Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday have not been good days for the Harare suburb in which I live - Marlborough. These are the days in which we experience our largest electricity cuts.

Doggedly, through the very worst of our electricity dearths, the rough outline of a pattern has persisted. Then during what is becoming something of a false Spring, electricity cuts virtually disappeared and to our amazement and even disquiet, we were getting electricity even on days we were not supposed to.

Now diesel queues re-emerge and power cuts worsen - one of the major suppliers of power in Zimbabwe, the Hwange thermal power station, is not producing at all as the electricity commission is unable to pay for coal, which is there in abundance.

And so on Tuesday, Thursdays and Saturdays we are again pretty sure that our electricity supply will be meagre if any. Next to Marlborough is Mabelreign - and that is where Mabelreign Girls High School is of course.  Generally when we do not get electricity in Marlborough, they also don't have it in Mabelreign.

But 16th June this year fell on a Tuesday and the European Union-financed participatory theatre communication project for young women on HIV/AIDS, was to take place at Mabelreign Girls High School on 16th June, the Day of the African Child. This would mean that there would be no PA system, no stage lighting and the cameras would have to do their best on batteries.

However we had reckoned without the determination of the Headmistress, Ms V.Mutanda, and her loyal band of teachers that this event would be a credit to their school. Off they went to ZESA (the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority), which when the ongoing saga of Zimbabwe has become a blip in history, will be recognised as having deserved an award for service to its country, and as she herself informed me, ZESA had agreed to switch on again as from 9.11. She was so precise I got confused and thought what she was saying had something to do with the Twin Towers.

So power there was and with such dedication and resourcefulness going into ensuring it would be a success, the event turned out, naturally, to be extremely well attended and the programme well-organised, thought-provoking and entertaining, as both CHIPAWO and Mabelreign Girls in partnership pulled out all the stops.

The event was held in the school hall. The stage was not going to be used as it was important to deconstruct the idea of performance and focus on communication. A semicircular 'acting-out area' had been arranged in front of two blank screens along one of the side walls. A group of 40 Mabelreign girls were seated around the semicircle. These were to be the participants in the communication session.

The stage curtains were drawn and in front of the stage on a raised dais the Guest of Honour, Mr Paulo Barduagni, standing in for the Ambassador of the European Union in Zimbabwe, Mr Xavier Marchal, and other speakers sat. In front of them were two rows of seats for invited guests. Behind the girls from Mabelreign were rows of seats for the small parties of girls from different schools with their teachers who had been invited to observe. All in all there must have been about 180 people and the hall was full.

In front of the screens the furniture used for the acting out was lined up, simple home-made wooden chairs and tables painted a bright red or yellow. On either side of the acting-out area were two painted benches on which the 'actors' sat during the acting out sessions. The Facilitator sat on one of them and the Resource Person sat a little behind one of the benches to the side.

The programme was kicked off by the Director of Ceremonies, a Grade 5 girl from the CHIPAWO Mbare centre - easily the smallest girl there. Confidently she called on the Head Girl of Mabelreign to welcome everyone and introduce the National Anthem. (See the Programme below.)

In its discussions with the school in the process of preparing for the event, it became clear to CHIPAWO that though the date for the demonstration had not been chosen with any special significance in mind, it was shaping up to be a Day of the African Child commemoration and that it was going to be necessary to pay attention to this fact.

The Day of the African Child is the most important day in the world calendar for CHIPAWO and CHIPAWO has adopted it as CHIPAWO Day. A special CHIPAWO Day event had already been lined up for the coming Saturday (20th June) in the high-density suburb of Mufakose. However for Mabelreign Girls High this was going to be their Day of the African Child celebration and CHIPAWO had to help make it that.

CHIPAWO has a long tradition of performance in honour of the Day of the African Child and it took no time at all for Girl Power to put a short re-enactment of the Soweto Uprising together.

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Girl Power is an all-girl CHIPAWO arts education centre which combines high power female performing and media arts training and performance with education and discussion on issues of relevance to girls and young women. Girl Power it was that was going to demonstrate the participatory theatre communication method later in the programme.

In no time at all Girl Power put together a short but rousing evocation of the events in Soweto that began on 16th June, 1976, and contributed significantly to the eventual coming of democracy to South Africa 18 years later in 1994 - complete with demonstrating schoolchildren carrying placards denouncing Afrikaans as the oppressor's language and slogans such as "Asifuni isiBhunu" (We don't want Afrikaans), touching songs like the militant freedom song, "Siyay' ePitoli' (We are going to Pretoria) and the ever-moving 'Senzeni na?' (What have we done?), the death of Hector Petersen, the first Soweto martyr, and a narration explaining how the Day of the African Child derived from the Soweto Uprising.

After this there were introductory remarks from the Chairman of CHIPAWO, the well-known Zimbabwean playwright and former Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture, Steve Chifunyise. In particular, he stressed that 'CHIPAWO needs to raise funding to pay the basic costs of the Girl Power centreÉ (and needs) to pursue similar projects with boys and young men.' He went on to mention the plan 'for a professional youth theatre production later this year of Lutanga Shaba's book, 'Secrets of a Woman's Soul'.

I came next with a lecture on Participatory Theatre Communications and an explanation as to what the demonstration people had come to see was all about. I decided to do this in order to stress the fact that CHIPAWO was trying to demonstrate an alternative to conventional communication methods in development work, including theatre for development. To do this I tried to place it in the context of development communication theory, distinguishing it from Forum Theatre, which in some ways it resembles. (See the text of the Chairman's speech and the lecture below.)

The time came for the actual demonstration and the girls performed the first two phases of the communication, Familiarisation and Involvement, with panache. Familiarisation is simply the introductory phase where the actor-communicators familiarise the audience with what is going to happen and get them relaxed and open to join in. Involvement is the phase in which they are drawn into the story itself.

Then came Phase Three of the communication process, Choices. The process presented four choices to the young women, derived from the story - 'to thank a man with your body', 'to go for treatment', 'to take the test' and 'to disclose your status'. After each choice was presented dramatically, the young women discussed the issues involved and participated in 'acting-out' their ideas or suggestions.

When this was completed, Phase Four was Action. In other words, after all the weighing of choices what are the young women going to do about it. There was a resounding endorsement of the need to respect one's body, the need to go for treatment, the need to take the test - though many were frightened and admitted that they might rather just let sleeping dogs lie - but there was distinct apprehension about disclosing their status and it is clear that there is a great deal that still has to be done in terms of behaviour change in this regard.

The process did not work nearly as well at Mabelreignas it did in the session I described at Vainona High School. The Mabelreign girls were shy and inhibited - despite their rumbustious participation in the singing and dancing that initiated the communication process. Perhaps one can put this down to the presence of lots of observers, older people, dignitaries etc. Perhaps it is simply an indicator of the fact that Girl Power is still very much wet behind the ears when it comes to managing a process which takes a lot of skill and experience.

What was getting to me as I observed the process was not only my own anxiety as the young Facilitator failed to follow leads and missed opportunities to explore paradoxes and contradictions but sharply the presence of Luta, the writer of the book, as these heart-rending incidents from her own life were enacted out before her. As Hamlet taught Claudius, it is one thing to know what you have done - and in the case of Luta to write it down - it is another to see it re-lived before your very eyes.

This must have been hard but even harder I felt - and what kept prompting me to want to get up and go and take her hand - was hearing and observing young women, who never had to go through it, so easily say what she and her mother did was wrong and that they would not have done it. The Facilitator did not as yet have the expertise to use the method to confront those participating in the process with the hollowness of their easy rejections and the essential rigours of such choices in the experiential context in which they presented themselves.

It is easy to say you would reject the advances of an old man who is giving your mother a job and paying your school fees when you are already studying at high school and see no obstacle to your continued education. But when you are in the real situation, out there in the ghetto, your mother battling to put bread on the table and nothing to spare for a girl's education and you have a burning determination to become a lawyer - to rebuff the man is a form of self-immolation, a burial in the poverty and misery around, to consent may seem a small price to pay.

Luta in her rousing address to the girls at the end made it clear that of course she had been wrong. Her mistake was to think that she would give herself to the old man and that would be 'the be-all and the end-all here'. She went on to realise that the consequences of her choice in that case pursued her for the rest of her life. Luta presented herself as 'a good example of a bad example' and she urged the girls to believe that what they have it in them to be, they will be. They do not need to take short-cuts to get there. It may have taken her longer to be a lawyer if she had turned the old man down but if she was really determined to be a lawyer she would have become one.

Idealistic, perhaps, but motivational. I just can't wait to get down and start workshopping a real theatre experience based on Luta's tragic but inspirational testimony. I may in the course of duty do other things - theatre for development, participatory theatre communications, T.I.E. - but, like an actor who makes his or her money in films but always feels the stage, though it hardly pays the bills, is home, so it is with me. The theatre is my real home - and I can't wait to get Luta's book into it.