Professor's Videos Foster AIDS Prevenetion in Namibia

from SUNY Cortland News

The open discussion of AIDS prevention in the southwestern African country of Namibia is being helped by four videos produced by Paul van der Veur, an associate professor of communication studies at SUNY Cortland.

During his six months spent in the Sub-Saharan African nation in Spring 2007, van der Veur collaborated with Namibian filmmakers to produce the videos.

Each is a real-life documentary, with its own Namibian subjects and film crew. The videos began airing recently on television channels across the country, said van der Veur, who joined the College in 2002 and has chaired the Communication Studies Department since January 2005. He has a doctorate in international media studies from Ohio University’s School of Telecommunications.

The 23-minute documentaries, each formatted to fit the Namibia Broadcasting Corporation’s specifications, were first aired on national television in September and then screened as part of the events marking World AIDS Day, Dec. 1.

Between 20 to 30 percent of the adult population in Namibia - a republic about the size of Texas with a population of 1.8 million people - are infected with AIDS, one of the highest rates in the world.

“Many people in the country know the basics about AIDS prevention but it hasn’t resulted in behavioral change,” van der Veur asserted, noting that the public is silent about the epidemic and many assume the illness is inevitable.

“That is why I wanted to show people living with HIV as opposed to dying from AIDS,” he said. “Each video focuses on a different person and a different set of social issues. If enough people see a video, they might talk about it in social situations.

“By telling these stories, you work to reduce the social stigma,” van der Veur said. “You also bring up a number of these social issues: womens’ status, poverty, lack of education, alcohol abuse. These are a huge component of the problem in this region. Tangentially, many of these issues are brought up in the videos.”

Produced in five different Namibian languages with subtitles in English, the videos on the theme of “Acceptance” are being shown in individual movie theaters and at film festivals in this desert country situated along the Atlantic Coast and sandwiched between South Africa and Angola. The two most artistically promising productions were shown at “Wild Cinema,” Namibia’s national film festival in the Capital city of Windhoek.

To reach even more viewers, they are now being used in different local public health campaigns. DVDs cut from the videos are being shared with governmental and non-governmental development agencies through the U.S. Agency for International Development. The videos make the rounds through a network of 50 partner organizations and 200 producers and regional distributors.

One Namibian featured in the videos, Herlyn Uiras, is taking the project on an educational tour of communities around Namibia.

“The ‘Acceptance Series’ is a big hit,” Geniene Veil, secretary in the U.S. Public Affairs Office in Namibia, wrote to van der Veur recently. “We have now embarked upon a project with VMG, an acapella group, who are touring Namibia with Herlyn Uiras promoting positive living. I must say it has been received very well. Herlyn is an amazing person.”

“Uiras talks about prevention and other social issues,” van der Veur explained.
Van der Veur also taught several media courses while working out of Polytechnic of Namibia, a professional institute in Windhoek. In fulfillment of another major objective of his travels, he facilitated a week-long national workshop held to establish six community-owned radio stations in Namibia.

Van der Veur’s work was supported by a $50,000 Fulbright grant he received to promote broadcast education and produce the documentaries about the AIDS crisis in Namibia.

He also collaborated with a U.S. government public affairs officer in Windhoek to obtain a $25,000 grant from the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief. The grant involved his work with young filmmakers and covered some equipment and production costs. Aspiring filmmakers, including two individuals from the Namibia Broadcasting Corporation, directed all the television productions.

“I’m trying to foster in the filmmakers a capacity to create their own communication for this and other development projects,” van der Veur said.

“I’d like to see many more such videos produced in Namibia and also in other areas,” van der Veur said. “Cortland has contacts with institutions in a number of different African countries through which to continue the project.”

He learned three African languages, Sesotho, Afrikaans and Setswana, on previous travels and studies in Africa and the Netherlands as a community development volunteer and as a scholar.

Van der Veur first became interested in Africa when he and his wife, Shirley, who has taught in SUNY Cortland’s Foundations and Social Advocacy Department, volunteered for the Peace Corps in a small rural village in Lesotho in 1985. Both van der Veur and his wife stayed in Africa until 1989 to work on other development projects. They returned in 1995 to conduct research for their dissertations.

He first visited Namibia in 2001 as a consultant to work with the minister of education in developing his master’s thesis in education from the University of Montana. In 2002, van der Veur was awarded a $200,000 grant for a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co. to work on AIDS education and prevention in Swaziland.

In terms of his own scholarship, the most recent project allowed him to tie in both his production interests and skills with his research interests in broadcasting and education in the region.

“The Fulbright gave me an opportunity to give back to South Africa and to countries with AIDS communities,” he said. “There is still work to be done in AIDS prevention in Africa and the region. I think I would like to focus on that for the next few years.”