Briget Ganske

03Nov07

In January 2008, I will sell my furniture, pack up my books and belongings, move out of my Brooklyn brownstone, and fly on a one-way ticket to South Africa—drawn there by the words Nelson Mandela said upon its soil, “When you educate a woman, you educate a nation.”

In light of these words, Amazwi, a nonprofit arts organization, is educating women in rural northern South Africa, and I will be a part of that education. Amazwi works in a province where only 40 percent of adults are educated and 80 percent of people live below the poverty line. A Zulu word, Amazwi means “voices,” a word that ties together the organization’s missions of education, empowerment, and preservation—ways of ensuring local voices are told, heard, and recorded.

Amazwi educates women in journalism and creative nonfiction. It empowers them by creating opportunities specifically for rural black women, a demographic in South Africa that has been insufficiently represented in business, academics, and the media. In addition to developing writing and reporting skills, the women contribute to The Amazwi Villager newspaper, on which I will work as managing editor. Together, the women and I will report on local social issues and indigenous cultures, and we will learn how to be journalists in a region where stories, so far, have gone untold in the media.

I became interested in women’s empowerment and international humanitarian issues during the summer before my senior year at Northwestern University. I was awarded a summer grant to volunteer at a home for abandoned girls in Cusco, Peru, and to use the experience for my narrative nonfiction senior honors piece for my Creative Writing Major. The Peruvian girls I came to know were strong and intelligent but lacked many opportunities after grammar school. They had stories to tell and my ears to listen, and from them, I learned how powerful narrative nonfiction can be to create intimate portraits and to educate the rest of the world.

After graduating from college in 2006, I moved to New York City to pursue book publishing, an easy answer when I questioned myself during those post-graduation months about how to make a living from my love of literature. I have since learned that easy answers are not always the best solutions, for they rarely get us what we really want, what we are afraid of taking responsibility to get. For me, that was being a writer.

In the office, I yearned to be in the field and to write about issues that deserved more immediate public attention. To take responsibility for this desire, I initiated and organized a mentoring program that pairs Harlem ninth graders with New York writers and photographers who aid the students in creative projects that portray their lives. I loved providing the chance for students and young adults to connect through art and for young people to engage in their communities. Students told me that just holding a camera “opened their eyes to things they had never noticed.”

My experience with the Harlem students prompted a search to look for full-time opportunities that combined arts education and social service. Through an irretraceable path of online job boards, I found out about Amazwi. I had been interested in South Africa since a handful of college friends returned from study abroad programs in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. I saw album upon album of photos showing everything beautiful: coasts and mountains, villages and cities, deserts and woodlands. In addition to these physical extremities, I also learned about race relations, gender roles, the 50 years of apartheid, and the past decade of democracy. South Africa’s rich and complex history, along with Amazwi’s mission of educating and empowering, made the opportunity to live and work there beckoning and befitting.

Next came the long application process, the waiting, the phone interviews, the waiting, and finally the acceptance. Elated, I could hardly sit still in my cubical, and I still had more than seven months until January.

Soon, though, came an offer that took me out of the cubical and out of book publishing. A friend planned to travel to Serbia to teach a summer English language pilot program that needed additional teachers for the more than 50 students who had enrolled. I enthusiastically agreed to go and also volunteered to lead a creative writing and photography workshop. In Serbia, I realized the inspiring potential of a cultural exchange and a common language. The other two teachers and I previously knew little about Serbia and the high school students had never before met Americans, yet because of the students’ fairly comprehensive English, we were able to connect and learn much about each other and each other’s culture, and in the creative workshop, they were able to show me (and the world through the website we created) the people and places that most strongly influenced them.

So here I am back in New York, only a few months from my departure, spending my time reading about South Africa, working as a photographer (including working for Maryanne Russell at NYWICI events!), freelance writing for magazines, and teaching the Harlem photography and writing workshop—a program that I intend to replicate in South Africa, in addition to my managing editor role, with children in the local villages.

And I have been fundraising. The organization has just enough funding to pay the staff of local women and cover the costs of printing the newspaper, so my work will be on a volunteer basis. I have applied for grants to cover my personal costs of airfare, housing, food, and health insurance, and to finance my plans for a photography workshop, but these grants are competitive and nothing has been promised. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable asking for money, yet I ask out of my commitment—and the commitment I know others share—for all women to have ability and choice to express themselves. I ask because I know money can be a flow, like water, a conduit for social improvement, a currency of love, a force for educating a nation.

To find out more about Amazwi, go to www.amazwi.org. If you’d like to support Briget Ganske, you can make a secure donation at www.amazwi.org/donate.html, including her name and email in the gift information box.

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