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American artist Kresta K.C. Venning, M.A. Photography, partnered with Africa Humanitarian Action(AHA) to offer a Photography Workshop in which 5 days training in basic digital Nikon camera skills were offered to 6 male and 4 female refugees ages 19 - 26. This training occurred over two weeks from August 15 - August 29 and took place at the Health Center at Kiziba Refugee Camp in Kibuye, Rwanda. In addition to the classroom, field workshops were held at various sites across several Quartiers and Villages throughout Kiziba Camp, including students' homes, churches, football fields, pastures, community gathering places, potable water collection and/or laundry/washing sites, a secondary school, a grave site, and a hill-top village. The objectives of this visual arts project was three-fold: 1) teach basic camera skills with an emphasis on basic portraiture technique so that students might later, if provided cameras to share from AHA, be able to earn income making refugees' portraits 2) encourage an artistic outlet and 3) encourage young refugees to depict, dignify, and reflect upon their lives as refugees, for both a local refugee audience as well as a foreign, international audience. The training consisted of 4 days of 3 hour workshops for each group of 5 students, supplemented with several hours of optional photography field-trip classes around the camp the first weekend. (These extra hours were optional as several students had unavoidable church or family commitments.) Following the camera technique workshops, students also participated in selecting from 100s of photographs 30 that they deemed exhibition-worthy images. From these 30 photographs, Kresta then chose the final 5 photographs per student that would be exhibited in Kiziba Camp's Youth Hall, August 29. During classroom time, students were also asked 6 questions to guide their written artist's personal statements. These statements accompanied the final 5 photographs and served to give exhibition viewers insight/context into the individual bodies of work, as well as the photography workshop itself. (Kresta selected the final 5 images herself only because the camp lost power for days and the students were not able to select the photographs themselves from Kresta's laptop.)

Prior to this Photography Workshop, 8 of the students had never held a camera or taken a photograph. As many did not have a single childhood photograph of themselves. Thus, this workshop was full of firsts. First time touching a camera, first time taking a picture, first time making a portrait of their mother, brother, sister, cousin, friend, local shop owner. Implications of this basic camera training are that students thoroughly enjoyed the training, were challenged and inspired to be creative artistically, felt encouraged to develop a technical and artistic eye, and hope to receive cameras to share from AHA. Along with cameras, a laptop is required, otherwise students cannot edit (using photoshop or a similar editing software program). Needless to say, there was no time to teach basic photo-editing skills during this photography workshop. That would be the next phase, if AHA is to develop this training. As for the final 50 photographs included in the exhibition, Kresta edited each one for color saturation and contrast/brightness. Such editing is standard practice and must be taught to the photography students if they are to make photographs that are in fact "sellable" as AHA has mentioned it envisions. This Photography Workshop was unprecedented, as was the culminating photography exhibition that was attended by 100 friends, family members, AHA staff, and one UNHCR representative.

In this exhibition we learn about food distribution--rations of maize(cornmeal), common beans, and cooking oil delivered in massive World Food Programme lorries and packaged in thick neutral or white sacks or plastic jugs--and food, goat's meat, processed after a bloody slaughter, the meat man slashing the goat's flesh with a dull knife in a tiny unventilated mud room. We appreciate a trinity of ripe avocados as abstract art, witness a bride and groom 'I do'. We observe students seated eagerly on long classroom benches the first day back at school, or wide-eyed babies swaddled to their sisters' small backs. We realize that places of hard work might also double as places of play: the cement laundry slab where children both wash clothes and pretend to be gymnasts toddling on thin, soapy balance beams. We are reminded that when we live in a mud home, we must frequently repair it with more mud, slabbing the wet earth to the home's side, an act of necessity and humility. If these 50 photographs say anything, they say we live in tiny homes with few possessions--a radio, mosquito net, knife, bowl, bed--and we take care of what we own. We make meager meals from wood that we chop, water that we carry, in round smoky huts with singed walls and sloping floors. In other words, we labor to live. This exhibit offers impossible contradictions--how can you smile with something so heavy on your head? To what do you look forward to when you cannot see where you have been? Case in point, you can be 26 and not have ever taken an art class, held a paint brush or touched a camera. You can be 19 and have spent the last 15 years living at a refugee camp, a recognized citizen of neither your native nor your host country. And you might one day have children who can claim the same. So, this exhibition might also smolder of despair. Despair for what these students, these Congolese refugees depicted in their photographs, inhabitants of a hill-side no man's land, may not also experience in the future, that they may remain in isolation on the camp, with little artistic or intellectual development. With even less true freedom to live in freedom, if by freedom we mean having the choice to live where we want to live, and live how we want to live. This exhibition may speak more about what isn't than about what is.

Photography Exhibition
Kiziba Refugee Camp
August 29, 2011
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.

Monday morning we spent 4 1/2 hours trying to affix 50 photographs to the Youth Hall's walls using 3 types of medical-issue bandage tape. We also had two pairs of dull scissors, 3 students, and 1 UNCHR employee to help. Two other students rearranged the long, heavy wooden benches to create aisles allowing exhibition attendees to traverse the huge space. Outside it was grey with intermittent showers. Inside, we were still without power. All day the exhibition hall oscillated between dark and very dark. At the exhibition's peak, the hall was so dark, even with curtains fully opened, one could barely see the photographs. There was 15 minutes, though, when there was enough light to appreciate the photographs on display, so I remain thankful. As for the tape, it held and it didn't. I spent a lot of time walking around the room either straightening or re-affixing the photographs to the pocked, dusty walls.

I have recently learned a helpful acronym: TIA--'This Is Africa'. Indeed it was on Monday, but no one seemed to mind the falling photographs as nearly 100 people attended Kiziba Refugee Camp's first-ever art/photography exhibition. If I am honest though, many people spent more time sitting in the center benches than actually looking at the photographs. But, I suppose, that does not matter either.

What matters most is that we had a very organized exhibition, complete with brief speeches from Kiziba Camp's head doctor for Africa Humanitarian Action(AHA) as well as a representative from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees(UNHCR). As I met students' relatives (yes, Gafishi Daniel's mother made it, as did Shabizi Olivier's older brother, Nzeyimana Christian's younger brother and Carine Asha's father), I was deeply appreciative that the camp was experiencing its first visual art exhibition, and that I was there to witness such an extraordinary community event. The students themselves told me how proud they were to have their photographs on display for such a large audience.

Below are several photographs taken at the event. As you would guess, I've had to lighten them considerably, otherwise, they'd be too dark. As for using flash, it's difficult enough to take pictures in a culture that is sensitive, rightfully so, to having its picture taken--flash would be even more off-putting. As for the 'gallery space' itself, what a perfect place, the wall condition matching the wall condition(s) in some of the photographs. During the actual event, several refugees remarked that this was a wonderful experience for everyone, that they were proud to see their own lives depicted by other refugees. These comments, I confess, confirmed what I'd already observed that afternoon in the storm-lit exhibition hall: encouraging art here at the camp was a necessity, and if AHA and UNHCR want to add to their assistance to the refugees here, they will add 'Art' to the already packed program. I'm sure they will do their best.

AHA, UNHCR, American Refugee Committee (ARC), and The Jesuit Committee(I will verify their true name soon) work in concert to feed, shelter, train in small crop gardening, educate to 4th form, provide potable water and basic health care to the refugees here. This is a phenomenal operation where peace is fragile and crisis possible. That these 4 organizations allowed 10 young adult refugees loose with cameras to capture their own lives is a testament to a shared belief that the refugees themselves have something to say about their own living conditions.

Though many might wonder what place the visual arts have here at the camp, on Monday, we saw the wonders of a Youth Hall transformed into an art gallery. So, there is already a place for the visual arts at Kiziba Refugee Camp. All that's needed here is the encouragement and cultivation of the artists.

We know that the photographs in our own family albums help us hold onto people, places, and events that shaped our lives. These photographs validate our existence within a small family and a larger humanity. These photographs help us form our own identity. Eight of my students do not have a single childhood photograph. They certainly have no family album to refer to in order to help reflect on the significant moments of their lives. Bringing photography to the refugees here at Kiziba Refugee Camp may not only help validate their lives, it may also help dignify it, and uplift it. It may help them celebrate their births, marriages, graduations from 4th form, football matches, their mothers, brothers, boyfriends--all the little and large life-events and people that make life worth living--not just surviving.

Kiziba Refugee Camp
Kibuye, Rwanda
August 18, 2011

For Africa Humanitarian Action(AHA)
All rights reserved
www.krestakingphotography.com

After the World Food Programme (WFP) delivers the monthly food rations, the heavy sacks of cornmeal and plastic containers of cooking oil must be carried to family homes from the food distribution site in the center of the refugee camp. There are many ways the food will be transported. By wooden bicycle is one way. Here you see children loading a rickety wooden bicycle with heavy sacks of cornmeal(maize). The children use chunky rubber bands to affix the piled sacks to the central wooden plank.

This is only one example of the intense manual labor demanded of daily life on a refugee camp.

Kiziba Refugee Camp
Kibuye, Rwanda
August 15, 2011

For Africa Humanitarian Action(AHA)
All rights reserved
www.krestakingphotography.com

Kiziba Refugee Camp
Kibuye, Rwanda
August 15, 2011

For Africa Humanitarian Action(AHA)
All rights reserved
www.krestakingphotography.com