PROVIDENCE, R.I., March 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In "the new China," might boys and girls break tradition and hold hands? Will the advent of electricity in a rural African village increase kids' education, or distract their attention? Does the parent who repairs shoes on a sidewalk in New Delhi feel threatened by sneakers made in Indonesia?
With the nonprofit What Kids Can Do http://www.whatkidscando.org/ as a springboard, young people are documenting global change through photographs, essays, and audio, and drawing interest from students and teachers across the hemispheres.
The actual voices of eight students at Beijing High School No. 12 this week contributed the latest entry on the WKCD website, "Life in New China" http://www.whatkidscando.org/china_site/index.html. Speaking candidly in English and Chinese, teenagers talk about such high school universals as friendship, art, sports, lunch, and school uniforms.
Launched with help from the Asia Society, the China pages also contain side-by-side photographs and commentary in which students show the rapid changes in their city's culture. One can even download a multimedia Chinese- English "dictionary" featuring the voices of younger students as they translate captions for photos of Beijing.
In the rural Tanzanian village of Kambi ya Simba, secondary school students who had never before held a camera helped create the book In Our Village: Kambi Ya Simba Through the Eyes of Its Youth, published in late 2006 by Next Generation Press. Their interviews, photographs, and videos, posted at http://www.inourvillage.org/, have sparked spin-off projects in far-flung places from Guatemala to Los Angeles.
Another ambitious project on has WKCD working with youth in Delhi and San Francisco to document the effects of globalization in their communities. Part of a worldwide http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/philanthropy/youthvoices/, it will result in mixed-media pieces produced by young people supplied with digital cameras, tape recorders, and Adobe creative software.
Immigrant and refugee youth in southeast London are creating digital stories about their resettlement. Youth in Bangalore are working on a "Day in the Life" photo essay.
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