An Example of Youth-Led Community Change in Mali

For the past couple years, I’ve been supporting the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM)  project in 6 African countries. One of the best things about being involved in the project is the opportunity to work with some incredible people who are developing the program strategies and implementing YETAM on the ground.  Bedo, the child media program coordinator in Plan Mali, is one of those people I've been lucky enough to work with.  He's kind, gentle, thoughtful and soft spoken yet solid in his opinions and knowledge. His face totally lights up when he's working with the youth. He has clear vision and gets things done, writes excellent reports, and isn't afraid to clarify things if he's not sure he's understood correctly.  It's been a real pleasure working with him. On Friday, Bedo told me about some of the short-term positive results that the Mali team is seeing in the YETAM program there.... continue reading at Wait... What's new website!


Related posts on Wait... What?
Fostering a new political consciousness on violence against children

Home Again Home Again

Whew. Got home yesterday right on time with no hitches. I’m soooo tired though. I spent the whole day today cleaning and catching up on housework. Well, and I also did my taxes, so my tax refund is that much closer and that’s a relief. Tomorrow back to catching up on all my work stuff that was pending last week. I know that I have a lot to do because I was checking email last week, just not able to reply or manage any real work because the internet was not reliable…. It will be a busy week now!

YETAM Mali visit!

I got myself up around 7 and showered. Put my same clothes back on and called Bedo. He and the guys from the Kids Waves radio program came to get me about 8 and we drove about an hour and a half out to the community. We dropped the radio guys off first in one community where we will visit tomorrow and where they will do a live Kids Waves show. The YETAM community was a decent drive down a pretty dusty road, but not really too bad. The kids were all in the school house. They had a whole program planned where they showed the theater and songs that they had made up during the project and since then. They also showed me the photos that they’d taken as part of the project. I took a bunch of video with my phone so that I could make some short testimonials for Nokia about the project. I was really impressed with the kids and the topics they chose – they did one play about female genital cutting, one about the dangers of selling bad meat in the community, and had a song motivating people to go out and vote. Really relevant stuff for community awareness and motivation.

Photo: kids who are participating in the YETAM project.

About 2 we finished the community program and they served lunch. It was rice with meat – goat I think. So as usual I was faced with the vegetarian’s dilemma (as opposed to the omnivore’s dilemma, ha) of how to avoid being rude. In the end I just ended up eating the rice with all the goat ‘juice’ on it. People crowd up and share a big platter of food. They wash up and then each person squats around the platter and uses their right hand to scoop out some rice and form a ball with it, and then eat it along with some of the meat and vegetables. It’s nice to have a communal plate like that. I’ve seen it in many countries and it really feels more like you are sharing the meal rather than each eating from your own private space. I just wasn’t sure how the meat juices and grease would settle since I haven’t eaten meat for so many years…. I was feeling a big woozy by the time we got back, but mainly due to lack of sleep and water since I didn’t drink any water all day and it was pretty hot. (Didn’t want to have to go to the toilet!)

On my way to A'dam & Mali

It's been a bit of a crazy month, spent doing some budget scenarios for different projects. For this year it looks like we'll be doing YETAM in Kenya (April) and Cameroon (July). I've been working with the countries on getting our reports from last year in as well as our forward planning for 2009. We have the project point persons selected now for Kenya and Cameroon. They are both really excited about the project. We'll continue to seek funds for Mozambique and Ghana.

My next big challenge will be to put together a training pack for the new countries. We weren't able to include a face-to-face meeting in the budget for the YETAM coordinators, so I'll plan to arrive in each country a little ahead of time to work with the staff and partners, and we'll do as much by email and skype as possible.

The past month I've been trying to get a feel for Twitter and how it could be useful to us. It seems to be a great tool for sharing ideas and learning, sharing links and initiatives. Hopefully I can keep it to a manageable level so that I can keep up with all the stuff being shared! The 'follow me on twitter' function on blogger is nice too.

So it's been a pretty cool and exciting month learning and tech wise. I'll meet with Plan's Innovations Manager in Amsterdam next week, and then all the regional communications people and some from headquarters will be in Bamako (Mali) for the meeting starting Tuesday. I'll get a chance to visit the YETAM Mali project on Sunday and another one on Monday before we start the meeting on Tuesday.... looking forward to this year. :-)

YETAM on YouTube now!

I'm so excited because now YouTube has captions now. And I have a GREAT intern named Ayla who is doing all the subtitling for the Rwanda videos. She's posted several of them on dotsub.com and done the subtitles from Kinyarwandan and from English (using the documents that Joseph and Baptiste did). Chrystel from Plan Rwanda will send us the French versions soon, and so all 3 planned languages will be done.

We were getting some comments that the videos were not loading quickly so we are testing with YouTube and now will be posting in both places. Basically it's really simple. We take the videos and compress them into flash (.flv) files, and upload them to dotsub.com to do the subtitling. Then we upload them also to YouTube and we download the subtitle files from YouTube and re-upload/attach them to the YouTube file. And it's working super well. I started a PlanYETAM channel so as the videos get loaded they will be available there.

http://www.youtube.com/user/PlanYETAM

Once Ayla finishes uploading Rwanda films, we should have the Mali and the Senegal ones in hand to start uploading. I'm hoping that the web company can the just embed the videos from YouTube and they will come complete with the captions. You can also use geo-location from YouTube, which is cool since I've been wanting to do a google earth overlay for quite awhile, and now with the videos on YouTube it will be a snap. Ayla is already figuring it out -- she's great!

I am dying to see the Senegal and Mali films since I wasn't at the training. Mali sent a really cool attachment with their quarterly report. They used an evaluation methodology called Most Significant Change where you use storytelling to identify the most significant change from the training. So there are some amazing stories and quotes from the kids in there. I hope that we can use this for the upcoming YETAM projects in the next countries.

I had to do a presentation today at our office because it's already been 6 months that I've been on this 'secondment' or special assignment with the West Africa office. I can't believe it's gone by so fast. I think I've enjoyed almost every minute of it.