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April 6, 2012
Cambodia through the lens
Judi Angel’s photographs from South East Asia are at the Zack.
OLGA LIVSHIN
Volunteering in the developing countries is a privilege,” said photographer Judi Angel. “We’re lucky to have enough in our lives so we can go and help others.” Angel’s exhibition Tikun Olom: Healing the World is a visual diary of her volunteering experience in Cambodia. She and her husband, Colin Mallet, volunteered there under the auspices of American Jewish World Service (AJWS) from October 2010 to February 2011. The show opened at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery on March 29.
Angel’s path to volunteering started about 10 years ago. “I heard Stephen Lewis speak,” she remembered. “He was the United Nations’ special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. He motivated me. After his lecture, I called Colin and said, ‘We should go to Africa. We should help.’” He agreed.
In an interview with the Independent, Angel credited her husband as being the one who makes things happen. “Colin is an inspirational guy. He always says, ‘Let’s do it.’ Without him, I wouldn’t have so many adventures.”
Together, they researched the organizations supplying volunteers to various countries and decided upon AJWS. “To me, AJWS embodies the notion of tikkun olam,” said Angel. “They truly ‘walk the talk’ of their mission. They’re dedicated to relieving poverty, hunger and diseases among the people of the developing world, regardless of race, religion or nationality. They’re ‘color-blind’ and would help any small nonprofit: church-based, a Buddhist temple, anyone who helps people. And they allow their volunteers certain flexibility of time and place.”
In her professional capacity, Angel has had a long career with Canadian nonprofits, and she has several skills to offer to the countries where she travels as a volunteer. Under the AJWS umbrella, she and her husband first went to Uganda, where they lived and worked for three months in 2003. “The first trip was scary, especially in the beginning,” she recalled. “The first few days, I wouldn’t go out without Colin. But after awhile, you establish the safety parameters and you just work there.”
Three years later, they went to Ghana, and Cambodia was their third volunteering experience. “I was placed with an HIV/AIDS association, a small local nonprofit,” she said about the latter trip. “The people there were so eager to learn. I helped them create document templates, taught them how to read guidelines of many foundations. In the developing countries, all of their fundraising has to be international; there’s no money inside the country, so all the websites are in English, and the proposals must be written in English. I helped with that too.”
She also trained the staff in the organizational development and management, living and working side by side with the people she mentored, talked to them, learned about their families.
“That’s what I did at home too,” she said, “but the local situation and traditions are always different. I had to be flexible…. I know it’s a very small contribution. I can’t change much in their huge problems, but maybe a little bit at a time. They have a saying in Uganda: ‘Slowly by slowly.’ That’s what I hope for.”
One constant during all her volunteering trips is that Angel took photographs. She had always been interested in photography but, recently, she decided to deepen her technical and artistic skills. For the last few years, she has been taking classes at Vancouver Photo Workshops and the Focal Point Photography School.
After bringing home more than 12,000 images from her trip to South East Asia, she selected 20 for the current exhibition. She also published a book of her photographs to accompany the show.
Angel wanted to present a different view of Cambodia from how it’s seen by many of its visitors. “I didn’t want to photograph the temples in Cambodia,” she explained. “Every tourist photographs them. Instead, I went around the city we lived in, Phnom Penh, taking photos in the alleys.”
Monks in their orange robes and ordinary people in the streets, dealing with poverty and hardship, interested Angel much more than the colonial architecture or traditional religious artifacts. In the cities in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand to which the husband-and-wife team traveled on their way to and from their volunteer placement, she never went anywhere without her camera.
Once, she visited an orphanage where her husband was volunteering. “The children are happy there,” she said. “Some have parents, but the families are so poor, the children can’t go to school unless they are in an orphanage. It’s a good place for them. But there was one girl, sad, damaged. I asked to photograph her, and she tried to smile.” Angel captured the girl’s attempt at a smile in the poignant black and white photo “Trying to Smile.”
Another photo, “Resting by a Road Stand,” depicts an aged woman sitting under fluttering, colorful scarves. She looks defeated, as if all the weight of the world presses on her frail, stooped shoulders. In contrast, “Market Woman,” in her cheerful hat, seems optimistic.
The pictures in the show stress the juxtapositions between bright articles of clothing and drab dwellings, hope and poverty, sadness and contentment. They make Angel’s Cambodia come alive for visitors who enter the gallery.
Tikun Olom is at the Zack Gallery until April 15.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
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