Voluntary organisation Otherwise has taken the homeless off the streets and put them on the air in an innovative new project, reports Glynis O’ Hara
BABALWA NANI (21) has spent the past five years on the streets of Cape Town doing anything and everything to survive. Now she is involved in an autobiographical radio documentary. She has shifted from being a homeless petty criminal to radio producer – part of a new project by a local non-profit organisation.
“The first night I was on the street I thought, where am I going to sleep,” she says. “But that wasn’t a problem, friends told me. There’s a railway bridge, they said, and in the middle there’s a river flowing. So water wasn’t a problem at all …
“For a living we committed crime. We left Rondebosch because the police bothered us. One of us suggested we sleep at the graveyard. We decided to break open the top of a grave that looked like a house-shape from the outside. Inside it was empty,” says Nani in a recording of her autobiography, Think Twice Before You Close That Door.
Nani is being trained in radio production with six other recruits selected from an all-female shelter – Ons Plek in the suburb of Woodstock. She is able, for the first time, to record a part of her life.
The radio project, she says, can rescue her from a past she would rather forget: “I want to do something right that I can feel good and proud about myself … that I’ve achieved something through hard work,” she says.
The training is conducted by Otherwise, a voluntary organisation aimed at developing audio and literacy skills. The young recruits are taught script writing, studio and field recording and editing. Concentrating mostly on disadvantaged people, Otherwise doesn’t delve too deeply into the suffering of their recruits, preferring to pass on skills rather than be counsellors.
While the radio documentaries touch on issues such as substance abuse, the girls are left to discuss their lives in a way that’s comfortable for them, says Otherwise co-ordinator and trainer Kali van der Merwe.
She adds that it is hard for the girls to “talk about things like prostitution and rape. It’s very painful for them, so we concentrate rather on coming out of it – for this reason the pupils named themselves The Breakthrough Girls.”
Van der Merwe says Nani, who never worked as a prostitute, has made some “remarkable recoveries” through her involvement in the radio project and adds proudly: “She decided to change her life. She no longer drinks heavily, she no longer commits petty crime for survival, she is finishing her schooling. She is learning to be responsible, plan her time effectively and to budget and handle money.”
But that is not where it ends as the trainees often feel there are additional benefits such as self-motivation and offering the possibility of a way out.
Nani is now studying with the hope of completing standard eight and devotes weekends to working on her radio programme.
The radio programmes completed by Otherwise are funded by the Open Society Foundation, and this enables the girls to earn a fee for their work.
Otherwise plans to set up a permanent skills training centre, perhaps even a small radio station which could increase the number of people who are reached, says Van der Merwe.
Otherwise has completed three programmes so far:
* Nonhlupheko, a drama about leaving an abusive home and going on to the streets of Cape Town.
* The Breakthrough Girls, a documentary about the five girls at Ons Plek and the futures they see for themselves.
* The Street Educators, a documentary in which youths on the street are interviewed about their concerns, needs and aspirations.
The programmes have been aired on a range of community stations. “But if we are going to survive, we’re going to have to sell programmes to big independents or the SABC. Community radio just doesn’t have the budget to buy,” says Van der Merwe.
The programmes are not all about the streets. Charmain Carrol (19), for example, has been working on preserving her heritage through Grandmother Stories recorded in Xhosa in the Eastern Cape and to be broadcast on Radio Zibonele and Radio Xhosa.
Carrol set out to record folk tales passed on from generation to generation: “These stories are about the peoples’ beliefs and they tell it to the younger generation so that the stories must not be forgotten as this is the Xhosa way.
“My grandmother used to tell me these stories and it always ended up with people telling jokes in bed in the dark, laughing. I look forward to telling them to my grandchildren.”
Carrol, who also lives at Ons Plek and has a baby, is studying for matric. Originally from Phillipi squatter camp near Nyanga she was placed at Ons Plek when she was 17 and pregnant. However, thanks to the radio programme, Carrol too has found some hope. “This radio project has changed my life,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do, what to be. Now I know I want to work in radio and to one day have my own radio programme.”