Lesotho Puppetry Festival, Africa

In December 2006, Sharon Gelber and I were invited to participate in the Lesotho Educational Puppetry Festival. Puppetry students from Lesotho and Swaziland were gathered in a competition to present their performance pieces. We flew from Cape Town to Maseru together with Janni Younge, Chair Person of UNIMA South Africa to provide these budding puppeteers with encouragement and give feedback on their presentations. We were highly impressed with their creativity and ability to put across sensitive socio- medical issues using their new found puppetry skills. It was a great inspiration to know that the groups which I had taught in Kenya over the past 10 years had been passing on their skills through Africa. Congratulations to all involved!

MADaboutART, Knysna, South Africa

MADaboutART is a charity that unites children across the world in understanding and fighting HIV and AIDS with art and education.

Situated in a squator camp outside Knysna, between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, the group provide a unique mix of innovative arts-based education and narrative therapies designed to increase children’s knowledge of HIV and AIDS and create more open communication, as well as reduce risk-taking behaviour by increasing self-esteem and self-advocacy.
They partner with communities to create an open, accepting community response to HIV that breaks down stigma and discrimination. Ultimately their aim is to reduce new HIV infections in children and young people.

Towards the end of December, we were invited to provide the youth ambassadors of MADaboutART with skills to further their tools which could assist them in the community. We provided them with an insight and techniques into the worlds of Brain Gym and Puppetry in the form of a Paper Creations Workshop. It was inspiring for them to discover how using the simplicity of a sheet of brown paper, they could express their fears and issues through this new exciting medium. They plan to make use of these new creative skills in their community educational work.