Amnesty International student and local groups from high schools, colleges, and towns around Connecticut will be coming to Yale University on Saturday, October 17 for the Amnesty International Connecticut State Meeting. Meeting participants will spend the day attending workshops to build their organizing skills, hearing guest speakers on Amnesty's priority issues, and discussing how to better work together as a state. Guest speakers include Yale Law School lecturer Hope Metcalf, speaking about detainee abuse by US forces; Pooja Sripad, a student at the Yale School of Public Health, presenting on maternal mortality to introduce Amnesty International's new Demand Dignity Campaign; and Cynthia Gabriel, Amnesty's Field Organizer for the Northeast region. If you are interested in attending the state meeting, please email Yale Amnesty's State Meeting Coordinator Helen Jack at helen.jack@yale.edu Check out more details of the event (via Facebook) here!
Whenever anyone asked me what I was doing this summer, I had a hard time trying to explain. “I’m taking this class,” I’d say, “that attempts to combine theater and public health into a thorough, psychosocial approach to dealing with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and helping those affected by it.” Blank stares. “Well, uh…” I’d continue, “it’s about trying to use art to help educate people about public health…or at least to try to get a message across.” Cocked heads. “Umm… I don’t totally know yet, but it involves using theater to try to bring people’s attention to certain aspects of the epidemic, in order to allow them to more fully understand it, and possibly get them to change their deeply-rooted outlooks toward this hushed-up, stigmatized disease.” At this point, I’d be met by more looks of confusion, accompanied by glossed-over eyes. “I’m going to Africa!” I’d sputter at last, and then receive wide smiles and enthusiastic nods of approval.
Yet after all of my attempts at describing the course - which was actually called 'Arts and Public Health in Action: Study of HIV/AIDS in Swaziland'- it turned out to be even more impossible to describe than I could have ever expected. And even more incredible. This year, the agenda was to spend three weeks in Durban, South Africa, working with a socially- sensitive dance company and then two weeks in Swaziland, collaborating with groups called 'Clowns Without Borders' and 'People’s Educational Theater.' Our intention was to create and perform various clown shows for the children and, in addition, to lead after- school workshops teaching them how to make up their own plays and to engage their imaginations. And, of course, we would also be providing them with food. In Durban, we worked with one of the first performance companies to be racially integrated at the end of the apartheid, a very talented group of dancers called Siwela Sonke (meaning “going across together” in Zulu). Together, we did a project called ‘Secrets,’ in which we interviewed local people about their secrets, especially in relation to health issues, and the embarrassment, stigma, and shame associated with being HIV- positive. We created four separate pieces involving dance, music, and poetry, based on what different people had told us about their secrets, and then performed them on the streets of Durban, as people got on and off buses all around us and gathered into an attentive, ever-growing crowd.
In Swaziland, we spent our days clowning, our evenings reading about epidemiology and public health, and our nights writing in our journals. As the country with the last remaining absolute monarchy in the world, and the country with the highest rate of HIV, Swaziland was quite an adjustment for us all. Swazi women have very limited rights and are considered perpetual minors, which means that they go from being wards of their fathers to financially, legally, and socially dependent brides. They cannot buy property or make important decisions without their husbands’ approval. The country also still places large value on the traditional notion of the dowry, or “lubuli”- the typical matrimonial price is 17 cows. Yet, while these different customs and gender- related attitudes interested us and raised many questions, they were not our main focus.
After performing our clown shows at different schools in the mornings, we led our workshops with certain students who had been identified by communities as OVCs (orphans and vulnerable children) in the afternoons. This classification was given to kids who had been seriously affected by the AIDS epidemic and, as a result, were either living with incredibly overworked and underpaid caretakers, many of whom were unrelated to them, or in child- headed households.
Being with the kids, teaching them songs and theatrical games that made them laugh, gave me a mixed feeling of hope and futility. Our project only lasted two weeks. How much could we really do? Even though we gave them food at the end of each session, how useful really were our chants and “zip-zap-zop” exercises, when they would get home and probably not eat again for the rest of that day? Although it was great to see them smile, it was hard to keep up my own smile as we drove away. One thing that gave me hope was the knowledge that, despite the fact that our program had an end- date, Clowns Without Borders would come back multiple times a year. In addition, other local organizations would do their best to help. And even if it was only for a brief amount of time, I felt sure that we had helped to make their lives a little easier, and a lot more fun.
This experience with clowning and teaching the kids made me start thinking about something that had happened a few weeks earlier, at the beginning of the trip. We had visited an HIV clinic in Durban and had gotten the chance to talk to one of the head doctors about her job. Extremely passionate, yet understandably embittered, she explained to us that the situation was grim. The epidemic had hit southern Africa hard, and did not seem to be letting up any time soon. After presenting these statements, she started to get really riled up. Her life would be a lot easier, she went on to say, if it weren’t for “that damn human rights problem.” In her opinion, the HIV epidemic could be stamped out in a few decades if the government started regulating automatic screening and treatment of all those who tested positive. “However,” she said, “there are those damn human rights issues: the right to not know your status, the right to not take medicine, the right to die, blah blah blah. This is what really stands in the way and makes the virus virtually unbeatable.”
Shocked, we stopped her right there. Was that really how she saw it? Did she truly believe that, given the rampant prevalence of the disease and the powerful stigma associated with not only having, but even just talking about being HIV positive, people really didn’t have the right to not pay it a lot of attention? And, if that were the case, was she actually advocating that, in this situation, the inalienable human right to decide whether or not to know the full facts or to take action based on individual preferences and comfort levels, be stripped away? Was she really telling us that, given the severity of the epidemic, as a contagious, ever-spreading, unchecked, and indiscriminate attacker, no one really had the right to not care?
“Yes,” she said emphatically. “Or as we say in Zulu, ‘yebo.’” I have been mulling over this doctor’s thought- provoking statements ever since. In the service of public health, is it actually justifiable that the rights of the individual get sacrificed on the altar of the bigger picture? Is there a point at which personal liberties become less valuable than more global considerations, and, as a result, must bow down to them?
Well, I never thought of it that way before. Maybe this is something I need to think about some more? Yebo. Yebo, indeed.
6/17/09 Blogger Timmia Hearn Feldman, Morse College 2012 Written from Toukkhel, Godavari, Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
The quality of the heat was the first thing I noticed was different. Along with several hundred other passengers, I disembarked in Delhi, India, and was instantly struck by the heavy heat of this part of Asia in the summer. Heat such as I had never felt before, despite my childhood in the scorching summers of Kansas and winter breaks in Trinidad and Tobago. This heat was heavy, thick, tangible, and somehow far more bearable than other heat I’d felt before. Perhaps it was more bearable because it was so foreign. There is intrigue in what is different. It surprises me how easy it was to adjust to life in the heavy heat, to the fact that there are only two meals a day, morning and night, and that both are curry. How little it surprised me to suddenly have no shower and no toilet paper (only a tap, a bucket and water). But life went seamlessly on, and before I knew it, I was in love with not only the children who have become my students, but with Nepal itself. It strikes me as strange that I never want to leave a country where human rights are so pathetically lacking, where wife beating is all too common, and where male dominance is the order of the day. Where there hasn’t been a stable government in years, where pollution and littering aren’t really even concepts but instead such common practices that the rivers and roadsides are dotted with almost as many plastic bags as plants, and where the education system, to say the least, is sub standard. And yet, somehow, I find pleasant breezes that make the heat more than bearable, and see the smiles of my students as more than worth every clean well organized school room in my own home town.
The organization I am currently volunteering for is highly progressive for Nepal. The boys learn to respect the girls, and the girls learn to have respect for themselves, and learn their own value. They are friends across gender and age, and there is nothing more wonderful to see than almost all of the 103 students here having a profound appreciation for what they are given. From education to food, they absorb it all and take nothing for granted. And I know that is because they have come from slave labor in Indian circuses, where abuse was a daily experience, or from the streets, begging and stealing for their daily rice, or from abusive or grindingly poor families. I know that these kids have suffered more than anyone should ever have to suffer in a life time. I’ve visited the huts where some of the kids come from. I have seen the terror of being reunited with a family who could not protect them, as well as the tears mingled with longing to stay with their families, and anger at those same families. The other day in class my fellow volunteer, who has been having a very difficult time here, had to leave class half way through because it became too much for her. The students were all very worried and after class all went out to see what was wrong. She told them she’d been missing her family, and one of the girls in the class began to cry. Missing ones family is a very sore subject. But through all this suffering, something truly beautiful has been born. These children are given the opportunity to have ambitions and hope of achieving them.
Two students will be off to university in a year or two, and might get to go abroad and get an internationally recognized education. Others have already left the refuge, with university degrees, though none international as of yet. But it’s not just in higher education that these children are getting to thrive in. I watch them every day and see the bonds of love between them, see their trust and love of the staff here. They are being protected, they have a support system, and despite the large number of them, they are each known personally and loved individually. And they find beauty in their lives. Not just beauty in their current fortunate situation, but beauty in the surrounding landscapes: they take pride in Nepali music and culture. The young ones have hearts so open to love, and they cling to my hands when we take walks together or play together. They are responsible and thoughtful. There is honesty in their smiles and their words of broken English that I am working to improve. Within the heat and pollution of Nepal there are the most beautiful breaths of fresh clean air. Off of the dirty streets are beautiful fields of rice, and houses of stunningly elegant architecture. From lives that could have been just one great tragedy have been born stories of laughter and learning, joy and knowledge. Tomorrow some of us take some of the older students trekking. Another adventure unfolds.
