“would
you still want to travel to
that
country
if
you could not take a camera with you
– a question of appropriation” – Nayyirah Waheed
In Elizabeth Barret’s 2000 documentary film, Stranger with a Camera, she explores the murder of a filmmaker who sought to capture the War on Poverty in rural Appalachia in the 60s. She questions the role of the storyteller in shaping the narrative of a place. I find myself circling back to this film whenever I reflect on my past stints in the social impact world.
Who gets to tell someone else’s story? What is my responsibility in telling a story as an outsider?
Barret posits the extent to which the camera is a weapon, capable of representation and misrepresentation, and in doing so, has the power of creating or destroying worlds. She asks: What is the difference between how people see their own place and how others represent it? Similarly, as we saw in class last week, the journalist Amy Costello had a key role in crafting the narrative(s) of PlayPump which led to its initial success.
In 2011, I took the year off to volunteer with an NGO in the Western province of Cambodia. The NGO sought to “achieve sustainability and self-sufficiency through wells, irrigation systems, schools, training and empowerment.” In a country still recovering from the reeling 1979 genocide, access to clean water, sanitation, food, and education remains low. Further, widespread corruption stifles the distribution of international aid.
I worked on 2 key projects: i) grant writing, ii) healthcare and sanitation. In the former, I found myself looking for and hoping to tell a certain narrative; that of poverty-stricken Cambodia. I sought pictures to affirm donors’ perceptions (and perhaps, my own perceptions) of a “third-world” nation. Consciously and unconsciously, I was complicit in re-perpetuating the political and cultural domination of Cambodia through the images I had captured. To what extent did my camera serve as a tool to re-colonize the Khmers?
In the latter project, I worked with the health and sanitation department to design and assess the quality of water programs. My biggest takeaway from this project was the importance of co-design in impact work. Whilst the NGO had implemented wells in villages, my conversations with the villagers revealed that the shared wells had become a source of tension in the community. While the NGOs had assumed that the villagers would have no issues with the communal wells, in reality, the families wanted their own individual biosand water filters.
In retrospect, the extent to which I was least-positioned to tackle the issues I had sought to address couldn’t be more jarring. Fresh out of high-school then, I had nothing else to offer besides good intentions; intentions that fell short of redesigning water systems or implementing public health curriculums. Those were some sobering months indeed!
