Katie Chalcraft has been awarded a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship and is currently travelling in Malawi and South Africa, exploring the use of arts in programmes working with people living with HIV. This blog is the third in a series of journal entries from Katie as she travels.
DAY 2: Temwa
Forum Theatre
On my second day in Usisya, Kams and I left her home at 5.30am and met Hillary on the path for our 2 ½ hour walk to Chiwisi Primary School. Determined not to be deterred by the lack of fuel and transport Hilary and Kams have spent the last few months walking up and down mountains for up to 6 hours in a day to deliver training to the AIDS Action Clubs. AIDS Action clubs were a government initiative for young people in schools to receive education on HIV, to protect themselves from the virus and to fight the stigma and discrimination so commonly associated with HIV.
In June, Hilary and Kams ran training with Chiwisi’s AIDS Action Club in communication, leadership and introduction to drama skills. Following this, four star pupils were selected along with four from each of the other 29 AIDS Action clubs from schools in Temwa’s catchment area to be trained in forum theatre. Today’s visit to Chiwisi was to monitor what the club members had retained from the trainings and to prepare them for an open day planned next month. The open day would provide the opportunity for the AIDS Action clubs from a number of schools to introduce the community to forum theatre and to show how they can use forum theatre as a way of ‘rehearsing life’ and practicing behaviour change.
Forum theatre was developed by Augusto Boal and is highly participatory. It involves directly inviting audience members to the stage to try to find practical strategies for changing the behaviour of the characters in the play. This kind of theatre has proved to be a powerful method for developing dialogue around HIV and sex education as it favours critical thinking and draws attention to social and psychological aspects of the pandemic.
In the dark and dusty classroom, AIDS Action Club members (aged between 13 and 17) ran games to warm up the audience. Following this they forumed a real life situation: a schoolgirl was telling her parents that she was going to school when really she was going to meet her boyfriend. The facilitator, a skinny young boy (no more than 13 years of age), pauses the scene and asked the audience – so what is the problem here? He gathered the answers: the main concern of these school children was that the girl is at risk of contracting HIV.
The facilitator then asked the audience to get into groups for 5 minutes and to brainstorm what the girl can do to change her situation. The following solutions were suggested: the schoolgirl should be advised to use a condom, be counselled to abstain from sex, go for an HIV test. The facilitator explained that anyone in the audience can step into the scene and try out their solution. A slender young girl with high cheekbones and almond shaped eyes raises her hand – she wants to participate. The facilitator clarified who she was in relation to the protagonist, which point she wishes to step into the play and where she is coming from when she enters the scene.
So she steps out from the audience and onto the stage as the friend of the schoolgirl. She begins her intervention by chastising the boyfriend before turning her attention to her friend warning her that she should not be having sex with him because of the risks of contracting HIV. She spoke of the importance of going to school and getting an education. Her friend is resistant, arguing “who does not want a man? He gives me money, he gives me love – who would not want that? What’s the point in me going to school when I can be supported by this man?” It appears that her boyfriend is older than her and is working, the school children tell me that this is a common scenario. After some time and a heated discussion, finally the friend convinces her to focus on her education and to leave her boyfriend.
Following this conclusion, the facilitator asked the audience: “having watched the drama has the problem been solved? Are you happy with that solution? Are there any other solutions?”. Some other bold young women say that the girl must learn how to use condoms, another one says the girl in the play must go for Voluntary Counselling and Testing. The facilitator probes further – if you were in this situation what would you do? Would this solution work for you? Would you use this solution for your friends here in school? Why? Why would this work? What have we learned from this? Where do we take this information now? The facilitator summarised the drama and the key lessons learned before closing with a game.
I was particularly impressed with how the girls spoke out, their knowledge about condoms and the importance of testing. Contrary to my expectations, it was the girls who spoke out in this scenario more than the boys. Forum theatre is providing these young people not only with an opportunity to practice dealing with real life situations they face but it also provides a forum to explore the variety of options available to them in reaching solutions. I wish I had time to attend one of the open days it would have been interesting to observe the response of the audience in the community.
Arriving home exhausted, having scrambled over rocks, through the lake, trees and bushes (Hilary took us on a short cut!), I was struck by the sheer dogged determination of Temwa staff to continue to run their programmes despite the many obstacles they may face in their work. I was informed that the route I walked was one of the easier ones and Kams and Hilary joked that this time we were lucky because at least we had food and water with us.
