update

The Accidental Students. Meet Them Now

An update on Calcutta's kids with cameras after "Born into Brothels."

By: Anne Mollegen Smith | Source: NRTA Live & Learn | May 30, 2005

SEVERAL MEMORABLE SCENES in the Oscar-winning documentary Born Into Brothels involve bright yellow taxis speeding insanely through chaotic Calcutta streets. In one, the wry and philosophical Avijit—then all of 12 years old—is on his way to the airport to go to a World Press Photo event in Amsterdam. "Please drive slowly," he tells the cabbie. "I won't get there if there's an accident," he says. "I won't fulfill my dreams."

But as the film makes clear, it's really the lucky accident, the exceptional case, when any child from Calcutta's red light district can break out. Co-directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman worked heroically to get the kids in her photography workshop out of the brothels and into boarding schools—schools that didn't welcome children of criminals and regularly sank their applications in a sea of paperwork—but when filming ended, sadly, only two of the children remained in residential programs.

The picture has brightened considerably since then. None of the kids is "in the line" of prostitution. Puja, the impish tomboy, has good English and avidly sends text messages to Ross on a cell phone he supplied. Tapasi lives at the Sanclaa and Kochi at the Sabera Foundation homes for girls. Kochi is fluent in English now and full of plans for the future. Avijit goes to an excellent school in Calcutta; he lives at the Future Hope boys' home. [An update on Avijit's life and work has been posted in September, 2008.]

When Briski and Kauffman went back in February to show the final film to the kids, they enrolled Manik in Future Hope also; his sister Shanti has twice entered Sabera but both times she left, missing home too much. Gour still lives at the brothel, not wanting to leave his mother there. He takes computer and English classes with his best friend, Puja. Suchitra is also learning English and hopes for a computer job. Fees for classes and boarding come from sales of their work via www.kids-with-cameras.org.

Kids with Cameras (KWC), a nonprofit, is starting three new workshops. In Jerusalem, Jason Eskenazi—like Briski, a documentary photographer and former Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow—works with a group of Israeli children and a group of Palestinians, with the intent of bringing the two together creatively. Award-winning photographer Gigi Cohen is setting up a workshop with restavecs—children in low-paid domestic service—in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The third is to empower the children of Zabaleen, the garbage collectors' district of Cairo.

And for Calcutta, KWC plans a School of Leadership and the Arts specifically for children of the brothels. Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity, has joined the KWC advisory board and last month was in India with Briski to select a site. Sinclair and his students at Montana State University, in Bozeman, MT, will design the school pro bono. Currently KWC is raising $250,000 to build the school and hopes to open it in 2006.

Anne Mollegen Smith is president of Qwerty Communications and frequently covers education and women's issues. This article appeared in the Spring, 2005 issue of NRTA Live & Learn.

Update 2008: Now known as Asha Niwas, or in English Hope House, the school is intended to house up to 150 children and provide free education through high school. Over half a million dollars have been raised toward its revised goal of $750,000. It is to be staffed and managed by the Buntain Foundation, which is associated with Calcutta Mercy Ministries that Catholic missionaries Mark and Huldah Buntain began more than 50 years ago.

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