A Lesson: A digital story by Nekeisha Lima

In 2012, GOJoven at the Public Health Institute and the Center for Digital Storytelling’s Silence Speaks initiative implemented the Youth Leaders Speak project, which emphasizes the importance of personal narratives as tools for education, youth mobilization, and advocacy on behalf of adolescent sexual health and rights. Through the project, GOJoven and Silence Speaks led two digital storytelling workshops with selected GOJoven Fellows from Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, who came together in four-day sessions to record first-person accounts of what led them to the field of youth health, collect images and video clips with which to illustrate their stories, and learn how to edit these materials into short digital story videos. One of these young story tellers is Nekeisha. She is a young Belizean woman who became pregnant at an early age, due to a lack of information about sexuality and conception. She speaks in her story about the life she used to lead as a teenager free of adult responsibilities, and of how she became involved with a much-older man. After a miscarriage and in spite of his objections, she decided to carry her second child to term. She speaks of how she now is involved in GOJoven through which she educates women younger than herself to help them prevent unwanted early pregnancy.