After the creation of the first map, Green removed the satellite imagery to generate a more abstract, simple version. This was the result:
This version of the map was used as a conversation platform during our focus groups. We asked parents, teachers, and youths from four different schools in Muhuru Bay as well as male and female community leaders and health workers to label the maps with stickers to help us better understand community.
Focus group participants used red stickers to label places where kids get into trouble and green stickers to label safe places for them to spend time. Yellow stickers showed places where youths’ parents spent a lot of time and blue stickers were used to indicate unsupervised areas. A consistent community narrative about Muhuru Bay soon emerged. On almost every map, the same places were labeled in the same way. This helped us understand the locations of sex, drug, and alcohol hot-spots. Most maps ended up looking something like this:
These sticker maps helped us figure out the parts of the community we would focus on exploring in Phase Three of our project. After research participants completed the maps, Eric and I turned on the the projector (powered by a generator we rented for each focus group session), to show participants our satellite image of Muhuru using QGIS. We zoomed in on areas close to the participants’ home compounds and asked the research participants to point out and talk about the different restaurants, hotels, and beach shores they had labeled on their maps (The purpose of this was less about Eric and I learning more about the exact locations of these places and more about encouraging discussion.). Kids in particular enjoyed looking at the satellite imagery and were surprisingly adept at identifying specific locations on the map, despite the fact that most of them have never seen an aerial view of their village.