Reflection title: Jesse McGleughlin on her experience with The Children's Radio Foundation's facilitation methods
Author: Jesse McGleughlin, Future Positive Intern, 2015
“We must not just educate young people for employment. We must educate young people to have something of their own, to find a reason in li...
Author: Jesse McGleughlin, Future Positive Intern, 2015
“We must not just educate young people for employment. We must educate young people to have something of their own, to find a reason in life.” These were the words spoken by a high school English and choir teacher in the Kayamandi township after her students won their choir competition. Music, she posited, offered students something that was tangibly theirs.
Philosopher and public intellectual Achille Mbembe wrote about the importance of aesthetics and a project of the creative. He said,
“The emotional sublimity of the Congolese musical imagination taught me how indispensible it was to think with the bodily senses, to write with the musicality of one’s own flesh. With this music I could feel not only the movement of power, but also the truth of WE du Bois’s injunction: “Life is not simply fact.” Music has the capacity to marry soul and matter. Indeed, in Africa, music has always been a celebration of the ineradicability of life, in a long life-denying history. It is the genre that has historically expressed, in the most haunting way, our raging desire not only for existence, but more importantly for joy in existence – what we should call the practice of joy before death.”
“Joy in existence.” I have been thinking about what this construction might offer those of us who are youth workers and advocates and facilitators. Mbembe, much like my colleague at the high school in the Kayamandi township, placed the creative as central to survival. I begin here because the vision of Children’s Radio Foundation offers us something similar; a belief that creative processes have the power to expose the experiences of being alive. The Children’s Radio Foundation asks young people—those affected by poverty, HIV/AIDs, and gender based violence—to dream. It is a precarious project. And a critical one.
I spent two-days-per-week for seven months as an intern at the Children’s Radio Foundation. In that time, I was struck by the importance of youth programs that invest in creative practices and develop critical thinking skills. These are a few stories from my time.
Seated in the youth clinic in Khayelitsha, participants in the Women in Power Group discussed the issue of hate crimes against LGBTQI women. One of the participants told the story of friends who had been “correctively raped,” and men who raped women claiming they were teaching them “what it’s like to be a lady, what it’s like to feel a man inside you.” Participants took turns taking notes on a tree diagram. “What are the roots of the problem? What is the trunk: the structures and policies that allow hate crimes to happen? And what is the fruit: the impact or symptoms of the issue?” In the process of mapping out ideas, a discussion emerged. What is the role of the police? How should we talk about being a lesbian or queer? Where is it possible to feel safe?
Two weeks later, the Women in Power group performed their live radio show on hate crimes against LGBTIQ women to an audience of young people. “I would like to tell my brother, lesbians like women, they don’t like men,” a young woman said in one of the clips. In another clip, a boy said, “It’s not a solution to rape people for who you are.” Yolanda, the event’s host, asked the audience members, “What do you think about what it means to be gay?” She was met with silence. But she asked again and soon, it was the beginning of a dialogue. It was choppy and slow but it was the start of something. I watched the clinic space transform. Young people waiting to be seen by nurses stood up to participate in dialogue and dance-offs on the makeshift stage. “What is gay?” Yolanda asked again. “I chose to be on this side of lesbian,” a woman told the audience. She told them, I choose this, I claim this as my own.
Following a Children’s Radio Foundation workshop, I talk with Themba, a CRF facilitator, about the “bankruptcy of the imagination,” the idea that schools and workplaces and institutions are not investing in the creative. Themba talks about attending a conference where he stood up and said, “Can we stop only arguing for young people to think only about their stomachs? To fight to be full? What about their souls?”
What about their souls?
It is a question that CRF engages daily. In a context where young people are rarely asked what they think, the radio workshops and shows inspire dialogue and conversation. They open up spaces to talk about difficult topics. It is no coincidence that these conversations happen inside a clinic. CRF recognizes that providing young people with care—HIV testing and treatment—must happen alongside a different kind of care. A kind of care that asks young people what they think and feel. A kind of care that asks young people to tell stories, to create dramas, to think and feel out loud. I have learned that to do this work, sometimes you have to sit with young people in difficulty, to hold spaces that are not easy.
I talk with Farhana, a CRF facilitator, about the power of small moments with participants; when they say a comment, or write a line, or wonder out loud. She says, “the moments [of learning] are soft, sometimes it is a side comment or a whisper.” She is right about working with young people; the learning does not always feel tangible or monumental. It doesn’t always feel like it sticks or stays. It is moments that feel like whispers. But nevertheless, I am sure that we can hear them. Children’s Radio Foundation invites youth and young adults to speak louder, longer and with greater confidence. It is a project that supports youth-centered health care and soul care and tangibly affirms that CRF’s young people matter, both in body and soul.
