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Last week the Soot Semee coordinators organised two days of community-centred media workshops to train new volunteers and to refresh the existing team’s skills. As well as learning media skills such as how to record interviews and make effective community service announcements (CSAs), the training workshop includes time to reflect on community goals for development and exploring opportunities to work together in other “off-air” activities. To mark the end of the training the community organised a peace-friendly football match.

So what exactly does Soot Semee mean by “peacebuilding”?

Soot Semee volunteer team, Nov 2022

Peacebuilding is sometimes understood as aiming for a cessation of armed conflict. However, it is important to know what everyday peace looks like to the community members involved. You might pause for a moment and ask yourself:

“If I were to think about my own situation, rather than geo-political events, what does peace look like to me?”

This is the sort of exercise that the organisation Everyday Peace Indicators does regularly in their mission to build bridges between communities and the diverse organisations working to build peace.

Taking a cue from their work, we asked this question to several community members in Omugo 4. The responses are interestingly varied:

Susan – “Peace is like staying good calmly with love”.

Idoru – “Peace is like for example if you have a wife, and you understand each other very well, that’s how peace looks like”.

Maka – ‘Peace is when there is always enough food at home

Moses – “To me something called peace, is like when you stay well with other people, with good security and no fear, that’s peace”.

Isaac– “Peace is when you live in a place that has no war”

Alfred – “peace is when there is money at home”

Margret– “peace is when every family member embraces love for one another”.

Simon – “Peace is when you live without threatening words of ending someone’s life. You stay stress free”.

Florence – “Peace is when you have everything at home”

Mary – “What also looks like peace is when someone wrongs you, then you don’t need to keep it in your heart because you want to pay back, but instead show your goodness to him or her”.

Click play to hear community members voice their responses in Bari and Juba Arabic.

You may have noticed that only one response refers to war, and just one other refers to threat of violence. The rest of the responses refer to relationships, food security and wellbeing.

Our partners, Community Development Centre, who lead the Soot Semee project, also belong to the South Sudanese refugee community they serve. They understand that building a place where peace can thrive means addressing all these everyday aspects of peace. This is reflected in Soot Semee’s programme planning and the associated off-air activities outlined below.

This month, Soot Semee audio programmes will address environmental issues, while community volunteers have organised activities to clear up plastic bottles and bags from Omugo 4 village. They have also made plans to plant new trees.

Trees contribute to a more resilient natural environment. They can also help reduce violence. A lack of trees has led, in some cases, to conflict over places to collect firewood.

In December, Soot Semee volunteers will focus on wellness with programmes promoting hygiene and sanitation. The volunteers have also organised days to clean up the water collection points along with the locally organised water management committees. Clean water and good hygiene also contribute to everyday peace as it is defined by the Omugo 4 community members.

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If you’ve been following the Facebook page of Amplifying Voices Pakistan, you’ll have seen this story unfold over the last few weeks. But we feel it’s a story worth re-telling. It’s the story of a radio programme that dug a new borehole!

Since November last year a new partner organisation, Community Media Power, founded by Amplifying Voices Pakistan, has been making radio programmes based on conversations in two or three isolated communities outside Nowshera. In one of these programmes, community members talked about the efforts they have to go to to fetch water. A listener was moved by the story and decided to help the community do something about it.

The community lives in an informal settlement that was built about 40 years ago by people who had fled from their homes in Afghanistan. The current residents, numbering around 50-60 families, have still not been fully integrated into the wider community. However, at some point several years ago, someone did dig a couple of boreholes to provide clean water. The pipes lining the boreholes have since rusted and one of the pumps has lost its handle. With no fresh water available locally, community members had to cross a railway track and walk to another community to fetch water, where they were not always welcome and sometimes chased away.

Community Media Power created a radio programme with the community voices telling this story and a local FM station in Nowshera aired the programme. A woman, who was looking for a suitable way to give charitably in preparation for Ramadan, heard the story and decided to get in touch. She said that if the community could get the work started before Ramadan, she would pay for a new borehole and repairs to the other two.

The new borehole has been located near the mosque, with a solar powered pump, a 1000-gallon storage tank so that water is always available from the borehole via taps. This has an additional benefit of providing water for worshipers washing before prayers. The broken boreholes have had the metal lining removed and replaced with more durable plastic pipe lining, and the pump mechanism refurbished.

Community volunteers feed plastic lining into new borehole, Nowshera, March 2022

It only took a week to dig the new borehole, drilling down to 150ft to ensure a good supply of clean water. When the new borehole was ready, the community held a celebration event, to which the donor also came. She gave a radio interview via Community Media Power, encouraging others to do something similar, providing communities with means to develop themselves.

We know that a radio programme cannot actually dig a borehole, but we continue to be encouraged by the power of community-centred radio programmes to advocate for communities whilst also mobilising the community members to take action locally.

Installing borehole - Video courtesy of Community Media Power and Amplifying Voices

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Dennis is from the New England area of the capital. His neighbourhood is teeming with people. After hundreds of thousands flocked to Freetown following the civil war, people made do with homes lacking basic facilities like running water or electricity. Unemployment remains high, and the economy struggles on. Dennis could see the need but wasn’t sure what he could do.

Amplifying Voices partners with the Believers Broadcasting Network (BBN)* in Sierra Leone. Together, we’re supporting a community project named Amplifying Voices through SALT to strengthen community health, wellbeing, and resilience.

Gathering together a strong group of volunteers from the community, clinic, and churches, the SALT team goes out to seven areas of Freetown and regularly meets people in their homes. The team listen to people’s concerns, strengths, and hopes.

It was during one of these visits that Dennis met the team. The SALT ethos – Strengthen, Amplify, Listen and Transform – resonated with Dennis, and soon he became a regular volunteer.

Speaking to his community, Dennis was passionate to do something about the water situation in the New England district. But he knew he couldn’t do it alone. It takes a shift in community mindset to make lasting change.

Dennis began encouraging other young people to get involved. The SALT team, BBN, and Amplifying Voices continues to help people build on their strengths to influence change. BBN featured Dennis on a few of its radio programs, where he echoed local stories and challenges people faced with the lack of water. By representing his community, he invites others to become part of the change they want to see.

Since coming on board, Dennis has proactively engaged with the Ministry of Water to get access to more deprived settlements of Freetown. As a result, this has recently lead to the installation of several water tanks and wells.

Celebrating Dennis’ enthusiasm and example, the SALT team is reporting more community members engaging in these kinds of initiatives.

Stories like this encourage the other communities to invite the SALT team in, demonstrating the power of community-centred media to others. People are being empowered to champion their own social change.

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The featured image of this article is representational.

*BBN set up the SALT ministry in 2015 in response to the devastating Ebola outbreak which heavily weakened Sierra Leone’s already fragile health system. SALT is a strengths-based approach to improving health and promoting community healing, integrated with radio broadcasts.

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This arduous task would become one of her lifetime duties. She would have to collect water several times a day to provide the 20 litres her family needed to survive. This task would not only rob her of the opportunity to go to school, but years later it would take its toll on her health with the repetitive strain of carrying heavy water loads on her head each day.

Water, the gift of life

But that all changed for Sunita and her entire community this week. Working with our partners, Seva, we helped provide Wello water wheels for each family in the village. 

“You have given us the gift of life,” Sunita said. “Now I can spend my life doing more productive things, and it will also relieve the burden from my children.”

The “Wello Water” is a simple water barrel in the shape of a wheel. It can deliver more than enough water for an entire family’s needs for a whole day.

Fullness of life through local partner initiatives

This distribution is part of the Adivasi Voices Project, an initiative to provide remote indigenous (Adivasi) communities with speaker boxes containing audio content that can transform lives. 

Using local voices, stories, drama, interviews, and music, the programmes entertain, educate and inform, as well as provide a safe space for community voices to be heard. This stimulates conversations and ideas on how local challenges and problems can be resolved.

With local-dialect dramas, music, and audio programmes that educate, inform and entertain, the ‘Adivasi Voices Project’ is an innovative way to help get communities talking and taking action.

The team leader, Shilpa reports that an extensive evaluation done recently, demonstrates that the project has been a huge success where the speaker boxes have been distributed.

“In remote parts, many communities don’t have access to radio, television or even mobile phones. Many can’t read,” she says. “But since we started distributing speaker boxes, we have seen dramatic changes in health, sanitation, education, and livelihoods,” she adds.

The Adivasi Voices project is a partnership initiative between Seva and Amplifying Voices. Over the next three years, we hope to reach out to more than 53 villages with a vision to serve them so that they may enjoy the fullness of life.

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What a joy to be back in the remote Maharashtran village of Kahandol in time to celebrate the inauguration of their two new wells.  Just four months earlier I had been standing on a dried up riverbed with my Indian colleagues, Shilpa, Sam and Akshay and the head of the village, Patil Ramdas Warde.  Ramdas told us how the drought had brought great hardship to his village, with only 28 days of water, and he asked us if there was anything we could do to help.

Amplifying Voices began working with Seva Social Welfare Foundation (Seva) in January 2018, with a vision to use a community-centred media approach to transform indigenous tribal communities, known as Adivasis, who are some of the most disadvantaged people in the country.  “In the last 10 months since the first audio programmes were distributed we have seen a dramatic decline in many illnesses as people have changed their habits around water, sanitation and hygiene,” Shilpa Shinde Seva’s chief executive told me.  Besides monthly health camps, the community have been receiving creative audio programmes on “speakerboxes” (Mp3 players) which have already brought about significant change on a range of issues ranging from health and hygiene to livelihoods and the importance of educating female children.

But it was the water crisis that has focused the attention of the Seva team for the last four months, during which time they facilitated the sinking of two wells and tanks that will mean the village will never lack for water again.

After colourful tribal dances and music played on traditional instruments followed by a community meal, Ramdas turned to me and said, “This water has given the gift of life to this community for generations to come.  You came back.  You kept your promise.  Thank you!”

In September we will be facilitating a major evaluation to assess how the project has impacted the community with a view to scaling the project up to reach many more tribal villages across the state and then across the country.

If you would like to support this project or would like further information please contact us

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• The main street leading into the village is being upgraded with a concrete surface. Until a few months ago it was a rough, soil track scarred with ditches and puddles.

• A new transformer is soon to be installed. This summer people can enjoy a cool breeze from their fans. Previously the low capacity in the electricity supply meant people suffered in the heat with fans running at tortoise speed.

• 

  Community volunteer sprays against dengue. KPK, Apr 2019

  The local administration has agreed to spray the community to prevent mosquitoes from breeding and spreading Dengue fever. Summer heat is on its way and with it the risk of Dengue increases.

Structural development like this doesn’t happen easily because of bureaucratic inertia. But something new has happened in the last year few months. Local authorities have started to release funds for development as they pay new attention to the community needs, and to the appetite for change.  Other are taking notice too. Nearby villages want to know how to bring similar changes to their own communities.

“It is all due to our radio program and WhatsApp group”

Zahid Ullah Zahid, who heads the Naway Saher Community Services Group

Naway Saher formed a small radio production team, trained by HCR Pakistan, and, since November 2018, they have been broadcasting a community radio programme in Pushto language on a local FM station. The village voice is getting louder and stronger through radio and it reached the ears of the district councillor.  He decided to support the new structural developments and even came to be interviewed in the radio studio.

“We didn’t realize that our voice was so effective and strong”

Quote from one of the newly trained production team members

So far the Majukay story has been one of gradual change. People have been coming together to discuss issues and establish unity. Less and less people have the mindset that nothing will happen and only the government should do everything. Naway Saher (New Dawn) Community Services Group, supported by HCR Pakistan, has held community workshops, village committees, and youth sports events. Village elders have given their support. Families have started boiling water for drinking to avoid illness from contaminated water sources. In 2016 HCR Pakistan supported the community to dig a well and the well has been giving clean water since. People come from far away to get the only clean drinking water and are claiming that it is a miracle as the water never stops giving odorless good water.

The Majukay story is spreading – upwards, outwards and inwards.

“More people are joining with us” says Zahid Ullah. Not only are surrounding villages wanting to see similar changes, but more people from within the community want to get involved.

HCR Pakistan is seeking funding to help Naway Saher become even more inclusive, with more media content created for and by women and girls.

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The dichotomy of India

India is the fastest growing economy in the world, yet when we went to pay for our hotel stay in Nashik, reception could not accept an international credit card. We experienced similar problems trying to withdraw cash from ATMs. As I upload this blog using 4G from my mobile hotspot, villages 10 kilometres from here do not have a sustainable water supply. It is such a bizarre phenomenon to be surrounded by all the technology of the modern age yet know basic needs for daily living are lacking around us. But there is an incredible opportunity here for positive social change using media.

Amplifying Voices is working with Seva Social Welfare Foundation to bring health, education, and social development through the “speaker boxes” project.The speaker-MP3 players, provided to every family in the village, are filled with informative and entertaining programmes to help alleviate the problems that come from dirty water, non-nutritional food, and lack of sanitation healthcare.

“Speaker boxes” making an astonishing impact

It is six months since the “speaker boxes” were first distributed, and already the impact is astonishing.

 “People are changing their habits. There is good hygiene now, people are boiling water, and there are fewer stomach problems than before,” says the Patil. He told us that the tribe learned how to construct a dam through the Adivasi Village Project.

“Without your programmes, we would have already run out of water.”

Patil Ramdas also told us that when the monsoon does arrive in June, and the reservoir begins to fill, the first rain collected in the dam makes people very sick. Seva is now supplying chlorine tablets to prevent cholera and other common diseases after the first rainfall.

But now the urgent need is to find a specialist on-the-ground group to come and aid the village – drilling a well would mean they never run out of water again.

Patil Ramdas is concerned for his community.

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“You have lost me my business,” health clinic owner,  Zahid jokingly tells HCR Pakistan director Hazeen Latif.   He was speaking at the opening of the new drinking well in his village, provided by HCR, funded by an Australian church.  “Since this well opened three weeks ago,” Zahid says, “I am selling less Flagyl because fewer people are having stomach problems.”  With a smile on his face he says, “this water is even better than Nestlé’s.”  The well project was a result of a consultation facilitated by HCR which identified some of the main needs facing the community. 

HCR has been working in this village in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province since 2013, helping the community understand and tackle their health and social development challenges.  “It has been such a privilege to walk alongside this community for the last three years and feel like I’m part of them,” says Hazeen.  “During that time we’ve seen some great things happen, like the medical camp that HCR sponsored with a local partner. We also sponsored a community cricket match and have done a micro-enterprise project, “he added,”but perhaps the most difficult time was when a nearby school was attacked by terrorists and I experienced the grief the community was going through.”

HCR has been working in Pakistan in development and disaster response since 2013, with a vision of seeing whole of life transformation in some of the most challenging places in the country.

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