Amanda van Scoyoc

It has been a crazy couple of months since I last blogged. The big news is that I am putting up another “Raising them Right” show in February. It is going to be at Duke’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy and I am going to work with Duke to put together a few talks on the topic. I’m very excited to be able to look at my work from a completely academic standpoint.

I have been reading everything that I can find on the topic and have finally found some academic literature that reflects all that I experienced in Chelsea. Almost all writing I have encountered about teen pregnancy is misguided. It is such a hot topic that the information readily available rarely is well researched. I become very frustrated when I read articles that place blame on teens and that state that teen pregnancy is a cause of poverty. I feel that anyone who works within such a community understands that poverty and teen pregnancy have a more confounded relationship and if anything it is the poverty and lack of meaningful opportunities that causes young people to want a baby to bring meaning to their lives.

Anyhow, I just finished a wonderful book on these topics and will write more once I have time to digest.

In other news, here are some photographs that I have been meaning to post from the past month or two. After returning my Duke camera, Mac, and copy of Photoshop, I finally bought a new camera and have been learning how to use it, my new Mac, and lightroom.

Here are some photographs from a lovely family walk (minus Greg) over Thanksgiving. The light was incredibly beautiful.

My favorite photos from Thanksgiving Dinner.

Some presents silk screened by me! This is the season of robots and owls. If you received a Christmas present from me, chances are it had an owl or a robot on it.

On December 4th we celebrated Eli’s birthday.

Eli and my house is way too small for a tree so we helped Rusty and Erin set up their tree.

We hosted a dinner party and had another birthday pie for our friend John.

And we became God parents (or God-less parents) to baby Isaac. I am so incredibly excited to watch Andrea and Isaac grow up. From what I know of these little people, there are no better little people this world has to offer.

I always have a difficult time when my days are timeless with nothing in particular that needs to get done at any given time and everything that needs to get done eventually. Since returning to NC, I’ve been studying for the GREs, looking at graduate school programs, looking for a job, troubleshooting photography issues, and looking at houses. All of these decisions that I need to make feel very oppressive. Finding a job in this economy is incredibly difficult.

I miss being in Boston where I had concrete goals. I miss knowing exactly what I want to do and knowing what I had to do on any particular day. These days I seem to have an incredibly hard time relaxing because the goals are too large to complete on a daily basis. I seem to wake up and go to sleep with the exact same anxieties and the feeling that nothing I do in the course of the day will dramatically reduce the stress.

Yesterday me and Eli spent the entire day out of the house. I needed that, and it was wonderful to escape. We ended up going to the NC state fair. It made me feel proud to be a NC State resident (even if most of the political stickers we saw were for McCain Palin.) I am always so fascinated by how different people live their lives, and at the NC state fair I am always reminded that so many lives in NC revolve around crops and livestock. It’s such a strange thing for me to see young children raising animals to be slaughtered. There is such obvious affection for the animals.

Eli and Dromedary

Amanda and Dromedary

Eli milking a cow

Cow gets milked

Amanda milking a cow

I’ve put up a new website (thanks to Eli) that displays the final project that I completed up in Boston. Check out the new website. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I wanted to create a place online just for the work with young mothers so that this website and blog could become less specifically focused.

I’m finally somewhat settled down in North Carolina so I figure three weeks late it’s about time to write about the opening and to put up some of the photos from the exhibit.

The opening was one of the most amazing nights of my life. So many people came together. It was wonderful to have so many people that I so deeply care about together in the same place.

I was impressed by how many of the young moms came to the gallery and brought their children. Without their help this gallery opening would never have happened. They were in the car with me doing errands beforehand. They were the one’s hanging the photos and putting out the food. And at the end of the gallery show, they were the one’s that helped tear the show down and package it up. It was such a wonderful feeling to know that they were there to make sure that this thing happened.

I also loved how the kids took over the gallery space. Izzy and Denise spent all night playing on the stairs, TJ kept on sneaking chocolate, Naisha and Tommy drew, and Andrea, Evan and Ethan were passed from person to person smiling the whole time. I felt like having all those kids there happily doing what they do spoke more about what these young women have accomplished than anything on the walls.

I was very fortunate to have 3 good friends taking photos during the opening. Thank you Eli, Margaux and Xexeil. Margaux has also put up a flickr gallery if you would like to see some more photos from the opening.

Yesterday Emily, Desiree, Inalvis, Denise and Alex ,one of my high school friends, helped me set up the gallery show. Everyone was so incredibly helpful and I can’t believe how much we got done yesterday. Desiree solved all of the spacing/hanging issues that we were having in the beginning and by 5 o’clock we got all of the medium format photos on the wall and figured out a general gallery plan.

Inalvis, Desiree, and Denise in the gallery

On Sunday Andrea was presented to the church. I am fortunate enough to have been chosen as Andrea’s God mother (I accepted a lot of expectations in Spanish during the ceremony and am going to have to ask Damaris what exactly these expectations were.) Being a part of such an intimate family celebration is making it even harder to pack up our apartment and prepare to leave.

Andrea being presented

Damaris, Andres and Andrea

The presentation of Andrea Isabella

Roca, MGH and the Alliance for Teen Pregnancy are co-sponsoring the opening of Young Motherhood in Massachusetts, a community-based photography exhibit envisioned by Amanda van Scoyoc, which opens on Wednesday August 6th from 5-8 p.m. at the Gallery at Spencer Lofts. The event, “Raising them Right” is an exhibition of photos, words, and paintings made in collaboration with young mothers in Chelsea, Revere, Lynn and East Boston, documenting their experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. The Gallery at Spencer Lofts is located at 60 Dudley St, Chelsea, MA; the event is open to the public, refreshments will be provided.

Amanda van Scoyoc, the photographer, worked with Roca in Chelsea, MA to create the images for this exhibit. She is a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania ’05, with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Fine Arts. For the last six years, she has worked on a variety of documentary projects both domestically and abroad that focus on reproductive issues and child raising. In the Spring of ’07 she was awarded a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellowship from Duke University enabling her to develop this portrait of young motherhood.

Roca, which is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year, is founded on the belief that it is unacceptable to lose so many young people to violence and poverty in our country. In the last twenty years, Roca has won nationwide respect and recognition for its effective and innovative approaches to helping young people live self-sufficiently and out of harm’s way. Roca’s vision is clear; young people will leave the streets and gangs to take responsibility for their actions and have jobs. Young immigrant mothers will raise their children in safety and be recognized for their contributions to society. Our communities will have the ability to keep young people out of harm’s way and in turn, thrive through their participation and leadership.

The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program is a project of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University. Each year, Hine Fellows are sent to work domestically and abroad with local organizations to document humanitarian issues over the course of ten months. They then return to work with documentarians at CDS to continue to develop their projects. The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program is supported by the Philanthropic Initiative and the Jessica Jennifer Cohen Foundation.

MGH Chelsea offers primary care for children, adolescents, and adults and has specialists in obstetrics, gynecology, cardiology, neurology, hematology, oncology, geriatric medicine, rehabilitation medicine, occupational health, and mental health. MGH Chelsea recently expanded and now offers Chelsea families additional medical services during longer, more convenient hours than ever before.

Founded in 1979 as the Alliance for Young Families by eleven Boston-area agencies seeking to improve teen parent services, the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy is the ONLY organization in Massachusetts dedicated to ensuring that state policies and programs effectively address the complex issues associated with teen pregnancy. The mission of the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy is to provide statewide leadership to prevent teenage pregnancy and meet the service needs of pregnant and parenting teens and their children through policy analysis, research, education, and advocacy. The Alliance works to ensure that Massachusetts’ youth have access to comprehensive pregnancy-prevention services and that pregnant and parenting teens and their children have the resources and support they need to thrive. Our means for achieving these outcomes are to educate, empower and support young people and the adults who work with them to become leaders on the issue of teen pregnancy prevention and the needs of young parents.

This week I’ve been doing a lot more work than usual. I’ve been trying to track down the last few girls that I have taken photos of but haven’t interviewed. It has been frustrating because some of the girls are near impossible to get in touch with. Jennifer lost her cell phone. Monique’s baby threw the cell phone in the toilet. Yesenia works and is never at home. It’s been frustrating and I feel so pressed for time now that I am calling them with stalker like frequency.

Eli and I are leaving for Michigan in about a week. His family lives there and on the way we are going to spend a couple of days in Montreal and Toronto. I am very excited. I have been so overwhelmed trying to get all of the last pieces done and figuring out the exhibit that I really need this break. When we get back we will have a week and a half to pack our apartment into a car (which means sell most everything on craigslist), put up and take down a gallery show, and say goodbye to everyone here.

Because I am down to my last couple of weeks, I have been enjoying every moment of work. I finished up my last photo shoot on Tuesday with Zeinab and Oliya who are both from Somalia. I ended up at Zeinab’s house for a couple of hours hanging out with her son Ali while we tried to calm him down for the shoot.

The interviews with Zeinab and Oliya have been very interesting because their views about pregnancy and motherhood are very different than those of the other girls that I work with. Oliya is 21 and married. She was engaged for a year before they married and after they married she became pregnant a few months later. A lot of the questions I always ask were irrelevant to her. For instance, when I asked how her relationship with her husband had changed during the pregnancy and after she responded that they were already married so it hadn’t. When I asked how many children she wanted in the future, she responded as many as she will have.

Yesterday Damaris came over with Andrea and we spent the afternoon looking through photos and playing back the video tapes from Damaris’ pregnancy and Andrea’s birth. It is amazing how much they both have changed in the past three months. Damaris has transitioned into a stay at home mom and Andrea is more and more awake and responsive every time I see her. Damaris and I talked for a while about her taking one or two college classes this fall. I can’t even imagine college with a baby. It is so much easier to go through school without stopping or really even thinking about not being there. From everything I have read about young motherhood, the one marker that can really change your income, living situation… for the better is education. Even though Roca is such a nurturing place for young mothers, I support Damaris’ decision to work towards further education rather than to continue to work at Roca.

Illustration by Eli Van Zoeren
A little less then a week ago I flew from my parent’s house in DC back to Boston. I am terrified of flying. I find the idea of sitting in basically an enormous tin can with wings that propels itself through the air incredibly anxiety producing. I have a hard time understanding how other people are ok with the concept of flying. It just seems so unnatural. Without any exit strategy while in the air, when I get into an airplane, it feels like I am tempting fate.

Although I don’t consider myself a terribly superstitious person, before I get on an airplane all of the superstitions I grew up with emerge from my unconscious. My mom has always been superstitious. Her superstitions lie somewhere between cliché superstitions, karma, and self-created religious beliefs. For example, she believes not only that the number 13 has unlucky properties but also that if anything bad happens to the blue birds in our back yard, we had better watch out. She also believes that my deceased grandmother sometimes enters our lives through small acts such as rainbows on the walls or the right song playing at the right time. Usually I roll my eyes and pretend that my mom is crazy when she points these things out, but before getting on a plane, I find myself believing.

Last week when Eli and I were packed up and ready to head to the airport my mom yelled down from her bathroom that I should come up quickly to see something. When I got to her bathroom, it was covered in tiny rainbows. She explained that the light only hits the glass for a moment a couple of times a week to make the rainbows. Therefore, the fact that it was happening now, right before we left, must be a good sign.

We got in the car and started driving while she continued to explain what a good sign it was to see the rainbows at that particular moment. As she was explaining, a squirrel carrying a nut ran into the road and right under the wheel of the car. We looked back and saw that it was dead. I felt a sudden dread. One of the worst curses is the curse of having killed an animal. To hit one on the way to the airport before getting into a plane that was going to climb 35,000 feet into the air seemed to be quite a curse to consider. Before I said anything, my mom knowing exactly what I was equating in my mind exclaimed, “Rainbows beat dead squirrels.”

Eli started laughing at the ridiculous statement. With superstitions we are making value judgments and at that moment I was satisfied that rainbows really do beat dead squirrels. Even though I understood how ridiculous the statement was, I got on the airplane.

I bring this story up partially because I think these equations would make for a great documentary painting project and partially because I have encountered so much superstition at work. This year I have heard stories about devil worshipers placing curses on babies and devils coming out of pictures on the wall. I have been surprised at others’ beliefs, and it is good to remember that I have some quirky ones of my own.

This weekend I created a painting based on a few of the photos I took during Andrea’s birth. The picture of the painting is fuzzy because it’s about to storm and there isn’t enough light in our apartment to take a decent photo.