Part 2 in a Series: Radio and Development
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – At 2:30 p.m. every Saturday, patients descend to the garden of Hospital Psicoasistencial Interdisciplinario José Tiburcio Borda, Argentina’s largest psychiatric hospital, to participate in the live broadcast of LT22 Radio La Colifata.
Among them is Adrián, a man of about 45, whose last name, along with those of the other patients, has been withheld at the request of the hospital. Adrián moves closer to the group from afar, waving his arms and shouting to his radio colleagues that he has good news.
“That’s it!” he shouts. “They fixed all my molars!”
Mariana Heredia, a psychologist, goes to meet him and gives him a hug.
Adrián wears a white shirt half-tucked into a pair of black pants. The pants are too big for him, and his fly is down. But he seems happy and full of energy. His smile reveals empty spaces where he is still missing teeth.
It’s a fresh autumn afternoon in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital. Yellow leaves have fallen from the trees onto the ground, adding a bit of color to the gray walls of the hospital. Men with lost looks on their faces, dirty clothes and disheveled hair walk along the paths that cut through the gardens of the hospital grounds. Security guards man the entrance and exit.
And in one corner, the radio program coordinators from Asociación Civil La Colifata Salud Mental y Comunicación, a nongovernmental organization that wields the media for mental health therapy and awareness, arrange plastic chairs into a circle. There are already a dozen people gathered outside in the open air to participate in the weekly live broadcast. In addition to the patients, there are also former patients and a few who are friends of the participants or just curious.
Adrián greets everyone, then begins to share his ideas about his dreams for his and the country’s future.
“When I think, I think very logically,” says Adrián, who was admitted to the hospital in 1997. “All that I ask is to meet with the legislators or to run for president.”
At the top of his presidential agenda would be more affordable living.
“I, Adrián, what I propose is houses and apartments for a peso so that the people live better and live well,” he says. “Oil, 20 cents. Sugar, 20 cents. It is a future for when I leave here.”
He says he already has supporters for his campaign.
“I spoke with people, and they are going to vote for me,” he says. “After President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is me, Adrián.”
He recites his full name and the number of his national identity document.
Adrián shares his electoral platform to become the future president of Argentina during a segment on La Colifata called “Adrián habla de política.” But sometimes, he tires of talking about politics, and he discusses other subjects. Other times, he doesn’t talk at all. What he likes about La Colifata is that there is someone on the other side who is listening.
The coordinators of the radio program note on a chalkboard who is participating that day. There are those who talk about cooking, those who talk about music and those who recite poetry, like María, 71, who is always smiling and saying hello to everyone with strong hugs and kisses.
They call María “the grandmother of the radio.” She says that she used to be a teacher and a scrub nurse in an operating room. Now, she channels her energy into writing poetry, which she recites on the radio.
“I missed not one single day on the radio,” she says. “For me, it is a link to the land. Moreover, it’s beautiful because you can pay attention to the pain of another. You can be supportive.”
The program finally begins, with 20 or so people gathered around. The microphone passes from person to person, and they all introduce themselves formally. The broadcast lasts until 7:30 p.m., at which point “los colifatos,” a caring local term for people with mental health issues, switch off the microphone until the next Saturday.
Every Saturday, La Colifata strives to establish “bridges where there are walls,” the radio station’s official motto, which is emblazoned on the back of some of the coordinators’ T-shirts. The broadcast aims to unite people inside and outside the neuropsychiatric hospital, enabling those with mental health issues to express themselves knowing that there is an audience listening and listeners to understand that the people here have interesting things to say, things that concern all human beings. Outside the broadcast, La Colifata's coordinators work with the patients individually and in group therapy sessions to supplement their mental health treatment.
But this communicational-therapeutic project continues to suffer from a lack of finances, which has plagued the program since its inception 20 years ago. Last year, it was on the brink of closing and today still looks to restructure in order to avoid collapse.
La Colifata’s financial crisis is part of a larger crisis that affects Hospital José T. Borda, a public institution dependent on the city government. Known simply as, “El Borda,” the hospital has been operating since 1967, according to its website. It has more than 1,200 beds for people with mental health issues as well as attends to hundreds of outpatients.
In the last month, the hospital has appeared in the local news for unsatisfactory building maintenance, including the lack of gas in large sections of the building, which makes heating a challenge as the winter months approach. Photos of destroyed walls, torn yellow mattresses and people curled up in corners have circulated local media and social networks. The city government presented in April a two-year plan to reform the hospital.
As a result of this financial crisis, various patients don’t have psychologists, says Verónica Kazimierczak, 28, general coordinator of La Colifata. Their only treatment is medication, permanently sedating them without a guided process toward a cure. The psychologists of La Colifata therefore work with participants on an individual basis as well in a group therapy session every Friday.
La Colifata’s team consists of five professionals, including psychologists, teachers and radio operators. Working independently of the hospital, they attend to the radio program’s 30 participants for whatever they may need.
Adrián is just one example of this. Kazimierczak says that although Adrián has a psychologist at the hospital, he went more than 10 years without leaving its grounds. So La Colifata began to coordinate with Adrián’s specialist and secured permission for him to go to a radio festival in November 2011 some 300 kilometers from the city.
Kazimierczak highlights the progress that Adrián has made since joining the radio program a year and a half ago, remembering how at first he used to just approach the group, yell and then leave without participating in the broadcast. Beyond the radio show, his involvement in the program’s weekly group therapy session enabled him to express that he needed to go to a dentist. The team then helped him to begin dental treatment.
“Sometimes, they generate moments that are magic, that have their mysticism, where one feels grateful to be part of this,” says Kazimierczak, reflecting on the experiences of Adrián and his fellow broadcasters. “Each being is valuable by oneself. We all have something to communicate.”
Alfredo Olivera, 45, the program’s creator and strategic director, says that La Colifata was the first radio station in the world to broadcast from a neuropsychiatric hospital. The model has since been exported to other parts of the globe, but La Colifata was the first.
For Olivera, a psychologist, one of the keys of La Colifata is the existence of the listener.
“The role of the listener returns the statute of existing to the one who speaks,” he says. “The categorization that the law makes cataloguing someone as insane or unable makes a very strong mark on subjectivity. That’s why it is so important that they return to feeling that they have a say and that there is someone who is listening to them.”
He explains that the program also aims to maintain the listeners’ loyalty. La Colifata prizes being unique, creating its own aesthetic, music and creative theme songs. At the same time, it strives for content that addresses universal concepts that transcend the hospital walls.
“The listener is interested if what he or she listens to refers to his or her own search,” says Olivera, who currently manages radio operations from Paris. “Because ultimately, the users gather to ask themselves things that we all ask ourselves.”
Olivera says that he has dedicated more than 20 years to La Colifata. He was 24 when he started volunteering at El Borda as a psychologist. One day, he met a man on a bus who had a radio program on topics that varied daily. The man invited Olivera onto the program to talk about insanity.
But Olivera had a better idea. Instead of discussing insanity on the program himself, he recorded the ideas of various patients about insanity using an old portable recorder, and the radio played the tape. The station also recorded the response of the listeners on a tape and sent it to the hospital so that the patients could hear it.
“The first time, they talked about insanity,” Olivera says. “And they talked with a density, with a richness. The communicative potential of that program was incredible.”
He says that listeners were astonished.
“They waited for foolishness, and it was totally the opposite,” he says.
So the segments from El Borda continued, traversing a range of topics.
“The following week, they talked about women,” he says. “Later about God, later about laughter.”
And Radio La Colifata was born. They selected topics and recorded microprograms that were broadcast on various local radio stations.
Javier González, the owner of one of these stations, FM La Boca, says that the material produced by the patients and former patients of El Borda succeeds in deconstructing listeners’ preconceptions.
“La Colifata totally destructures the listener because it breaks the mindset that one has,” he says. “They show reality from another form, using a form of thinking that is not structured. They manage to give visions of reality from another place. At first, one says, ‘Pobrecitos, los locos.’ But later, they are amazed at what they produce.”
For González, La Colifata also invites the listener to introspect. And it stirs up a certain solidarity with the people who are living in El Borda.
La Colifata eventually gained its own antenna in order to broadcast the program live and to other neighborhoods in the city. In addition to the weekly live broadcasts, listeners can access recorded content on the radio’s website 24 hours a day, seven days a week. La Colifata currently has more than 130,000 followers on Facebook.
Olivera remembers that they obtained the antenna thanks to donations. In recent years, they financed the radio largely with foreign funding, mainly organizations from Spain and France.
“In 2008, 2009 and 2010, it was financed with money from foreign countries – 85 percent from France and Spain,” Olivera says. “There was also some 12 percent of public advertising from the government of the city, which later it cut without previous notice. The rest were donations.”
In 2011, La Colifata lost all its foreign funding because the organizations decided to redistribute their grants. At the end of the year, the national Argentine government began to respond to repeated calls for help from the radio and offered funds for public advertising, although these funds are not constant and represent half of what the radio needs.
“It was a dramatic year,” Olivera says. “I sold a car that I had and put the money there. Verónica received an inheritance, and she also put the money into La Colifata. We had to indebt ourselves because we had a lot of people working with us whom we couldn’t pay.”
He says that only five of the 12 employees on the coordinating team stayed on. The plans of subsistence consisted of finding volunteers that could join the team without pay and launching microentrepreneurial projects, like selling T-shirts painted by patients on the Internet.
The station stayed afloat, but it’s economic future is still uncertain.
“La Colifata needs 40,000 pesos per month in order to be able to carry on,” Olivera says, which is the equivalent of nearly $9,000.
But running parallel to these emergency measures are also much higher aspirations, Olivera says. The radio team hopes to accomplish in the coming years an old dream – to broadcast a daily program that reaches the entire city as well as offer former patients socio-economic support as they re-establish themselves outside the hospital.
“Our old dream is that La Colifata reaches all of the city and that it’s a space of social inclusion,” he says. “The objective is that the people who are leaving can do live programs during the week, to arm mixed teams where former patients participate together with other people who were never admitted. And the idea is that long-term, that could bring economic recognition.”
This project, baptized “New technologies,” received approval from the federal government, which has slowly begun to release the funds for the program to buy the necessary equipment.
La Colifata always knew how to reinvent itself and overcome the lack of funding, says Kazimierczak, who also works as a music teacher for children with special needs. This radio program has been a part of her life since she was a girl, when she used to listen to it with her dad, who is now dead.
“The marvelous thing about La Colifata is that it truly is a bridge,” she says. “It is a radio of truth. It is a radio that is listened to. La Colifata is pure creativity. That’s why it can’t stop.”
