Learning to see through child's eyes

For two years, professor and anthropologist Pamela Reynolds studied Crossroads, a shantytown in South Africa.

While many in her profession would focus their attention on the adult community that lived in the 3,000 shacks clustered in the sand, Reynolds turned her gaze to the youngest, spending her days with seven-year-olds.

In an essay on her work in Southern Africa, Reynolds describes how, in the course of this investigation and several others she conducted in the 1980s, she realized that the vibrancy, excitement and ingenuity she saw in these children was often shadowed by sorrow.

"I did not set out to examine their suffering," she admitted, "but I have been made aware of their pain, particularly the pain caused by oppression, poverty and war."

When Reynolds began to collect her research and write about it, she had trouble putting into words the experiences of the children of Crossroads, who lived amid what she described as "shacks of zinc and scraps among the wattle trees on the sand dunes."

Looking back on her days at the encampment from her current position as a professor at Hopkins, she recalled walking with the children to the places that were important to them -- school, church, home.

"When we came back, I made a felt map for them to point out where these places were. I realized that I couldn't ask them to draw a map for me to explain how they lived, or draw a map myself. You have to think of other ways to understand the complexity of their conception," she said.

A world away, anthropologist Veena Das studied young girls infected with HIV.

"I wanted to see how the disease impacted how the girls saw themselves," she said, recapping research that ultimately ended up involving the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"We found that a girl who's 14 with HIV says to herself, `This is a grown-up disease, this is such an adult disease."

Das, like Reynolds, found herself having difficulty working within the categories that the average person thinks as "adulthood" or "childhood."

So, together in 2003, Reynolds and Das created the Child On The Wing Fellowship, dedicated to studying children "on the wing," literally immersed in situations of violence, struggle or economic catastrophe.

Many of the nations that these children call home have no ability or impetus to create welfare policies for their truly poor citizens, and more often than not, the children that Child On The Wing deals with have fallen through these sizeable cracks in the system.

The fellowship, which since 2004 pays for two scholars to spend one year at Hopkins studying children in conflict zones around the world, also hosts an annual conference where anthropologists and social scientists from universities as close as Duke and as far as Amsterdam gather to talk over their own work, much of which has very real association with the day's headlines.

Many speakers have focused on the epidemic of child soldiers, drugged and exploited to fight wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Mozambique, and their sometimes painful reentry into society.

Others have cut closer to home, detailing the ordeals of illegal immigrant children detained by border patrols on the U.S.-Mexico line.

Reynolds explained the guiding light behind the fellowship.

"It's called 'Child on the Wing' because we wanted to highlight the way children do things 'on the wing.' Do you know that expression? It's more English. It's the way children tackle violence. In some ways, when you're a child in these situations, you've got to invent your roots, your manner of coping, and often that invention is very creative, surprising and successful, given the circumstances."

Das agreed. Despite the fellowship's penchant for tackling emotionally rending subjects, like the young illegal migrants who risk everything on a dash from Morocco to Europe on what one researcher called a "gamble with life," she believes that, ultimately, the children they study carve out a way of life despite violence.

"Through our research, we wanted to present children as makers: those who make their own world," she explained. "It's said about anthropology that it's the land of the free. It's not in a straitjacket, that you have to collect data according to this predetermined process, like in natural science."

She gave an example of a participant who wanted to study the experience of children growing up as dalit, the untouchable caste in India, but from a new angle that hadn't been examined.

He chose to study their paintings, bringing in aspects of psychoanalysis in his work.

It was a perfect melding of anthropology and the field of psychology, which rarely interrelate. In Das' words, it "bridged the humanities and social sciences gap."

Part of the success of the project is due to how universally it hits home. After all, we were all children once.

By tapping into that well of childhood association and memory, participants find themselves "surprised by how much they already know," Reynolds said.

She conceded, though, that the project's goals can sometimes be hard to meet.

"We want children to be their own ethnographers, so children can reflect on their own lives and examine them."

"What you have to do is enable that situation. You can't just interview children because most children will find interviews boring and walk away. So we need to facilitate a way for children to explain their own lives with you."

Das recalled an experience she had with a child whose father had been killed by mob violence in India, which she recounted in an essay that prefaced the start of the program in 2003. The child was a deaf-mute, but his mother explained that his actions were as loud as the words he could not speak.

One day, when the child passed the site where his father had been murdered, he became agitated and acted out the hanging, with his head lolling forward and his eyes going wide.

Das used this anecdote to illustrate the ways that children communicate if adults are willing to listen. Reynolds returned to her days conducting African fieldwork to explain the thrust of the project.

"I used to work in settlements where the police would come and destroy these children's towns frequently, put their mothers in prison."

"With this project, we want to get away from the ideas that situations like this make children powerless. We want to get rid of the notion of the child as simply a victim."

Next year, workshops will be offered in one-week spans, which will allow participants to have to give up less time out of academic schedules to participate.

Past fellows have been able to use grant money to research topics that, in some cases, have always intrigued them but were never the focal points of their research. Some participants are not anthropologists at all- in 2004, a Zimbabwean psychotherapist was selected as a fellow and chose to study AIDS orphans in his native country.

The message of Child On The Wing, perhaps more than any other, is that children are far from only victims; they have agency and ability to create change in their worlds.

For the children of mothers raped during the wars in Bangladesh and Yugoslavia, or the fatherless sons of Sikhs killed in New Delhi riots, this message would probably come as nothing new.

For those who look from the outside, however, it is a reminder that the children we fear for display hidden strength that we often cannot see without their help.