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Indian Students Create Disaster Awareness Comics

Published Wed, 24 Mar 2010 07:00:53 -0500

Groups of students in the Assam province of India are learning how to draw cartoons in classrooms to create disaster awareness comics.

Targetting a falling attention span, these young "comic activists" are the result of the work of students in mass communications at Guwahati University. They are aiming to spread disaster management tactics, in association with World Comics India – a collection of artists, activists, celebrities and journalists aiming to bring about social change through the medium of comic books.

So one young teen student takes his experience dealing with being the victim of repeated flooding, and his family making makeshift camps to educate others how to cope with the same. Anyother passes on a story from his uncle where breaches in a village embankment would be reported by beating village drums to alert the other villagers. Sanitation, hygiene, how to help the elderly and women with young families all have their own comic books.

And by creating local comic books by local students, the results have a greater "grassroots" feel that someone passed on down from an official body.

Grassroots comics trainers have provided a number of their experiences on Facebook.

Nida: Participants have never before worked on such medium; initially their reactions were simply amazing! Later they expressed that comics would help them a lot in awareness campaigns. I found that the idea of grassroots comics is quite unique for this region and people simply loving it. I got very encouraging feedback from the participants and their respective organizations. Participants now producing new comics, publishing and exhibiting their work and the journey is on…!!!

Amrith: The participants of the workshop were children who arrive from three different states of northeastern region. These 30 participant belongs to different religions and caste and used to speak different languages. The communication was a real challenge here as I had to work in four languages simultaneously i.e. Assamese, English, Hindi and Bodo and there was nobody to translate.

Manas: Comics was something that I was in love with since childhood. Tintin, Astrix, Disney characters etc. always facinated me while I equally enjoyed reading a Tinkle digest or a Chacha Chaudhary. I realize now that in fact comics was the sweetdish inside which the pill of knowledge was hidden. It was so much fun!

Subhashree: Children are like those empty drawing sheets …. they learn and write their dreams on them. wonderful stories flowed out of their imaginative minds and it reflected rich contents and send across very powerful messages

after being trained about the technicalities like OT exercises, postures, sheet division ………….
the comics were created !!!!
the field testing was the most amazing experince an HIV and Comic activist could have like mepeople were very enthusiastic to read the narratives of children and encouraged them to display their work of art with their shops, stores and street walls
I can never forget the old man of 55 blessing Manik ( participant) telling him
that with so much social conciousness at this age , you make us fell ashmaed of our insensitivity to the society.. god bless u