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Amy Kay, United States, District 7600
In addition to receiving an honors bachelor's degree in English from
Virginia Tech, Amy also completed a certificate in high elementary Arabic
from the American University in Cairo as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar.
While in Egypt, Amy volunteered with the National Council for Women and was
the president of a local Rotaract club. She has worked with several
organizations that offer educational and mentoring programs to inner-city
children in her hometown of Virginia Beach. Amy also travelled to Honduras
as part of the Hurricane Mitch relief drive, working with children's
shelters and raising funds for local schools even after her return home. Amy
hopes to enhance her academic career to provide a foundation for
international humanitarian work that focuses on women and children's issues. |
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Project summary by Amy Beth Kay
I decided to
create a project that covered two programs over the summer both dealing
with HIV/AIDS in two very different contexts. I first travelled to
Ethiopia and worked with a documentary photographer, Eric Grottsman and
his wife Sara Greene. There I worked with a grassroots organization
‘Hope for Children’ where I joined a small and efficient office staff
doing amazing work in some of the poorest villages in Addis Ababa. Hope
for Children serves over 200 children who have been orphaned due to
their parents dying of AIDS. Although small and under resourced, HFC
has been recognized by the government as a model NGO, recently asked to
service another 200 children in need of basic protections and support as
the HIV/AIDS crisis continues to spread, leaving an orphaned generation
in the country. Ethiopia has the second highest rate of AIDS orphans in
the world, currently estimated at 1.2 million. In addition, 230,000
children are estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS. Eric’s project, put
cameras in the hands of kids who were living with AIDS (as orphans or
infected with HIV) to help them document their own experiences with
HIV/AIDS. This was a unique approach to representing what HIV/AIDS
means. The images produced in the project helped to break the silence
and stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS, by creating a form of communication
that empowered the children to speak for themselves and share their
experiences. Their photographs are part of an exhibit,
“I Was Not a Child When I Was a Child” shown in neighbourhoods in Addis
Ababa and City Hall. I would like to bring these photographs here to
Brisbane as part of an exhibit that would take place during the
first Rotary World Peace Scholar Paul Harris Seminar. In addition I
would also like to set up a MATCHING GRANT for HFC to
promote its programs that support education and protecting the rights of
children who are AIDS orphans.
I used the second half of my semester to work at the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Cairo. I had lived in Cairo
for three years before moving to Brisbane, and had worked for several
NGOs including Egypt’s National Council for Women. This time, I worked
with a new program through the UNDP, the HIV/AIDS Regional Program in
the Arab States (HARPAS). This program covers 18 countries in the
Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region. Unlike Ethiopia and the
surrounding Horn of Africa region, the MENA region is considered a low
prevalence region, with less than 800,000 reported cases of HIV
infection. However, this relatively low infection rate is combined with
high risk factors including a culture of silence and stigma surrounding
the disease. This silence and stigma has fuelled the epidemic resulting
in 20million people now living with HIV/AIDS in the neighbouring
sub-Saharan region. The HARPAS program is thus, geared towards creating
an awareness of HIV/AIDS by ‘breaking the silence’ surrounding HIV/AIDS
that can be so deadly. I worked with the director of the HARPAS program
on media strategy and outreach initiatives. This included project
development for mobilizing religious leadership in the region to help
stem the spread of HIV/AIDS and related stigma and discrimination. I
also worked on gender mainstreaming the program with a focus on reaching
women with culturally sensitive HIV/AIDS education and prevention
methods. |
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Amy
continues to focus on HIV/AIDS during her last semester of research,
concentrating on issues related to representation and human rights. For
her Paul Harris seminar, Amy would like to bring
Gottesman’s exhibit to Australia, that features the photography of the
children in Addis Ababa who participate in Hope for Children programs to
support HFC and its related programs. When finished with her master’s
degree in Peace and Conflict Resolution
at
the University of Queensland, Amy would like to continue work related to
HIV/AIDS.
To
contact Amy Kay regarding bringing the children’s exhibit here to
Brisbane and to support a Matching Grant, write:
amy.kay@gmail.com or writeamykay@yahoo.com |
