austraLasia 1081
TV, communications and EAO
HUA HIN: 14th March 2005 -- 'TV' here means Team Visit, but it might just as well mean what everybody else means by TV, since the writer has in hand a series of DVDs and other items of the kind emanating from the now concluded East Asia-Oceania Team Visit. It's time to give the broader picture of a communication event that leaves the mind staggering, just a little!
By general consent, the majority of nations within the Salesian region designated EAO, from Mongolia 'up North' to the islands of the Pacific 'down South', are not as advanced technologically as other parts of the world. Exceptions there are, of course. It appears that the more low-tech East has stolen a march on the more hi-tech West in a number of ways. The men and women of the EAO region have done themselves proud during the Team Visit. It is worth giving the reader an overview of what actually happened.
'Communications', for THA, during the Team Visit, meant far more than equipment, bandwidth and an efficient Technology Centre (S.I.T). It meant a particular and indeed outstanding degree of hospitality that made even non English speakers feel very much at home. One group, the Koreans, who are less accustomed to regular exchange in English, felt very much at home and able to communicate. One Councillor, Fr Domenech, (who just moments ago accepted a CD especially put together to help people like him learn English), gave/read, but the effort was admirable, his talk in English, perhaps for the first time, because he felt encouraged to do so.
That's the background to real communications. To that we add: the GIA website - being managed, oddly enough from Dublin, during this week - linked in with austraLasia to give almost real time coverage of events for Japan's web-viewers (check www.salesio.jp ). The Team Visit dossier, a hefty tome, was available for participants in Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese as well as English. All events during the meetings, group work, assemblies, were available in minuted and visually projected form almost immediately afterwards and certainly for the next step each time. Provinces were able (and some did so) to use the same materials for in-province animation concurrently. The THA confreres' retreat, preached by Fr Cef Ledesma, missionary in Cambodia, began in Hua Hin two days after the Team Visit with a summary, in Thai, of the Visit, drawn from austraLasia and www.sdb.org materials.
EAO is 'thinking' in communication terms for starters. And while one also has to consider a number of ethical questions, the fact remains that a number of materials, including the recent film of a prominent Religious Founder (!) are already in Tetum and an abbreviated version in English; that the Mongolia DVD and CD are already in Vietnamese...
If you want all the documents from EAOTV they are now available on www.bosconet.aust.com with a single click (a zip file). There are even ppt files zipped for your access (hefty!).
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AustraLasia is an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia Pacific. It also functions as an agency for ANS based in Rome. Try also www.bosconet.aust.com and Lexisdb
