By Suzy Young
Special to The
Rotarian
25 March 2005
Tenanesh Kifyalew's first name means "health" in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia, but she was far from healthy. She died of AIDS at age 12 after her parents succumbed to the disease 10 years earlier. She was raised by her grandmother, attended school until she was too weak to do so, and dreamed of going to heaven.
Although Kifyalew died last year, her story lives on thanks to a photographer, a fine arts student, several Rotarians, and two Rotary World Peace Fellows. Kifyalew and other children were photographed as part of a project to raise awareness about Ethiopian children whose parents died of AIDS. The gritty black-and-white photos were displayed last year at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, during World AIDS Day, 1 December. The images mostly show Kifyalew at home with her friends and family, many of whom had their faces obscured because of the stigma associated with the disease.
The web of interaction that joined the two Rotary World Peace Fellows and the
other people behind the
World AIDS Day event began in August 1999 when Boston
photographer Eric Gottesman traveled to Ethiopia to help document the worsening
drought in the southern part of the country. Gottesman quickly realized that
although the world was reacting with concern to the deaths of hundreds of people
a year from the drought, just as many were quietly dying from AIDS in the same
country.
According to Gottesman, the reason for the silence surrounding HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia is that its religiously influenced society views people who have the sexually transmitted disease as promiscuous. Gottesman wanted to open discussion by documenting the lives of AIDS orphans using a technique called collaborative photography, in which images are produced with the active participation of the subject. The method encourages close examination of the subject and aims to deepen the experience for photographer, subject, and viewer.
At first, the agencies Gottesman approached about the project were skeptical. But eventually he was introduced to a small group of children who had lost their parents to AIDS and was allowed to explain his idea to them.
"They just stared at me," he remembers. "But after a few days they asked for me to come back and they said they would do it to help other children like themselves. So that was my goal."
Once Gottesman started working with the children, he found their natural curiosity overwhelmed any apprehensions they might have had. They took to the project enthusiastically, and as they worked together, the children began to talk openly with him about their lives and their feelings about losing their parents.
As part of the collaborative process, Gottesman gave his young subjects the option of taking pictures or being photographed by him. The children also chose the subject matter, and the entire project was shot using a Polaroid camera, so that each child would be able to see his or her photos and decide whether to keep or destroy them. According to Gottesman, this aspect of the process was important because it empowered children whose lives had been ruled by forces beyond their control.
The culmination of the process was a photo exhibition at the Addis Ababa city hall. The photos were then taken all over Ethiopia and later used as an exhibit at the United Nations Special Assembly on HIV/AIDS in New York.
"I felt that I had been able to do what the children asked me to do, which was to raise advocacy for their situation and make people aware of their plight," says Gottesman. The success of the first project led him to start another project with a larger group of children, including Kifyalew. Despite her illness, Kifyalew threw her remaining strength into the project, speaking to thousands of people at public meetings around Ethiopia and eventually becoming a UNESCO Ambassador on behalf of AIDS-affected children. "Tenanesh somehow kept going, and her strength amazed me," says Gottesman.
From Ethiopia to Brisbane
Amy Kay and Carolyn Fanelli, who have completed studies at the Rotary Center for International Studies in peace and conflict resolution at the University of Queensland, were far from the dusty streets of Addis Ababa when Gottesman and Kifyalew began working together. But Kay, who had been working with the UN Development Programme in the Arab States as part of the summer fieldwork required of all Rotary World Peace Fellows, was looking for another field project in the area of HIV/AIDS education. Fanelli, who has worked as an advocate for refugees and asylum-seekers and has educated young people about global issues, passed on some contacts that eventually led Kay to Addis Ababa. There, Kay worked on community HIV/AIDS education with Hope for Children, a nonprofit that assists disabled, orphaned, poor, and exploited children, particularly those living in developing countries. She also got her first glimpse of Gottesman's work.
"I first saw Eric's photos hanging on a line where they were drying after processing," Kay recalls. "They hit me in the heart. I could see that these images had more power than photographs I had seen before to represent what HIV/AIDS meant."
Kay saw that art could play a valuable role in humanitarian work. She believed that international aid needed to take the views and feelings of the recipients into account and that overexposure to the fear, pain, and suffering of others, or "compassion fatigue," was becoming an obstacle to public awareness.
"Statistics are often used for words we don't have to describe such overwhelming loss of life. Perhaps they give us a sense of control in some way," Kay says. The downside, she says, is that statistics don't show the dignity and complexity of the life of the person with HIV/AIDS.
"This project was an attempt to tell one story from a different perspective that allows people to stop, to be surprised, and to feel something more than overwhelmed, hopeless, or distant," she says. "It connects people emotionally and thus politically."
When she returned to Australia, Kay set out to turn Gottesman's collection of Polaroid negatives into an arresting, evocative display that would do justice to the message. Fanelli was intrigued by the possibility of developing educational materials in conjunction with the issues raised by Kay's project, and she also had some experience working with displays and presentation. She approached Ralph Hammond, past governor of RI District 7910 and a member of the Rotary club in her hometown of Bedford, Mass., USA, for help.
"His response was wonderful," Fanelli recalls. "I got an e-mail back right away saying, 'Whatever I can do to help, I'll do it.' I was so amazed I stood up in the office and told everybody about it."
Hammond followed through on his offer, putting Gottesman in touch with John Lorusso, a Bedford Rotarian and president and CEO of Parrot Digigraphics, which produces high-resolution photography for art galleries, museums, and others. Lorusso worked closely with Gottesman for two weeks, scanning, retouching, and turning the 25 distressed negatives into finished pieces. "When you look at the images of these people, they're just so helpless," Lorusso says. "I knew that the word just had to get out to our Rotary community."
Back in Australia, Kay and Fanelli located a venue and recruited Sven Knutson, a University of Queensland student working on a double degree in fine arts and business and planning a career in gallery management, to take on the role of curator. The experience confirmed Knutson's belief that art can play a powerful role in illustrating issues of social justice, and he has since taken over the role of collating the work and information into a folio and setting up a traveling schedule for the show. Already it has served as a talking point at a conference on human rights at Brisbane's Griffith University and is being considered for an arts festival for children in Brisbane.
"It wasn't meant to be a story of sadness — more a testament to Tenanesh's strength," Knutson says.
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Suzy Young is a freelance writer based in Queensland. This article originally appeared in the April 2005 issue of The Rotarian.