Love
After Loss
BY ELENA RUE (LEWIS HINE FELLOW, 2005–2006)
INTRODUCTION BY ELENA RUE
During the last quarter century AIDS has killed more than 25 million
people. Despite the substantial funds that are spent every year
in research, prevention, treatment, and relief programs there are
still 40 million people living with the virus. Given this grim picture,
it is hard to see the positive things that are happening around
the world in response to HIV.
In 2006, I spent nine months in Ethiopia as a Lewis Hine Documentary
Fellow working with a non-governmental organization called Hope
for Children (HFC) based in Addis Ababa. Started six years ago by
an Ethiopian woman in response to the rapidly growing number of
children orphaned by HIV/AIDS, HFC gives support to over 600 children.
Each child is provided with clothes, education, medical attention,
and has the opportunity to participate in several clubs, groups,
performances, and events. This enables children to relax in a supportive,
stigma-free environment, and move beyond the problems they faced
before coming to live in the group homes provided by HFC. For children
who still have family, friends, or neighbors to live with, HFC sponsorship
allows them to stay in their own community.
“The love within the
group homes does not exist anywhere else in the world.”—Yewoinshet
Masresha, Hope for Children’s founder and director
Hope for Children’s seven group homes are the size of a traditional
Ethiopian family (six to eight children) and are headed by a group
home mother. Once the children are brought together and given everything
they need, HFC steps back to allow them to become a family. It was
remarkable to watch the children form bonds and help each other
adjust to their new and different lives. Their care, love, and support
for each other serves as therapy like none other. The group home
mother is another element that makes these homes unique. When a
woman agrees to be a group home mother, she takes on a lifestyle,
not a job. She offers her entire life to these children and begins
to love and care for them as her own.
I spent time in each of Hope for Children’s group homes during
my nine months in Ethiopia. When I first arrived, I was prepared
to witness each child suffering from deep sadness and trauma, but
while grief is part of these children’s experience, the homes
are also filled with their energy and life. With this collection
of photographs I hope to provide a sense of the family life within
the group homes, and to give a face to the statistics flooding the
media about HIV/AIDS orphans. When I focus on numbers, the difficulty
of addressing the AIDS crisis seems overwhelming and disheartening,
but learning the stories of these children helped restore my faith
in the steps that are being taken to improve the lives of people
harmed by HIV/AIDS. These images shed a positive, yet realistic,
light on HIV-affected communities and their children. With the help
of Hope for Children, these children have futures that are full
of potential.
I went to Ethiopia with the idea of giving something to children
in need, but I found that I was often the one receiving inspiration
and strength from them. I hope to pass some of that along.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELENA RUE
INTRODUCTION
BY ELENA RUE TO POSTER SERIES
How to discuss problems of
HIV/AIDS in a town where few admit the disease exists, and even
fewer are willing to talk about it? How to get adult members of
a community to see past themselves in order to notice the children
who are suffering the effects of their mistakes?
These are questions that I asked myself as I began to work in Babile,
a small town in eastern Ethiopia. Babile has a large military presence,
and its location between two major cities, Harar and Jijiga, makes
it susceptible to heavy truck traffic. These factors, which compound
the existing risks, have contributed to the town’s large and
growing HIV/AIDS infection rate.
As a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow, I was in Babile with Hope
for Children, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that supports
children who have been orphaned or severely impacted by HIV in Ethiopia.
Hope
for Children (HFC), which has had a tremendous impact in Addis
Ababa since its founding in 2000, recently began working in Babile,
and is only the second NGO to be allowed to operate within the wary
community. As a result of HFC’s work in Babile, dozens of
children are off the streets, attending school, and living healthy
lives. Through a simple sponsorship program HFC provides a child
with a set amount of money each month. This funding allows children
to stay with their remaining family members and covers the costs
of food, education, and clothes.
Even though the children in this program have been freed from worrying
about their basic needs, the hardships they encounter are fresh
and alive in the community. The despair and poverty caused by the
HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to affect children at a growing rate.
But unlike many Babile adults, who face complex, sometimes confusing
sexual issues, these children often have a clear understanding of
the problems surrounding HIV and what needs to be done to address
them.
When I spoke with some of Hope for Children’s beneficiaries
about working together on a documentary project, they unanimously
decided that making posters would be the best way to get their messages
across. Posters and billboards are used throughout Ethiopia as means
of communication, and in rural areas, where education rates are
low, using images on posters is particularly appropriate.
Over the course of a few months, I worked with Babile youth to create
photographs and messages that focused on drawing attention to the
HIV-related problems they faced in their communities. The process
began with the children sharing their experiences. During these
discussions we came to see that the difficulties they faced were
as similar as their tactics for survival. We decided to re-enact
the desperate circumstances that many of them had gone through,
selecting five situations that everyone agreed were common and problematic:
starvation, loss of the family unit, stigma, lack of shelter, and
denial of education. The tendency of many people in Babile is to
ignore these issues by pretending they’re not happening in
their communities. To address this, we decided to photograph the
re-enactments in common public areas, and we composed the messages
in both Oromifa and Amharic in order to reach all members of the
community. As one boy put it, “Maybe people in the town will
finally see where we have come from.
In one day we put up hundreds of posters—in hotels, restaurants,
barbershops, pharmacies, small shops, homes, offices; on windows,
gates, and walls. As we anticipated, the wide distribution attracted
a great deal of attention, which worked in our favor. As we rushed
around, we overheard discussions sparked by the images as well as
recognition of the situations represented on the posters. The children
took these opportunities to explain in more detail the situations
they had lived through. There has always been poverty in Babile,
but the children were careful to talk about HIV/AIDS and the ways
in which the virus had played a significant role in the hardships
they had experienced.
A few days after we hung the posters we discovered that several
of them had been taken down. As it turned out, many members of the
community had taken them to display in their own homes. To encourage
this, we replaced the stolen posters and made copies available to
anyone who wanted them in their homes or establishments.
Although this project was one small step in the fight against the
spread of HIV in Babile, my hope is that the people in the community
learned from the children’s experiences, and that the children
will continue to engage and challenge their friends and neighbors
about these problems.
