Jackie Sawiris is a half Jordanian, half Egyptian, Libyan-born, American-raised, Jordan-based writer, filmmaker, and actor. She discovered how truly powerful film can be when she initiated objecDEFY Harassment, an Arab world-based, self-perpetuating initiative that empowers people of all gender identities to combat harassment and regain agency over their bodies and spaces. She volunteered her skills at Video Volunteers in exchange for learning how to make the perfect cup of chai – and ended up with a whole lot more. Here, she recounts her amazing experience conducting what she likes to term The Passion Workshop.

I face a group of people I am in awe of and who I know through voices and images only – theirs and those of others they interview for videos they produce as IndiaUnheard Community Correspondents. I am shy. I am nervous. I am speechless. Perhaps the worst thing for me to be on this day when I’m supposed to be training these 24 men and women – who come from various communities all over India and speak three different languages – in voice projection and speaking with passion. I am doomed.

So I throw myself into the deep end and do the only thing I can think of to do. Emotionally prostate myself before them and tell them the truth: You guys are my heroes. You inspired me before I met you. Before I understood the extent to which you’ve made your communities better – and our world at large. You’ve inspired a whole bunch of people my country, Jordan, to find their voices and use them to do what you do.

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600 female laborers in Maharashtra get equal pay because of our Community Correspondent Rohini Pawar’s video

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“Even in the age of information overload, it is surprising that so little information is available on the tribals. So many histories- personal, political, oral, visual, gastronomic, medical, linguistic, are tucked away in little pockets of the country. During the Songadh trainings, I realized that these pockets are not the corners that they seem but entire horizons,” says Manish Kumar, senior Media Trainer and Program Manager at Video Volunteers. He recently returned, much enthused and contemplative, after wrapping an extensive training camp in video production and editing for the adivasi community in Songadh, Gujarat.

The training was organized by Video Volunteers in collaboration with the Shakti- Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre, Songadh, an NGO which works at the grassroots with the adivasis on several socio-economic, cultural, educational, political and religious issues. The project came together in the quest to set up a tribal arts and culture centre which will house, archive and display visual anthropological records of the adivasi communities’ lives and traditions. The proposed centre is the brainchild of Sannybhai, Managing Trustee of Shakti. He envisions the centre as a comprehensive resource of adivasi art, culture and way of life which bridges the past with the present and leads into the future. Speaking of the decision to collaborate with Video Volunteers, he says, “I was familiar with the organization’s work but when the idea of starting a cultural centre came up, it was Ingrid Beazely, our friend and well-wisher from London who suggested the tie-up.”

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