Adapting Visual Methods

Providing an initial framework to the narrative interviews gave me an appreciation of the various transitions that the young people had experienced in terms of migration to the street, making the decisions to leave the street, arriving at a new centre or school and going home etc. In order to add greater depth to the stories, visual methods were employed: auto-photography, drawing activities and a focus group.

I was unable to conduct auto-photography with all of the participants. At Imani disposable cameras were taken home by the apprentices, which were used to take photographs over 24-hours, of objects that would help them to describe their return journeys home. However, on developing the film from the disposable cameras it was found that they had all been damaged by heat. Time did not allow for a second attempt.

Matumaini advised against the use of auto-photography with their beneficiaries as they

either came from or lived close to the town’s Turkana community: older members of which would have been suspicious of the use of cameras and considered it disrespectful to encourage young people to actively take photographs around their home communities. Auto-photography was therefore only organised at Nyumbani, the long-term transition centre run by Usaidizi, to avoid offending the local community.

103

Eight boys were given a digital camera for a short period of time and asked to take photographs of objects, rooms and areas of their primary school and Nyumbani’s compound that would help them to talk about their first few days and/or weeks there. Once the pictures had been taken, they were downloaded onto a laptop to be viewed as a slide show. Each boy participated in an image-elicitation interview. The boys were asked to view their pictures and then choose the one that they felt was most important. Once this had been done, I asked them why this picture was important and why it had been taken. Once the picture had been fully discussed I then asked each boy to choose the next important pictures and asked the same questions. This continued until all the

photographs had been viewed. In ordering the photographs, the boys dictated the structure of the narrative they related and led through the interview. As such they were able to feel in control of the narrative and provide an indication of the most significant and/or challenging aspects of the transition made to Nyumbani and school.

As there were only two cameras available for the activity, only two boys could be trained in the use of the cameras or engaged in taking photographs at any one time. It therefore took a number of days to complete both the auto-photography sessions and the

subsequent photo-elicitation interviews. The participants appeared more relaxed during the image-elicitation interviews: I took care to ensure that both myself, and the student, were on the same side of the table used for the laptop, and the images on the screen provided a focus through which they could develop confidence in their answers before talking to me directly. The drawings created by the younger participants at Nyumbani and

Matumaini’s centre were a similar focus at the beginning of the narrative interviews. The

discussions about the pictures were effective in breaking the ice and making them feel more at ease.

As I had been unable to complete the auto-photography exercise at Imani, I adapted the drawing activities for use with the apprentices. I asked them to draw one or more pictures of something that they wanted to tell me about and provided coloured pencils, pencils, pens, paper and rulers. The drawing activity was conducted after all of the young men had been interviewed. The resulting images were of a variety of different subjects and aspects of their lives. Given their age (between 18 and 28) I had not anticipated that the drawing activity would be as engaging for the young men as it had been. They

104

enjoyed drawing so much that I had to arrange a second session in which they were able to “finish the pictures properly”. The main benefit of using the drawings was how the interviews yielded greater detail about the aspects of their lives that were shown in them. They either added depth of detail to certain elements of the stories related during the semi-structured interviews, or highlighted aspects of their lives that had not previously been mentioned.

The use of collective visual methods (Boyden and Ennew 1997), through the creation of a poster as part of a focus group exercise, provided an insight into the lives of the

participants that highlighted both their transitions away from the street and the contexts within which the transitions took place. I gave the young people free reign on how they wanted to present their posters. Neither recreated the spider diagram framework from my handout (Figure 3.1): the young women wrote in columns on the flip chart paper that corresponded to each of the life stages they discussed, and the young men wrote their thoughts out on A4 foolscap as prose. The discussion they had while negotiating what they were to write down provided a depth of understanding to the phrases they chose to include.