While most of the rest of the world was watching videos of the armed forces successfully ridding Egypt of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi Wednesday, Cairo resident Karen Flowers was in Russellville mounting pictures she has shot in Egypt over the past decade.
Flowers, a 1971 graduate of Russellville High School, has lived in the Cairo area for most of this century. She is a quilter and photographer who uses her talents to help the people of her adopted country learn new skills and even more about a better life.
Resource Exchange International says of Karen Flowers: “REI’s staff member in Cairo, Egypt, a retired Arizona businesswoman, has served with REI since 2008, and has a rather unique role with REI. Although she works primarily with women?coordinating quilting clubs as a form of micro-business and teaching infant care to new mothers?she also works with both genders, offering training in photography and serving the urban poor in Cairo’s famed ‘Garbage City.’ Her work has garnered the praise of local religious and civic leaders.”
"I'm a retired grandmother who found it cheaper to live in a country whose cost of living is about one-third of what I had known in the United States," she told The LoJo in 2010. "I live among the poorest people outside Cairo-- about 70 percent of those who live across the street from me have no running water. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Yet I have found my neighbors to be very hospitable. It's the most hospitable culture in the world. Visitors are welcome."
In addition to visiting her own relatives while she is in and around Russellville (daughter Carrie Persinger and grandchildren Michaela, Taylor and Brenen in Bowling Green and dad Bill Flowers, brother Mike Flowers, sister Vicki Page and uncle and aunt Bill and Brenda McGinnis, all in Russellville, along with sisters Marjorie Flowers in Owensboro and Mary Snyder in Indiana), Karen has placed many of her prize-winning photographs on display and for sale at Kentucky Artisans at the Saddle Factory on Russellville’s East Fourth Street this weekend.
All proceeds from this sale and similar exhibits in Oakland, Calif. and Scottsdale, Ariz. will go toward a project Karen is leading in Egypt. She hopes to—and most likely will—build The Village, a school for girls on the banks of a river near Cairo. Instead of teaching language arts, math and science, The Village will emphasize teaching life skills to girls ages 10-15. They will learn things like baby care, quilting and knitting.
“This small village on the Nile had welcomed me into the family as the ‘light of Egypt.’ It is not me they are seeing, but the Light that lives in me,” she writes in a publication called Lydia’s Light. “These girls have little to dream of except the day they are old enough to marry and have babies. In reality, what 13-14 year old does not think of these things, yet for these girls it is their only reality.
“God has given me a vision to meet these girls where they are and give them something more to dream of. My prayer is that God would speak to your heart to join in helping us build a girls school.”
She says the school, which will be about double the size of the small building behind the Saddle Factory where the photographs are displayed, can be constructed for about $25,000. She hopes that construction will begin when she returns to Egypt in the early fall.
Most marriages in Egyptian villages are arranged, and many girls are already mothers by the time they are 14. The two women shown holding young children in the lower right photo of the attached flier announcing the exhibit are 14 years old.
Flowers tells of a 10-year-old girl recently saying she can’t wait until she is 12 when she will marry her cousin and “he will put a baby in my belly.” Flowers says, “I realized at that point that she has been programmed for this all her young life. God has given me a dream to use the groundwork He has already put into place in the form of the Baby Care Program, to take it one step further and give these young girls a different life. Yes motherhood is important, but maybe, just maybe, waiting a few years could prevent the agony of lost babies, and the ignorance of not knowing how to care for a child.”
Many people in the village, even some men, are enthusiastic about Flowers’ plans for the school. The classes will be very informal, using the older young moms to teach the baby care, sewing and other life skills that will teach a sense of self-worth. “I hope to include a literacy class, both for the children and any of the adults that want to learn to read and write,” Flowers says.
After the school gets going, Flowers plans to spend one week there each month, teaching others how to teach skills to younger girls. “Many of them don’t even know how to give their baby a good bath. That’s a skill we can teach them, and children will be healthier as a result,” she says.
Not only would Logan Countians be contributing to a most worthy cause by buying some of the enlarged photographs this weekend, but they are top quality. Her photos vividly depict Egyptians from wrinkled older people to babies, wild animals that can’t be found running free in most areas, and scenes from Egyptian ‘football,’ which Americans know as soccer. She is the official photographer for one top Egyptian team.
One set of photos for sale here shows scenes in Russellville and Logan County which she shot while she was visiting Russellville in 2010. The article which The LoJo carried about her then can be read at http://www.theloganjournal.com/Stories.aspx?Article=features13 .
A ribbon cutting for the exhibit will be held Friday, July 5 at 10:30 a.m. at the Saddle Factory. The exhibit/sale will continue the remainder of the day Friday and all day Saturday. To see a sample of photographs by Karen Flowers, click on
https://www.facebook.com/karen.flowers.779?ref=ts&fref=ts#!/SandshutterPhotography?fref=ts