Body Mapping

A friend from New Orleans told me about the forthcoming "International Day of Sharing Life Stories" that Museum of the Person and Centre for Digital Story Telling are organising for May 16th 2008. I have worked with an organization called Trust for Indigenous Culture and Health (TICAH) here in Kenya for the past few years and we would like to like to share some visually stunning and emotionally inspiring stories with the world as part of the event.

TICAH'S mission statement reads:

We work to strengthen our understanding of the positive links between cultural belief, practice, and knowledge and the attainment of health.

One of TICAH's many projects has been to conduct Body Mapping workshops with HIV+ women and men in Kenya, Thailand and India. Body Mapping is a technique that has derived from the Memory Work that was pioneered by an HIV+ Ugandan women’s group, NACWOLA. This work originated as a means of helping HIV+ women cope with the fact that they were dieing and leaving their children behind. By writing in Memory Books, they were able to process their own fears and feelings, to leave memories and identities for their children in these books and to plan for their children’s futures as orphans. From these origins, Memory Work has evolved to look at how people are choosing to live with HIV, including the exploration of their health and treatment experiences and options. By drawing life-size silhouettes of themselves, many HIV+ people have been able to explore the longer-term realities of living with HIV and share their spiritual, nutritional and emotional health strategies in an imaginative way.

We would like to share the Body Maps and the stories of the positive people who created them. Please see the TICAH web page for more information about the Body Mapping project.