Capturing Chaicuriri

Greg Spira is a learner in the MA Professional Communications program at Royal Roads. This PhotoVoice International project is his thesis project.

Greg Spira left Ladysmith for Bolivia with a pack full of donated cameras to help rural villagers tell their stories. Here is what he found.

Special to the Chronicle

Blinded by the light of 27 camera flashes, I couldn’t have been happier; my Bolivian PhotoVoice international development project had begun.

When I left Ladysmith for Chaicuriri in late August I didn’t expect my project to begin in a dim school house with only a single battery-powered fluorescent light to illuminate the scene. The cluster of eagerly contorted faces pressed against their cameras’ viewfinders was what I had hoped for.

Night-time photography courses occur regularly in Canada, but there’s usually enough light for students to see what they’re doing. But having to squint in the darkness to see the buttons did not staunch the enthusiasm that evening of those gathered in Chaicuriri’s two-room school house filled with little more than a blackboard and rough-hewn, age-greyed, timber desks. Over 40 cameras, many donated by Ladysmith’s residents served their purpose well.

This remote community, located at 13,200 feet elevation, is squeezed into a small boulder-filled valley under vast cerulean skies and huge expanses of barren rolling hills covered only with tufts of brown knee-high grass. Working in a community where participants walk for hours to attend meetings, one quickly develops a great degree of patience and resourcefulness.

Flexibility was definitely needed in the hours before my first meeting with the project’s adult participants.

6:00 p.m. I arrived at the schoolhouse to find not a soul in attendance.

7:00 p.m. No one.

8:00 p.m. Still no one. I began to tremble, fearing for my project’s success.

8:30 p.m.; A stiff wind blew in 27 shuffling figures, bundled tightly against the cold in their homespun brown llama wool blankets. Sixteen women and eleven men, their weathered faces half-hidden by broad boiled-leather hats, wanted to demonstrate their vision of development through photography. Arriving so far past the appointed hour was not rude, nor did it reflect a lack of interest. Their family and community responsibilities simply took longer than anticipated to complete.

My original plan was to involve only the community’s women. However, as is often the case, local politics meant the men wanted a voice too. I agreed to their involvement, but only if children in the community were given a voice as well. Instead of one vision of development, residents would bring forth three distinct views of the community’s future.

The goal of empowering the village’s female leaders stayed the same; involving multiple groups simply increased the likelihood the entire community would own the results.

Earlier that day I had gathered with 14 girls and 4 boys to conduct a well-lit and on-time version of Camera Operation 101. Their peels of laughter flooded the classroom as they experienced their first-ever opportunity to see and operate a camera. The children paid careful attention and took to photography as if they’d done it a million times before. Working in pairs, they helped each other sort out which button did what and decide what would make a good photo.

However, many of the adults complained they couldn’t see anything in the viewfinder. Holding the camera at arms length from their faces didn’t help. Sebastian, a seventy-year old community elder who had lost his right hand to dynamite years earlier, puzzled over how to use a camera with only his left hand. Sebastian solved his dilemma by simply turning the camera upside down.

It wasn’t long before flashes were exploding in the school house. The sounds of so many shutters firing echoed off the room’s stone walls. It was a good thing their cameras didn’t have film in them yet.

Photo Caption: Don Filiberto, age 77, is among the participants in Greg Spira’s PhotoVoice International project in Chairuriri, Bolivia. Spira is helping villagers share their views of progress on film. by Greg Spira Photo