HiperBarrio

Catalina Restrepo was in class when the University of Antioquia was shaken by small explosions when disturbances and riots started last May 9th. Following, she tells her tale.

Well, I was going to post a while back but I hadn’t found anything relevant that deserved to be written…

Today I’m back here again, trying to make words portray the fear that I felt yesterday while I was in the middle of a riot between the police and some university students.

I was in the Theory of Social Sciences class. The teacher had arrived at about 9:00 am and was somewhat angry because no-one was answering his questions, making it evident that very few of us had read the document we had as homework from the previous class.

It was close to 11:20 when several explosions were heard. The class continued and the teacher insisted that we should concentrate.

From one momento to the next, the explosions were closer together and people were leaving their class rooms looking for safer places, since the building where I am usually found is one of the most affected when events of this magnitude take place suddenly.

I had already come down from the third floor, but I remembered I had to deliver an assignment and I had to go back and get to the last floor to find the teacher’s office… Quite scared, obviously.

After handing in the paper, the classmates I was with decided we should seek the University entrance that is closer to the Metro Station; but there were so many people that were coming out like opened flood gates from every single imaginable place, that we decided instead to sit down somewhere we could feel safe.

We hadn’t been sitting even five minutes, when we saw up close some hooded and masked men and we even thought that they might be coming towards us. They moved on and some meters beyond they exploded something that made a very big noise.

Facing the prescence of these people, the people who minutes earlier had been conglomerated around an ATM machine looking at who knows what, left terrified; just like my classmates and myself at that moment, who seeing that those who were facing off with the police were so close, we quickly found a way to get out of the University.

Once I was outside, fear started invading me, the heat was terrible and a pounding headache wouldn’t let me be. The bit of [tear] gas that I had to stand managed to affect me greatly…

Facing events like these I don’t dare to take sides; but I will say that weapons used to make people feel stronger and braver are not the way to solve the problems for which they decide to fight.

After it all ended, the only thing left was anxiety. As far as I saw, nothing changed. The country didn’t stop having internal refugees and the people who are unemployed, hungry and homeless are still the same ones.

I would like for someone to tell me what change took place yesterday among pipe bombs, firecrackers, stones and paint; because to tell you the truth, I didn´t see any.

Gabriel Jaime Venegas, Argos, has been the glue to hold HiperBarrio in La Loma together. He is mentor, teacher, support and promoter of the project and each and every one of the individuals that calls themselves ConVerGentes in the community. This past week they got together, and I´m translating his tale:

Since the middle of last year, when we started on the road to this thing called Blogs along with Álvaro Ramírez and since the story of Suso made us start working as construction workers building his house, we hadn’t had a break.

Since “every saint has his day” and thanks to the Asociation of Community Mothers Loma Hermosa, we managed to make saturday night the night to get together, watch a movie and share a barbecue.

At fibe people arrived to help prep everything and install equipment, then we saw the movie Freedom Writers and finally we ate, we saw the pictures we’ve been taking and we listened to a bit of music.

We missed all of those who couldn’t be with us because of their obligations or because they are outside the country: Yesenia Corrales, Milton Araque, Isabel Guarin, Alejandra Medina, Alfedo Marulanda, David Sasaki, Álvaro Ramírez, among others who slip my mind.

Thanks to everyone for being there!

Translation of post by Jorge Montoya on hiperbarrio.org [ES]

OnMarch 7th and 8th the Digital Culture  Festival in Medellín took place, Medelink 2008 [ES] . We were there representing our project. The main objective we drew for our presence there was to bring more people into our project of sharing knowledge with as many people as possible.

Two whole days standing behind a table, where some participants from previous workshops talked about their experiences and motivated others to join our network. AS a result, we know have a database where we have collected  a good number of people willing to be either facilitators or give workshops, and others who are interested in taking the workshops themselves and help the hiperbarrio family grow.

We also met with people belonging to local innitiatives who expressed the desire to join this project which bit by bit has stopped belonging to us and know belongs to everyone. We already have scheduled appointments with these organizations to see how we can work with their needs and what will be the steps to follow.

After this event, we are left with a positive balance regarding expectations and achievements. We need to look towards the future which will surely also bring great satisfaction to those of us who believe that we are doing useful, worthy and worthwhile work.

To each and everyone who has expressed their support, to those who volunteered, to those who are waiting to be a part of this process, to the Medelink organizers and the HiperBarrio team who were those two days telling their stories in person: Thanks!

———-

More about the event:

• Medelink va por buen camino [ES] [Víctor Solano]
• Top 10 Medelink 2008[ES] [La Rana Berden]
• Reflexiones post Medelink ¡Cultura libre y viva! [ES] [Carolina Botero]
• Después de Medelink [ES] [Medea]
• Medelink 2008 [ES] [Patton]
• Musicatosis en Medelink [ES] [Mancho]
• Tras la primavera de las blogs [medelink] [ES] [Cristóbal Cobo]

At la Loma, the hiperbarrio team has taken it to help out their community member, Manuel Salvador Pizarro Sierra  better known as Suso.

 First, for a bit of background, we have the feature story written on the Rising Voices blog by David Sasaki:

In San Javier La Loma, a hillside working class community on the outskirts of Medellín, one of the most well-known local celebrities, “Filthy Suso”, had, until recently, also been one of the most enigmatic. Thanks to the work of HiperBarrio, a citizen journalism outreach project of Rising Voices, the story of “Filthy Suso” is now known both locally and internationally. Led by Yuliana Isabel Paniagua Cano, Catalina Restrepo Martínez, and Gabriel Jaime Venegas, the collective of new citizen journalists created both a video and article about “Filthy Suso’, La Loma’s local collector of recyclables. Below are both the video and text, translated from the original Spanish versions. It is worth noting that HiperBarrio’s article on Suso was also published on the front page of the weekly local newspaper, Conexion.

You can read the fully translated article on the Rising Voices blog. The following video was made by the Hiperbarrio participants to document Suso´s history and was subtitled through dot.sub:

Gabriel Jaime writes about a fund raiser which took place last week in their community, trying to gather enough cash to build Suso a deserving home:

Se ha logrado cambiar la imagen empobrecida y miope que se tenia de Manuel Salvador Pizarro por una de reconocimiento, respeto, dignidad y gratitud que merece; al tiempo que se encuentran nuevas significaciones del papel de su familia y el suyo propio en la historia local.

Esta vereda unida por una causa, nos ayuda entender el valor que ha tenido el trabajo comunitario en la construcción del destino de nuestros pueblos.

El día que Suso nos falte, no se ira al olvido, quedara grabado en el imaginario de miles de personas que lo conocen, no solo en su comunidad sino en el mundo entero gracias al Internet, la prensa escrita y al voz a voz que ya convirtió esta historia en el mito de “El Suso”.

Lo más importante de este proceso es que comienza a regenerar el tejido social roto por la violencia que tantos estragos provoca, aun hoy, en la existencia de las personas que habitan esta vereda y que solo sueñan con vivir en paz al lado de su familia y las personas que aman.

We have managed to change the poor and miopic image that people had of Manuel Salvador Pizarro for one of recognition, respect, dignity and well deserved gratitude; at the same time that new meanings are being found of the role his family and himself have played on the local history.

This bourrough which came together for a cause, helped us understand the value that community work has had on the construction of our people’s destiny.

The day Suso is no longer with us, he won’t be forgotten. He’ll be branded on the minds of thousands of people who know of him, not only in his community but throughout the world thanks to Internet, written press and word of mouth which made this story the “Suso” myth.

The most important aspect of this process is that the broken social makeup of our people, damanged by violence which causes so much pain, is being mended. People who’se only desire is to live in peace with their families and the people they love.

Carmen Elena Paniagua, better known for her online nickname of Camela, wrote a beautiful poem in her blog Baúl de Letras in honor of Suso, recording the day his old home was demolished to make room for the new one;

 AL FINAL

Por última vez el viento silbará entre lal tapias;

los muros centenarios y leales morirán con sus secretos.

La historia, reducida a meras partículas de polvo, solo quedará grabada en la memoria cansada de un viejo.

Con cada golpe de la almádena, su corazón se estremecerá y evocará un recuerdo; una añoranza de pantalones cortos, de pies descalzos, de bigotes de leche y cocechas de café.

Su mirada parcial, se detendrá dulcemente en un éxode de cucarachas; y de las ruinas rescatará las antiguas llaves de la casa y las guardará en su bolsillo, tal vez para abrir la puerta del pasado en una noche de reminiscencias.

Ya no las paredes desatarán su coloquio en las noches, fidedignos relatos que en el espesor del barro se escondían de la luz del día;

ya no los bacanales de extrovertidos fantasmas;

ya no los abrazos íntimos con la soledad;

ya no las anotaciones que a falta de papel, se esculpían en los muros terrosos.

Ahora solo hay escombros; una vida regada por los suelos; los pedazos de una existencia, que se rompe al final de una honda caída.

IN THE END

For the last time, the wind will blow between the walls,

those centenary and loyal walls will die with their secrets.

History, reduced to mere dust particles, will only remain recorded in the tired memory of an old man.

With each strike of the sledgehammer, his heart will shiver and a memory will come up; yearnings for short pants, bare feet, milk moustaches and coffee picking.

His partial sight will sweetly stop on the cockroach exodus; from the ruins he’ll rescue the old keys to his house and will put them in his pocket, perhaps to open a door into the past on a night full of memories.

No more shall the walls untie their evening conversations, faithful stories that hide within the thick mud walls during the daytime;

No more shall the extrovert ghostly parties take place;

No more the intimate hugs with solitude;

no more the note taking that due to a lack of paper were sculpted on the dirt walls.

Now there is only rubble; a life scattered on the ground; pieces of someone’s existence bronken at the end of a long fall.

A video taken by David Sasaki when he met Suso can be found on his blog as well.

After the wonderful presentation up at la Loma de San Javier, many of the blog posts that the participants wrote were included in Equinoxio magazine, and David Sasaki also wrote about it, giving his firsthand account of what it was like to share the day with the people from La Loma, both participants, family and other community members. You can read that article by following this link.

This community presentation also opened other doors: la Redecom, the alternative media network has approached us and they´re interested in working with us to jumpstart the network and give the members proper citizen media training and a better online presence.

Learning how to use flickr during the BPP workshop.

This week, David Sasaki, Director of Outreach for Global Voices, and the person behind Rising Voices, has been giving a couple of workshops in the Pilot Public Library. The first one, yesterday, had to do with opening a flickr account and uploading pictures, as well as joining groups, and David created one specifically for the workshop, adding notes, placing pictures on a map and commenting on other pictures. Today´s workshop will be a continuation of yesterday´s, where participants will learn how to edit pictures with picnik.Next week, we have two important meetings: on one with we will also meet with Medellín Digital, a government effort to improve computer literacy and to check out if we can participate in their annual fair in February, the other one is with Medelink, who organizes a yearly digital culture festival during March, and in which we hope to participate.

Hiperbarrio is growing, and it´s great to see how far we´ve come.

On December 18th 2007, our Hiperbarrio closing ceremony took place. We got together at the auditorium in the Library Park Presbítero José Luis Arroyave in San Javier. Gathered were both teams of coordinators from the two Hiperbarrio proyects in the city of Medellín: the one in La Loma de San Javier and the ones in Santo Domingo.

The Library Network, who arranged for us to have the auditorium and the VideoBeam were present, and Dr. Piedad Aguilar, who directs the Library Network spoke at the beginning of the event to show her admiration for the work that has been done. David Sasaki, one of our biggest fans, who also happens to be Director of Outreach for Rising Voices, the organization that fathered our project and supports us through a micro-grant was also present. Global Voices author Eduardo Ávila, who runs the Voces Bolivianas Rising Voices project in Bolivia was also present.

We had slideshow presentations with pictures that the participants took as well as videos and multimedia presentations of the work that was done during the whole process of new media technology training.

As the evening progressed, both participants and organizers started talking about the project, their experiences, and the steps that should be taken into the future, speaking out about weaknesses in the projects and dreaming about what we would like to see in the future. The main problems mentioned were technical issues like internet connection speed and the lack of a stable connection when we work. Some participants who went to the Santo Domingo workshops from afar mentioned transportation costs as one of the problems.

Milthon, a La Loma participant who writes in his blog Helelbensahar, as Akenaton, presented us with an entertaining clown sketch. In the picture, he can be seen joking around with Alejandra. After that we all had some refreshments and milled around, later moving the casual conversations outside to continue talking after the library closed.

Edit: Please view our Hiperbarrio.org article in Spanish, with different pictures of the event, kindly taken by David Sasaki.

Alfredo Marulanda tells us what has been going on at La Loma de San Javier:

The last workshop given was on editing, formats and narrative resources; I´m worried about the little productivity of the group, we have established that during these days they would begin formulating or establishing projects. On Saturday October 6th I´ll go back to La Loma to work with the group of ConVerGentes (with whom we worked last Saturday as well), specifically about the production of documentaries, there is a very interesting project which requires much attention, Videobarrio will also be at this workshop, I would like very much for the Videobarrio participants to integrate themselves a bit more with convergentes since they have good projects and I think that between the two of them great work can get done.

Next week I´ll be informing you ow what we saw in the workshop and of what we talked regarding the projects to take on.
Regards,
Alfredo

Gabriel Jaime Vanegas Montoya, librarian at the Pilot Public Library in La Loma of San Cristóbal writes in Spanish about Martin Weber and Miguel Orts Vizcarra´s visit. Both are photographers for the project “Pizarrón” and Latin America´s dream map.

HiperBarrio is a socially geared program in citizen media based in Medellin, Colombia.

Our objective is to help people in the working class neighborhoods in the hillside slopes surrounding Medellin to tell their stories through videos, blogs and images, empowering them with the possibility of deciding how they wish to represent their lives, their communities and Colombia to the rest of the world through online media technologies.

Medellin has experienced a cultural renaissance in the past few years where peace has spread through our city. This is mentioned in the podcast interview made by David Sasaki, Director of Outreach for Global Voices:

First we become acquainted with Medellín, Colombia; its violent past, its current tenuous peace, and the mathematician mayor who is comissioning gigantic modernist libraries in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

In the second part of this podcast, which will be published later in the week, we’ll focus on the HiperBarrio project and learn how a few motivated Medellin bloggers are headed to the hills of their city to teach the tools of citizen media to working class youth.

You can listen to the first part of the podcast here: Medellin, Colombia: From Kidnapping Capital to Renaissance City

The second part of the podcast here: HiperBarrio: Local Stories, Global Audience

We believe in blogs, in Creative commons, in finding simple solutions to commonplace problems, in sharing knowledge in social and personal growth through the appropriation of common spaces such as the public libraries and neighborhoods where our projects will take place.

The Public Library Network which has become a cornerstone of our project. The Library Network and their objectives travel parallel to ours:

Promote Capacity and Social Capital Development: Libraries should continue to be entities for building society and strengthen cultural identity, foster participation, develop capacity, complement social practices and the educational and cultural spaces; they should stimulate the communities to transform information into knowledge but to do this, they must use ICT and they need to transcend the barriers of space and time and provide access to local and global information. Each of the libraries will play a central role in their community by developing information centers with access to internet, online catalogues, virtual libraries, etc. The development of local capacities will also go hand in hand with the development of local content. The leaders of the 36 libraries of the network will be trained and empowered to be content contributors. This will serve two purposes, the development of local relevant content and the capacity development of those researching and producing the content. In the future the network will offer services for users so they also become content contributors and participants in virtual communities.

Norman Oder from the Library Journal writes:

Five new libraries are parts of the Parques Biblioteca concept: “library parks” for education, recreation, and culture. In the slum of Santo Domingo Savio, with a population of 170,000, the Parque Biblioteca España “includes a library, auditorium, Internet rooms, day care center, and an art gallery,” the Times noted. “Such a beautiful thing, right here with us,” observed one resident. “Who could have imagined that?”

The Public Library Network has agreed to provide us with access to their fully equipped computer lab with wireless internet access at the Library Park España in Santo Domingo Savio for our bimonthly workshops. In exchange for this, participants will create videos representing their communities´ values which will be published in the Library Network´s website.

So far there is a video production team called VideoBarrio located in La Loma de San Javier, and a blogging team called ConVerGentes which began prior to conversations with the Library Network, as well as an intensive workshop in citizen media which lasted 3 days and was named “Ciudad Comunicante”. In Santo Domingo a week long workshop also took place: tallersantodomingo.

Our plan is to make all this community generated content visible and available to a wider audience by placing it in visible spaces in internet, translating articles and subtitling videos, a process which began with the recipe for a connected community from the “Ciudad Comunicante” workshop.

All these are reasons why Juliana Rincón, Jorge Montoya and Álvaro Ramírez, Mauricio Múnera, Diego Gómez and Juan Diego Estrada have united their efforts through HiperBarrio and are working together to create skills in these communities, delivering tools and knowledge which will make the participants able to tell their stories and document their own history.