Bowling Green, Ky. - A Western Kentucky University photojournalism student will use a $10,000 grant to tell the story of rape victims in war-torn central Africa.

Melanie Blanding, a senior from Roanoke, Va., is the student winner in the 2006 Alexia Foundation photo competition. Blanding won a $9,000 scholarship to study photojournalism at the Syracuse University London Centre and a $1,000 grant to produce her picture story on rape victims in east Congo.

Blanding traveled to Sudan and Congo last August as a volunteer photographer for Answering the Call, a mission organization. “I originally went to Sudan and expected to make storytelling images,” she said. “When I got to Congo, I realized how severe the issues are there.”

Blanding spent several days at a rape clinic in Bukavu, near the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s border with Rwanda. While there, she interviewed women and established a relationship at the clinic, where about 4,000 women were treated last year.

“That’s when I learned the extent to which women were victimized in the wars in Africa,” she said. “Only the healthiest 4,000 women were able to make it to the clinic. There’s no telling how many more victims die.”

She plans to return to Bukavu this summer to complete her project documenting the women’s stories.

“This is something that we in America are unaware of,” Blanding said. “I was really touched by these women’s lives, their tenacity, their will to live and their resilience.”

As part of the grant award, Blanding will supply a collection of photographs to the Alexia Foundation.

She’s already been invited to speak to a women’s missionary group at her church in Roanoke, Va., and she expects to share her photos and story with other groups to raise awareness about the situation in Africa.

The Alexia Foundation student grants are awarded to photojournalists who can further cultural understanding by conceiving concise, focused and meaningful story proposals that further the foundation’s goals of promoting world peace and cultural understanding.

The foundation (http://www.alexiafoundation.org/) was established by the family of Alexia Tsairis, a Syracuse University photojournalism student who died in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Blanding has had internships at The Flint Journal in Flint, Mich., and at the U.S. Army Public Affairs Office at Fort Knox, Ky. She is photo editor of The Talisman, the WKU yearbook, and a staff photographer for The College Heights Herald, the WKU student newspaper.

She also is president of the WKU National Press Photographers Association student chapter and finished second in the 2004-05 NPPA Student Clip Contest.

More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.

For information, contact James Kenney at (270) 745-6307.

 

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