Abstinence, Reproductive Health and a Youth Festival

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Tuungane Reproductive Health Festival

Tuungane is a youth centre in Kisumu City with satellite branches through the urban slums around Kisumu. They target youth ages 10-19 and promote abstinence and being faithful to prevent HIV and STI (sexually transmitted infections) through education, awareness and behaviour change activities. They also offer youth friendly VCT (Voluntary Counselling and Testing for HIV) and STI Services. In December they held a reproductive health festival where the youth performed in different categories, were judged by a panel and the winners were announced and received trophies. There were performances by youth from all the various centres, there was poetry, dancing, singing and drama - as well as some HIV plays performed by my friend’s drama troupe VUTIA, a group of men and one woman from Majengo which is a small town outside Kisumu.

The festival was by kicked off by VUTIA strapping on their stilts, picking up their instruments and walking around the block near Tuungane to gather an audience. They were dancing and playing music straight for 20-30 minutes while we followed and danced around the block. The stares from the bystanders and the small children who danced along with the group were very entertaining - it’s not everyday that guys in stilts dance down your street. I was tasked with videotaping which was much harder than I anticipated as I was walking backwards most of the time. Once we returned to Tuungange the festival started with poetry that was followed by dancing, singing and drama.

The most hilarious thing all day was the dancing, you had these kids who barely looked to be 10 years old bumping and grinding all over the dance floor, humping the concrete, shaking their hips - like something off of MTV - the dancing was terribly entertaining - as you can from some of the pictures I posted.

The drama was good but since most was in Kiswahili I was unable to completely follow the story lines and rather just watched the acting. Overall the day lasted from 10:00am until well after 5:00pm… I got sunburned, took lots of pictures and my friend Moses tried to get me onto stage to present one of the awards. Luckily I was holding a baby so I had a good excuse to say “no” and thus successfully avoided walking on stage and presenting an award with no preparation. Of course I would have had full-on stage fright as I do not do well ad-libbing in front of audiences… I about wanted to strangle Moses but luckily was saved by the random baby someone gave me to hold onto. Overall it may have been a long and hot day but it was really fun. I took some okay footage of VUTIA walking around and performing their skits and got some nice pictures and was entertained by local aspiring actors, singers and dancers.

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Photos

my favourite dancer
i caught this kid in a series of his ever so impressive dancing skills, he was one of the funniest and most entertaining ones of the day....

VUTIA
In this picture VUTIA has just entered Tuungane after walking around to gather some more audience and entertain the local neighbourhood before the festival began.

VUTIA on the street
This picture was taken as VUTIA walked around the block playing music and walking on their stilts.

Dancing for the judges
This kid was actually quite good but he kept making the most ridiculous faces (you can kind of see in this picture) and I am afraid his facial expressions may have lost him the dancing title...

youth dancing skills
I combined a few pictures of this one kid so you can get an idea of the movement of the dance...

Moses and his group
Moses and his brother (George) and some of their friends have a group where they perform traditional music and dancing, in this picture some of the audience joined them on stage.

Comments

[malte]

mzuri sana
i dud a google search on vutia and found this! great blog, feels almost like i was there....