We have been experiencing some power outages here in Cape Town, so as a result we have a lot of catching up to do for this blog entry. On Friday we went back to Atlantis where the radio station was. We interviewed three more people there, including another volunteer for the radio station, a man named Shane King who is living with AIDS. Unlike the other HIV positive people that we have interviewed so far, with Shane the effects that AIDS has had on his health is very visible. We barely even had to interview him, I think we asked him two or three questions, once he started talking he just kept going, filling up two sixty-minute tapes. He was really kind of amazing to talk to, very positive, none of the self-pity that I imagine that I would feel if I was in his situation, and he had a lot to share about his own personal experience and was also very knowledgeable about government policy toward HIV/AIDS and the various activist organizations that are out there. The thing that made the biggest impact on me was that he seemed to really WANT to talk, afterwards he thanked us for the chance to voice his thoughts and experiences, when of course we were the ones who really learned from listening to him.
We had our first filming-free weekend since being in Cape Town, so besides making plans for the upcoming week and capturing some of our footage from the previous week, we had some time to continue our explorations. On Saturday we joined some of our house-mates on a hike up Table Mountain which overlooks the city, and we spent most of Sunday on a trip to Robben Island, (where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for nineteen years,) and worked on expanding our knowledge about South Africa’s complicated history.
Today, (Monday,) we met with an Organization called Worker’s World Media Productions that trains community radio stations, (such as Radio Atlantis,) to do radio shows about local issues primarily regarding labor and worker’s rights, but they are starting to focus more and more on HIV/AIDS. In our interviews with both the project coordinator of the Labour Community Radio Project and the project coordinator of the youth media project we heard a different perspective and on the role of media in communicating localized messages about HIV/AIDS, and the power of radio in a country that still struggles with high rates of illiteracy. In an informal conversation before the interviews, they took an opportunity to reverse roles and ask us a couple of challenging questions about this documentary that we are trying to make, starting with “Why will Americans care about what is happening in South Africa?” We tried to address their questions as fairly and honestly as we could, answering that we can’t guarantee that Americans will care, but we are hoping that we can help to promote the idea that AIDS is a global problem that needs to be dealt with on a global scale. It was an unexpected turn of events, but we also truly appreciated to be challenged in this way, and it was the first time since being here that we really had to actively defend our project, and our ideas-- always a worthwhile exercise.