- Chrissy Sykes
Look what we have done this year with zero budget and a whole lot of great Linkedin friends !!!!!
In January 2017 I finally finished the first fully animated program of the "My Body Is My Body Child Abuse Prevention Program". I was very excited from the very supportive feedback I had received after completing the songs. I had no idea that 11 months later the program would be translated into 12 different languages (with 4 more translations waiting for me to work on) and several more in the pipeline. Just goes to show what can be achieved by networking on Linkedin.
For those of you that do not know about the program - it is an animated, musical program of 5 songs for children aged 3 - 8 years old, teaching them about preventing abuse in a positive and non threatening way. It is one of the few programs around that covers sexual abuse, physical abuse, peer pressure, talking about problems and who to tell. Furthermore, it teaches about love. The program comes with a full 28 page tutorial for teachers, parents, carers and social workers highlighting the objectives of teaching each song. There is also a section detailing past questions from the children in past live performances (taken from a pool of 350,000 children).
The program is FREE for everyone to use and distribute.
I have been totally overwhelmed by the support I have received this year, and by the wonderful friends I have made so far in this journey - and it is only the beginning !!
These are just some of the wonderful people that have supported the program:
Tufail Muhammad - I would like to thank you so much for your support and belief in the program, and for introducing me to ISPCAN where I have made some wonderful friends. I was also invited by ISPCAN to do a Webinar about the program which was very exciting. Tufail also organised for the My Body Is My Body Program to be presented at the "1st South Asia Regional Conference on Child Rights" which was such an honour.
Elske Bijpost & Jan Bijpost from Stichting Geton - thank you for being so supportive in finding translators for the program. To date they have organised Loyiso Gura - Xhosa Translations, ZoyaSpeaks who did an amazing job on the Xhosa voice overs and singing. Kabelo Given Rabaji who translated the Setswana songs, Lindo Mbatha who did the Zulu translations. Elske also translated the full Dutch Website and found a lovely singer Charlotte Hulsbergen who has been doing a great job on the Dutch voice overs and songs. They have also organised translations for the Afrikaans songs. Stichting Geton also sponsored the recording studio in South Africa and are sponsoring the recording studio for the Swahili voice overs and songs. I can't thank you enough!!
Herold Super - my dear friend from recoding days in South Africa. It has been wonderful to catch up with Herold after 28 years, he found me on Linkedin. Herold just loved the program and has become an Ambassador to help spread the message of Child Abuse Prevention through the "My Body is My Body" Program. He has been fantastic at finding people to translate and so far has organised Russian with Natalia Germann, German with Gerlinde Hesse, Swedish with Micaela Svanberg. He has a Japanese translator. Herold is also looking to find sponsors to put the program onto DVD for the areas in the world that do not have good internet access. We want to make sure that the program is translated and sung in as many languages as possible so the children can join
in with the program.
Afrikaans - Anelize van Eden is currently translating the full website.
Portuguese - Sheila Soma and Lucia Williams translated the Portuguese songs
Tamil - Padmapriya TS translated the Tamil songs
Swahili - Thierry Irambona is currently working on the Swahili songs with a singer in Burundi.
Greek - Alexandra Pavlidou is currently translating the full program into Greek.
Chinese - Sofie Xufei translated the full website and songs. Chinese - Alice Wang is currently recording the voice overs and songs in Mandarin. A big thank you to Nick Hocart for introducing me to Alice.
Farsi (Persian) - Shima Azizi translated the songs into Farsi.
Swahili - JB Mugi translated the full website and songs into Swahili.
Sinhala - Sanjeeva de Mel is currently working on the Sinhala translations.
Khmer - Phan Phalka is currently working on the Khmer translations.
Turkish - Tülae Dündar - translated the songs into Turkish.
Urdu - Salem Bokhari - thank you for helping with the Urdu Translations.
Cambodian, Vietnamese and Burmese - translations are all being worked on by Child Safe Horizons.
Togalog - Flerida Mikouis is currently working on translations.
Arabic - Majed Elbdeiwi - thank you for helping with these translations.
Hindi - Haida Raza is currently translating the full website and songs.
There have been many more supportive people like Dr Joyce Knudson and Dr Rosina McAlpine who both invited me onto their radio shows, and all of you that have spread the word and in general been supportive - Thank you all !!
I cant wait to see what we can achieve in 2018 Let's see how many children we can reach so we can PREVENT Child Abuse !!!!
