International Peace Tile Project raises HIV/AIDS awareness
A group of local children gaze up at a vibrant collage of decorated wooden tiles at the Upper Peninsula Children’s Museum in Marquette. The tiles contain messages from children very much like themselves, though under much more dire circumstances. The tiles were created by children halfway across the world to raise awareness of the pandemic that constantly threatens their lives, HIV/AIDS.
Phrases such as “Kissing doesn’t kill: greed and indifference do,” “See into tomorrow,” and “We all deserve a second chance,” provide insight into the lives of the artists and give voice to the millions of children at risk from HIV/AIDS. According to UNICEF, more than 500,000 children under the age of fifteen have died of AIDS and more than two million children younger than fifteen are living with the HIV/AIDS virus.
Even though the tiles focus on a sobering topic, they convey the hope and optimism of their creators. One tile depicts the image of the earth surrounded by a sea of people with a large orange heart in the lower left-hand corner. Others include warnings and many feature the word “hope.” Each of the eight-by-eight-inch tiles reflects the unique personality of the child who made it. Some consist of simple images painted on wood while others are more intricate with lace, beads and magazine clippings.
The museum is hosting a collection of forty-eight tiles in recognition of World AIDS Day, December 1. The tiles were brought to the museum through the International Peace Tiles Project, an initiative that seeks to raise HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention among youth. Already the project has involved more than 1,000 youth from Bangladesh, Cameroon, Costa Rica, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda and the United States. Most of the tiles on display at the museum were made in India.
On World AIDS Day, major displays of peace tiles were unveiled in Johannesburg, South Africa; Geneva, Switzerland; and Jaipur (India). Many smaller exhibits, such as the one in Marquette, were displayed worldwide.
Louise Bourgault, professor of communication and performance studies at Northern Michigan University, helped bring the exhibit to Marquette. Bourgault first heard of the project through an Internet list serve. She supervised NMU student Wendy Gaudette, who organized the exhibition in conjunction with the children’s museum.
“This issue is of great urgency at the moment because there are 40,000,000 cases of HIV and AIDS worldwide. Also it’s an issue that affects people in our own country,” Bourgault said. “I felt that this was interesting because it was involving younger children, and that it would have a very positive message and it would help children in the Marquette area relate to children in other parts of the world.”
Peace Tiles project creator and coordinator Lars Hasselblad Torres of Montpelier (Vermont) was inspired to start the project as a way to raise HIV/AIDS awareness through art.
“I’ve always had this passion for the visual arts,” Torres said. “At the same time, I’ve been an educator and really enjoy working with young people, and thought that there might be a way to combine my passion for the arts and my enthusiasm for working with young people in a global awareness campaign around HIV/AIDS.”
Torres hopes the project will reach young people of widely varying experience with HIV/AIDS.
“The goal of this year’s effort is to enable young people to express their experience with HIV/AIDS on whatever dimension,” Torres said. “Those might be [youth] who are living with HIV/AIDS. It might also be those who are at risk—they sort of know it’s out there and they’re scared or they’re totally oblivious. And also for those who may not be at risk—they know it’s out there and they want to send messages of hope to other young people around the world.”
A lot of work and collaboration has gone into the project.
“For World AIDS Day I coordinated the activities in terms of developing the basic materials, helping to find artists who could go to communities to work, helping to figure out where the murals would go, raising money and distributing money, creating the online forum for publicity purposes, as well as getting people to share their stories around peace tiles,” Torres said.
One of Torres’ international collaborators is Bhawani Shanker Kusum, secretary and executive director of the Indian non-government organization, Gram Bharati Samiti, which translates to the Society for Rural Development.
“He’s an incredibly committed guy to rural issues affecting women and youth, and saw a connection between what he’s trying to do and what peace tiles was all about,” Torres said. “You might call him the driving force.”
Kusum set up six workshops in the rural area surrounding Jaipur, the capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan. He contacted instructors, developed the strategy for creating the tiles, and involved more than 600 children ages thirteen through nineteen.
Kusum was amazed at the quality of the children’s work.
“I was thrilled to see their creativity while making the peace tiles,” Kusum said. “I had never expected such a wonderful creativity among the small kids. It was just beyond my imagination.”
Torres said it is important for the project to concentrate on India due to its severe HIV/AIDS infection rate. With 5.3 million infected people, India’s rate is second only to South Africa.
“The reason why India is important is because it’s the place on the planet where the next demographic bomb is supposed to explode,” Torres said. “Already in South Africa, mortality rates, which is to say the number of people dying within the population, has surpassed infection rates. It’s how you know the HIV/AIDS pandemic has reached a critical level. India is the place where that’s supposed to happen next.”
Kusum said it is crucial to educate youth in the prevention of HIV/AIDS for three reasons.
“One, they are innocent ones and have been orphaned without any fault,” he said. “Two, they belong to a new generation that must be protected from the risks, and three, they are the most efficient group to disseminate the message.”
Torres said that peace tiles and other awareness projects will have a lasting impact on the fight against AIDS.
“It’s an issue that’s staring the world in the face,” he said. “Peace tiles is one of thousands of activities people are doing, and if thousands more people take individual action on an issue like HIV/AIDS then international mechanisms for fighting AIDS will be a lot more motivated to do their work. Soon enough you’ll have a global mass movement to actually make AIDS history.”
The project has strengthened Kusum’s optimism for fighting the disease.
“It’s a very unique and wonderful experience to involve the younger generation through art in the fight against AIDS,” Kusum said. “It has given us a bright indication of hope to cope with the pandemic.”
—8-18 Media

Editor’s Note: This is written by Pryce Hadley, sixteen, and Anna Burnett, fifteen, with help from Kelsie Coccia, thirteen; Adam Gannon, thirteen; Clint Remsburg, thirteen, and Emma Roy, thirteen.

Girl with HIV gains hope through peace tile project
An Indian girl stares out of a photograph, facing straight ahead, her guarded expression veiling some past tragedy and a childhood ended too soon. Sheba Khan, thirteen, is infected with the HIV virus. So are her mother and younger brother and sister. Four years ago, Khan’s father died of AIDS. Because her mother is HIV positive, she can’t find work.
The whole family survives on the small government pension her grandfather receives, barely getting enough food to eat every day.
8-18 Media interviewed Khan through e-mail with translating assistance from Bhawani Shanker Kusum, secretary and executive director of Gram Bharati Samiti, the Society for Rural Development, in Jaipur (India).
Khan’s mother was shocked when she learned that she and three of her children were infected with HIV. They were looked upon with pity. Sometimes the townspeople would give them clothes and food, but there was no one to comfort them.
“No one was there to console a broken family,” Khan said.
In the rural area of India where Khan lives, HIV/AIDS treatment is difficult to access for poor families such as hers.
“No medicines for HIV/AIDS are available free of charge and none of them can afford the expensive medicines prescribed by the government hospital,” she said. “When there is no surety of even getting food two times a day, how can we think about the nutritious food the doctor had advised?”
Khan and her family are desperately waiting for the day when her fifteen-year-old brother, Shehbaz, is old enough to find work. Shehbaz is not infected with HIV.
“Then my mother and I myself could get proper food and treatment,” Khan said. “Then we will not be a burden on my old grandfather.”
Khan participated in a peace tile workshop coordinated by Kusum last fall. Through it, she gained a greater understanding of the virus that has changed her life forever.
“This is the only event in my life that gave me a great chance to understand HIV/AIDS,” she said. “Earlier I was simply told that I had been infected with some very dreadful disease which can never be cured.”
Working on the peace tiles changed Khan’s outlook on life.
“I could believe in myself, which I couldn’t do earlier,” she said. “Now I am hopeful to do something. It has given me a great spirit of happy life and made me think that a girl like me infected with HIV can be of some use.”
Khan takes comfort that the peace tiles project will help many others, not just herself.
“I strongly believe that this project will give a power to the youth of my age throughout the world to raise awareness on HIV/AIDS,” she said.
Her compassionate approach toward children with HIV is simple and sincere.
“The poor children infected with HIV/AIDS must be treated with love and sympathy everywhere in the world,” she said.
—8-18 Media

Editor’s Note: This story was written by Pryce Hadley, sixteen; and Anna Burnett, fifteen; with contributions from Kelsie Coccia, thirteen; Adam Gannon, thirteen; Clint Remsburg, thirteen; and Emma Roy, thirteen.

MTV correspondent makes news more accessible to young people
Gideon Yago is the voice of news to a multitude of American teens. As an MTV news correspondent, the twenty-seven-year-old Yago delivers daily “ten-to-the-hour” news updates and documentaries on the youth-oriented network better known for its music videos and reality shows.
Yago has covered stories including gun violence, drug addiction and HIV/AIDS. He has reported from the tsunami in Southeast Asia, the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and the war in Iraq.
8-18 Media spoke with Yago prior to a recent speech sponsored by Platform Personalities at Northern Michigan University.
As a teenager in Queens (New York), Yago was a typical “media junkie” who spent hundreds of hours watching TV, playing video games, reading magazines and going to movies. His parents were professors and spent a lot of time watching the news and discussing politics. But one event especially peaked his interest in news.
“When the Berlin Wall came down, that was a really big deal because my mom being German, here was this issue that I was connected to,” Yago said. “I remember sitting with my mom and dad up all night fielding phone calls from our family over in Germany about what was going on.
“I think that was really where I got dialed into that rush of watching history unfold right in front of your eyes, which so many people get dragged into the news business by.”
Yago’s first appearance on MTV came during his freshman year at Columbia College in New York City as a contestant on a game show called Idiot Savant. Three years later as a senior, he responded to an MTV ad seeking college students who were interested in politics. He thought he was applying for another game show, but it ended up being an audition for MTV’s 2000 “Choose or Lose” campaign to educate and register young voters.
He was chosen as one of six reporters around the nation to cover election-year issues for young people. He says the idea behind Choose or Lose is to get people voting at a young age so they will become life-long voters.
“If somebody votes at eighteen they’re likely to vote again at twenty-two,” he said. “So much of the channel is us trying to tell people what is cool or what is interesting or what is out there in the world of pop culture. If we can do that as well with politics, it feels like we’re giving back.”
When Yago graduated with a degree in history, MTV hired him as a full-time news correspondent. His coverage of the aftermath of September 11, 2001 was a turning point in his career. As events of the day began to unfold, MTV carried CBS News coverage. Hours after the attacks, Yago realized there were a lot of names and terms in the CBS reports that would be unfamiliar to the MTV audience. So he began to gather material and to produce segments himself.
“We earned a lot of chops with the stuff that we did from 9/11 on,” he said.
As the United States began its military operations in Iraq, it was a “no-brainer” for him to go to Iraq, he said. He had to convince MTV executives that it was the biggest story for young people in America and that MTV News should be there to explain it to their audience.
“I don’t think that there was anyone else talking to a young audience about the experiences of young servicemen or young Iraqis,” he said.
MTV was not embedded or attached to any military unit, so Yago spent a lot of time talking to young American soldiers and “the average Iraqi kid on the street.”
“It was very interesting to see how the experiences of young eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old American service people and young eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old Iraqis had been through this war,” he said. “The difference is very important because through understanding and recognizing each other as individuals you can build common ground and dialog.”
In Iraq, he interviewed a nineteen-year-old translator, one of the most impressive people he has ever met.
“He was working as a translator for the First Armored Division and was really committed to the reconstruction but had a very different relationship to it because he had to commute,” he said. “There’s a price on his head and he was sleeping in different houses every night. The other guys his age had their battalion around them. This guy had to drive home every night in a place where insurgents wanted to kill him.”
Yago hopes to return to Iraq soon. He plans to be more cautious about the situations he puts himself into and the risks he takes because he believes that the security situation has become progressively worse since his first visit.
In addition to challenges of security, Yago has overcome challenges in his job arising from his age.
“Usually people are skeptical and you get a lot of, ‘MTV, I thought that was just music videos.’ Especially overseas,” he said. “In 2000, I got a lot of crap from a lot of older people, but once they saw what we were doing in and around 9/11 and leading up to the war, I earned myself a lot of space.”
Yago calls his career with MTV News the best experience of his life. But that experience may soon be coming to an end. His contract with MTV expires in December, and because he’s in his late twenties, it may not be renewed.
“I’ve been there six years now. I’ve had a really good run. I don’t think you can hang onto it forever,” he said.
He says his career could go anywhere.
“I’m probably most known for doing the corresponding work, but I have a lot of experience in the editing room and I have a lot of experience making television, disproportionately so for somebody my age,” he said. “So maybe I’ll be making something click like that.”
“I think the key is to find a really amazing idea first and commit yourself to that. And I’m not sure what that idea is yet because I haven’t really spent the time thinking about it.”
—8-18 Media

Editor’s Note: This story was written by Andrew LaCombe, sixteen, with contributions from Justine LaViolette, fifteen; Kelsie Coccia, thirteen; and Hanna Schafer-Nelson, thirteen.

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