Searching for Eldorado

In participating in Searching for Eldorado, the children were invited, and provided with the means, to represent Eldorado as they see and experience it in their daily lives. Teaching the participants photographic and digital skills was certainly part of the project's strategy (most had not been previously exposed to this communication medium), but was not the key aim or goal. Rather, this skill-building process was seen as a means only: to enable young participants to share their vision of Eldorado - in the form of images - with people outside their community as a way of creating links with "a world that largely ignores their existence. When the media or other outsiders do choose to focus on the community they usually represent it in a negative way and the children and young people who live in this community would like the opportunity to represent themselves in a way that they feel more truthfully represents them."

Face-to-face communication was used to foster this process. Participants engaged in a series of group discussions about the community and the places, people and things within it that are most important to them. Within these discussions, ideas about representation and self-representation were raised and the dominant media image of Eldorado and other marginalised communities as relentlessly violent and hopeless was brought into question.

The bilingual (English and Portuguese) Searching for Eldorado website provides a photographic portrait of the community of Eldorado through the eyes of its children and youth. The gallery of photos taken (over a 4-month period) by these young people shows their lives - their families, their houses, their friends, their neighbourhoods - as they see and live them. According to organisers, the community they have portrayed is vibrant and diverse - "filled with colour, creativity, humour, faith, love, hope and dreams, often found in surprisingly unexpected places. However, the lack of material and social resources are also evident in the images."

Children, Youth.

On the periphery of the major financial centre of South America, Eldorado is a shanty town suffering from high levels of unemployment and extreme poverty. According to project organisers, education, health and police services are inadequate, the area has no bank or post office, many areas do not have reliable sewerage or electricity supply, and roads are frequently unpaved and unlit at night. With limited access to education and fewer and fewer opportunities for skilled work available, even those who are lucky enough to have some form of work are often unable to meet their family's basic needs; in many cases children are expected to contribute to the household income. In this environment, domestic abuse, crime, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and drug trafficking are common; their presence further impacts on the whole community's, and particularly its children's, well-being.