Aboriginal school children in the community of Areyonga are learning about healthy lifestyles through music and sport as part of Red Dust Role Models’ Healthy Living Weeks program.
Part of the Australian Government’s Live Longer! program, these week-long workshops in remote communities across the Northern Territory focus on healthy living topics, such as smoking, exercise, and nutrition at schools.
For Red Dust Role Models, the focus is on making learning fun, using interactive activities like music, sport, art, and cooking to raise awareness about healthier lifestyles.
“Using fun activities that engage the kids is much more effective than just handing out pamphlets,” says Red Dust Role Models project manager, Emma Staples.
A glance at the 2012 program shows how Red Dust works with individual communities to design activities that are guaranteed to get local children excited.
Each workshop addresses a health topic requested by the community, and could include sporting clinics, music workshops, cooking sessions, and art activities which specifically address risk factors and behaviours such as unhealthy diets, limited physical activity, smoking and drinking too much alcohol.
After attending the workshops, the children of Areyonga are helping to spread the ‘healthy living’ message. They’ve put their knowledge about good nutrition on show, writing and singing a song that’s now available as a music video “Living Longer in Areyonga”. It’s a great example of how the school and community are raising awareness of good nutrition.
“The music video is really educational, relating to both the students and the adults in the wider community,” says Staples.
“The video that the kids produced is relevant to the whole community, not just to the kids who participated in it. The video plays at the school, at the clinic and is even used at adult workshops.
The song is catchy and the people in the film are recognisable, so every time someone sees the video, they are reminded of the health messages and the fact that everyone else is trying to be healthy too.”
Red Dust Role Models are visiting Daly River, Lajamanu and Nguiu again in April and May 2012. Visit Red Dust’s website for more information about their previous community visits. Check out these music videos produced during Red Dust’s visits to Warburton, where they wrote a song about living healthily called “Don’t Be Rama Rama”, and Lajamanu, where they wrote a song called “Eat Good Tucker all the Time”.
If you enjoyed reading this article, why not check out Yamba the Honeyant’s tour through south west Queensland?