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In July, Insight director Chris Lunch was invited to run a Participatory Video training by the Valley Trust in South Africa. Named after the thousand valleys that stretch across the local landscape of Kwazulu Natal near Durban, the Valley Trust has been working as a community health organisation since its founding in 1953. The Valley Trust saw the potential for Participatory Video to empower people through telling their own stories on video, both to themselves and to the authorities.

In this extract from Chris's fieldwork diary, he describes the day the team worked in a HIV hospice.

Monday
Everyone got together and went through the days plan that we had created on Saturday, and then we had a pep talk about how well everyone had been doing, but also pointing out that a film is not just about interviews, but needs more than this.

I thought that we should look at storyboards as a way to visualise their films and so went through this again. On the previous Friday at the community centre, the youth had been unsure about who we were and why we were there so we had launched straight into the name game to get them interested and hook them in. When we had watched it back, it had given us a chance to talk about our aims and why we had come, and then ask them if they would be interested to do more.

So, based on this approach, we decided to do the same today at the HIV hospice. They were all lying down when we got there, but they sat up to do the name game with each other; a good example of how its not necessary to sit in a circle to do this exercise. Also, because they were in bed, we moved to each individual and helped them to learn the camera, rather than have them teach each other as we would normally do in the name game. We had to really help them touch the record button and guide their fingers. Although at first their esteem was very low and they were all incredibly shy, they really enjoyed watching back the footage and were keen to do more when asked.

One of the nurses tried to dominate the process by encouraging them to do the film on Anti Retro Viral drugs, but we encouraged the participants to present their own ideas. Because they were so shy, and in their beds, each of the facilitators went to talk to the girls separately to hear their stories and help them create their own storyboard film plan. Xoli, one of the facilitators, was working with one woman who was so sick and weak that she had to stop. Gertie and Mainzie's skills as counselors were incredibly important and useful for doing this kind of sensitive PV work. One of the girls didn't want to show her face as her boyfriend still did not know her status and nobody knew that she was there. So, I helped Gertie and her to think of other images or ways of keeping her face out of the film, and they had some good ideas. They filmed this girl's story first, while the others had to wait as we only had one camera. It took about 20 minutes and the girl was so shy about speaking. When watching the film back, the girl was still nervous about who might see her, but we were able to show her that the camera had not been pointing at her and so her identity was hidden. She then agreed to sign the consent form, and we filmed the next storyboard. This girl was also incredibly shy and almost seemed to have forgotten what she wanted to say, and her speech was incredibly short so I'm not sure how it will turn out. I had to stop Manzie from whispering words to her as it only ended up creating more confusion. I had to explain to Manzie that, as a facilitator, it is better to ask clear questions and then get her to speak, and that a facilitator's role is to encourage, remind, prompt and help, but not to put words in the participants' mouths.

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