West teacher helps kids capture life through lens

By HEATHER GILLERS

AURORA -- Washington Middle School art teacher Somphonh "Samantha" Oulavong used to spend her vacations vacationing -- until she realized she would rather spend them teaching.

The spring breaks and summers when Oulavong once traveled in the south of France now find her in developing countries helping children and teens learn to photograph the world around them.

"A lot of these kids will never ever have a chance to hold a camera ever in their lifetime," said Oulavong, who will travel to Nicaragua and Cambodia this summer.

In Cambodia she plans to spend six weeks in Phnom Penh working with students ages 10 to 14 whose parents have HIV or whose lives have otherwise been affected by the virus.

It will not be her first encounter with children who face tragedy. Oulavong spent her spring break teaching photography to nine impoverished Nicaraguan children and teens in Managua.

She said one student, who worked at a local landfill, was "only 16 years old, but when you look at him he looks like he was in his late 30s." Another student, a 14-year-old, walked two miles to attend her photography workshop, she said.

Those students' pictures, along with Oulavong's photographs of them, will be exhibited this summer in Nicaragua, where she will visit before traveling to Cambodia.

Oulavong is in the process of forming a non-profit organization, Lens of Vision & Expression (LOVE), to support her work. She hopes the group will partner with other non-profit organizations that work with teens and children in order to bring photography workshops to the youth.

Oulavong knows film and a camera will not solve all the problems of an impoverished teen boy or the daughter of a parent living with HIV. But, she said, "when you give a child an opportunity to play and to use their imagination in a creative way, it allows them to have dreams and have hopes and to have a vision."

She is not just speculating. As a young child, Oulavong, whose parents are Chinese and who was born in Laos, lived in refugee camps in Thailand before the family moved to the United States.

"I remember having foreigners helping us out," she said. "I wanted to do something like that, to give somebody some sense of comfort, just let them know that there is help, there is hope."