Dear Mr Britten,
Drowning by falling into water-filled ditches may be prevented by on-location poster campaign that water is dangerous. Earlier, I had designed multilingual posters in Hindi, English, Telugu, with the text ‘Beware! Water is very dangerous’, and ‘Entry prohibited – Water is dangerous area’, with image warning STOP sign. As literacy is low, you may want to use audio recordings, personal counseling, multiple storytelling sessions, street plays, face photo reminders of those who have drowned, multimedia format testimonials of those 5 mothers who lost their child’s life, video recording of those five elder sisters recounting how ‘prevention is everything - there is no place for negligence when protecting the life of sibling in my care’, child-to-child narration of wise counsel giving easy 2-step details to follow instructions (take left if water is on right, hold tight to the sand bank, cling to rungs or stairs or steps built into the walls on water bank, learn to swim, place boulders on the bottom of the ditch to climb up if necessary), arrange meetings for the children to prevail on municipal councilors to adopt safety precautions, make an exhaustive list of human factors that can positively impact the project and rope in support – formal and informal, contact Afghanistan community leaders in Dubai for support and assistance to this project on protecting sacred life and well-being of infants and children.
May your efforts become the role model for prevention of children drowning.
Thank you.
Regards,
Shobha
CHIFA profile:
Shobha Mocherla is an audio-visual producer with L V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, India. She produces videos for medical and instructional training. www.lvpei.org/videogallery.html mshoba AT lvpei.org