Workshop 1, Monday January 3rd
Last week I began teaching video workshops at a safehouse for teenage sex trafficking survivors in Mitad Del Mundo (about a half hour outside of Quito). When I first proposed the workshops at the end of November, there were 11 girls at the safehouse. When I visited just before Christmas, 4 more girls had recently arrived. When I showed up this past Monday to teach the first class, I was surprised to find 20 girls waiting in the multi-purpose room. Luckily, my friend and fellow Fulbrighter, Shannon, had come with me.
To introduce ourselves to one another, we each decorated (more or less, depending on how well your marker was working) a piece of cloth with our name, something we are good at, and something we want to do this coming year. Then we shared what we wrote with the group. In an homage to the Cordel Project in Inhumas, Brasil, we strung yarn along the barred windows in the room and clothes-pinned the pieces of fabric to the yarn.
Many of the girls wrote that what they want for the new year is to be with their families.
I gave an overview of what we will be doing in the workshops, and the girls and Shannon and I came up with some rules to govern our time together: Respetar todas y tu misma! Colaborar! Participar! Ponga atencion! Then Shannon and I passed out a series of photographs - from National Geographic, Sebastiao Salgado, Henri Cartier Bresson, Dorothea Lange, and others - and asked a question:
What is the story of the moment of this photograph?
After some minutes of thinking and jotting down notes in their journals, each girl shared with the group. Amazing responses, profound. Most of the girls read a story of sadness into their photograph (even with photographs that to me seemed happy), and related images of children to loneliness and images of women to abuse. They created whole stories - beginning, middle, and end - for their photographs; sometimes small stories (a few minutes of time in the life of a character) and sometimes big stories (years or the entire lifetime of a character). One girl looked at a black and white photo of a boy standing in the archway of an ancient ruin with a church in the distant background and imagined that the boy had been walking around, exploring. He came upon the church and chose to walk through its cemetery. His father had recently passed away and he felt connected to his father´s funeral by walking through this strange cemetery. Then he continued walking to the ruin and stood in the archway, feeling very small and alone. Another girl looked at a black and white portrait of a Sicilian woman from the 1920s and imagined that she was abused and sad, trying to figure out what to do. (see notes below)
We hit a major stumbling block with regards to the sharing portion of the exercise. Each girl's presentation to the group was lost in some way. It's a big group that includes two babies, and there are always several things going on. A psychologist comes in every so often to bring a girl in and take another girl out. Babies need to be played with and breast fed, need to be attended to when they are upset. There are a couple side conversations going on, which seems to be an accepted and practiced part of the classroom in Ecuador. There are also some obvious conflicts within the group (inflamed by already-raw emotions) and some very withdrawn personalities. I understand that these complications won't disappear, so the change has to come from my end. I have to figure out a different way for the girls to present their thoughts and ideas to each other in a way that they can benefit from each other.
Workshop 2, Tuesday January 4th
Today I traveled to the workshops on my own.
A sidenote about buses: To get from my apartment in the center of Quito to the safehouse in Mitad Del Mundo, two buses are required. The first bus goes to a giant mall called the Condado Shopping Center. From Condado Shopping Center, I catch a bus going to Mitad Del Mundo (there are many) and, if I can, a particular Mitad Del Mundo bus that says "Kartodromo" on it. The Kartodromo bus drops me 3 blocks from the safehouse, whereas the other Mitad Del Mundo buses drop me 5 blocks + 3 blocks from the safehouse.
The way to tell if the approaching bus is your desired bus is to scramble to read the half-dozen words in the passenger-side front window. For example, Amazonas, CCI, CCNU, Condado, Ofelia, Cotocollao, and Av. la Prensa, might all be in the window of a bus. When I see the word I'm looking for (Condado) I approach the bus and ask the co-pilot if the bus is indeed going where I need to go (Condado). On Monday, Shannon and I followed this procedure. We had each made the trip one time before and were pooling our experience to make a successful joint trip this time. We were on the bus for the first leg for a long time, though, and were starting to suspect that something was wrong. We did not see Condado Shopping Center. Eventually the bus reached the end of its line and we asked the bus driver what was going on. The bus sign said "Condado" but, as it turns out, "Condado" is something different from "Condado Shopping." Bummer. We took a couple more buses (one in the wrong direction) to Condado Shopping Center and from there caught the Mitad Del Mundo bus. We arrived at the workshops a square 45 minutes late.
Today (Tuesday), I caught the Condado Shopping bus (success!), but waited a while for a Kartodromo bus. Eventually I decided to get on a regular Mitad Del Mundo bus and walk the longer distance to my destination. I arrived ten minutes late, not bad. In another stroke of luck, a social worker named Diana was joining the workshop for the day.
Because I had noted conflicts within the group on Monday, we started off Tuesday by reviewing our rules and expectations for our interactions. Then, to photographs! I passed out another group of photographs from a variety of photographers and asked a different question:
How could the moment captured in the photograph be an important moment in the life of one of the people in the photograph?
This time I asked the girls to work in pairs. One minute in silence LOOKING at the photograph. Then three minutes to discuss your thoughts and jot down any notes. One minute to present your thoughts to the group. Amazing responses again. Amazing! But we ran into the same roadblock as in Monday's class with presentations - each pair's presentation didn't reach the group because we couldn't find quiet and focus within the larger group. It didn't matter that there was a team of two people talking to the group instead of one person.
Next we read through a passage from an autobiography called My Name is Noyud Ali, I Am Ten Years Old, and I Am Divorced. The book is about a girl in Yemen who was forced to marry a thirty year old man from another town. After repeated sexual and physical abuse, she got on a bus one day and went to the town courthouse. She demanded a divorce and persisted until she got one.
I passed out a photocopy of one passage to each pair of girls. In this part of the story, it is the morning that Noyud must leave her childhood home with the family of her new husband and drive away to the distant town where she will be living. Diana read the text aloud for us. I asked the girls to discuss the passage in their pairs, and note down in their notebooks thoughts and questions. A lot of the girls ended up working individually; some stayed in their pairs. Eventually, we came together again as a group. Most of the girls seemed very interested in the story. There were a lot of questions about how this could happen, questions about how Noyud's mother and father could allow it to happen. Some hypotheses provided by the girls: The mother was a single mother and didn't love her daughter, wanted to get rid of her; the mother needed money and felt pressured to sell her daughter.
I was hoping to get to questions about descriptions (for example, What images did you see when we were reading the passage? What words do you think created those images in your mind?), but the conversation stayed pointed on content. I would like to come back to this.
Workshop 3, Friday January 7th
Yesterday I called the coordinator at the safehouse and asked for the group to be divided into two groups of ten. I would teach the first ten from 9am to 10:30am, and the second ten from 10:30 to noon.
Warm-up exercise: Instead of photographs, I brought in a bag of characters, locations, and complications - story pieces written on strips of paper. My friend, a filmmaker from Chicago named Erika, came with me today. We divided the girls into four groups of three. Each trio drew two characters, one location, and one complication out of the bags, and were challenged with making a story. One of the groups wasn't interested in the game, but the other three groups wrote great stories; two of them had a beginning, middle, and end. Even though we are in a much smaller group, presentations still didn't go well.
The girls had asked yesterday about the Noyud Ali story so today I brought in another passage from the book. One of the girls volunteered to read it aloud to the group. In this passage, Noyud has arrived at the house of her husband far from the town where she grew up. She meets her mother-in-law and is told about the chores she will learn the next day. She is told that her life as a child is over. Then she is shown her room and lays down to sleep.
After we read through the passage, I asked the girls to work in their groups of three to write what they imagine/want to be the next scene in the story. It was a complicated question, and it took repeated explanation before the girls were able to begin. During this process, one group disappeared from the room. Two groups of three became groups of two. Two of the remaining groups were very interested in the exercise and one was luke-warm. They all wrote fascinating scenes. One group imagined Noyud escaping. One imagined her parents talking about the arranged marriage and realizing they had made a mistake. One imagined Noyud mapping out different possibilities for escape but staying put for the time being.
After this, I asked the groups to design three images that would illustrate what they had written. The rule was that the images had to be filmed within the multi-purpose room, and I tried to emphasize creating meaning with abstract images (such as using an image of the barred windows in the multi-purpose room to communicate the feeling of being stuck, imprisoned). One of the groups wasn't interested in filming images, so they recorded their scene as voice over narration with Erika. The other two groups were excited to film images in addition to recording voice over narration. One group designed some abstract images. The rest of the images were more literal, with one member of the group acting out the voice over. Pretty great. I'll edit them together over the weekend and we'll watch them on Monday.
(audio recordings in Spanish of the girls reading the scenes they wrote)
We finished a little late with the first group - about 10:45 - and the second group of girls was fifteen minutes away, selling quail eggs at a market. I didn't think an hour would be enough time to do the workshop for the second group, so I asked to start with the second group on Monday.
