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selections from WE CHEAT EACH OTHER: A Portrait of Salam Project Statement This project is a decade-long portrait of a young Ethiopian girl affected by HIV/AIDS. She was born Ruth Alemu, but she has many names: Ruth. Salam. Beti. Meron. Nefsua. She was begging on the streets with her mother when she was four, six when her mother died, seven when she changed her name to Peace (“Salamawit”), nine when I met her. Her sister, Yamrot, and she were left to take care of each other. They had no place to go after their mother died, so they stayed in the hospital. The nurses took care of them, gave them pajamas. It was two years before they found a home with a foster mother, Hirut. Three years later, when Selam was eleven, Hirut died suddenly. When we met, I gave her a camera and asked her to show me what her life had been like. She pushed the camera aside and pulled out a deck of cards. She dealt a game without explaining the rules and then cheated so she would win. She laughed until she was almost hyperventilating, her eyes squinting, her teeth shining. I couldn’t understand a thing she was saying. For a while, she was the top in her class. After Hirut died, Salam started skipping school. I saw her at the Orthodox Timket ceremony celebrating the baptism of Jesus. Salam, now thirteen, had a flock of ten-year-old boys following her. She seemed at ease with them. They knew the streets. I learned the card game and we cheated each other every time we played. Eventually, she wanted to make pictures with me. She asked for more film every time I went to visit. A few years ago she invented a fictional character named Beti. Beti asked me to take pictures of her. She and Salam were similar: both watched their mothers die of AIDS, both were left to beg on the streets, both were likely raped, both found friends with similar problems. Beti went on to be a productive member of her community, helping others who suffered fates similar to her mother’s. Salam ran away from home soon after we stopped photographing. She left her sister a phone number and said she would be working as a maid for some ferenji (white people). She packed up a few clothes, including a sweatsuit my mother had sent her, and she left. Yamrot waited a few days and called the number. The woman who answered spoke Amharic, said there were no ferenji there. She had never heard of Salam. A few months later, two boys went looking for her and found her. She had changed her name again: the other girls in the brothel call her Meron. |