Affected Clapping

From Global Venture

I found this article, published in Rwanda’s Sunday Times from Global Venture, via Paul Allison’s excellent blog, New Journalism.

To know Rwanda is to know a country stained with sorrow. Kigali’s city streets may be kept immaculately clean, but no matter how hard the government tries, the horrors of the 1994 Genocide will not be swept away.

Every day, a new story of suffering emerges. Every day, a new crime is confessed to. Every day, an old wound is re-opened, leaving little choice but to face the past all over again.

From all of the grief, though, also come stories of awe-inspiring forgiveness, humble hope, and indestructible faith. There is a strength and a beauty in Rwanda – in its people – that not only persist, but undoubtedly serve as the backbone of a nation trying to pull itself back together again.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the small northern town of Bisate, where a group of elementary school children have come together to capture on film the beauty that surrounds them on a daily basis.

Getting the call

Debbie Roessel is an art teacher at the Riverdale-Kingsbridge Academy in the Bronx, New York. She had been longing to carry out some sort of creative exchange with students in Africa. One day, along with her colleague Marisa Harford, the two participated in a conference call with Laura and Sean Clauson.

The Clauson’s are a brother and sister team that hail from America, but are currently based in Bisate, Rwanda. Laura Clauson is the director of Comprehensive Community Health Initiatives & Programs (CCHIPS), an organization that seeks to upgrade rundown rural health clinics. She had caller her brother, Sean, to come and document her first project in Bisate.

An experienced filmographer, Sean Clauson, was then working on what he calls “a mindless commercial campaign for McDonalds Corp,” when he got the call. “I was at the time eagerly searching for ‘meaningful work’ and so I jumped at this opportunity.”

Together, the siblings set off to realize and document the re-birth of the Bisate Clinic. Their progress can be found on ClinicsRising.com, a website started in 2006 by Peter Raymond “out of the need to tell the stories that often go untold about amazing work in health care worldwide,” he says.

Hatching the plan

In that first conference call, Roessel asked the Clauson’s to describe some of the cultural differences they had noticed in their time in Rwanda. “Two of their answers were totally unexpected,” she says.

“They explained that the concepts of ‘past’, ‘future’, and of ‘art’ are foreign in Bisate, as a person’s immediate need for food, water, travel-by-foot, and getting medical care consumes nearly all their time,” explains Roessel. “As an artist, I cannot imagine living in a world with no creative means for expressing and sharing ideas.”

With that, Roessel had an idea. Why not start a photography project that would not only help children in Bisate express themselves creatively, but also make them focus more on the beauty that surrounds them.

Because the Bisate Clinic had already established a health outreach program at a local school, the logistics of the project were relatively easy to arrange. Roessel found a grant to purchase cameras for the students, then wrote a detailed lesson plan, which her daughter, Lauren Fitzsimmons, carried out along with the Clauson’s and their translator, Elie Sebigoli.

A class of students at Bisate Primary school was selected to participate in the project. Each student was given a camera and some basic training, and told to take twenty-four pictures all of one thing – the one thing they found the most beautiful to them – and write down why they chose their subject.

“We planned collaboratively to create a project that would be intellectually stimulating, engaging, and practical,” says Harford, “and jointly decided on the central theme: ‘What is beautiful to you?’”

“The class was clearly excited and enjoyed spending the three hours learning how to operate the cameras and experimenting with different camera angles and lighting situations,” says Roessel.

At the same time, a group of similar-aged students from the Riverdale-Kingsbridge Academy in the U.S. were also selected as participants in the program and given the same instructions.

The two groups of students would then exchange their photographs in order to expose the other to “lifestyles and ideas that are different from their own,” says Harford.

The photos

Sandrine Mukandekezi is a 15-year-old student at Bisate Primary school. She was also one of the participants in the photography exchange program. For her assignment, she took a picture of a stone.

“The reason is that the stone makes me happy,” she says. “This place reminds me of my father, young sisters and brothers who died. When I think about all of them, I have to go to sit on that stone to watch the beauty of nature and forget my life problems.”

16-year-old Tumukunde Marie Chance chose to photograph her brother. “The reason I chose my brother is because he is the only one I have and he loves me very much.”

For 17-year-old Michael Ihimazwe, the most beautiful thing for him was a football. “To play football helps people of different nations to meet and create relationships,” he says. “I remember when our Bisate school football team won a cup, I went to town for my first time. I was excited.” Interestingly, points out Roessel, a student from the Bronx also chose soccer as their object of beauty.

One student’s photograph of the hill upon which her parents were buried proved especially moving to Sean Clauson. “That really hit me in the heart,” he says, “and powerfully reinforced my faith in this project’s ability to communicate at a very deep and personal level.”

The goal

“I think that it is important to pause every now and then to notice things that give us pleasure and have a special meaning,” says Roessel. “Just the act of seeking out something beautiful directs our minds to focus on the goodness in the world.”

Beyond that, says Clauson, the power of film can play an important role in any nation’s development. “Countries must first cross their cultural divide before they can effectively assist one another,” he suggests. “We must understand before we can effectively help.”

Harford echoes those sentiments, saying, “I think that young people always benefit from being exposed to lifestyles and ideas that are different from their own, and that this exposure is good both for the Rwandan students and our students.”

Students in the Bronx were particularly shocked, says Harford, “to consider kids their age who spent their afternoons working in the fields with their parents or listening to the radio to hear news of the war across the nearby border with the Congo.”

For that reason, this project proved especially enriching to the children in Bisate, since many of them had never even held a camera before, let alone had instruction on how to use one.

The reaction

“The students have loved the project,” says Harford. “Both groups of students took the project very seriously, thought carefully about their subjects, experimented with lighting and angles in their photographs, and wrote insightful and touching accounts of their work.”

Students in both Bisate and the Bronx embraced the project wholeheartedly, devoting much time and energy to capturing the perfect frame, with some even asking for an extension on their given deadlines until the weather became more ideal.

“That the students were so vocal and outgoing and excited about the project was an extremely pleasurable surprise,” says Sean Clauson. “I was especially impressed because the kids so rapidly developed firm ideas about what they wanted to shoot and also how they wanted to shoot it. For kids who had never even held a camera before this was quite an incredible thing to witness.”

What’s next?

When the student’s photographs have all been developed and mounted, they will be put into an exhibition for display in both the Bronx and Bisate, bringing their messages of beauty and intercultural exchange to a wider audience.

In the meantime, Raymond and the Clauson’s will continue in their efforts to work towards and document the revitalization of health clinics throughout the developing world.

Clinics Rising has most recently moved onto documenting a new clinic in Shingiro. “Working with our producers, writers, filmmakers, designers and photographers we can help them tell their story in the way that it needs to be told,” says Raymond.

For now, students and teachers in Bisate and the Bronx alike anxiously await the final product, but no matter what the outcome, the rewards for both have already been realized.

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