Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor
ITEM. THE Tesco Children's Storytelling Festival held recently at the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh was described as a huge success. Nearly 400 students attended. The initiative was designed to help children to develop literacy skills outside the classroom. Before the festival ended, a decision was taken to make it an annual affair. There will be no shortage of funds.
According to Tesco's Mannion, regional marketing manager, "Tesco involvement in this unique initiative reinforces our commitment to support education in the community. Storytelling is an important part of our heritage and by supporting this we hope pupils will have the opportunity to develop their own storytelling skills and creativity in the future."
Item. The International Children's Institute has begun collecting the stories and drawings of war-affected children in Canada, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Sierra Leone. This material is intended to contribute to the improved understanding of policymakers and educators with respect to the main stressors and needs of war-affected children.
Item. Caribbean storytellers have been contracted by Language Alive!,in collaboration with the BBC, to conduct storytelling workshops for primary school teachers in Birmingham, specifically using Ananse (the Ghanaian spelling of his name) character as the tool of delivery. The fact that they focus on Birmingham should tell us something about their view of the role of culture, traditions and heroes of folklore in the education process.
Item. In 1994, OCAB, the Organisation of Caribbean Associations in Barbados identified the promotion of regional integration as its primary objective. The vehicle was annual an storytelling festival with tellers from across the region from Belize to Guyana. After three years operating on a shoestring budget the idea found a new home, well two new homes under the Tellabration! umbrella, the international celebration of storytelling occurring simultaneously in every continent and region in over four hundred different locations across the globe. One home was at Firefly in Jamaica. The second was in Grand Cayman.
The Cayman Festival is now supported by the Government through the Cayman National Cultural Foundation and sponsored and promoted by their Tourist Board. It attracted in 2003, visitors from cruise ships who arrived at many of the venues ahead of the storytellers who are usually the first to arrive.
The Netherbow Arts Centre in Scotland is a year-round meeting place for storytellers, especially those coming from the Caribbean and from North and West Africa, but also from India, Israel and Holland.
The organisers of Festival at the Edge at Much Wenlock in the United Kingdom have such a waiting list of storytellers wanting to attend that they have decided to require prospective tellers to submit proposals stating how they would present their stories under given themes. The theme for 2004, incidentally is Begged, Stolen, Borrowed: Tales From The Diaspora.
STORYTELLING REVIVED
All across the world there is a conscious effort to revive storytelling. There are national organisations and specialised local organisations of storytellers. You could take your pick of a group specialising in stories about gypsies, ghouls (that is farin duppies), stories from the Bibles, stories about animals, creation stories, and if you are so minded or funded you could spend the entire year travelling from one storytelling festival or conference to the next.
In many parts of the world many storytellers earn a living working in libraries or devising ways to help schools deliver the curriculum through stories.
Stories are perhaps the most effective teaching tool ever used. All of the world's great religions use tales and parables to preserve and transmit attitudes and values. Stories are for everyone but for children, storytelling is more important now than ever before.
So many forms of entertainment for children provide the images for them. Among storytelling's many benefits to children, the development of the imagination is one of the most significant. Not to be forgotten is the simple fact that children love storytelling first and foremost because it delights them.
Jamaica boasts the only international storytelling festival in which, rather than sit and listen, children are the primary tellers of tales.
The international storytellers participating in the inaugural Likklestoryfest have been requested to conduct workshops for children in other parts of the region towards duplicating the Jamaican experience.
Regional organisations concerned with the way children learn to be so that they can be educated have begun working with some of these tellers to develop a regional pilot project on the use of storytelling in parenting education.
People are catching the vision about the link between ancient wit and modern development and many of them are looking to Jamaica, the so-called cultural mecca of the region to show the way. In many ways, like numerous other aspects of our lives, we need to show ourselves first.
Likklestoryfest 2003 played to students in more than 32 schools in four days in eight locations across the island. The projection for 2004 is for more than 50 schools in four days in seven locations. The children and their teachers will interact with a group of Haitians resident in Jamaica performing Haitian folksongs, local storytellers and storytellers from China, Trinidad and Costa Rica.
PARTICIPATION
Those students who participated last year will be building on their interaction with the tellers from Dominica, Trinidad and South Africa as well as the senior citizens in their communities who have so many stories to share.
It is an invaluable input into their developmental experience and the national understanding of what it means to operate in the global village.
Financial support from the Fund for Culture, Health, Arts, Sports and Education (CHASE) is critical to this second part of the unfolding of the dream in 2004 to once again celebrate Child Month.
So too is the Creative Production and Training Centre, CPTC, whose involvement is directly targeted at maximizing the educational component of the activity. The Institute of Jamaica, the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission, The Division of Culture Air Jamaica, BWIA, the Jamaica Pegasus and Beaches Boscobel and the Gleaner, who through the Children's Own newspaper and the Youth Link, also share in the vision.
It is a good position from which, like the Tesco Festival, to contemplate sustainability, even before the May 9-16 staging of Likklestoryfest 2004.
In the way in which wealth emerges from our cultural and artistic endeavours, there will always be those who catch the vision at its earliest stage and those who will wait to catch the train when it gathers full momentum. Never mind, as they say in the south of the United States, it matters not when you get on the train, just so long as you get on.
Schools are invited to register their participation by calling the Division of Culture at Caenwood Centre, Arnold Road.
