WMC News & Features

Rising Up in Haiti on International Day of the Girl

Nadia20 Todres

In the Spring of 2010, three months after the catastrophic earthquake that rocked Haiti, the photojournalist Nadia Todres met Mazile. The Haitian girl was 15, had a newborn baby, and lived in a makeshift tent home in a dust-strewn area of Port-au-Prince called Siloe.

Todres, who shoots primarily for nongovernmental organizations and divides her time between New York and Port-Au-Prince, was drawn to the plight of adolescent girls because she saw them everywhere—in the camps; in clinics; lacking access to food, water, and protection from unwanted pregnancy or HIV. It was Mazile who strengthened Todres’s resolve to not only highlight the girl agenda in Haiti but step in to help in the best way she knew how—teaching them photography through the organization she founded specifically for this purpose, The Center for the Arts Port Au Prince.

By 2012, armed with a donation of point-and-shoot cameras, Todres enlisted twenty girls she’d become familiar with, not only to learn photography but also to become skilled in jewelry making and painting. They’re now being taught weekly by Haitian artists and teachers. Todres also recognized, from the start, the importance of teaching the girls English, and she offered this, along with classes in gender-based violence, after recruiting a woman teaching with the International Red Cross. For the last two years, girls from Siloe, which is home to 20,000 displaced persons, have had their artistic sides nurtured, and this journey is documented in a new book called Rising Up: Empowering Adolescent Girls Through the Arts in Haiti, launching this week on International Day of the Girl. (In 2011, the United Nations General Assembly declared October 11 International Day of the Girl Child to recognize girls’ rights and the unique challenges they face around the world.) Through personal expression, in words and images, the empowerment of these young girls is poignantly illustrated. They raise their lenses to the people and things encountered in their daily life, providing an intimate glimpse of their families, friends, and the spirit that exists in this makeshift community that they call home.

Within its pages, seventeen-year-old Jennifer explains what life was like before disaster struck:

“I remember before the earthquake I had a much better life. I was very happy. I always got what I wanted. I was not living in a tent. I remember I didn’t have to fetch water. I had many friends to play with. I remember I was alone in the house January 12th; the house fell on me and I was injured on my head. But even as I was bleeding I was asking where my mother is. I saw her very late that day and she is the one who told me I was bleeding. I remember we had to sleep under the stars and the rain was falling on us. I was constantly praying for God to have mercy on us and I was all the time sad.”

Jennifer’s community is one of the hardest-hit areas of Port-au-Prince. Unlike many Haitian communities that have received a great deal of international support since the earthquake, Siloe seems unlikely to see improvements in infrastructure anytime soon. Its people will likely continue to live without electricity, water, or proper housing for years to come.

Working with girls ages 11-18 at a shelter in this area that is so remote that it “at times, feels as if no one knows that it is there,” Todres explains what her skills offer the girls. “Giving a girl in Haiti a camera is the start of a transformative process that beautifully unfolds, and begins an extraordinary journey. Allowing girls to bear witness to their world around them, and to use skills they have acquired to create, often times, extraordinarily evocative images, gives girls a belief in themselves. They begin to see that not only are they capable of picture taking, but really of so much more, that they never knew they were capable of—and that is the process of empowerment.”

“Girls in Haiti lead a difficult life…. Between home and school, they are not presented with opportunities to talk about themselves, to focus on themselves, to express themselves,” Todres explains. She’s had the opportunity to see them participate in panel discussions and speak out about violence against women and girls in the community. The girls of Siloe have called on their own government, by writing letters to Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, to take notice—to look at the photographs they have taken and pay attention to the plight of girls. They’ve even extended an invitation to Lamothe to attend Saturday’s book launch. The journey then, and the one we see in Rising Up, is of one of a sense of increased independence and growing self-esteem for adolescent girls.

This is, after all, the essence of Day of the Girl. As Haitian women’s rights and health activist Didi Bertrand Farmer writes in the book’s introduction: “Investing in girls is one of the surest ways to promote social and economic development that might be meaningfully termed ‘just’ and ‘sustainable.’” Rising up is assurance that the story of Mazile will be told over and over again so the international community will take action to eliminate violence against, and create opportunities for, women and girls in Haiti.

“To see this alternative vision of power, imagine, as these girls clearly do, a future in which they will know the opposite of fear and insecurity and material privation,” writes Farmer. “Imagine a future … in which their own cultural contributions, current and future, are valued. This is, in the end, ‘the girl agenda’ imbued in the words and images captured in this remarkable book.”

The book is being launched in the US with photo exhibits and the help of World Connect. Follow CFTA on Facebook at facebook.com/centerfortheartspap. To learn more about supporting the work of the CFTA, you can contact Todres at ntodres@gmail.com.


SHARE

[SHARE]

Article.DirectLink

Contributor
Sign up for our Newsletter

Learn more about topics like these by signing up for Women’s Media Center’s newsletter.