Sunday, February 04, 2007

Photographer gets message out by documenting living conditions in India and Africa

from The News Times Live

By Susan Tuz
THE NEWS-TIMES

DANBURY -- When Georgette DeWan was a little girl she knew someday she would travel to India and Africa to see firsthand the poverty and devastation there.

What DeWan didn't know at that time was how she would help the people she met in those countries or when she would go.

Today, DeWan, 43, of Danbury, has found a vocation that allows her to spread the message that there are people in Third World countries who need the help of the wealthier countries of the world. She is using her photography to get that message out.

"I was watching Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, on the Charlie Rose show one night. He was talking about his book, 'The End of Poverty,'" DeWan said. "That interview changed my life."

DeWan, an executive assistant to private investment bankers at the time, began to search for a way to get the message out that Sachs was spreading.

Through a friend, she contacted Thomas Gallagher, then special assistant for administrative affairs for the Mother Teresa Center in Riverside, Conn., and arranged to go to Calcutta and work with the poor.

"I learned I could go to India and work with severely handicapped children," DeWan said. She took her camera and left for Calcutta at the end of February last year. She spent three weeks there, traveling into the tea fields of Darjeeling and the mountain villages.

What she saw and documented "changed my life," she said.

DeWan saw young children breaking stones in quarries to repair roads and 60-year-old women carrying heavy baskets of stones on their backs. There were other women working in the tea estates doing backbreaking physical labor, then going home to live in shacks. She said her heart was "wrenched."

"I thought, this is the place I'm meant to go to, this and other places in the world where wrenching poverty exists," DeWan said. "I lived on bananas, eggs and toast while there. I washed my eyes out with bottled water to avoid getting infections."

DeWan went to India with seven pairs of pants and seven tops. She had some spending money. She gave it all away while there, coming home with just the clothes on her back and her camera equipment.

"There's a population that's so poor it's horrific," she said. "In some ways, I felt guilty coming back home to all we have here in this country."

DeWan returned to Connecticut and began going to different venues where she could show the photographs she took in India and tell of the poverty she saw. Her cousin painted 10 paintings from the images DeWan brought back from India and they have been included in a gallery show in Braselton, Ga. DeWan's images of India are also displayed on the NYC Emerald Society Web site. Her hope is that it will move people to take action.

She talks of Sachs' and rock star Bono's involvement in the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of bringing an end to poverty in the world by 2015.

"I would love to play a small part in this by educating people to the horrors of poverty in countries like India," DeWan said.

DeWan, the photographer for St. Anthony's Maronite Rite Catholic Church in Danbury, is a temporary worker at the VNA Hospice in Stamford. She feels a deep need to help others in all phases of her life. She is looking for a way to go to Africa and document poverty conditions there.

"I would like nothing better than to just give back through my photography," DeWan said. "I want to find permanent work with an organization that gives back on a humanitarian level."

Gallagher, who helped form the Mother Teresa Center in Riverside, one of four such centers around the world, left his position there last spring. But not before he helped DeWan go to India.

"I gave Georgette an overview of what to expect and how to embrace what Calcutta is," Gallagher said. "I had been there in 2004 and 2005."

Gallagher said DeWan "authentically focuses on the plight of the poor. She brings a joy to them and gets joy from them. She loves the poor and wants to help the poor."

Gallagher noted that with her talent in photography, DeWan is already an advocate for the poor.

"For those of us who can't regularly get to impoverished communities, Georgette's photography is a link," Gallagher said. "She makes these people real and immediate for all who see her photographs."

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