By Deborah Ensor
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

March 24, 2003

Photo gallery

These are simple pictures. Innocent. Elegant. A tiny baby sitting on a dirty, tattered, old bed. Two young boys standing in a deserted and dusty soccer field. A child playing dead.

Pictures, they say, are worth a thousand words. But these pictures may be worth even more.

"Sometimes, I saw that my parents were sad," wrote Jose William Claros Conde, a 10-year-old boy from Colombia, who took an eerie photograph of his brother and a friend in an abandoned soccer field. "Because we couldn't go out to play because other kids had been kidnapped and taken by the guerrillas and all that."

Jazmin Gonzalez Pindea, 11, took a picture of her sister playing dead, lying on her stomach.

"Sometimes they rape girls and kill them afterwards and leave them there until they are found," Jazmin wrote about her picture. "That's why I took this photo."

These children live in El Progreso, a barrio outside Bogota. The photos they took are part of a program, "Shooting Cameras for Peace," sponsored by the AJA Project, a nonprofit organization run out of a small apartment in Ocean Beach.

"We think it is so important for kids to have full control on how they are represented to the world," said Shinpei Takeda, 24, the co-founder and president of AJA. "There is a real therapeutic value to documenting what these kids have seen. They've seen their parents' death in front of them; they've seen a lot of conflict. Our programs provide a creative outlet to let go."

PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune Students in San Diego look over photos sent by their counterparts in Columbia. As part of the project, the students are exchanging letters and photographs and will become multimedia pen pals.

The volunteers at AJA – the initials stand for "supporting self-sufficiency" in Spanish – work to provide educational support to young people living in areas of violent conflict and social upheaval. The photos provide children with an outlet to explain their lives, and the rest of the world an opportunity to understand what these young people are experiencing. The project in Colombia was so successful that a 40-piece exhibit is traveling all over the country and was featured on Colombian television.

AJA works with hundreds of young people in a trio of places: There is the project in Colombia, three educational programs in a refugee camp on the Thailand/Myanmar (formerly Burma) border, and a photography project with refugee children in San Diego.

Reaching out

They are bright, young people with prestigious college degrees who take jobs as pedicab drivers or bouncers on the weekends so they can devote themselves full time to making the world a better place.

"AJA is an incarnation of the spirit of our generation," said Warren Ogden, 26, co-founder and executive director of AJA.

Many people in their 20s have life-defining experiences, Ogden said, by studying, living and traveling in the developing world. AJA members get at least 40 calls every week from peers looking for a way to connect or a place to volunteer. The group has five full-time volunteers and about 20 part-timers.

"One of the callings of our generation is to reach out internationally, to do what we can as individuals," Ogden said. "To help those who, by circumstance of birth, live in places without resources, institutions or opportunities that we are so lucky to have here in the U.S., it is almost a responsibility."

The genesis of the AJA project comes from just such a calling. It started when Takeda was a 19-year-old freshman at Duke University in North Carolina. Instead of a traditional internship, he went to a refugee camp on the Thailand/Myanmar border to visit with some of the 100,000 Karen refugees there. The Karen, the most populous ethnic minority in Myanmar, have been living through five decades of war in their country.

"Going there changed my life," Takeda said. "The ethos of AJA lies in my early experiences in the refugee camps."

Takeda dug up a few small grants and continued to visit the camps every summer. He wanted to help the Karen help themselves, to develop self-sustaining projects that improved their lives.

"I really felt responsible for the community I was working in," he said. "Not just to come in and leave, but I wanted to make a permanent contribution."

While Takeda was visiting Thailand, Ogden, his friend and fellow Duke student, was doing similar things. Ogden spent one of his summers in Northern Ireland, "the birth of my interest in ethnic conflict." He then lived in Nicaragua, working for Terra Segura on land-mine issues. He eventually came to San Diego, where he works part time as a cartographer, mapping out potential unexploded ordnance areas.

When Takeda finished school, he joined Ogden in San Diego. The two turned their interest into an official nonprofit in August 2001.

AJA's first project is at a refugee camp in northwestern Thailand, the same place Takeda visited his freshman year.

There, they support a vocational program, which promotes the weaving traditions of the Karen, and they provide basic school supplies to the village schools in the camps.

The key project there – and everywhere AJA works – is the photography project.

"Photos are an incredible tool for learning," Ogden said. "There is a value to encourage children to actively analyze their environment and situation. Their main options in life are often to take up arms. We want to help them develop skills, help them see they have other options."

Photography is especially important to the Karen at these camps, Takeda said.

"This is truly community-based, documentary storytelling," he said. "Their culture and community are going through a big transition. They are stuck in a camp, no access to freedom. In such a phase, the community faces a big identity crisis. This provides a tool to document that."

Takeda continues to visit Thailand twice a year, and Alex Fattal, who developed the Colombia program, travels to El Progreso several times a year. Both programs are run by small, local staffs, with the aid of the Internet and e-mail.

AJA's budget is extremely modest. All three programs ran on about $14,000 last year. The children's photos are sold through the group's Web site, with the money going toward sustaining the program.

Slice of life

AJA works with refugee children at Cajon Valley Middle School in El Cajon with the help of the International Rescue Committee's Student Plus Program. This semester, they also started a program with the Sudanese English Project 6-to-6 Program in City Heights.

Abdi Ali, a 15-year-old from Somalia, is one of about 20 children working with AJA in City Heights.

Abdi said most of his family is in a refugee camp in Kenya. His immediate family was sponsored to come to the United States by an elderly woman in Florida, where he lived before coming to San Diego.

"It's like a second chance in life to come here," he said. "People cope with difficult situations. Though they are very horrible, you get stronger from that."

Abdi said he can't write letters to his family in Africa because the government won't allow them through. So the pictures will be valuable to show what his life has been like in the United States.

"I will save the pictures to share with my family," said Abdi, who has taken portraits of himself dressed in green and hiding behind a eucalyptus tree. The pictures, he said, illustrate how well he has blended into his surroundings in America.

Abdiweli Ali, 15, and his cousin, Badri Abdi, 16, took lots of pictures of their friends and family playing basketball, cooking and horsing around "so people will get to know about our lives," Abdiweli said. "It's important for people just to know about other people, about the world more, about different races and religions."

The photos are valuable to Milano Fatho, a 12-year-old girl from Iraq, especially during this time of war in her native country. Milano attends Cajon Valley Middle School and is able to use the images to share the journey of her life with her new friends.

"It's important so that people learn how it feels to come into a new country without knowing anything," she said.

The photos also help Milano share her new world with her family in Iraq. She left Iraq six years ago, living in Lebanon until her family came here as refugees. Her father's family is in Iraq, and she sent them some of her photos with a relative who went back to visit.

As an offshoot of the project, AJA is connecting some of the students in San Diego with their counterparts in Colombia. They are exchanging letters and photographs, becoming cross-cultural, multimedia pen pals.

"The children have a much more intimate, innocent perspective," Takeda said. "Society tends to victimize, to sensationalize them. But they are regular kids that just happen to be in very horrifying circumstances."

That perspective is apparent in a photo that Jose, the boy from Colombia, took of a young friend running through his back yard. He was trying to illustrate a dream he had.

"I dreamt that a kid was running around looking for peace," Jose wrote about his photo. "Here's the kid's house, and he was looking for peace in another place, because he suffers a lot in this place and needs a new home."