Street Theatre in the Sri Lankan Tea Plantations

“I am really proud of the way you acted in the play, but if you behave that way in real life, we will simply kill you!” Keerthika’s father said, reflecting the conservative norms of the community…

Keerthika and her family live and work in the Melfort Tea Plantation, in central highlands of Sri Lanka. Keerthika is a peer educator and the main actor in a play about teen pregnancy and suicide developed as a part of the Centre for Development Alternatives (CDA) RHIYA project. Shocking as her father’s words may sound, they have opened the door to a conversation in the family about reproductive health, in a community where unwanted pregnancy is so shameful that it often leads unmarried girls to commit suicide. While suicide may sound an extreme solution, loosing your virginity before you are married here means a very significant loss of value for a girl, leaving her with little hope of ever getting married. CDA has been working with Tamil communities in tea plantations since 1982.

Prior to RHIYA, they had been involved in a project which used street theatre to make parents aware of the risks and consequences of sending their daughters to work as domestic workers in Colombo, the capital. At that time, CDA realised the power of drama to raise awareness about sensitive topics. So when they started their RHIYA project, it was a natural progression for them to decide to use theatre again as a way to enable parents to realise the SRH problems facing their children and the need to address them.

Street plays draw heavily on the actual experiences of young people

The play Keerthika acted in, developed by a group of volunteer peer educators, centres on the story of two teenagers in the plantation. The boy has been working in Colombo, where he has a girlfriend. When he returns to the plantation, he starts a secret relationship with the daughter of his parents’ neighbours. When they have unprotected sex, she gets pregnant, but he returns to Colombo, abandoning her. With the first symptoms of pregnancy, her mother becomes suspicious and confronts her. When her daughter admits she is pregnant, the mother is furious and her father, arriving home drunk, beats both her and her mother severely. In desperation, the girl decides to end her life, but is saved by the intervention of a peer educator who takes her to a counsellor for advice.

The street plays draw heavily on the actual experiences of young people in this community and the inclusion of real issues, such as suicide, gender stereotypes, alcoholism and domestic violence, evokes strong feelings among the audiences. The drama provides an entry point for families to start talking about these issues based on fictional stories and characters. This then opens the door for youth to get their parents’ permission and the community’s acceptance to talk to the peer educators, and when they want to, to see the CDA reproductive health counsellor on the plantation about an issue. Kanthi Jayawardena, the Estate Medical Assistant and the Principal Counsellor for CDA, says, “After the dramas, the number of young people coming to talk to me has doubled. I have not heard about any more suicides either”.

EU/UNFPA RHIYA “Making common cause: Good Practices for Creating an Enabling Environment”, p.17.