Follow Your Passions

A presentation for LFHS and LBMS by Kaitlin Rogers

Hi, my name is Kaitlin Rogers. I graduated from LFHS is 2006 and Duke University last May. I am a photographer, and I am here to talk a bit about my experiences working in Tanzania and how my passions have lead me to a career in service.

I want to briefly reference a timeline, only to put everything in perspective and to point out that it really was not that long ago that I was in your shoes.

I graduated high school five years ago and took my first trip to Arusha, Tanzania three years ago, the summer after my sophomore year of college, to work with a program called Literacy Through Photography (LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY), which I will elaborate on shortly. I returned to Arusha the following summer to continue developing the LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY program there, and just last summer I made my third trip to work both with LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY and a Tanzanian-based nonprofit called The Foundation For Tomorrow.

Before I give you a background about what Literacy Through Photography and The Foundation For Tomorrow are and how I have been involved with these programs, I want to touch upon passion, because that is ultimately what this presentation is about.

There are three passions that continually inspire me: children, education, and photography. It seems that any project that involves one of these three passions sparks my interest, and any project that involves two of these passions inevitably garners my attention and enthusiasm; and, a project that unites all three of these passions powerfully captures my whole heart.

Literacy Through Photography is a teaching methodology that introduces photography into elementary school classrooms as an educational tool. LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY helps kids learn creatively and invites students to think about and make sense of curriculum material in a new way.

So, you can see that kids, photography, and education are all at play.

Wendy Ewald, a photographer and educator, first developed Literacy Through Photography in the late 1970s and early 1980s while working on a photography project in Kentucky in which she encouraged kids to use the camera as a tool for self expression. She found that the process of planning for and making photographs and then ultimately writing about the images greatly improved the kids writing. In 1989 Wendy partnered with Duke University and Durham public schools to implement her teaching methodology in the local elementary school classrooms.

In 2004 a series of events lead an Art Teacher from Arusha, Tanzania, Pelle Shaibu, to attend an LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY workshop in North Carolina. Pelle quickly identified that LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY’s teaching style would greatly benefit the Tanzanian students. This propelled Wendy and her LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY teaching partner Katie Hyde to launch Literacy Through Photography in Arusha.

Before I go further, I would like to briefly explain the path that led me to Literacy Through Photography and this project.

I found myself terribly unhappy during my freshman year of college at a school that was 100% wrong for me. As I assessed my situation, it became clear that I needed to take action and make a change. I decided to apply to transfer. Therefore, I was back scouring through college websites. During my search through Duke’s website I stumbled upon the course description of a class called Literacy Through Photography. I literally froze reading its description because I could not imagine a more perfect blend of my passions.

At Duke the following year I took Katie Hyde’s Literacy Through Photography class. During that class I learned about the Literacy Through Photography program in Tanzania that Katie was starting, and I jumped at the chance to join the first group of students traveling to Tanzania to develop this program during the summer of 2008.

My first trip to Arusha was five weeks. And I found the entire experience to be eye-opening, fulfilling, stimulating, and challenging. We worked in a variety of different schools: government and private, primary and secondary. Also, because our goal is to create a sustainable program, we emphasized teacher training and then split into groups to work with the teachers on Literacy Through Photography projects in their classrooms.

In public schools in Tanzania it is not uncommon for a teacher to instruct a class of over 100 students without resources such as simple visual aids. In addition to the lack of resources, the Tanzanian school system also completely lacks creativity. The students learn entirely by rote memorization. They can regurgitate encyclopedias worth of information, but most of the time they don’t actually understand anything. They don’t learn to think critically, to ask questions, or to form their own ideas. They learn to repeat factual information EXACTLY as it is presented in the textbook.

LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY offers a wonderful diversion from this way of teaching. Students first learn to closely study the details in photographs and to draw conclusions about the image based on what they see. The children then set out to take their own pictures, and each student becomes a director as he or she carefully composes the image just so. The strength of LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY is that it is not it’s own subject but instead fits within any curriculum. LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY asks the students to take a topic they’re already studying and to conceptualize it visually in an image. This takes creative and abstract thinking and is a wonderful way to synthesize a lecture.

We have lead many successful LITERACY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY projects in math, science, history, health, English, and Swahili classes.

For example: how can you depict the function and processes of the skeletal system in a series of images?

How can you visually represent new vocabulary words so that the images become flash cards?

Not only is this creative way of teaching engaging and memorable, after each project, the teacher has a new set of beautiful visual aids to hang in their otherwise bare classroom.

So, this is how we spend our days in Arusha: leading teacher training workshops, teaching in classrooms, running after school programs, planning for the next day, and soaking in life in Arusha.

Over the past three summers, I have seen Literacy Through Photography succeed in Tanzania in a different way than it does in the U.S. Here in the States, one Literacy Through Photography’s biggest strengths is that the projects excite the students and get them more interested and motivated to learn.

In Tanzania, enthusiasm for learning is no issue. In fact, saying that the kids are enthusiastic about learning and school would be an understatement. The kids in Tanzania have this amazing head-over-heals desire to learn anything and everything. These kids are so thirsty for education that they hang on your every word. It is culturally engrained from a very young age that education is the key to success and that attending school is a privilege.

During my first and second summer in Arusha, I taught an afterschool writing class. I worked with the same group of students both years, so they were sixth graders the first year and seventh graders the second year. We met every day to work on writing and eventually put together a class newspaper. Even though it was after school, the kids sat at their desks, remained quiet, and after a brief lesson, spent the remainder of the time writing. During this time EVERY SINGLE DAY kids who were not in the class would climb up on the windows to look in and see what was going on. Even during after school hours the kids are eager to work hard and to learn!

And it truly is a huge privilege. 46 million African children have never stepped foot in a classroom.

The Foundation For Tomorrow (TFFT), which I will discuss next, strives to make quality education accessible to all Tanzanian children.

There are X orphaned and abandoned children in Tanzania. The orphanages in Tanzania do not have the resources or capacity to support school-aged children, so when most of you were hoping on the big yellow school bus for the first time, orphans in Tanzania “age out” of the orphanages and are left homeless. This devastating reality is what motivated Meghann Gunderman to create TFFT in 2007 when she was only 23 years old.

TFFT grew out of Meghann’s trip to Arusha the summer after her sophomore year. She volunteered in an orphanage while doing research for her dissertation, and she fell in love with triplets, X, X, X, who were about to age out of the orphanage. She could not stand the thought of what would happen to these kids and how grim their futures were. She ended up sending an email to family and friends and was able to raise enough money to pay for X, X, and X to attend boarding school. And so, these were the first unofficial scholarship children before TFFT even existed. These triplets are now 10 years old, and having played with them myself last summer, I can assure you they are thriving in every way at Usa River Academy with TFFT’s support.

TFFT’s scholarship program for orphaned and abandoned children has grown to include 76 children. The scholarship program is TFFT’s core program, and once part of the scholarship program, the kids are promised boarding school education through their high school graduation. In addition to funding their education, TFFT provides each child with a foster family, medical care, other essentials such as shoes and clothes, and the support of TFFT’s staff who work with the TFFT kids afterschool daily.

I discovered The Foundation For Tomorrow because of a bike ride they were hosting as a fundraiser and to raise awareness. This ride was called RIDETZ, and it was 400 miles, beginning at Mt. Kilimanjaro and stretching to the Indian Ocean. It was the first bike ride of its kind in Tanzania… ever, and TFFT needed a photographer for the ride. That photographer was ME! I initially leapt at the chance to document the ride because it seemed like a phenomenal photographic opportunity. For 10 days 20 American riders and the TFFT RIDETZ team traveled through rural and remote Tanzania on an old slave trade route. It was dirty, hot, exhausting, strenuous, and not at all glamorous, but it was a phenomenal photographic opportunity.

It was also the single greatest experience of my life so far.

Just to clear things up, I was not riding a bike. Surprisingly, that is everyone’s first question when I share this story! I traveled by safari car and documented the experience with my camera. This gave me the opportunity to experience the ride from a different perspective. I spent my days shooting from the window, asking the driver to pull over a million times so I could jump out, and hanging out in tiny remote villages talking (and pantomiming) to villagers while I waited for the riders to come through. My previous experience in Tanzania, my broken Swahili, and my familiarity with Tanzanian culture made it much easier to communicate with village people. Although for the most part they were just dumbfounded at this ghostly girl, jumping around with a camera, acting like a crazy person J I was able to see parts of the country very different from where I had previously spent time. Most of the ride was so remote that the villagers had never even seen a white person before!

The ride was incredible, unlike anything I could have imagined, but what was equally as moving were the weeks before and after the ride when I photographed TFFT’s partner orphanages and schools. During this time I saw the incredible work that TFFT does and the enormous impact the organization has on the lives of hundreds of children in addition to their 76 scholarship children. What struck me was the tremendous courage and compassion the individuals behind TFFT must have to confront this enormous issue and truly make a difference. It was so clear that TFFT truly places the children at its core, holds them in their hearts, and thoughtfully makes every decision with only the kids’ best interest in mind by way of educating, caring, and providing for orphans who would otherwise have nothing.

My heart has since quickened its beat with inspiration and gratitude. I found myself with seventeen thousand photographs and a strong desire to share the images and their story with a broad audience. This motivated me to compile a selection of the images into a coffee table book, which I hope introduces readers to Tanzania’s beauty, focuses awareness on a devastating social issue, and connects the readers with the means to become part of the solution, by making them aware of TFFT’s mission.

I really cannot describe just how transformative this experience was. I am passionate about photography. I have known that since I took Mrs. Zare’s class my sophomore year of high school. I love kids. I have known that all my life, and I always swore one day I would be a teacher. I still would like to be a teacher one day. For me these all existed as separate entities. The three forces that drive and inspire me.

It was Literacy Through Photography that first combined these forces because Literacy Through Photography is a way to use photography as an educational tool. This drove me to dedicate much of my undergraduate years to learn about and use Literacy Through Photography in elementary school classrooms both in North Carolina and in Tanzania. With Literacy Through Photography, however, it is the students who take the pictures. As a photographer, I take great pleasure in being behind the camera. Therefore, while in college, I also interned with a local photography studio. My work at the studio involved photographing families and children. I love this work, and I love that it enables me to work behind the camera.

Last summer was different though.

Like Literacy Through Photography, it involved my passions: kids, photography, and education, but it did so in a new way. I was the photographer, and I was photographing kids, and I was doing so to create images that would inspire people to support TFFT’s programs so that these amazing kids could receive the education they deserve. This ignited something within me. It really felt magical.

That feeling led me to take action. Since August, I put together the coffee table book and have volunteered for TFFT in whatever ways I could and as often as possible.

Now I am thrilled to be able to say that starting in July I will be working fulltime for The Foundation For Tomorrow. Currently Meghann is TFFT’s only employee based in the United States. The rest of the team is on the ground in Tanzania. I will be moving to Charlotte, North Carolina to join Meghann stateside. The role will involve a bit of everything but will be mostly developmental. I could not be more excited about this new endeavor. One year ago I did not really even know what TFFT was about. It only took one summer of inspiration and six months of action to completely change my path.

Now I want to talk about service. And I also want to talk more specifically about passion.

The stereotypical perception of service involves some form of volunteering at a soup kitchen, knitting blankets, spending time at a nursing home, etc. Of course those are all very valuable and worthwhile activities, but, unless you are passionate about those experiences, it is likely that you associate service with dread, or guilt, or obligation somewhere along the lines of, “I know I really should be doing X,Y,Z… but I have A, B, C excuse so I’m not”

I, however, like to think of service as simply giving of yourself (your time, your talents, your personality, you resources) to better a cause you believe in. Sure, service is supposed to be altruistic, all I’m an amazingly selfless person, and I do this only for the good of someone else, and I get no benefit. I personally reject this mindset. I believe service is most powerful when you put yourself back into it. Do something you love for a cause you love, and you and the cause will BOTH benefit. Moreover, in this manner service will become a way of life rather than a category on a checklist that is separate from your other dreams and goals.

Each person in this room had a unique set of talents and there are countless worthy causes that need YOUR help. Coupling your passion (or even just something you enjoy doing) and a cause you believe in is a truly magical combination.

It was during RIDETZ that I realized I could use my passion for photography as a form of service. It dawned on me while I was photographing this young girl.

I was sitting on the ground. Mid-afternoon. In Tanzania. This beautiful little girl was standing about six feet in front of me playing with her scarf. As I sat there, in no hurry at all, watching her movements, it struck me that not only doing what I love, I was doing it FOR A CAUSE THAT CAPTURED MY WHOLE HEART. This girl was something special. This moment I had was something special. And I had my camera to help me capture it, to enable other people to see what I was seeing right then. This made being behind my camera more powerful than it had ever been before, and it made what passed before my lens that much more mesmerizing. I yearned for these photographs to capture and communicate something beyond words: the essence of Tanzania and of TFFT’s purpose there.

Interestingly, multiple people have identified that series as their favorite of the images I took during the ride.

I want to close with a brief story. One evening last summer I was in the car with Meghann. RIDETZ was over, and we were back in Arusha. It was dusk and everything looked dimly orange in the day’s last light. We were exhausted after a long day, and our conversation was paused. We were driving pretty quickly down the rough and uneven dirt road, and the bumps and the cars motor created an unpredictable rhythm. As Meghann drove, I watched the scenes that rolled passed my window. At one point Meghann broke the silence with the offhanded comment, “you know when you were little, and you would ride your bike, and this amazing feeling would rush over you? You felt like you were riding faster than anything and this sense that anything is possible would overtake you? THAT is how I feel when I’m working in Tanzania, and that is how I know I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t ever want to stop feeling that way.”

She said that and, although I’d never thought of it that way, I knew exactly what feeling she was referring to. I believe this feeling happens when passion meets action or, at first, when passion meets inspiration for action.

And that feeling can become a driving force, and that feeling makes us more present in the moment.

It’s like when Emily in Our Town asks, “Do humans ever really realize life as they live it?” NO! Far too often we go through the motions, do what we have to do, and complain a lot along the way.

STOP. Find that passion, find that cause, and combine the two. If you do so, your “service” will become both a service to yourself as well as to the community.

I want close with two of my favorite quotes:

“If you want something you’ve never had before, you’ve got to do something you’ve never done before.”

I love that because it puts YOU in the driver seat. You cannot just sit there and say, “but I just don’t knowwww what I’m passionate about.” Fine. That’s fair. There are a lot of people in this world who don’t feel particularly passionate. But, you can become passionate about finding that passion… clearly, if that is how you feel, nothing you are already doing is IT, so go on a hunt. TRY SOMETHING NEW. Identify what you’re not passionate about and wait to see what speaks to you. It’s not going to fall in your lap.

I did not have some master plan of how I wanted things to turn out. In fact if I had tried in high school to create a plan for myself I would have limited myself because I never in one million years could have planned for what has happened. Instead I identified what I loved to do, what lit me up and inspired me, and I sought out opportunities that involved these things. This way my path created itself, and it still is creating itself. I have no idea where I will be in five or ten years. I have goals and dreams but I am excited to see what surprises come up along the way.

If you fall into the category of feeling like you shoouuldd be doing service, but you don’t feel that motivated, you just need to readjust your idea of service. Nearly ANYTHING can be turned into service.

For example, every nonprofit needs an accountant. If, perhaps, numbers and accounting happens to be something you LOVE you could volunteer your time accounting for a cause you believe in.

Finally, one of my all time favorite quotes:

“Do not ask yourself what the worlds needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive. The world needs people who have come alive.”