Success!

The exhibit was quite successful. We had roughly 75 people attend the opening, which was more than I thought would come. Only one student brought his parents, so I told the rest that they needed to bring their parents down at a later time so they could show off their work. I'll take down the photos later today and give them to the students to keep. I'm so proud of them!

I'm not sure how I am going to create an online display for the students. Since I haven't quite figured that out, I wanted to share my favorite photograph from the exhibit. It's the grandmother of one of my students.

The exhibit's introduction read like this:

Kosovo in Transition: The Perspective of Youth

For two years an exceptionally talented group of Prizren youth have been meeting biweekly. These students are part of the ACCESS program, a program in which the surface aim is to teach students American English and introduce them to an American-style classroom. However, these students have gained infinitely more. Within the ACCESS classroom, students had a rare opportunity not available to them in formal educational situations: to interact with peers of different language and ethnic backgrounds in a structured classroom environment. These young adults reflect Prizren's diversity. They are Turkish, Bosnian, Albanian: They are Kosovar.

The ten students who chose to participate in this project have created an inspiring body of work. For this project, students were tasked with showing how they are different from previous generations. Each student was given a digital camera for one week to capture these differences. Please look carefully at what the students have chosen to show. Each photograph tells a story, and each photograph is accompanied by a piece of writing that propels the story further.

The success of this project is indebted to the US Embassy in Pristina for funding and to Stefan Mueller of the German KFOR PsyOps detachment for speaking to the students about the basics of photography. Additionally, this project would not have been possible without the assistance of Arben Shala of the Kosovo Education Center.