Lena Zúñiga

Sulá Batsú has been working on the project “Information and Knowledge Management (IKM)”. The project is reflecting about and improving the knowledge processes, as well as the connection between diverse types of knowledge. It is a global project with 4 different work teams, one of them looking at local knowledge processes, and Sula’s initiative fits into that work area.

Sula’s project is directed towards youth empowerment and intergenerational knowledge sharing supported by ICT tools. The idea is to generate a collectively constructed product based on the experience of key actors and stakeholders, analyzed from the perspective of young members of the community. There is a blog to follow up on the project advance. The group so far has created a variety of methodologies including games, photography, painting, storytelling, interviews and group dynamics, all directed to recover the history of the community and to create capacity to generate and share new knowledge.

There’s more information about the project in Spanish, and there’s a video about some of the project activities (activate the English subtitles by clicking on the CC link of the Youtube video).* There is also a Flickr account for the project, where we have photos taken mostly by the children in the communities.

*A technical detail: I helped with the subtitling of this video. I used Jubler to do the subtitling and then used YouTube feature for including subtitle files. Days later, I learned the folks at Miro are coming up with a cool solution for subtitling in multiple platforms. Remind me of writing a post specifically about that.

A few months ago I contacted Voice of Witness because I was interested in their work using storytelling to highlight the voices of human rights victims. I started collaborating in a small way by proofreading the Spanish versions of some of the stories compiled in the book “Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives“. The book is a collection of oral histories from men and women struggling to carve a life in the United States.

All the stories were touching and inspiring in their own way. I was humbled by the struggle and the determination of the people who shared their stories for this book. As a recent immigrant going through the complicated legal process to remain in this country, I can only begin to imagine the difficulties and uncertainties that illegal immigrants are facing under the current social and economic climate. The human rights of this always growing population are under constant threat.

The Spanish version, named “En las Sombras de Estados Unidos: Narraciones de Inmigrantes de Indocumentados“, will be presented at the San Francisco public library on November 19, 2009.

Itzpapalotl es mi blog personal desde hace más de seis años. En este espacio he publicado mis ejercicios de escritura creativa en varios formatos, mezclando lo cotidiano con la ficción. Itzpapalotl ganó un Bloggie Award al mejor weblog latinoamericano en el año 2001.

Itzpapalotl is my personal weblog since about six years ago. In this space I publish my creative writing experiments in different formats, mixing everyday reality with fiction. Itzpapalotl won a Bloggie Award to best latin american weblog in 2001.