Culture and HIV/AIDS

HIV/AIDS: The Creative Challenge produced 22 case studies of the work of project partners. These case studies illustrate a range of cultural approaches to HIV prevention and care from Cambodia, Vietnam, Kenya, South Africa, Jamaica and Trinidad.

Developed during 2006 & 2007 in collaboration with the partner organisations using questionnaires, visits and interviews, they are snapshots of the activities of these organisations.

ABC Ulwazi Radio

Body, Mind and Soul

South Africa, all nine provinces

ABC Ulwazi develops, scripts, produces and broadcasts 12-minute episodes of the Educational Entertainment radio soap opera series, Body, Mind and Soul in four major languages, English, Zulu, Sotho and Afrikaans. The target audience is young people aged 18 to 35, and older adults.

Each episode is built around critical HIV and AIDS issues and messages that move beyond the mainstream understanding of HIV and AIDS. Episode topics include primary and secondary abstinence, partner reduction, faithfulness, delayed sexual debut, condom use, antiretroviral drugs, post exposure prophylaxis, PMTCT, and HIV testing.

Body, Mind and Soul aims to influence positive change in HIV preventive behaviour, to support attitudes that overcome stigma, and to promote awareness of prevention, treatment, care and support strategies.

 

Abila Creative Centre

It’s our life’ debating conventions

Kisumu, Kenya

The aim of the debates is to create and sustain intra- and inter-generational dialogue (across gender, culture and age lines, in schools, in the community and especially among young people) about culture, its practice, and its role in communication, especially on matters pertaining to HIV.

 

Artscape ADE (SoundTrack4Life)

SoundTrack4Life

South Africa, Western Cape

Soundtrack4Life (ST4L) equips high school communities in the Western Cape, principally in the Cape Town area, with the skills to face the challenges of HIV/AIDS. It offers life skills training and performing arts at schools, enabling participants to explore personal choices in an interactive environment.

The project also recognises the importance of training and supporting educators in counselling and mentoring skills.

ST4L operates through consultation and research to ascertain needs and issues before, during and after each year’s programme. It operates from a Human Rights basis and a non-judgemental, non-prescriptive approach.

 

Ashe Caribbean Performing Arts

Vibes in the World of Sexuality

Jamaica/Caribbean

The project aimed to disseminate knowledge of:

• ‘Super Safer Sexual Skills’ [communication; trust; honesty]
• sexual challenges [uncontrollable urges; jealousy; guilt; ignorance etc]
• sexually transmitted diseases and their symptoms [gonorrhoea; AIDS; syphilis]
• healthy ‘Safer Sex’ choices [abstinence, protection or reclaiming their virginity]
  
  

The BARCAM

Let’s Move

Caribbean

The project aims to:

• Provide an avenue for peer educators to develop holistic solutions that are culturally sensitive, in response to the global HIV and AIDS pandemic
• Highlight the importance of healthy family functioning, in STI (including HIV and AIDS) intervention programmes
• Provide tools to peer educators to enhance their delivery of STI (including HIV and AIDS) information to various target audiences
• Create the awareness of the necessity to assist young people to make informed choices
• Strengthen the partnership between The Trinidad Youth Council and CARICOM
• Cater to the needs of multiple-intelligences, demonstrating the effectiveness and potential of participatory methodologies with a focus on Educative and Developmental Theatre
• Develop a cadre of trained peer educators, building the human resource of young Caribbean nationals
• Create spaces where peer educators are able to practice their new skills and creatively develop approaches that are relevant to their countries and communities
• Create an environment where peer educators can achieve personal development
• Create synergy between the peer educators and encourage the formation of a network after the training

Centre for AIDS Development, Research and Evaluation (CADRE)

Tsha Tsha TV Series

South Africa

Tsha Tsha is an entertainment-education television drama series focusing on young people and dealing with love, sexuality and relationships in a world affected by HIV/AIDS. Set in the small fictional rural town of Lubusi in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the drama aims to explore young people’s lives as they make their way through the passage to adulthood, developing self-efficacy and humanity at an individual and community level.

 

Children First Agency

Mobile Reproductive Health and Information Unit – Bashy Bus

Jamaica/Caribbean

The project aimed to:

• disseminate HIV/AIDS and Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health (ASRH) information, counselling and services to over 20,000 adolescents and youths along major transport routes, in rural communities and popular hang out spots for youths in the parishes of St Catherine, St Ann and St James
• increase the awareness and knowledge of vulnerable adolescents to sexual and reproductive health, abstinence, safe sex, sexuality and HIV/STI prevention in a wholesome environment using an adolescent/ youth friendly approach
• provide rapid testing and Voluntary Counselling and Testing to young people
• provide skill building training in the uses of cultural approaches to 40 young persons (peer educators) to undertake interventions among high risk adolescents 10–24 years of age, in their communities
• reduce stigma and discrimination against persons living with or affected by HIV/AIDS through advocacy and public education

Community Focus Group

Artistic Approach to HIV/AIDS

Embakasi, Nairobi, Kenya

Using poetry and other performance forms to disseminate information and raise issues around HIV/AIDS, and to mobilise practical support for AIDS orphans.

DramAidE

Caring Communities Project (CCP)

South Africa, Kwa-Zulu Natal

The CCP project provides support to orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) during and after school and enhances the capacity of rural families and communities in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) to respond to the psychological and social needs of these children. This is achieved through training community facilitators who live and work in the area, in DramAidE’s participatory and interactive approach.

The specific objectives of the CCP project are to develop and update a database of children and families in need in specific rural communities, link with existing social services networks through meetings and workshops and establish a network of service providers. The project also interacts with community radio stations such as:

• Icora Radio (Based in Eshowe)
• Radio iKhwezi (Based at Kranskop but reaching Uthungulu)

 

 

Kwa Mashu Community Advancement Projects of Positive Arts (K-CAP)

Break the Silence’ awareness campaign

South Africa, Kwa Mashu Township, Durban

The K-Cap project works in the township of Kwa Mashu to:

• change "passive culture" among young people, helping them to learn to secure their existence in the social economical environment in Kwa Mashu and play their active role in future leadership;
• prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS by providing access of appropriate and meaningful information, raising awareness and encouraging discussion across Kwa Mashu through a series of drama campaigns prioritising young people, youth in families infected and affected and the community;
• raise awareness among the youth of Kwa Mashu Township area of Durban that HIV/AIDS is affecting these communities and can be beaten through education, and through breaking the silence for people both infected and affected in the community.
• break down the barriers that are promoting the spread of this disease, i.e. stigma, denial and prejudice;
• equip youth with proper skills and knowledge influencing them to make positive changes in their lives.

 

Living Together Institute

The Living Together Project: Conversations: HIV and the family

South Africa, principally Gauteng province

Using performance methodologies, as well as other artistic activities, the project aims to promote and facilitate conversations within groups, especially families, about HIV. It is a developmental project, believing that performance is a tool for growth. The project believes that everyone – individuals, families and communities, HIV infected and affected and others – need to find new ways of talking about HIV, to move beyond talking just about the ABCs and ARVs.

 

Magic Threes Consulting

“Do you have a friend who has H?” A leaflet for and by PLWHA

Vietnam

The project aimed to provide emotional support for newly diagnosed HIV positive people and their families by producing a leaflet that would attract People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) with an empowering tone that held promise of a future and information for healthy living.

 

The Mothertongue Project

Laphumi’langa (Xhosa for ‘sunrise’)

South Africa, Khayelitsha – Western Cape

The aim of the project was to raise awareness of the link between violence against women and HIV/AIDS, recognising that broader gender inequities play a role in the spread of HIV/AIDS. In particular the project aimed to:

• Create awareness of the value of drama in fostering change with emphasis on the voices of the affected and infected, targeting community based organisations working around these issues;
• Build the capacity of a pilot group of 28 women to use drama to articulate issues around violence against women and HIV/AIDS;
• Build the capacity of the pilot group to assess and analyse their own personal narratives in relation to the intersections between violence and HIV/AIDS;
• Build the capacity of the women to make informed choices around situations of violence in their own lives and their HIV status (if they are HIV positive).

 

Phare Ponleu Selpak

Trains against HIV/AIDS, drugs and trafficking

Cambodia

The project aimed to provide awareness about HIV/AIDS, drugs and people trafficking to vulnerable, marginalised and mobile populations of people living and working along the Phnom Penh to Battambang railway. The target audiences include unemployed people using the train to travel to other places in the search for work, woodcutters working along the line, sex workers, street children, teenagers, slum dwellers, small shop keepers, and other vendors including women and girls working both on the train and at stations along the line.

 
 

Sanaa Art Promotions

Participatory Interactive Media Model (PIMM) for HIV/AIDS intervention among youth

Nairobi, Central, Eastern and Coast provinces, Kenya

The project aims to reduce the risk of HIV transmission among adolescents and youth in Kenya, by providing credible information about HIV/AIDS to youth in school through performing and visual arts, and by equipping them with peer and life skills.

 

SIDAREC

Community magnet theatre: youth approach to fighting AIDS

Majengo and Mukuru-Kwa-Njenga, Nairobi, Kenya

The project aims to use youth-friendly communication strategies – capitalising on young people’s artistic talents and skills – to provide information to young people to enable them to make informed choices about their behaviour.

 

Sinomlando Research Centre for Oral History and Memory Work in Africa, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Memory Work in Families Affected by HIV/AIDS

South Africa, KwaZulu-Natal

The purpose of the programme is to enhance resilience in vulnerable children and orphans affected by HIV/AIDS through the methodology of oral history and memory boxes. The programme aims to:

• create, revise and test various manuals outlining the methodology of the memory boxes in English and in Zulu;
• train the staff and volunteers of various community organisations dealing with orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV/AIDS in the methodology of memory boxes as a way of enhancing resilience in these children;
• assist the staff and volunteers of these organisations in doing memory work during family visits;
• assist these organisations in facilitating children’s groups during which the children receive emotional support and life skills through the methodology of the memory boxes.

Sistren Theatre Collective

HIV/AIDS: Its impact on families

Kingston (Hannah Town; Barbican/Grants Pen and Fletcher’s Land communities), Jamaica / Caribbean

The project aimed to:

• educate high-risk groups, such as adolescent girls, about sexually transmitted infections (STIs) as part of the national prevention strategy to reduce the risk of HIV transmission among young adults
• provide community organisations with skills to provide support and care to people living with HIV and AIDS
• expose community members to a wider range of service providers and build support for the continuation of the programme

Sovannah Phum

Shadow puppet performances on drug awareness and HIV vulnerability messages for marginalised youth

Cambodia

The aim of this project was to create awareness about HIV, AIDS and drug prevention, with a focus on information related to risky behaviours, fighting against discrimination and informing people where to seek treatment. The intention was to relay educational messages through the popular traditional storytelling form of shadow puppet theatre. Vulnerable communities of street children and slum dwellers, especially youth and women, were targeted in provincial areas during mobile tours of the shadow puppet theatre.

Themba HIV/AIDS Organisation

Interactive Themba Theatre

South Africa, Gauteng province

To offer interactive performances and training in peer education so as to enable dialogue and influence behaviour change to reduce the spread of HIV and AIDS.

Specifically, to:

• empower and educate young people by providing accurate information through the Interactive Themba Theatre (ITT) process, thereby influencing behaviour change to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS;
• enable understanding and open and informed discussions between young people and their parents, teachers and community leaders about sex, HIV and dominant cultural norms which pressurise young people into risky behaviours;
• challenge sexual stereotypes and enable the breakdown of stigma around people affected by HIV;
• develop an effective South African tool (including mechanisms for dissemination, manuals, training, methodology and workshops) to influence behaviour change;
• develop a core group of Themba actor-educators to advocate and sustain the initiative. From these actor-educators create further Interactive Themba Theatre Companies to further the work in schools and businesses.

 

Thiện Chí, Center for Community Support and Development

Thiện Chi (“Goodwill”) theatre

Vietnam

The project aimed to use theatre for education to change attitudes on a number of important issues related to development, including HIV and AIDS.

World Population Foundation and David Glass Ensemble

Participatory theatre in sexuality and reproductive health education for young people

Vietnam

The aim of the project was to improve young people’s knowledge and attitudes about sexual reproductive health issues, including HIV prevention; and to encourage healthy behaviour related to sexuality and reproductive health of young people and adolescents in Hanoi and Nghe An. The project used participatory/interactive theatre as the basis for creating a community based forum for adolescents and young people to share correct knowledge, attitudes and behaviours on safe reproductive health practices, and to actively promote the roles of young people in meeting their own needs in sexuality and reproductive health education.