I walked over to Hannah Bohrer and asked her about her story. The night before, she had met her subject of the tale Marlen Talledo.
Marlen’s story moved Hannah. When Marlen showed up for the event we had for the community to see the videos we had been working on our last night in Lima, Hannah was excited to see Marlen.
When we were working with Hannah on the story, she was passionate about the content and all that she had learned about Marlen’s story.
One of the hardest things each student struggled with and through was cutting their videos down in time.
There were a few criteria for which we made our decisions. First, the missionaries picked people whose lives were changed by a particular ministry. We did stories on the seminary, a radio station, and the prenatal center.
Marlen Talledo is the director of Centro Prenatal Vida Nueva [english “New Life Prenatal Center”]. If the content didn’t help tell the story of how the Prenatal center changed her life, we cut that out of the story.
The other thing that was driving our stories was the audience. Why should the audience care, and how can they get involved? If the audience was to be at a conference where this video would be shown, we kept them in mind. If the audience were churches in the United States supporting the ABWE missionaries, we would be sure the content would engage them.
One way I helped teach this simple yet fundamental concept of storytelling was to ask people to think of communicating something to the mother or dad. Would how they tell the story change depending on which parent they were talking to at the moment.
Most of the videos were made for the United States churches that support ABWE and for the missionaries to use them with the Peruvian churches that support these ministries.
Hopefully, this gives you enough of the context for which Hannah made this video. Please comment below about what you think of the story.
If you want to learn how to have an experience like Hannah in a storytelling workshop, please consider joining us this June in Romania with Storytellers Abroad.
If you have a group that would like to have us come and teach you storytelling, then write to me so we can create a special workshop for your organization.
