the etuktuk project

This video outlines the recent activities of the Kothmale Community Radio Station. Featuring interviews with staff and management of the station it follows one of the stations announcers into a Tamil Tea Estate community in central Sri Lanka. Using the stations etuktuk, a mobile telecentre and radio production studio, the community participate in a live broadcast from the mobile. Filmed and Directed by Kalinga Seneviratne and Produced by the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC).

It was a busy day for me. KCR had organized a small workshop for the local public librarians in the Gampola area. We were suppose to talk about the use of new technologies in the field of radio and how the same technologies can be use in the public library’s. In the same day etuktuk had planned to visit a estate community to do a computer literacy program. This was the first time etuktuk went to a estate community to do a computer literacy program. How ever I had to participate in the workshop held in Gelioya public library about 20Km from KCR. I wished if I could be in two places at the same time.

Sriyapali who is the CMC manager and one of the relief staff members of KCR had planned to go to visit the Kanapathiwatta estate nearby KCR( 5 minutes from KCR). Intension of this visit was to educate the estate children and young people in the estate about the computers technologies and encourage them to use the facilities provided in the CMC. Lac of participation for the estate community in the CMC activities is one of the main issues with the CMC and this was spoken i the CMC staff meetings by the EAR researcher.

One of the main reasons for lack of participation for the Tamil communities is the absence of a Tamil speaking trainer in the CMC. For the last 10 months I have witnessed very few Tamil youngsters coming to the center to be trained in computer skills but they never continue to come. The main reason for this is language. Absence of a Tamil speaking person makes it harder to be in the center for person from the Tamil community. This was reviled in one of my interveives in the same tea estate community. When I was interviewing a housewife from the same estate I asked her about the CMC. And her reply was, “my children use to come there to use computers when the foreign lady was there (in 1999-2002 when an Australian volunteer worked at the CMC), but after that they didn’t go there. Because nobody was there to teach them”. This clearly meant that they felt unwelcome at the CMC.

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