No Strings Intl. "Tales of Disaster" Workshop-Cambodia
“Tales of Disaster” Workshop
A workshop was held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to work with partnering aid organizations that would be using the No Strings’ Films “Tales of Disaster” to teach youths about disaster preparedness.
The films ranged in subjects dealing with Flood, Landslide, Tsunami, Earthquake, Volcanoes and Cyclones.
For the message of the films to be effective the presentation involved presenters engaging children in games that asked questions about the subject and created a baseline understanding. The children are then shown the films, and after the films there are more presentations and questions to reinforce the messages of the films. In these presentations a puppet character was used to help create a fun and entertaining experience.
My role in these workshops was to help presenters learn basic skills of both puppetry performance and creating short scenes with puppet characters that can be used in the presentation.
On the final day of the workshop we put the new skills into practice and had the workshop participants conduct a presentation at a local school.
What was exciting for me was to see the puppet training being put to use, but to have the puppet characters speaking the local language. It was amazing to see puppets communicating with children in their own language. I loved seeing these puppet characters coming to life and combining their language with the new skills of puppetry.
