Kalandia Youth MediA

The kids of Kalandia Youth Media went on a daytrip to Ramallah last week.  It would have been impossible to take all of the girls at once; Ramallah is a packed city and the drivers don’t necessarily follow any hard and fast laws on the road.

There were no boys to take with us, since one of them was in Bethlehem visiting family, another was ill, and two others don’t usually show up without the previous two present. I’ve mentioned before the difficulties of working with youth of both genders in Kalandia camp, but there are also the challenges of social groups here. This sums up the problem: if the outgoing “leader” boys aren’t taking part in the day’s activities, the participating boys get shy and closed off. It occurs with the girls, as well, to a lesser extent.

The assignment for the girls was to document daily life in Ramallah. It could include the people and the shops, but their challenge was to capture the energy of the place. This meant capturing the smells, sounds, and feeling of Ramallah through their photographs. They were asked to consider how Ramallah made them feel: claustrophobic, energetic, scared, excited, etc. and to illuminate that in their photographs.

As soon as we put our feet onto the streets of Ramallah, the girls were lost. They were looking around at the shops, looking at the people’s faces, listening to me telling them to get off the street and onto the sidewalk. But they weren’t taking photos. Their cameras hung loosely by the wrist-straps at their sides. So we had a little meeting. I reminded them of the phenomenal work they had done in the past, all of the elements of photography they had learned, and reiterated a photography tip: don’t be afraid of taking photos. We had several “meetings” like this throughout the hot day in the city, and it motivated them to pick up their cameras and start shooting.