Margaret Cochrane, 2014, Anthropology

Margaret Cochrane ’14

The goal of our internship in Kenya was to learn extensively about community theater and how it can enact behavioral change in communities, specifically with concern to issues of safe water and sexual and environmental practices. We went through intensive workshops with the two youth groups with whom we were working in order to learn about the process of magnet theater and how they apply it to communities. We also did outreach, visiting many different communities and helping challenge and engage the community on issues like HIV and clean water. During the outreach we collected observational data such as the size of the audience and the responses of the participants. I learned much about magnet theater as a form of education, and on the health and environmental problems in Western Kenya. We hope that the outreach system we took part in will continue and successfully enact behavioral changes in rural communities. I definitely want to focus my studies on environmental issues in East Africa, and I plan on returning to work with these groups again.