: Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and The Sugarhill Gang.

In the early 1990's hip-hop's center of gravity migrated from New York City to Los Angeles, where N.W.A., Ice T, and others popularized gangsta rap as a genre of hip-hop that focused on the violence, partying, and hustling on the rough streets of Compton, California. It was only with the release of “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)” in 1993 that New York City was once again nationally recognized among hip-hop fans.

From Hong Kong to Staten Island to Liberia

Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman recently caught an interview on Tom Ashbrook’s public radio program, On Point with Wu Tang Clan leader Robert Diggs, also known as “the RZA.” During the interview we discover an unlikely intersection in the 1980's between the lives of Ashbrook, a Yale graduate and career journalist, and Diggs, a poor, aspiring rapper in Staten Island who sought shelter in a seedy movie theater that specialized in pornography and kung fu flicks. Ashbrook, it turns out, was a foreign correspondent at the time based in Hong Kong where he supplemented his income as a journalist by dubbing kung fu movies into English. It is entirely likely that one of the many kung fu films that influenced the Wu Tang Clan's unique style of hip-hop featured the voice of public radio's effusive Tom Ashbrook.

New York City's outer boroughs today are barely recognizable yuppie incarnations of their former selves. Gentrification has taken over Brooklyn and is increasingly creeping into the Bronx. In fact, a long and costly protest campaign has sought to protect 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the birthplace of hip-hop, from being converted into a new development. But Park Hill, the home community of the Wu Tang Clan, has changed far less than neighboring Brooklyn across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. While tourists often take the free Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan for its uninterrupted views of the Statue of Liberty, rarely do they spend anytime exploring Staten Island itself.

One of the most sudden changes to the island's demographics came in the late 1980's and early 1990's when civil war broke out in Liberia, a West African country that was founded by freed American slaves. Liberian refugees fled violence that was stirred up by the American-educated warlord, Charles Taylor, and arrived to Staten Island by the thousands. They now make up the largest community of Liberians living outside of Liberia and their troubles in assimilating to a New York state of mind have been featured in Mother Jones, The Village Voice, WNET, and twice in the New York Times.

Ruthie Ackerman is a freelance journalist who is currently writing a book about the social impact of the Liberian Civil War and the integration of Liberian refugees in the same Park Hill community that gave rise to the Wu Tang Clan so many years ago. But rather than merely speaking on behalf of Liberians Ackerman decided to launch Ceasefire Liberia, a citizen media project which teaches Liberians living in Monrovia and Park Hill how to use digital media to tell their own stories.

As the above video shows, Liberian refugees have had a difficult time assimilating to Park Hill's established community and culture. But music - especially hip-hop - has been an effective channel to help narrow the cultural divide. Genocide Records is a collective of Liberia-born rappers and MC's whose music is clearly influenced by New York's hip-hop legacy, but with lyrics that emphasize the struggle of West Africans living in the United States. They performed this past July at Park Hill Day:

From New York to Mongolia, Madagascar, Colombia, Bolivia, and the World

As noted above, those early hip-hop parties hosted by DJ Kool Herc at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue were most definitely influenced by his early years in Jamaica were DJs at dancehall parties would talk over the records they were playing. Hip-hop then evolved further in New York during the 1980's and it hasn't stopped evolving in its spread from New York to California to Mongolia and Madagascar. Zuckerman notes in his post that shortly after the release of Wu Tang Clan's “Enter The Wu Tang (36 Chambers)” he began seeing graffiti all over the world - including Mongolia - celebrating the hip-hop group.

Wu Tang graffiti in Ulaanbaatar.

Hip-hop's universal appeal has made itself apparent in countless blog posts across many of the Rising Voices citizen media projects. In Bolivia both Cristina Quisbert and La Mala Palabra of Voces Bolivianas honored the life of Aymara rapper and El Alto resident Abraham Bojorquez (the post has also been translated into Aymara).

In Madagascar Tahina, Joan, and Stéphane of Foko Madagascar have each highlighted some of the impressive Malagasy hip-hop acts, including Raboussa:

You can learn more about Malagasy hip-hop at the excellent blog HH Dago. Tahina also recommends “Zazavavin-drap” by Malagasy female rappers Nah and Bug:

The award-winning Colombian citizen media project HiperBarrio even has a rapper among its members. Last year Jorge Jurado used his rhyming skills to compose a song about citizen media and its link to his community's graffiti culture. Henry Barros from HiperBarrio also produced two short documentary videos about rappers in San Javier La Loma.

Finally, from the REPACTED project in Nakuru, Kenya blogger Eric Owanyama says that hip-hop is the “single biggest movement that allows youths to explore their creative minds independent of class rooms and allow them to learn from the society and speak philosophies that have proven to teach more than most educational systems and syllabus teach.”

As awkward as it may be, even Vladimir Putin has recognized the importance of hip-hop as a medium of communication with young people around the world. Whether “hip-hop is dead” as some have argued of late remains to be seen, but its global domination over the past twenty years reveals just what can be accomplished when a culture of remix, creative expression, and technology collide.

Repacted: Training Community Members

Rezwan — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:07:41 +0000

Rising Voices grantee Repacted got press recently. Its co-founder Dennis Kimambo was featured recently in the BBC pods and blogs podcast. In this interview Dennis talked about training local communities to blog and how this helps the communities to tackle the spread of HIV/AIDS. [Download the Interview in mp3 format from here (3.21MB)]

Earlier MTV Staying Alive Foundation published a video on the works of Repacted. From their website:

At the moment they are paying particular attention to youth in prisons and sex workers - both of which are high risk groups.

They are training 75 ‘change agents' (peer educators), organizing 3 youth symposiums, along with 11 community theatre outreach groups - complete with mobile testing units,

As if this weren't enough to keep co-founders Dennis and Collins busy, they're also creating and distributing a monthly magazine, establishing a support group and organising monthly life skills demonstration forums.

Recently the other co-founder Collins Odu Oduor published an update of the project detailing all the works it had done since 2001:

REPACTED’s work is unique in that it involves the community in coming up with solutions to the issues they face. We do this through the use of community theatre, in a method better known as “Magnet Theatre”. This method starts with tailor made community folk media mobilization techniques that pulls the audience to the magnet theatre site and enlists the audience in an active interactive discussion through a scripted performance designed to provoke the target audience’s feelings, attitudes and beliefs with an aim of inspiring positive behavior change.

Since 2005 REPACTED has been conducting theatre for development outreaches in the Adventist Relief and Development Agency, Abstinence and Behavior change for the youth project in two districts. REPACTED is a MTV Staying Alive Foundation two time award winner, the award is aimed at reaching youth in the Community, special learning institutions and Prisons with Magnet Theatre Outreaches and mobile VCT. Citizens’ Media Outreach is a project involving the community in video and photo blogging inclusive of basic computer skills. Funded by Rising global Voices, the project involves the training of community members in the use of information and communication technologies.

Here is a presentation showing the works of the Repacted project:

Now let us look what the Repacted bloggers are saying:

Collins Otieno Sailas informs:

Dancing stigma related to HIV\AIDS is a dance conveying a message to the community trying to educate on how to live with those people who are affected with the disease by loving, caring and excepting them back to the community because they are our brothers and sisters. Sawwa dancers are the ones staging the show at Nakuru players theater in October and after that we will take the stigma dance to various schools.

Eric Wanyama, an aspiring script and film director, who has managed to write his own script, discusses about his work:

Captive is a screenplay of a short film that fictionally poses a question on the fate and security of orphaned children. [..]

I have written the screenplay and together with REPACTED-Kenya, we would like to make the project a reality. The REPACTED-Kenya Members are ready to participate as the cast in the production together with other various members of the Nakuru Players Theater.

Eric also asks the readers for support of this project by monetary or other means.

Collins Odu informed recently:

Preparing for 2009 Mr. and Miss Red Ribbon. It will be better than the past events. We welcome all support from well wishers so as to meet the budget and continue fighting stigma and discrimination in the community. It is only through leadership that we can address societal and communal problems. Let us join hands and take the lead.

Images taken from Repacted Facebook group.

Blogging Positively Guide Encourages Open Conversations About HIV/AIDS

David Sasaki — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:33:37 +0000

We are pleased to announce the release of “Blogging Positively,” a collection of case studies, interviews, and best practices about citizen media related to HIV/AIDS. You will be introduced to some of the leaders and veterans of the HIV-positive blogging community, and also to citizen media projects which aim to spread more awareness about the pandemic. The guide contains tips for workshop facilitators and teachers, and points readers to helpful resources for new bloggers just getting started.

The Blogging Positively project began two years ago when Kenyan blogger Serina Kalande, volunteered to lead a working group to discuss how citizen media can best be implemented in the field of HIV/AIDS. Many of the project proposals we've received at Rising Voices have been related to spreading awareness about the pandemic. We wanted to learn from those proposals - and also from existing citizen media initiatives - to better understand how new media tools can be used most effectively to spread awareness and encourage discussion about HIV/AIDS-related topics. We also wanted to better understand some of the risks and obstacles facing bloggers who are HIV-positive, or who regularly write about HIV/AIDS-related topics.

Three online chats brought together people from all over the world, and from a wide range of fields. In addition to the creation of this guide, the participants of the chats collaborated on the creation of a map-based directory of HIV-positive bloggers who bravely defy stigma and discrimination to communicate their situation to the rest of the world.

To celebrate the release of the Blogging Positively guide, which has been two years in the making, today we begin a one-week campaign to update our map of HIV positive bloggers. If you are a positive blogger, or if you have suggestions for links to add to the directory, please send a message to Global Voices Public Health Editor Juhie Bhatia.

The Blogging Positively guide was authored by Janet Feldman of the Kenya AIDS Intervention Prevention Project Group and ActAlive, which encourages the use of the arts and media to address HIV/AIDS and other human-development challenges. Additional contributions were made by Solana Larsen, Sahar Romani, and Juhie Bhatia. Daudi Were coined the term “Blogging Positively.”

The importance and impact of this guide depends on our collective ability to get it into the hands of activists, and to encourage their contributions to the global conversation that is curated and amplified everyday on the Global Voices website. Please consider sharing this with your network of friends and blogging about it. If there are HIV/AIDS organizations and support groups in your region, please send them a copy of the guide.

Finally, if you would like to learn more about what bloggers around the world have to say about the AIDS pandemic, don't miss our Conversations for a Better World series which has so far featured commentary about HIV/AIDS from bloggers based in Africa, China, Cambodia, and the Middle East & North Africa.