Approximately 264 million children and adolescents around the world do not have the opportunity to enter or complete school. They dream of a life where they can have an education. Working in international development, we know education is a key factor in reducing the poverty cycle.

In Australia, we are extremely lucky to have public education for all children, which is why it might sound surprising that in some communities, there are children missing out on years of school or even their entire schooling. This has huge ramifications for their future abilities to live a fulfilling purposeful life.

In Carnarvon, a small town we work, school non-attendance is high, and with the support of community, government and supporting organisations changing attitudes and the culture of schooling and education is a key priority area.

There are many reasons why education is not a priority and after going on the school pick up bus you can see larger social issues which prevent children going to school exist. Run-down and insecure housing, family alcohol and other drug issues, lack of food security. Talking with locals, many of these social issues exist due to intergenerational trauma from past Government policies, including the Stolen Generation.

Children were taken from their families and to be brought up in institutions, fostered out or adopted by white families. Children lost their connection to family, culture, land and language. Not only does this contribute largely to current social issues within Aboriginal communities, but also has create a sense of distrust to ‘white’ education (AIATSIS).

However, with the support of the community, the school and the local Remote School Attendance Strategy team (who are part of Ngala Midwest & Gascoyne), there has been progress in supporting parents to get their children to school, and change the current perception. This takes a lot of dedicated people and a holistic approach to support families. Local leaders identify education is important for their community’s future, but are also passionate in passing down traditional culture.

For the past few years we have been working with the Carnarvon community and the Remote School Attendance Strategy team to develop local video and radio content to promote school and education. We have spoken with Elders, right through to kindy students about what education means to them. Recently we developed a set of videos which the Carnarvon community engaged with and we had great feedback. You can check one of them out here:

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Last week we were invited by the Bunidyarra Irra Wangga Language Program to a language workshop in Mullewa (about an hour’s drive east of our base in Geraldton), held at the Mullewa Aboriginal Arts Centre. The language program aims to preserve, revitalise and maintain Aboriginal language and culture. It was a great opportunity to observe the workshop and hear from local Mullewa people, some of which could speak Wajarri (the local language), and others who had not learnt it because of past government policies.

During the workshop, we had the privilege of trying bimba, a traditional bush food, also known as ‘bush lolly’, which you get from going out bush. 

To support the work of the Irra Wangga Language Centre, we help the community record their language for broadcast on the local Aboriginal community radio station, Radio MAMA, which we did in Mullewa.

We drove three hours onto Mount Magnet which is Badimaya country (a different language group). There we went to the District High School which started a language program this year in the school teaching both Wajarri and Badimaya. Due to family connections, many students are Yamaji or have Yamaji links (who speak Wajarri), as well as Badimaya. We met teacher Mrs Roslyn Little, who had a kindy (4-year-olds) and Pre-primary (5-year-olds) class while we visited. The students loved their language class, and with the help of their teacher, were able to record some great radio messages using Wajarri words. We aim to go back next school term to do more recordings in Badimaya. Have a listen to the radio messages the students recorded below. 

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By Hazeen Latif

Sahib Gul is 25 years of age and has never been able to walk. He uses his arms to go places in the community. The ground is covered with dust, stones, glass and rubbish. Sahib Gul’s hands get dirty, cut and blistered. He never thought he would be respected in the community. Almost every day he hears humiliating remarks from the community, even from relatives. Street kids taunt and tease him about his short stature.

His uncles and parents comment, “Who will marry you, your clothes and hands are always filthy, and how will you stand or walk with your wife”. These words have always echoed in Sahib Gul’s mind, that he is not worthy of a family life.

However, through all this, he has remained hopeful that someday he will hold his head high and have a family. This is what he shared with me when I met him a year ago.

A year on and things have changed. Recently HCR gifted Sahib Gul a wheelchair.

Sahib Gul’s response:

‘I am so much more confident sitting in this wheelchair. I feel I have got my own feet I am no longer on the ground. To me it’s not a wheelchair but it’s a journey from being dependent to independent. Through this wheelchair I can earn, contribute financially for my family, and will have a beautiful wife of my dreams. Now, no one can say, “who will marry you?”’

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Sitting in a “hujra” (a room in the house for meetings and discussions) my host’s uncle asked me, “What is your interest in coming to our village (Swabi, KPK)?”  This question is rarely asked of anyone when it comes to hospitality in KPK region, a province to north of Pakistan.

Before any kind of reply from me, my friend’s (the host) uncle changed the tone and said, “Oh, you must not misunderstand me. It rarely happens that people come to visit us in this hot weather, with no facility of any kind in the village, and having to sit on the ground with us. Please do not take this the wrong way as we are honored by your presence.” This dialogue gave me an opportunity to share how I felt in their midst. It was through my friend that I had been invited to visit the community and asked to help the community become healthy and prosperous. I told them that my visit to the community was the fulfilment of a promise to my friend; no more than that.

In the hujra (house), a council member from government was present who was elected to the union council for that region comprising of eight villages of which one was the village where I was sitting. All the men agreed to develop a CBO (community based organisation) for the villages. They all happily decided on the name which is Khush-hali meaning prosperity. Amazingly, they all agreed on the name. With my guidance, they identified the issues of the community for the first time and even proposed some solutions.  Major issues which came up in our discussion were education for all, but mostly for girls, and health issues as there is only one BHU (basic health unit) operational in the region for over ten thousand adults in the union council. Other issues discussed were youth being neglected, hygiene and poor infrastructure. The men asked me to develop a program and to proceed in developing Khush-hali by establishing a proper legal frame work. The meeting ended with a delicious lunch we all shared by eating from the one dish.

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Over 40 people participated at a community meeting in the village of Swabi, KPK, Pakistan, organised by HCR in January 2017. The purpose was to help community understand they have the capacity to bring about positive change in their community. Most of the members said they had never attended a meeting where everyone was given an opportunity to introduce themselves. It was important for HCR to ensure participation from all groups of the community. In particular, youth are generally not encourage to be part of any decision making, something that is traditionally left up to the community Elders. However, this was the first time all age groups had come together to discuss community issues, and for many the first time they were heard.

A senior spokesperson from the community endorsed what was said by HCR’s Hazeen Latif, “we have to unite and become an agent of change rather than an object to change”. At the conclusion of the meeting, Hazeen was thanked by all, “we have never talked in front of so many people, thank you for giving us the opportunity”!

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Community leader: “Sir, you could have cancelled the meeting and stayed home. It’s been raining for the last three days”.

Hazeen: “Rain can’t stop us”!

HCR has been working in Charsadda village in Pakistan since 2013, using the communication for development approach to help people identify, understand and resolve their health and social development issues and challenges. Many successful community initiatives have come from this approach such as the medical camp, cricket tournament, well water project, and the microenterprise awareness campaign. These have helped the community realise the importance of social capital and the power of people to challenge and change the circumstances of life.

A meeting facilitated by Hazeen Latif was held at a primary school which did not have benches or chairs. Instead, members sat on jute cloth mats. Even with rain and extremely cold weather conditions, members of the community participated and gave their consent to form a Community Based Organisation (CBO). Hazeen asked the group “what do you want your children to become”? One of the members who is a tailor said,”I want my son to become a doctor not less than that”. A fish seller wants all his five children to become educated and never ever sell fish. HCR will continue to work with the group to identify issues and challenges faced by the community, and work with the community to develop ways to overcome these.

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We have just arrived back from attending our second Yalgoo Emu Cup. Last year the sun was shining, so much so that one of the Radio MAMA staff members got heatstroke. There was definitely no heat stroke this year! We arrived to rains and a freezing cold wind, but that didn’t stop the community from having fun. Children were playing in the paddle pools (I shiver just thinking about it), jumping on bouncy castles, making their emu costumes and getting involved in the organised games. One community member said “The rain is good, it brings us all closer together, not just in terms of distance”.

When the storm hit, the whole community was huddled together underneath cover, except for some children who embraced the rain. Dane and I helped Radio MAMA do a live broadcast from the Emu Cup. We chatted on-air with lots of children, a well-known Indigenous hip hop artist, Bryte MC, as well as lots of community members including a gentleman who came to Australia from Chile as a political refugee 30 years ago! Even though the fireworks had to be cancelled, it was still a great event. Dane and I love how we are able to involve community people to be part of radio.

The highlight of the day was the stunning headline act, The Merindas, an Indigenous R&B soul group who sing a lot of motown hits, but have also just released an original song. They make their own costumes and are genuine down to earth people. Even though they were exhausted from a whole week of work-shopping with children from Geraldton and Yalgoo, they agreed to meet me on Sunday morning at 8am, so I could interview them about how they got to where they are today. The recorded interviews will be broadcast on the show I host on Radio MAMA, On the Road, which uses music and yarning to connect the Mid West and Gascoyne. If you ever want to tune in you can by selecting ‘Listen Live Geraldton’ at http://www.mama.net.au/. The show is on each Monday at 11am.

* Yalgoo is a town in the Murchison region, 499 kilometres north-north-east of Perth, Western Australia. 

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Our HCR team, Dane Waters and Celeste Larkins, based in Geraldton, travel to communities in the Mid West, Murchison and Gascoyne and support the community to address local issues through community media. They know too well that mental health and suicide prevention is a main issue in all the communities they work, particularly for Aboriginal people.

Along with the continuing work HCR do to raise awareness of mental health and suicide prevention in rural and remote WA, in the lead up for Mental Health Week, Dane and Celeste assisted the local Geraldton suicide prevention working group to develop community service announcements (CSAs). These were broadcast through Radio MAMA and Meeka FM.

HCR also supported an event held in Geraldton, and were part of an outside broadcast put on by Radio MAMA. Community members and service providers participated in the broadcast. This ensured information not only reached Geraldton, but also Mullewa, Meekatharra and Carnarvon.

If you want more information on mental health visit: https://www.beyondblue.org.au/ or see your local GP.

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By Ross James

By 1989, Russia’s leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev had orchestrated a reorientation of Soviet strategic aims that contributed to the end of the Cold War and brought in an era of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe were defeated in elections, and the East German Government opened the Berlin Wall. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) officially ceased to exist on 31 December 1991.

In these tumultuous years I was living and working in Pakistan and was part of a small team that travelled to Russia to support a group of people who wanted to broadcast radio programs responding to a vacuum of family, spiritual and social values in a country that was collapsing. Crime, corruption, alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty, hunger and unemployment now besieged a despairing people who had been denied freedom of expression, religion and individual empowerment for decades.

I have many memories of that time: of when we ate radish for breakfast because of the scarcity of fresh food but fed a starving cat scavenging beneath the tables of a dilapidated café a bowl of caviar because it was so plentiful; of not just one but many old women sitting on a footpath, pathetic in their attempts to sell a pair of used shoes or two tomatoes. But nothing will erase the memory of working with that first generation of broadcasters no longer coerced into thinking and behaving according to the collective ideology that had shaped their entire existence and which was now crumbling to pieces around them.

One of our sessions was in the training room of a radio station with powerful transmitters for jamming political and religious broadcasts from outside of the Soviet Union. Those transmitters were now silent, no longer churning out annoying and disruptive signals on the same frequencies as foreign broadcasts intended for Soviet audiences. But ideological apparatus remained around the radio facility: statues of Marx, Lenin, Stalin. In our training room, large portraits featuring their stern images looked down on us, as we developed a suite of communication strategies and radio programs that, over the next few years, had much positive impact on the lives of listeners. Let alone not having the opportunity to voice their concerns about family and social issues before, none of our group had any broadcasting experience.

In this photo, a translator is helping me to work through a programmer’s proposals during a mentoring session on a launch on the Amur River that flows through Khabarovsk, 30 kilometres from the Chinese border in Siberia.

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