Looking Back at Last Year's Afghan Project

 

I am currently completing the report for last year's Covenant funded Afghan project. It was due in a few months ago but coronavirus made it difficult to compete the report, and opening the Museum has meant limited time to spend on the task.

However, I now need to bring closure to this project and finalise the paperwork. Inevitably, it has reminded me of how we put this project together, the processes we went through and the fantastic contribution of the veterans who signed up to take part.

One of the areas that was enlightening was asking each veteran, when they completed the initial application to take part, to describe their experience in three words. This enabled a very individual response, especially as participants didn't know what others had written and it was amazing how many of them wrote similar, if not the same words. The best response was 'It was hot' until I informed the veteran that the idea was they were three individual words, not a sentence. 

An early word cloud is included above, but as the project progressed the words increased and gave a greater insight into how they viewed their experience. Infact, a group of veterans used the words to help decide on the title of the exhibition 'Blood, Sweat & Tears.' Because the words were so powerful, we decided to include them in the exhibition and produced a large vinyl which was stuck to one of our MDF display boards.

It was important that the veterans' own voices were heard during this project, and the 'three words' was part of that process. Everytime I look at the word cloud, I remember this particular element of the project. Which is why it is important that we include this in our evaluation report too.

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