By Philippe Talavera | Director
As you know, the Ombetja Yehinga Organisation (OYO) is a Namibian NGO that uses Arts to create social awareness. One of our tools is the OYO dance troupe. Since 2009, we have the first, and still currently only, dance troupe in Namibia employing young dancers as full-time performers.
We developed along the years a repertoire of pieces on HIV, gender-based violence, teenage pregnancy and much more. We traditionally perform in schools and correctional facilities. We occasionally perform in communities and for events.
Since March 2020 however the troupe has been extremely affected. It hasn’t been able to perform in schools between March 2020 and May 2021 – and while we thought we could start again end May 2021 the third wave hit us and all schools’ performances were again cancelled after 15 June. We haven’t been able to perform in correctional facilities or communities since March 2020.
The dance troupe has not been idled though and has developed online material – both as educational material (especially on COVID19) and as training material (to teach sections to people watching the tutorials). But of course, it has been much harder and it requires funding for editing.
With this micro-project, we were hoping to raise much needed funding to sustain the dancers and benefit from the littlexlittle campaign. We unfortunately didn’t raise as much funding as we would have liked to, but we would like to thank those of you who could contribute. We know the current situation is difficult on everybody so we appreciate your support.
With the funding we could answer a call from a school in Windhoek that is having issues with drugs. The school asked us to perform and discuss drug addiction with learners. 402 learners benefited from the intervention. We also decided to add a new piece on drug abuse to our repertoire and are currently developing it. We also prepared a proposal to create new clips including people with disabilities – the proposal has just been approved by UNAIDS, so we will be able to fund it. The clips will be ready for release in the new year.
So, thank you for your support. We still have a long way to go. 2020 and 2021 have been hard on us, but we know that with your support we can move on. Our main project remains opened, so if you know people who may be interested in supporting us, please do share our link https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/using-arts-educate-4000-namibian-teenagers-on-hiv
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