Tikhtak

Voices of hope from Sierra Leone

On our recent Free For All trip to Sierra Leone we took our MP3 recorders with us and interviewed Mohammed a YMCA volunteer who fled to Freetown during the civil war, children from our Free For All performance, Verity a CMS Missionary doing health work  as a physio and Zoe from the team who meets family from Sierra Leone she never knew she had. We also have footage of a trip to King Jimmy's market, a historical site where slaves were loaded on to ships 200 years ago. Check out Voices from Sierra Leone on tikhtak's youtube. You can also hear them featured on our trax16 for January. In this picture I am interviewing Mohammed, the YMCA volunteer while Anita interviews Verity. The interviews were not all carried out on the beach!

Latest Videos from Free For All, Sierra leone trip

I am systematically making clips of the highlights of our Free For All trip to Sierra Leone. You can see them by clicking directly on the pictures in the side bar and they will play in their own little window. Check out the most recent ones of Anita being lost and found in Freetown and our road trip to Moyamaba. I will also be sharing about the experience at the connect service at Holy Trinity, Clapham on Sunday evening.

Photo published in Schmap

I took this photo back in the summer at the Rise Festival  (London against racism) in Finsbury Park and it has been used on Schmaps for London. I have put the Schmap widget in the side bar on the right hand side just scroll down and click on the events  to find the photo in the Rise advert. Chuffed to bits!

A Rocha on trax16

Yesterday I visited the A Rocha offices based in Southall. A Rocha is a word for rock in Portuguese and the organisation combines their Christian faith with having a concern for the environment. John 3:16 "For God so loved the world (Cosmos) that he gave his one and only Son."  I interviewed the UK director Dave Bookless and the education team who you can hear on February's trax16. Although it was my first visit to A Rocha in Southall  I had visited an A Rocha project near Bangalore, India, where they manage an area where elephants and human both co-habit. It has been good to see two very different  A Rocha projects at work.

The Clapham Premier on Tikhtak

I have made life easier for anyone who has signed up for the prestigious Metro fantasy football Clapham premier league. If you scroll down the in the side bar on the right you can see the link displayed. It means there is no need to sign in to view all the important statistics, which make things more accessible. And the league is automatically updated in this side bar as results come in. It is a crucial time of the year and Tikhtak is in a commanding but not unassailable lead. Although this picture is a replica of the actual Clapham Premier league cup, the question is who will have their name inscribed on it first.

St Pancras Train Station

Yesterday I caught a train from St Pancras for a Youth and Children's meeting in Derby. I got to the station early so after a coffee in a very continental looking coffee bar, with Stella Artois on tap no less. So I decided to take a few photos! It is really an impressive station with a luminous atmosphere created by the glass roof. It was also about 7am in the morning so it felt like the whole of London had been evacuated it was so quiet. Check out the rest of the photos on my flickr

Creative project evaluation

This week as part of my MA Applied Drama at Goldsmiths College we looked at creative ways to plan or evaluate a project. It basically involved listing the main stages involved in the project from the initial idea, the theme, terminology, recruitment, people involved etc through to the evaluation and legacy of the project. In the first model we wrote out the stages of the project on big peices of paper and then were invited to transform it into a model or sulpture, decorating it and raising some bits up. We then analysed what we observed together. It was a very affective way of talking about and reflecting on the project creatively and in an indirect non confrontational way as all eyes were on the model and any comments were filtered through it. We also used this technique to plan a project. We split up into smaller groups to do this and once we had built our model other groups came  and had a look giving their observations of what they saw. It was a very revealing exercise and incredible how much we were able to observe from each other projects through just looking at the model. It was also a great way to get excited about the project at it's birth as we scuttled around trying to find materials. Having just finished a big CMS project ourselves Free For All and as we think about a possible new project for 2009 this could prove a useful tool. To see the models we made check out my flickr pics

Tikhtak on Youtube

I have put a bar up in the right hand column linking to Tikhtak's youtube channel. To check out the latest video from Sierra leone of our helicopter ride from Lungi to Freetown just click on the first one on the strip. I am impressed that it does not divert you away from the page but opens up it's own little box. I will be putting up other snippets from the Free For All Sierra Leone trip in the following weeks.