Until last year (1997), I don't know if I could have located Armenia on a World Map; however, that situation has changed greatly. Armenia is both a people and a spirit that I admire deeply. (For those of you who may be geographically challenged as I was last year, Armenia is a former Soviet State which is land-locked. Her neighbors are: Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran, and Georgia). I was working in Armenia for Save the Children while my wife was teaching at the Brusov Foreign Language Institute as a Peace Corps Higher Education Volunteer.
While in Armenia, my wife's Peace Corps group decided to do a Bike Tour during the summer recess. The idea was to ride across the country and do something with kids during the break. At one of the preliminary meetings, I suggested Freire's idea to "re-present" the ordinary to oppressed persons by taking photographs depicting the daily "life" situation of a community and enlarging them to poster size in order to provoke discussion (Freire used this method in Brazil and cites it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed). The group chose to try this since one of the PC Volunteers was a photographic artist by education. Pictures from every region of the country were shot and the group then assembled a representative portfolio of photos to have enlarged as discussion prompts for the summer tour.
During the "Trial Run" for this tour, a group of student volunteers was gathered in the Capital, Yerevan, and the response was incredible. These students could not "see" that these photos reflected the daily reality in Armenia. Some students believed that the photos were "taken five years ago after the earthquake" or were "near Azerbaijan where the war was happening." The fact that a good number of the pictures were taken in places that students walked everyday did not prohibit them from filtering their reality; they were somewhat unable to come to terms with the terrible economic oppression under which they were currently existing.
Needless to say, discussion was provoked by the photos at this trial run. Some students were in tears and one bright young woman left the room because she "hated Armenians and couldn't live here any longer." Some of the PC Volunteers were disturbed by the negative feelings brought out by this exercise, but it did make it into the Bike Tour Program for the summer. I guess that I tell this anecdote because I need to remember that liberatory education is neither easy or always pleasant. When individuals awaken to their existence in the material world, they are often afraid, bewildered, angry and sad.
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