Stories about Feature from November, 2008
FOKO: Growing Strong As A Connected Community
It was an eventful October for the Rising Voices grantee FOKO Blog Club (FBC) project in Madagascar. With the help of FOKO bloggers many participants at the 'Madagascar barcamp' and the 'E-Bit youth day ICT event' learned about digital literacy and citizen media. FOKO bloggers are now taking charge of the outreach activities with a inspired community feeling and FOKO is soon spreading to more parts of Madagascar.
Kwa Mashu Bloggers Tour Ekhaya Multi Arts Centre
The K-CAP bloggers from the Kwa Mashu township outside Durban, South Africa improve upon their digital storytelling skills and offer us an in-depth look at the Ekhaya Multi Arts Centre where they have just recently finished their year-long performing arts certificate program. Thanadanani and Ncebo are our hosts throughout the tour as we learn about local music groups, how the arts helps Kwa Mashu's development, and the good and bad that comes along with increased freedom in post-apartheid South Africa.
Ukraine: Harm Reduction and Law Enforcement, Part 2
In the follow-up to a recent post in which "Mazay" from the Drop-In Center explained harm reduction to Ukrainian police officers, Veronica Khokhlova offers this translation, which reveals that the lecture is already starting to bear fruit.
REPACTED: Working Towards A World Free From HIV/AIDS
Eduardo Ávila of the Voces Bolivanas project recently visited the REPACTED project in Kenya. Read his accounts of the works and the challenges of this project. Also posted in this feature are two videos of Magnet theatre, their tool for behavioral change in the society and some photos taken by Eduardo. Read also the highlights from the blogs of the REPACTED members, who are telling amazing stories online about their fight to make the world free from HIV/AIDS and STIs.
Nari Jibon Bloggers Start Writing in Their Own Language
Despite a few posts published in Bengali on their group blog, Amader Kotha ("Our Stories"), most Nari Jibon bloggers have had to write solely in English due to the lack of online and computer support for the Bengali language. Over the past few months Taslima, the supervisor of Nari Jibon's computer section, has been collecting best practices regarding how to blog in Bengali. Yesterday she led a workshop at the Nari Jibon center focused specifically on Bengali unicode, the various Bengali-language blogging platforms, and how to set up a Blogger-based blog in the bloggers' native language.
AIDS Rights Congo: Stories of Stigma and Hope
Communication officers and leaders of local HIV and AIDS organizations in Congo start blogging about their experiences with HIV/AIDS issues in their communities, sharing stories of discrimination, stigma, and hope.
Voces Bolivianas: Passion Makes Simple Ideas Successful
It all started in 2006 when well known Bolivian bloggers Mario Duran, Hugo Miranda, and Eduardo Ávila envisioned a digital literacy project for the underrepresented communities of Bolivia. With the help of a Rising Voices micro grant and the passion and commitment of the Bolivian bloggers the project had expanded from El Alto to other cities in Bolivia like Santa Cruz and Beni where blogger volunteers imparted blog, video, photography and podcast workshops to hundreds of Bolivians. The project has recently released two manuals in Spanish language on how to open a blog in Wordpress and Blogger platforms.
AIDS Rights Congo: Promoting Rights of HIV-Positive People
The AZUR Development organization is training communication officers and leaders of local HIV and AIDS organizations in digital story telling, podcasting, and blogging to help document the stigma and discrimination faced by people infected by HIV/AIDS in Congo.
Ukraine: Harm Reduction and Law Enforcement
The Drop-In Center based in Kiev, Ukraine has opened a LiveJournal blog to share their experiences of working at a harm reduction facility aimed at meeting the health needs of Kiev's injection drug user community. Veronica Khokhlova translates a recent post by one of the Drop-In Center's staff.
Rising Voices Bloggers on Obama's Victory
Rising Voices bloggers joined the global chorus this week as several responded to Barack Obama's victory in Tuesday's presidential election in the United States. We hear comparisons with elections in Colombia and Bolivia, and a blogger in Kenya shares his worries about the security of Obama's grandmother living in Kogelo, Kenya.
Hipperbarrio: Community and Beyond
The HiperBarrio project in Medellín, Colombia continues to inspire local communities as members and participants connect to the Internet via the public computers of libraries to post images, videos and write about their lives in their blogs. Through these citizen media tools they reach to the world.
Serbian Web Journalism School Joins Rising Voices Grantees
Rising Voices has provided funding to support the outreach work of the Serbian Web Journalism School. Founded earlier this year in Belgrade by Serbian citizen media enthusiast and veteran blogger, Ljubisa Bojic, the Serbian Web Journalism School gathers local new media experts like Danica Radovanovic and Lidija Kujundzic to teach the fundamentals of citizen media to traditional journalists and everyday Serbians.
