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Making
it Sweet: Somali Refugees, HIV/AIDS, and the Creation of a Community
Public Health Video
Alicia Blum-Ross
Department
of Anthropology
Oxford
University
Increasingly, organizations are turning to visual
media, and particularly, Behavior Change Communications (BCC), as
cost-effective and easily disseminated educational strategies to be used
combat the spread of HIV. In order to examine the often-surprising
intersection between community values, ‘traditional practices’ and
organizational aims, this paper uses the case study of the creation of a
community-conceptualized HIV-prevention BCC video amongst Somali Refugees
in the Dadaab Camps, Kenya. Here, I argue that the process of creating a
HIV/AIDS educational video allowed for a vision of ‘true’ Somali
identity to be re-created and wielded strategically in the project of
preventing the spread of HIV. Therefore, the video was more than a visual
document; it was an outgrowth of a communal storytelling process that
called upon participants to re-imagine themselves, their relationship to
the international agencies, and their own understandings of cultural
practices and the disease, through the writing of the story
Based on UNHCR’s ‘integrated mandate’ for
HIV/AIDS, all agencies serving refugees in East Africa should attempt to
provide health programming that relates to local contexts. This was
considered particularly important in the Dadaab Camps, as feedback from
the community indicated a persistent denial about the relevance of the
disease, saying it was for ‘non-Somalis’ and ‘non –Muslims.’
Simultaneously, medical professionals had identified cultural practices
such as early and forced marriage, female circumcision, easy divorce and
multiple marriages, to be possible contributors to the nascent spread of
the virus.
With no Somali-language
materials to draw upon, the HIV-prevention messages used by agency staff
were seemingly reinforcing the stereotype that AIDS was a disease for
outsiders. In order to make the possibility of AIDS more intimate to
the community, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and FilmAid International
partnered to facilitate a communal story-writing and ating process to
create a new video by and for the Somali refugees. Given free reign
over the content of the video, the community made frequently unanticipated
and contentious decisions in the storyline in the name of ‘making the
story sweet.’ For example, instead of avoiding the controversial
practice of female circumcision, the refugee committee in charge of the
video instead selected this topic as the central method of transmission
featured in the video.
Therefore, the values of
participation as an organizational goal were continually challenged in the
process of creating an HIV-prevention video in Dadaab. However,
based on participant-observation, interviews and discussions with agency
practitioners and refugees themselves, I argue that the playful acts of
agentive creativity, the negotiations over the actions and words spoken,
and the choice of the initial story, are examples of how the participatory
conceptualization of an educational video on HIV/AIDS instead became a
means for community members and agency staff to reconcile competing
narratives of disease. This participatory process was therefore used not
only in order to re-negotiate power hierarchies among agencies and
refugees within the confines of the camp, but also to recreate a sense of
‘true’ Somali identity in order to engage with narratives of disease
in alternate and extraordinary ways.
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