Give a 10-year-old refugee a semester of photography lessons and his own $50 point-and-shoot camera. This is what happens:
He will have his friends reenact the night they fled their village in terror, pulling on clothes and tearing through the jungle. Or he will take pictures of his sister lying facedown in a field, pretending to be one of the little girls they've seen raped and killed in the area just outside their new home. Or he will photograph a group of boys petting a horse and write below it: "These are my cousins; they recycle."
And he will turn a sunny afternoon trip to the National Geographic building very solemn for an American museum-goer, who, instead of seeing photographs of coral and jungles and exploding volcanoes, finds herself staring at a bleaker picture of the world.
Through an international nonprofit photography program he founded, Shin Takeda has been handing out cameras and developing these photographs for more than two years. He and other instructors from the AjA Project (an acronym for a Spanish phrase meaning "supporting self-sufficiency") have worked with almost 300 displaced children from Burma, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Colombia and the Sudan, teaching them to be a "protagonist rather than a victim" by documenting their lives.
In the meantime, he put together more than 70 photos with narration in the young photographers' own handwriting for a traveling exhibit called "Lives in Transition: Expressions of Refugee Youth." It will be in Washington through the first week of August.
So into the lobby of the National Geographic Society headquarters, which is the center of the full-color, high-gloss National Geographic universe, came Saw Moo Doh Wah (pronounced "so moo doe wah"), 10, and the black-and-white story of his life on the run.
He tells it in his own words underneath four poster-size photos. There is "Old Home" -- a village by the Pway Law Klo River in Burma; "Why I left" -- because the State Peace and Development Council dropped a "big bullet" on his house; "How I left" -- tearing through the jungle alongside 120,000 other fleeing members of the Karen ethnic group; and "New Community" -- Section 6 of a refugee camp in Thailand. Living in the Burmese mountains before his family was forced to flee "was so fun," he says in a video made for the exhibit, "if I think about the past I almost cry."
 Saw Moo Doh Wah, 10, staged this photo of life in a refugee camp after being forced from Burma. (Courtesy of the AJA Project) |
The United Nations says there are almost 20 million refugees and dislocated people with similar stories living around the world.
There's Wilson David Rodriguez, 10, from Colombia, for example, who photographed a pigtailed girl wailing, her back against the wall, her arms reaching out toward the camera. Next to her, painted on a wall, is a snowman in a top hat swinging a candy cane walking stick to his side. Or Saw Chit Khin, 14, who took a picture of a boy and a girl making funny faces on a swing to go alongside his story of flight from the Burmese State Peace and Development Council.
There is also Nargiz Alizadeh, 13, who moved to San Francisco after years spent evading the Taliban in Afghanistan, where she says she was not allowed to go to school, let alone study photography. She goes to an English-speaking school now with lots of Afghani friends "who have the same stories about leaving that I have."
Nargiz learned to use a camera in San Diego, one of three sites for Takeda's nonprofit project. The others are in Thailand and Colombia. She spoke to a weeping and empathetic crowd of 400 at the opening of the exhibit on World Refugee Day last month. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie was there, too. They exchanged e-mail addresses, Nargiz says, and promised to keep in touch.
In Afghanistan, she slept in a room with five or six other people. In America, she has her own room, where she takes most of her pictures now. It was difficult getting used to the camera at first, especially since she had never seen one before moving to California. But "now I'm good at it," she says, surrounded by giant posterboard reproductions of National Geographic photography. "I take pictures of anything."
Lives in Transition: Expressions of Refugee Youth is at the National Geographic building, 17th and M streets NW. It is open Monday-Saturday 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., through Aug. 6. Call 202-265-6280.