The Radio Workshop:
Giving Young People a Voice

Welcome to the Radio Workshop!

The Zambian Children’s Climate Conference is an inspiring event. It’s a place where more experienced Climate Ambassadors share their ideas and strategies for success with new youth joining the UNICEF initiative. Youth Facilitator Tambudzai Mutale is 19 years old. She tells younger climate warriors how she started a project to build a floating school in Mongu, which is badly affected by floods during the rainy season in Zambia.

Listen to the entire episode by clicking on the track below. Feel free to download the track or share via Facebook or Twitter.

The Radio Workshop would like to thank Tambudzai Mutale and the Climate Ambassadors at the Zambia Children’s Climate Conference.

And that’s all from this week’s Radio Workshop!

No time to listen to the entire show? Pick and choose what you want to listen to below! Or subscribe to our iTunes podcast to get full episodes delivered to you every week.

Listen to the entire show

Welcome to the Radio Workshop podcast! This week it’s science, science, science! Because it’s National Science Week, from August 1-8. Does science get you excited? Are you a future physicist, biologist, or geologist? Well if the answer is yes, today’s show is just for you. Stay tuned!

No time to listen to the entire show? Pick and choose what you want to listen to below! Or subscribe to our iTunes podcast to get full episodes delivered to you every week.

Welcome to the Show

Radio Workshop host Lesedi Mogoatlhe welcomes listeners to the show.

The Radio Workshop broadcasts every Saturday at 12 noon on SAFM. Visit SAFM’s website for information about how to find their frequency in your area.

A Visit to the MTN Science Centre

First up on the show, we take a visit to the MTN Science Centre in Cape Town.  We meet up with science educator Fikiswa Majola and find out why she’s so passionate about science.

Want to see what’s on at the MTN Science Centre? Take a look at the monthly schedule of events on their website.

Climate Change

What do rising sea levels, melting ice caps, and crazy weather have in common?  They are all effects of climate change.  Today we find out about what climate change means for our world, and what you can do to help change the situation.

If you want to get a copy of the “Smart Living Handbook,” visit the Youth Environmental School’s website.

For more information on climate change, get a copy of UNICEF’s “Climate Change and Children.” Download it from their website by clicking here.

This Week in History

Find out what important events happened this week in history!

For more exciting South African history, visit South African History Online.

Signing out

That’s it for this week, join us next week for more from the Radio Workshop. We hope you’ve enjoyed the show. Feel free to leave a comment below.  We’d love to know what you think!

Click here to listen to previous Radio Workshop podcasts. And click here to subscribe to our iTunes podcast to get new episodes delivered to you every week.

Mujahid Wiener, age 7

Mujahid Wiener came down with a serious case of the nerves on the day of the big interview.  He had given a lot of thought to the questions he would ask and wrote them down on a piece of paper.  He untangled the cables that connected the recorder to the microphone and headphones, and proceeded to meet his subject—his mother Kamilla.

Microphone in hand, he sat in silence opposite his mom, looking down at the floor. His mom instructed him not to be nervous. “Come now, man.  I’m your mother.  This is someone you speak to everyday,” she said.

Microphones are powerful things.  They have the ability to turn everyday conversations into considered and reflective moments.  They dig deep into the furthest reaches of your memories and experiences, bringing out the finest details.  The colours, smells, and sounds.  The moments you thought were long since forgotten.  Microphones get you speaking about things in new and exciting ways, and sharing moments and thoughts that were previously reserved for you alone.

For Mujahid and his mother, the microphone created a space for talking about something that is always there but never discussed.  It got them to both remember and reflect on the day last year when Mujahid was severely burned.  It was also the day he was first admitted into the ICU, when his relationship with Red Cross Children’s Hospital began.

Mujahid finally gathered the courage to ask his mother a question.  He asked her to recall what happened on the day of the accident.  She responded with a blow-by-blow of the chain of events.  Mujahid listened carefully at certain points, as if hearing these details for the first time.  Kamilla remarked earlier in the week that Mujahid struggled to speak about the accident, even though the social worker had encouraged them to speak about it openly.  She tried to bring about the conversation numerous times, but it never got very far.  He listened to what she had to say, but never spoke about it himself.

After a long pause Mujahid turned to his mother, looking her in the eyes. “Mommy, what were you thinking that day?”  And then the floodgates opened.  Kamilla clearly remembers every second of that day, and reconstructed her thoughts for her young son in the shape of a five-minute monologue.  Her response contained moments of pain, humour, and, joy.  It brought about many answers, many more questions, and what seemed like the start of a conversation.

Listen to Mujahid’s story:

Kauther Sallie, age 8

Kauther walks towards the E2 ward of Red Cross, the section of the hospital for children with kidney problems.  She’s on a mission to record the sounds of this ward, and has her recorder and microphone all ready to go.  Kauther can describe the various beeps of the machines that have saturated her environment while in the hospital, and can tell you what each beep means.  She can also tell you what it sounds like if things are not going well for a patient. As we enter the ward, the nurses start to fawn over Kauther.  Kauther, like many of the other children in the group, is very popular with the hospital staff.  They often go out of their way to acknowledge the kids, giving them hugs and kisses, and anything else they can think of to make them feel special.  But before they could get their hands on her, Kauther vanishes.  She had something she had to do first—she had to go see her friend. Kauther jets past the doctors and nurses and heads to the room just past the nurses’ station where Maurice stays. Maurice is just 2 years old, and Kauther says he’s her very good friend.  He’s waiting for a kidney transplant, just like Kauther.  They’ve been through much of the same routine at Red Cross, and shared a room before.

Kauther and Maurice

Maurice’s big eyes see Kauther coming around the corner.  He immediately turns away from the nurse at the side of his bed, throws down his plastic rattle, and holds both hands up high, inviting her embrace.  Kauther gives him a big hug with a smile, says a few words into his ear, and then lets him get back to the nurse.  “I love that boy,” Kauther says.  “He’s on dialysis.”  I ask her what dialysis is, and she replies, “I don’t know. But they take you into that room over there and hook you up to a machine.  My friend is on dialysis quite a lot.”  Kauther then returns to her sound collecting mission, in search of the beeps, and slowly makes her way back to the nurses to give them a proper hello. Listen to Kauther’s story:

Fast forward a few years to 2005.  That’s when Kwezi won his first title, the National Under 18 Longboarding Championships.  Long boarding is “more chilled than short boarding,” he says.  “It’s more like cruising, taking it easy.”

Kwezi was the first black African to ever win a surfing title.

He is quick to shrug off conversations around race, saying that he gets tired of being seen as a black surfer “rather than just a surfer.”  Regardless, he realizes that it still matters.  When he started surfing he had no black role models to look up to.  His initial fears of surfing had partly to do with not seeing black surfers, nor black people swimming in the sea.  “I had to do [it] on my own—now that there’s other black kids coming up it’s great.”  He likes it when he has young black kids come up to him and say that “they’re going to grow up and be better than [him].”  That’s how it should be, Kwezi says.  It shouldn’t be about race.  It should be about making your dreams come true, whatever they are.  Still, he sees himself as a role model not just to black kids—but to any kid.

Kwezi has taken several surfing titles already, but he remembers the first one like it was yesterday.  His mom was in the audience cheering him on, and that was really important to him. She wasn’t too excited about him taking up surfing in the first place, he says.  “But she’s come around since the championship.”

He barely remembers what he was like back on that day when he first got on the board, and wonders if he would recognize himself.  “Back when I just started surfing I was quite scrawny.”  Surfing strengthened not only his body, but his mind too.   It has shaped the way he understands and relates to other people.  “Surfing has opened me up…It’s not a colour thing for me, it’s not a racial thing for me, I just hang out because I want to hang out.  I don’t look at your skin colour and say oh do you want to hang out?  I can hang out with whoever whenever.”

These days Kwezi surfs a lot, gives lessons for a local surf shop, and is busy studying for a business degree.  He hopes to get all he can from his surfing career, to continue to do competitions and take any other opportunity that comes his way.  He knows that there’s a life on the other side of professional surfing, one that he needs to prepare for now.  “Maybe I’ll open my own surf shop one day,” he adds.
Whatever Kwezi decides to do in his future, I’m sure he’ll give it his all.  Watch this space, Kwezi Qika is making waves.

The terror of exams rules many children’s lives, especially at this time of year as the 2008 school calendar draws to a close.  For 17-year old Daniella de Wee of the small Western Cape town of De Doorns [the thorns] it was to prove fatal.

It started last Tuesday as a black south-easter covered Table Mountain in a thick dark cloud and whipped through the peninsula. Unlike the “Cape Doctor” as the familiar south-easter which blows during the dry summer months is known, the black south-easter combines both wind and rain. Soon the rains spread inland. Rivers came down in flood, six of the seven bridges in the Hex River Valley washed away and the Breede River reached its highest level in a 100 years.

De Doorns is the heart of the Hex River Valley faming community – an area rich with fruit farms and vineyards that account for more than half the country’s export grape crop.

A little more than two months ago, Daniella de Wee attended her matric farewell [the equivalent of the US high school prom] in a golden brown dress. As any South African learner will tell you, the matric exam is the all-important test that will determine one’s options after leaving school. The exams are standardised across the country for all Grade 12 students, and missing any one of them without a valid excuse has grave consequences.

Last Wednesday it was the Afrikaans exam, Daniella de Wee’s home language, and she headed out into the rain. The bridge she usually walked over to get to Hexvallei Secondary School was underwater and her father helped her as they made their way across. But the flood waters surged, tore her them apart and carried her away. A week later, police divers are still looking for her body.

News reports say that more than 36 matriculants were unable to reach their schools and missed their exams last week. In Touws River, which was split down the middle by the flooded Donkies River, rescue personnel transported exam papers by boat to students and alternative venues were hastily organised.

In January 1981 when black south-easter conditions caused similar floods at Laingsburg on the banks of the Buffels River on the edge of the semi-arid Karoo, 104 people lost their lives.  In 2008 only one life was lost, but this offers little comfort for the De Wee family.

The pressure around matric exams is intense, and, some would argue, out of all proportion, especially when weighed against the fear and dread it often invokes in students. Matric is a serious business, but it’s not life and death. This kind perspective is crucial if we are to avoid the occasional suicides that have preceded or followed matric exams in years’ past.

The same perspective is as important for families living in small communities where school principals hold power and influence. And last week, as the rains fell and the rivers rose, education authorities should have put out the word to families that their children’s safety comes first.

Better awareness of the power of radio could have made a difference. In a situation of extreme weather, with people particularly eager for news, a series of radio and television announcements could have delivered the all-important information – how dangerously the rivers were flooded, what to do about the next day’s exams, where to go, and most important of all, not to risk one’s life for the sake of an exam.