Many of the everyday aspects of life can pose tremendous challenges to anyone living with the HIV virus, regardless of gender, economic status, or country. But coping with these challenges can be especially difficult for children in developing countries who have been impacted by HIV/AIDS and lack access to even adequate health and social services. Even in situations where some children may get some form of care and support, their psychological and personal growth is often left underdeveloped or even ignored. These children can feel scared and alone, without a sense of belonging, lacking a voice with which to reach out to others.

Picturing Hope is an NGO dedicated to providing these at-risk children (aged 10-18) the supportive environments and resources they need to explore their feelings, strengthen their sense of self, and find a voice with which to tell their stories and share their hopes and dreams. In each of the five countries in which Picturing Hope has programs ­ Burkina Faso, India, Malawi, Romania, and Tanzania ­ the Program Director, Craig Bender, and his team of volunteers from aid organizations and NGOs have worked to gain the children’s trust and to provide a positive, safe, and open forum in which they can engage each other and the broader community.

The program’s key learning tool is photographs. The children were presented a wide array of photos and asked to share their perceptions and feelings about the images they saw. How do the children relate to the photos? What do the photos mean? What are their perceptions about people, events, and the world? Although many of the children were reserved and skeptical at first, they soon opened up, discussing their opinions and observations in complex and perceptive ways. After that point, the children involved in the Picturing Hope program became completely committed, initiating their own creative activities, and engaging in animated discussions with the other participants.

The next phase in the program was to let the children create their own visual narratives. With their donated cameras, the children ventured out in supervised groups to interview and photograph people from the surrounding community. Favorite photos were chosen and discussed, individually and as a group. The children explained why they preferred particular photos. They examined the larger story their individual photos told. They came together and educated each other, convinced each other, explored each others’ minds.

The response from people involved with the project has been extremely positive, and there is support to expand the project to other countries and more children. Picturing Hope was structured as an open-source teaching tool – one that is available for all users to build upon – so that it can be applied in different cultural contexts, thus increasing its long-term viability. By implementing the program in various countries, the Picturing Hope volunteers will learn and share culture-specific information to be fed back into the program. This continual flow of information and dialogue among the participants allows the program to keep on growing and positively affecting even more children around the world.

The children’s photographs have now been exhibited internationally at the World AIDS Conference 2004 in Bangkok, Thailand, The United States Capitol Building for World AIDS Day 2004 in Washington DC and the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS 2005 in New York as well as local exhibitions in each of the participating countries.

And it will always be the children who are the focus of Picturing Hope, children who, for the first time in many of their lives, have been given the opportunity to tell their stories, to demonstrate through words and images that they are special, that they are unique, that they are not alone, and that they have a future. They learn to picture hope.