ZAGORA OASIS, Morocco –- Aalya Berzougui, a 15-year-old at the School for Informal Education, knows her life in this settlement on the northern periphery of the Sahara Desert is humble compared with lives elsewhere in the world.
"I think the differences between life here and life in other places are big," she said last week through an interpreter. "Children in other countries have better, more beautiful schools and access to better education, but we are poor."
But Berzougui –- who hopes to be a doctor -- was thrilled to be chosen last week for a world photo project in which 500 children in 43 countries around the world are now in the process of taking snapshots to capture their everyday lives. She has never traveled anywhere, she said, but expects that children elsewhere would like to see how she and her family live.
"I would like to take photos of the gardens here in the oasis, and of birds and of the people," Berzougui said, after getting a briefing on the project from Philipp Abresch, 26, the Berlin graduate student who conceived the project as a follow-up to a project he did two years ago in Kosovo.
Abresch drove through Morocco to Zagora to hand out cameras to the willing students.
"I never thought I would ever be able to take pictures," said Naaima Khrif, 11, who has never seen a picture of herself except for group photos taken at school. "I would like to take pictures of old buildings."
Think of the project as a kind of "Day in the Life," kids version, with Yoko Ono as honorary chairperson.
"The idea of the project is not only to let children present their living circumstances in different places around the world, it's also to start a dialogue (among) these children, through the pictures, because they are universal," Abresch said.
"First, they will see the pictures from the other countries and see how other children live, and then they start a concrete dialogue, sending e-mails to each other, and maybe also letters."
The earlier project in Kosovo by Abresch started when he and other participants handed materials to refugee children in camps in Macedonia, who were asked to paint pictures of what they remembered of life in Kosovo. Abresch then returned with disposable cameras, handing them out to children when they had returned to Kosovo. The project produced a lasting record of their lives that also gave many of the children hope and pride.
Photos from the project were shown in more than 30 galleries, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe They are also available in an online gallery.
This year's project, called "Imagine: Your Photos Will Open My Eyes," will include schoolchildren in Brooklyn, New York, who saw the World Trade Center disaster unfold before their eyes. Other participating children live in Beijing, Moscow, Afghanistan, Israel, South Africa, Vietnam and Egypt. The children from the United States live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Lincoln, Nebraska.
"It's a democratic way for children to tell other people of their inner thoughts and their wishes, their dreams and their anxieties," Abresch said. "We wanted to encourage children, especially in the so-called Third World countries, to take part and become responsible for their societies. Many Third World countries are 60 percent children, and they will become responsible for their cultures very soon."
An exhibit featuring 80 photos from the project will open in late August at the Potstdamer Platz offices of the German Development Office (GTZ), a government agency that used its offices around the world to help distribute cameras and organize logistics for the project. Later, it will be shown throughout Europe and the United States.
"Children are very direct, and so they tell a lot of things by taking photographs," said Jutta Werner, 30, a GTZ official in Zagora. "That's the interesting aspect. I don't know if they will really come to communicate with others in other countries, since in many of the countries the Internet is something very new. But anyway, this project will be very interesting for them."
The project could lead to still other world photo projects, Abresch said.
"It's a very good medium to capture everyday life," Abresch said. "Because the cameras are very small, children who are photographing their own family act kind of normal, whereas a professional photographer who visits them with his big camera will always disturb things and won't get the authentic way of living at this moment."
As Aalya Berzougui's mother, a midwife, explained with a grin, as she raised a silver tea pot high in the air to fill the cups of a group of visitors: "It's up to her take pictures of whatever she wants."
