Mathare

My first few days in Mathare were a mixed of rejection, disbelieve and skepticism. I was not prepared for what I was to see. Nothing I had read, seen or heard, absolutely nothing, had or could had ever got me ready for such disheartening reality.www.rosaverde.orgI could not believe what my own senses were showing me. And, if I could not believe it, how on earth had I ever dare to think that I could explain it to other people. I certainly didn’t feel my photography, nor my writing, could ever make other people believe what I had to tell them.

(…) The Mathare slum in Nairobi -­‐one of the largest and poorest slums in Africa, with a population of about 500.000 people living in an area of two kilometres by 300 metres. It is a maze of low, rusted iron sheeting roofs with mud walls. Housing is wholly inadequate, with more houses measuring about eight feet by six feet and holding up to ten people. Few houses have running water, open gutters of sewage run throughout, the road infrastructure is extremely poor, refuse and litter dominate the area and the local authority provides few services.
(Coalter, 2013, p. 1)

In my walks up and down, in the middle of such chaos, photography was far from being the first thought in my mind. I could only focus on wondering about the real need for NGOs or any other form of external help; I exhorted myself to find a reason to bring basketball to these kids. Basketball will not change their society, it will not change their lives, so what can it do for them? -­‐ I would repeat myself once and again, all day long, up to exhaustion. And photography? Can it really do something for them or is it just the photographers egos which get satisfied?

www.rosaverde.org

Harsh questions for a photographer to ask oneself while trying to justify, with photos, her presence there.

“Perhaps it was a failure of my imagination, but I was unable to understand how participation in such [sport] programmes would lead to what is so casually and loosely termed ’development’”.
(Coalter, 2013, p. 2)

Needless to say that I got blocked trying to find a justification to taking the pictures that would tell the story I didn’t really want to tell. It took me days to realise that, if I was to take any pictures at all, I would have to give up on my expectations and settle for images that perhaps would tell the single story, but that, in the end, it was a single story that existed and, as a matter of fact, it was the reality I was immersed in.

In this struggle to go over my self imposed boundaries I constantly forced myself not to think of the society as a whole but of every single person I was meeting along the way. Still, loaded as I was with a heavy emotional burden, I didn’t feel confident that I could be 100% fair to their stories. It was at that point that I decided to ask the people to write down their thoughts about their reasons to practice basketball. I followed them around in their daily routines, we shared our lives, thoughts, fears and believes; and, little by little, I got to see beyond the place…

www.rosaverde.org

Seventeen days later I was back home from Kenya with a bunch of nice photos I was not prepare to show, simply because I felt that, for them to mean something, I would have to make up a story about a reality I didn’t quite understand.

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