Peter DiCampo for the Pulitzer Center
Kayayo girls in the "Sodomandgomorrah" section of Accra, Ghana, March 14th, 2009.
A few nights ago, I returned to Wantugu, the village in northern Ghana where I lived as a Peace Corps Volunteer, to show some Kayayo pictures as part of the current volunteer's Take Your Daughter To Work Day program. After blowing a tire (twice) on my friend Alicia's moto during the ride out, she and I stumbled into town around 8pm, apologized to a waiting crowd, and set up a projector facing one of the walls of the clinic in the center of the village. Alicia showed a feature film about Kayayo, which her Ghanaian friends wrote and starred in, with her assistance (see the Kayayo project page to link to an excerpt from the film). Afterwards, I showed about 40 photos from this project.
It was interesting to see which photos elicited a response (and by that I mean, which photos caused people to gasp, or to shout "oh!" or "woit!", common Ghanaian expressions of surprise). Many of the photos I had assumed they would react to, of girls laughing and joking with each other, were met with silence (I like to think this is because Ghanaians are used to laughter). Instead, people were struck by pictures of the work that Kayayo girls do and the conditions they live in, as well as scenes of Kumasi and Accra, large cities that many of the villagers have never and will never see. It occurs to me now, as I remember the uneasy quiet following pictures of northern boys smoking pot or girls out dancing, that silence is it's own reaction - who knows what people were thinking as they attentively looked on, listening to my descriptions of the photos...
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