Since November 2011, Baghch-E-Simsim, the Afghan version of Sesame Street, has brought laughter and important lessons about literacy, numeracy and cultural awareness to the children of Afghanistan. We’re excited to share with you this behind-the-scenes look at how one of our newest international co-productions gets made. To learn more about how Baghch-E-Simsim gets made, click here. To learn more about our work in Afghanistan, click here.

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Afghan children in Herat province listen to Baghch-e-Simsim with their mothers.

While Sesame Workshop is best known for the educational television programs we produce both in the United States and around the world, we believe many forms of technology, both old and new, can be an effective way of bringing learning and laughter to children. That’s why an accompanying radio production has been a big part of the success of Baghch-e-Simsim, the Afghan version of Sesame Street. In Afghanistan many households don’t have television; the radio broadcast allows us to ensure that lessons about literacy, numeracy and cultural understanding reach as many children in the country as possible.

In the United States, when we mention iconic Sesame Street Muppets like Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, images of the characters immediately come to mind. But for the children whose only contact with the characters is the Baghch-e-Simsim radio program, they have to imagine what the characters look like. Periodically, around special events like festivals or the New Year, Afghan children send in drawings of Baghch-e-Simsim to the radio stations it airs on and we get a chance to see how their imaginations have brought the show to life. Equal Access, Sesame Workshop’s Afghanistan based radio production partner of Baghch-e-Simsim, sent us some of the children’s drawings they had received, and we wanted to share them with you.

A drawing by Noorina Atta Zada in Kabul province.

A drawing sent in by Jalal ud din in Nangarhar province

Drawings by Nazifa and Shafiq, children in the Nanagar province of Afghanistan.

A drawing of the classic Sesame Street characters by Muhammad Imran, a child in Kapisa, Afghanistan.

A drawing by Kamran and Umer, two children from Nangarhar province.

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Congratulations to the entire Sesamstrasse team for making young children in Germany laugh and learn for the last 40 years.

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This article originally appeared on the Sesame Workshop India site. VisitSesameWorkshopIndia.org to learn more about Galli Galli Sim Sim and all the wonderful work Sesame Workshop India does to improve the lives of and educate the children of India.

Sesame Workshop in India is committed to sustainable projects that enrich children’s lives long after our work is complete. We do this through partnerships, local development, and by investing in the furry heart of our programs—the puppeteers themselves.

Folk traditions of string puppets and shadow puppetry flourished in India long before our Galli Galli Sim Sim television show arrived in 2006. Yet the program’s Muppets represent something new: a sense of humor and emotional depth that connects powerfully with children and opens them to all types of learning.

It’s this quality that attracted actor Manish Sachdeva, whose work with Sesame Street in India has transformed into an enduring passion. Despite having no puppetry experience before his audition for Galli Galli Sim Sim, Manish was chosen from among 2,000 actors to begin training with master Muppeteers from Sesame Street in the U.S. Learning the unusual art of video puppetry took weeks of hands-on mentorship and many rounds of video critiques.

Manish’s character Boombah the Lion is a playful big brother known to a generation of Indian children. Even during training, Manish was urged to explore Boombah’s persona and make him as real as possible. “I started asking ‘What’s his chemistry with other characters? What does he think?’” recalls Manish. “As an artist, you play with it and make it your own.”

The experience—artistic, technical, and social—was excellent preparation for Manish’s next big role. At the end of his tenure on Galli Galli Sim Sim, he started building his own puppets and a company of artists to bring them to life—The Puppet Studio. In its first year, the group produced numerous videos, hosted workshops for children and aspiring puppeteers, and staged an all-puppet version of “The Wizard of Oz.” And Manish is dreaming even bigger, with ambitions for a feature film and TV series that expand the legacy of Muppets in India.

By investing in puppeteers like Manish, Sesame Workshop in India is helping to nurture an art form that can move people in profound ways, giving a voice not only to artists but to children who might otherwise have none.

Living proof is Ghazal Javed, the voice and hands behind Chamki, the much-loved star of Galli Galli Sim Sim. India’s leading woman puppeteer, Ghazal’s career with Sesame Street in India started during her final college exams in 2005. She’s been immersed in puppetry ever since, parlaying her time on the show into a dizzying array of projects, including scriptwriting, documentaries, a soap opera, performing at the Cricket World Cup, and a high-profile government campaign to promote girls’ education.

But her most rewarding work, she says, happens more quietly. In 2011, Ghazal and her partner, who plays the character Googly on Galli Galli Sim Sim, brought a month-long puppet workshop to an orphanage in the embattled region of Kashmir. Working with children whose lives have been torn apart by war, Ghazal worked to create a safe space for them to share their stories.

Ghazal recalls one girl who wrote about how her father was gunned down by militants. At first, she struggled through tears to put words to her tale. Then she picked up a puppet.

“She grabbed this puppet, which she made,” Ghazal says, “and she stood up in front of everyone. She told about losing her parents and how she came to the orphanage. She didn’t flinch. She did it all confidently—with a smile.”

Behold the power of puppets.

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Dr. Fuster, who hails from Barcelona, Spain, is the former president of the American Heart Association and the World Heart Foundation. As the Chair of the Committee on Preventing the Global Epidemic of Cardiovascular Disease for the Institute of Medicine (IOM), he is a prominent advocate for cardiovascular health around the globe.

Barrio Sésamo’s Dr. Ruster may not be as achieved as his real life inspiration, but he’s equally dedicated to helping keep hearts healthy. In the Muppet doctor’s own words, “I have dedicated myself to that miraculous, beautiful organ… the heart!  My heart jumps at the chance to spend time with my furry friends in Barrio Sésamo. We love to exercise and eat scrumptious fruits and veggies together. But most of all, I just love to talk to my friends helping them get to the heart of any matter.”

Dr. Fuster, who first collaborated with Sesame Workshop in 2006 to promote cardiovascular health in Colombia, serves as an international advisor on Sesame Workshop’s Global Health Initiative. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death around the world, and the goal of the initiative is to measure health improvements in children and build global partnerships to address their critical health issues. Many studies show that childhood obesity leads to cardiovascular disease, thru an increase in cardiovascular disease risk factors such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol. In 2010 the number of overweight children under the age of five globally was estimated to be over 42 million.

To learn more about Dr. Fuster and the work he does to promote cardiovascular health, visit MountSinai.org.

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The site, which launched on May 30, is targeted at the parents and teachers of children ages 4-8, as well as the children themselves. The site includes games that help teach concepts that are critical for school readiness, “tips” and parental guides for caregivers, and introductions to Tonton, Juljul and Elmo, the furry friends children see when they watch Hikayat SimSim. Over time additional games, videos and stories will be added to the site as well.

Since 2003, when Hikayat SimSim first aired, Sesame Workshop has been helping the children of Jordan acquire the educational foundation necessary to achieve their full potential. As an organization we have a firm belief that educational messages are better retained if experienced on multiple platforms. That is why we are so excited to add an online component to our educational efforts in Jordan.

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The site is made up of three sections, titled “The Show,” “Grown-ups,” and “Meet Sesame Street.” The first includes segments from Sesame Street’s Big Bird Looks at the World, the Chinese version of Sesame Street, created in partnership with Shanghai Media Group’s Toonmax. “Grown-ups” has professional parenting tips to help Chinese families with their children’s mental, physical and emotional development. And “Meet Sesame Street” has information about Sesame Workshop’s research model, our historical international educational efforts both inside and outside China and the Workshops’ key partners. The website is also highly interconnected with Weibo and Kaixin, two extremely popular Chinese social media networks.

Sesame Workshop first began helping Chinese children fulfill their full potential in 1983 when we collaborated with CCTV to create Big Bird in China. With the launch of the Sesame Street China website, we’re proud to continue that tradition.

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Promoting the health and wellbeing of children around the world is a critical part of Sesame Workshop’s mission. That’s why we’re excited to support USAID’s Every Child Deserves a 5th Birthday child survival campaign. The above video, which pulls together footage from our international co-productions, highlights the importance of vaccination campaigns, hand washing, malaria control and HIV anti-stigma efforts to our educational content across the globe.

To learn more about “Every Child Deserves a 5th Birthday” campaign, please click here. To learn more about Sesame Workshop’s work around around the world, please click here.

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From left to right: Ernie, Bert, Ienie Menie, Tommie, Elmo, Pino and Purk

On this date in 1853, Vincent Van Gogh was born in Zundert, Netherlands. In October 1888, Van Gogh painted his first version of Bedroom in Arles, an iconic work of post-impressionist art. In December, 2011, Bert, Ernie and Elmo made a couple of… “improvements” to Van Gogh’s masterpiece.

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Sesamstraat, the Dutch version of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop partnered with the Amsterdam-based Vincent van Gogh Museum, where Bedroom in Arles hangs, to recreate a version of the famous painting featuring Elmo, Bert, Ernie and the beloved Sesamstraat Muppets^TM  Ienie Mienie, Tommie, Purk and Pino. The special painting, which was unveiled by Sesamstraat actor Frank Groothof, was on display at the museum in December 2011.

To keep your good ear to the ground and learn more about Sesamstraat and all of our international co-productions, visit Sesame Workshop’s “around the world” page.

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From Sesame Square, the Nigerian version of Sesame Street

Ayobisi Osuntusa is executive director of education, research, and outreach for Sesame Workshop’s Nigerian co-production, Sesame Square, currently funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with additional support from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Since 2008 she has been part of the team helping to teach Nigerian children the basics of literacy and numeracy as well as encourage greater appreciation of Nigeria’s rich cultural heritage. Recently we spoke with Ayobisi to learn more about the unique joys and challenges of working to educate the youth of this diverse African nation.

Sesame Workshop: Tell me a bit about the day-to-day operations in Nigeria. What does being executive director of education, research and outreach entail, specifically?

Ayobisi Osuntusa: We do a million things. Day-to-day, the focus right now is to develop our second set of outreach materials for health, numeracy, and science. We’re also looking for sponsors to advertise and essentially take some of the responsibility for helping us to broadcast nationwide and paying for that. We are looking for ways meet the demand for education reform in the North. Study shows that formal learning in the local languages at an early age can help boost the level of English literacy and understanding. We hope to be able to dub the television episodes (currently in Nigeria’s official language, English) into the local language to assist in this goal.

SW: As you suggest, Northern Nigeria is very different from the South. Tell me more about the cultural diversity of Nigeria and what your team does to ensure Sesame Square’s curriculum is effective no matter which region of the country the child lives in.

AO: Nigerians are all very different, our views, our cultures, so we have to be respectful of what we say and how we say it. Nigeria is divided into six geopolitical zones. We have about 500 languages in Nigeria, if not more.

To celebrate this diversity, we decided to introduce different live action films from all around Nigeria. We have live action films from the North, from the Southeast, from the Southwest. If you see a child dressed up in their traditional clothes, you will know from which part of the country they are from. In these films, children greeted members of their family and community in various languages and motions. This we felt was a great way to introduce the various greetings across Nigeria, so children could be exposed to their country’s rich cultural and linguistic diversity.

Ayobisi Osuntusa, third from the right, with some Nigerian children at a Sesame Workshop event in Nigeria.

AO:  There is a lot of room to improve education in Nigeria. Our program isn’t just about ABCs and 123s. We infuse it with thinking and reasoning skills; health, hygiene, and nutrition; child, family, and social relations; understanding, respect, and diversity; and finally arts and cultural heritage. Nigeria is blessed with a wonderful culture in which the community is concerned about each person and each child. We try to bring that back: respecting your elders, loving your community, and assisting the less fortunate. At the same time, we’re trying to teach the basics that children need to grow and succeed in school.

Another part of our project is about HIV/AIDS. It caused quite a stir, because people thought we were planning to teach small children about sex education. Eventually they realized that we are teaching them about loving everyone around you (reduce the stigma of HIV), that even if someone has HIV, you can love them, share food with them, and most importantly, play with them. We inform the children that their bodies belong to them, and if anyone does anything negative to their bodies, they have a right to say no and inform their parents/guardians.

We talk a bit about malaria; the number of children who die of malaria in Nigeria is large. We teach children to make sure there is no stagnant water in their compound, we encourage them to cover open water containers, and to sleep under a treated mosquito net.

Another interesting thing about the program is we try to promote girls’ education, by encouraging girls to go to school and stay there. Sesame Square features women who have succeeded to become important contributors to the society, like female pilots. We show a live action segment where a little girl goes to the airport and meets a female pilot. We also introduce a woman in the North who is a carpenter. We show and share situations where women have done very well for themselves in what is perceived as a “man’s” profession.

SW: Nigeria is a complex place, not only culturally, but also politically and economically. Tell me about that complexity and what the Sesame Square team does to overcome it.

AO: There seems to be a lot of problems in the Northern part of Nigeria right now with the bombings. It is a bit scary when you hear what’s going on, but like my husband who works in that part of the country, people still go about their day-to-day lives.

Another challenge we have is the fact that TVs are not in every household. We’re trying to find ways to around this. In most communities, you do find people with TVs, and as we’re working within the communities, we are identifying people who could share the use their TVs, whether it’s “come to our house and watch TV once a week,” or donate a television set.

Right now we have a little pilot project in Kano State in the North. We partnered with International Foundation for Education and Self Help (IFESH) and Intel. For this activity three pilot sites have been identified to receive our materials. Intel has donated laptops, and we’ve supplied Season 1 episodes of Sesame Square as well as a set of literacy activities on external hard drives for each laptop. IFESH has supplied reading materials and built a reading corner at the sites, and all three partners are conducting training on how to use their materials most effectively.

We are continuing to look for creative ways and additional platforms including radio to share the Sesame Square learning experience with children who otherwise might have little access to our show or other early education opportunities.

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