A lens for life's dreams: a creative photography project in Guatemala and Honduras is enabling children to experience worlds beyond their imaginations.

• Author: Elton, Catherine
• Position: Fotokids

The moment she most loves is when the photo surprises her. When the image just appears to her spontaneously, and she can lift her camera to her face, feel the cool metal pressing her cheekbone, and lock it into view. When she can make a fleeting moment stand still forever in an act of magic announced only by a click.

It happened that way one day when Evelyn Mansilla got caught in a rainstorm near Guatemala City's municipal dump. She was searching for shelter from the deluge when she found one of her all-time favorite photos. In the photo, a young girl waits apprehensively for the pelting drops of rain falling behind her to stop. Before the rain started, the girl had been working in the dump. Like the droves of people who eke out a living in the dump, she had been searching for sellable objects among the city's refuse.

This is only one of the many photos that Mansilla has taken in and around the dump and of the people who live and work there. But not all of her photos of the dump show the dark, rainy side of what is perhaps one of the country's most desperate landscapes. In the dump, Mansilla says that she has not only captured glimpses of beauty, but also of happiness.

"There are a lot of people who say there is so much poverty, and they take pictures of poor people that make you feel sorry for the people. Poverty is a way of life you get used to, .taking the good with the bad. One of the things I like about photography is that, with photos, you can show people not only the negative but the positive things in life," says Mansilla.

A nineteen-year-old college student majoring in journalism, Mansilla is a seasoned photographer who has been snapping photos since she was ten, and who also says she enjoys writing just as much. Her photos have been published in a book of photography and hung on the walls of galleries in Europe and the United States. In Spain, she interned for a film company working on screenplay writing.

Yet her perspective on what she has found at the dump is no condescending or romanticized view of poverty coming from a globe-trotting college student. She is, in fact, much like the girl in the photo: neither a stranger to poverty, nor a stranger to life and work in the dump.

Mansilla, the oldest of five siblings, also grew up in a neighborhood on the edge of the dump. When she was younger, she lived in a home of plastic tarp and corrugated metal sheets that didn't always keep out the rain. As a child, she spent her free time in the dump, searching for discarded treasures while grazing her aunt's pigs on the mountains of other people's long-forgotten food remains.

But unlike the vast majority of people who came from the conditions she did, she got a chance, which she converted into a way out. When she was ten years old she joined a photography class, which turned into an ongoing project that has paid her bills to stay in school, taught her the art of photography and, most importantly, how to dream and make those dreams come true.

Mansilla is part of the Fundacion de Ninos Artistas, a project popularly called Fotokids. Now in its tenth year and still growing, Fotokids has given some 150 children in Guatemala and Honduras scholarships to stay in school, while opening up to them the world of photography, art, and the creative process. Currently, the program serves seventy-five students of all ages.

The program started in 1991, two years after Nancy McGirr, a top-rate photographer for Reuters news agency, came to Guatemala after years of covering the civil war in El Salvador. She wanted to take some time off from the grind of daily reporting and work on longer term projects with a social angle. McGirr thought that Guatemala would be the place to do that and planned to stay for about a year.

She started taking photos for some local nonprofit organizations that worked with children, and it sparked an idea: "I wanted to give kids cameras and see what they'd do with them," McGirr recalls.

McGirr had also been volunteering her time teaching literacy classes for children of families who lived in and around the Guatemala City dump. When one of the two nuns who taught there became ill, she asked McGirr to take over. Today, from the quiet comfort of her folk-art filled home in Guatemala City, McGirr bursts into laughter as she recalls her first impression of the nun's idea. "I thought it was a bit...