How do children learn about fairness. justice, oppression, good and evil? How do they muster the courage to overcome their terror of the big, scary world? How do they imagine their future? Storytelling has always played a fundamental role in this process, from the boy who identifies with David's fight against Goliath to the girl who sees herself in Wonderland with Alice to the fearful child who learns not to fear the monster under the bed by watching Monsters, Inc. Unfortunately, a close examination of children's literature shows how inadequate it is to today's children. Bible stories, Victorian novels, The Lord of the Rings, Dr. Seuss, and Disney movies share the same, rural setting, teaching lessons that apply to the fears and aspirations of children from a time before urbanization. With the exception of some comic books, today's fears and injustices - crime, gangs, traffic, sexual exploitation - find little reflection in children's literature.
When today's children dream of adventure, what do they dream? What stories do they find compelling, disturbing, and fascinating? Many poor and marginalized children live the sorts of lives that make for powerful stories, full of life and death challenges, hair-raising adventures, and struggles for justice that really matter. When I tell stories of children who live on the street, my friends' sons and daughters are both enchanted and terrified, because such a life embodies their aspirations for adventure, freedom, and meaning… while it also holds all of their fears of misery and solitude. We might say the same of children living in shantytowns controlled by drug gangs, the traveling children of Colombia, or indigenous children on the frontier between the city and the jungle. This mixture of enchantment and terror has always lain at the center of children's literature, but few authors have been able to see it in this new context.
One of the clearest lessons from Shine a Light's work over the last decade is the importance of stories in the lives of marginalized and excluded children. Tales of adventure and escape fill the nights of any shelter for street kids; the most common narrative genre on the street is the boast; and NGOs have used theater, dance, and rap to help children turn their private stories into denunciations of injustice. Through these stories, children give meaning to their own suffering, reflect on their lives, and project themselves on a brighter future. Shine a Light, by teaching video to children and young people around Latin America, has given them a tool by which to tell their stories, with very powerful results, both æsthetically and therapeutically.
There is a hole in children's literature. At the same time, there is an excess of stories from the street, from the shantytown, and from the indigenous community. Pibe Quijote (Kid Quixote) creates a space in which marginalized children can tell their stories and other children (and adults) can learn and grow from them. The internet, DVDs, and e-commerce open the perfect opportunity to put these issues together into a new conception of childhood, social change, and - why not? - even art itself.
During the creation of our digital workshops - designed to document the methods of successful NGOs and teach them to other organizations - Shine a Light has taught filmmaking, journalism, and music composition to street kids, and seen the amazing quality of the art and literature they produce. In Argentina in 2006, we asked three ex-street kids to make videos based on their own life stories, so that other kids could learn from them, and this methodology earned an even more enthusiastic response and even more powerful artistic products. With Pibe Quijote: Shine a Light by and for kids, we would expand this model into fiction, as well as adding new genres like comic books, children's stories, and even juvenile novels. In the long term, we have also heard interest from people interested in teaching computer generated imaging and several other media.
The project should have significant impact on three different levels:
1. Child authors and their families. While teaching children to make video for SAL's digital workshops, we have seen what a powerful therapeutic, educational, and political tool the camera is. One Argentine ex-street kid synthesized what many children have told me: “Being in front of the camera, you feel a responsibility. You're teaching something to other people, and that means that it is serious. You have to think hard, examine yourself, wonder how your life can have an impact on other people.” The camera sets aside a space where a marginalized child's ideas and existence matter. This reflection is the essence of education: allowing children to criticize and value themselves, while at the same time opening a way for them to transform themselves and their communities. As one teenager in Bogotá told me, “when you try to change the world, that's when you can change yourself.”
2. Transforming popular perceptions of children and the poor. Pibe Quijote: SAL by and for Kids grows in soil already tilled by some of the best NGOs in Latin America, arts programs that create a space in which children can teach the wider public. At Taller de Vida, in Bogotá, Colombia, young refugees of the civil war have joined together in a theater troupe, where the children perform scenes from their lives, teaching both Colombians and Europeans (on their tours to Germany and France) about both the war and about their ability to overcome suffering. In Córdoba, Argentina, this process happens through La Luciérnaga,, a magazine written and sold by adolescents who live on the street. Pé no Chão, in Brazil, uses dance and rap to the same end. In each case, the experience transforms the way the audience sees poor children: not as victims or as a thugs, but as agents in their own lives. Pibe Quijote would extend this success to an international level, opening not just the stage or a magazine to marginalized children, but also the internet, video, and the publishing industry.
3. Teaching children (and adults) new tools to overcome fear. The last several years have shown that the manipulation of fear is the royal road to fascism. In the face of the perception of increased crime, the threat of terrorism, and waves of third world migration, governments all over the world have been able to repress basic freedoms and undermine the gains of democracy over the last decades. Children's literature has long been an important way to learn to overcome fear - both for children and for the adults who read to them - and this project will address contemporary, urban fear. Street children and teenagers living in violent neighborhoods create the tools to face fear out of necessity, and through literature, film, and other genres of storytelling, they can share these strengths with others.
The methodology of this project would be similar to the creation of our digital workshops: two to three months working with a particular NGO, organizing a team of young artists to create the product, and distribution through the internet, DVDs, and CD-ROMs. In the long term, we may also be able to collaborate with children's book publishers and the SAL volunteer translators to publish these materials in English and sell them on Amazon.com or eBay (see www.booksurge.com). Such a development might make the project self-sustainable, and could also provide an important income supplement for the families of the participating children.
This project is made possible thanks to a grant from ArtVenture
