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AID the FUTURE February 2013 » FUTURE, King, Williams, Pilot, Centre, Town » Fotoblog - Maryatta Wegerif

AID the FUTURE February 2013

What has Sushi got to do with the rural areas of the Eastern Cape in South Africa? Exactly nothing, I guess. And yet I heard the word “sushi” many times during the last week. It is a symbol for a better life; a hope that one-day this delicacy will be affordable. It represents everything that seems to make a criminal life worthwhile.  A dream of an unknown food told by a smitten girl to her positive HIV tested Boyfriend.

 

I just arrived back from a very intensive and emotional trip to King Williams Town where I documented parts of the Pilot project “AID the FUTURE”.

13 pupils from the Zanovuyo Senior School in Frankfort (Eastern Cape) rehearsed two weeks long after every exhausting school day for four to five hours in the community hall of Frankfort. I joined the project after one and a half weeks and was overwhelmed by the intensive examinations, the wild debates, the concentrated work and the host of incredible different emotions. Problems in life and the surrounding community, the circumstances of HIV, love, friendship, fears and violence are the themes with which the 13 scholars dealt with during the project. They conceptualised and wrote an own theatre play that caused goose pimples from the very first time I saw it and that till the last performance surprised with their beautiful lively improvisations.

 

“The Core of the Apple” describes both in Xhosa and in English frighteningly exactly the circumstances of being a youth in a community that is riddled by death, violence, rape, crime, sickness, poverty, helplessness and hunger.

 

I thought a lot about my own youth during the last week. The intensive and disturbing emotions, the insecurity and the hassle with life that no grown up seems to understand. That was quite a tough and also beautiful time. But then, I grew up in Germany where I was secure and safe with both my parents a live and enough food to eat. The youth in large parts of the Eastern Cape are not quite as lucky. Next to going through an anyway difficult teenage time they have to cope with completely different and worse problems.  „Our Youth does not fail. We just find ways that will work“, says Athi, a “concerned teenager”. He describes the temptations of their daily life, the possibilities one gets offered to earn a bit of pocket money with robbery, get a bit of comfort in drugs or get rid of a bit of anger by being violent. Again and again I heard the sentence “this is our reality”. One of these realities is, as we know in South Africa, rape. In the play is a scene that describes how three boys rape a girl. Another boy comes to help her and gets infected with HIV through her blood on his hands. The gossip and rumours that immediately start after his test is another sad and destroying reality in a lot of South African communities. But the important message of the play is in the end a message full of hope and willingness to challenge all problems: „The ball is shaking in our hands and we are willing to score and go further with our future“.  And that is exactly what the 13 participants of the Pilot project from AID the FUTURE started with, by converting the idea of the project.

The base background for the idea and realisation of AID the FUTURE is the missing communication between the generations. In the past 40 years the gap between grown ups and teenagers appears to have grown. No longer do the youth want to gain second-hand experiences and knowledge through the grown ups. More and more the youth of today wants to gain their own experiences and make their own mistakes. They want to solve the problems in their own way and make new pathways. And that is exactly what AID the FUTURE aims to. The project animates pupils to create a play in their own words with their own themes and act it out in front of other scholars of a similar age. After the play a debate between actors and audience about the acted problems and possible solutions is intended. The Pilot project showed how well this concept works.

The official premiere on Saturday, 9th February, in the newly build Steve Biko Centre in King William’s Town, was very exiting and successful. But the real challenge and project started the following Monday. Then the 13 young actors played for the first time in front of 300 pupils from another school, who where mainly older than them.  The excitement and anxiousness was huge. The performance was a wonderful and loud spectacle. The young audience could hardly stay quiet. Aghast calls, compassionate tong-clicks, whistles, laughter, comments and spontaneous applause indicated just how much the pupils were involved with what they saw. The following discussion between the scholars was very emotional, honest and full of  admiration for the courage the 13 pupils showed by playing all these difficult themes in front of other teenagers.

From Monday till Friday the volunteer actors played in 6 schools. I accompanied them until Wednesday. Each performance I saw was different and the focus during the following discussions changed. The themes that moved the pupils the most on Monday were Friendship, love and violence. On Tuesday the focus was lying on Gossip and the fear of becoming criminal as well as the fear of HIV. Wednesday on my last performance I was impressed by the fierce debate about sex and friendship.

What I found quite incredible was that a lot of the young audience mentioned their unwillingness to discuss these themes with grown ups and how glad they were to be able to debate so open and freely. I myself was always again impressed by every performance and the following discussion. During the premier I suddenly noticed that I was ignoring my camera being totally absorbed and was actually crying because the messages of the play I had heard so often already had a new strength and intensity that was overwhelming. During the following performances I caught myself over and over again forgetting the camera and just experiencing the always different and intensive show.

I seldom experienced such an intense, exiting and very emotional week. I know that this project must have a future. Because it is tailor made for the coming generation that wants to take charge of the problems in its own way and is willing to be courageous and strong to make a change. The projects helps the youth to create their own communication platform in a very creative and expressive way.

 

AID the FUTURE is a cooperation project between the German NGO Culture  for Development, Empilisiweni Masimanyane AIDs Centre and the Steve Biko Centre in King Williams Town.

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