What happens to hope when you, a child, have lost your family, like many around you, to terrible disease or famine or other circumstances? When you are left alone in a city the size of London, with no societal safety net, to fend for yourself? What do you dream of, hope for? Do you even dare to dream? Do you lose all hope? And if you've been given a chance to re-enter a familial environment (in these cases, the children are apart of an organization that has built families around them) are your hopes and dreams restored, the same as before? What do you hope for now? How does hope and hopefulness shift? Or does it?
What Is Hope? The Children of the Selamta Family Project seeks to explore these questions by documentary the stories of children who had once been orphans in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia but are now in stable and secure families, thriving in school and community.
The children of The Selamta Family Project in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Selamta has, for 6 years, successfully served orphaned and abandoned children and marginalized women who have lost their families to AIDS or other circumstances by creating stable, secure, life long families around them.
Click and scroll over the images for more info.
More photos from Selamta and Addis Ababa here
Through a mix of informal interviews and fly on the wall shooting to work as unobtrusively as possible, What is Hope? seeks to find out what life was like for these children before entry into the Selamta Family Project, into a secure family environment. What it is like now? What were their hopes and dreams then? Did they dare to dream? What do they dream of, hope for now?
What is Hope? strives to inspire action. By showing how successful Selamta has been since it's inception 6 years ago, we hope to embolden duplication of the project and affect change in children's lives across the world.
Sign up for Email Updates ---->
Want to stay up to date on the progress of What Is Hope? and be notified when the Kickstarter campaign is up and running. Shoot us your name and email (and Twitter addy if you're so inclined and we'll put you on our email list.