Philadelphia Inquirer - Image Section May 1st, 2005 By Melissa Dribben, Staff Writer Joan-Sara Klatchko's mission is to teach children that America is not a world unto itself. That children living in the rain forests of Borneo or desert caves in Australia or quaint villages in France have many of the same dreams, fears and chores as kids in America. That they have a lot in common, and yet, in some ways, nothing at all. "I believe a lot of problems come from not understanding other cultures," says Klatchko, a photojournalist who grew up in Levittown. "If someone is alien or foreign, it makes it easy to mock them. To make them enemies." Self-taught and intrepid, she has spent the last decade documenting what life is like on nearly every continent - in countries rich and poor, near and far, familiar and exotic. In March, Klatchko returned from a month long trip to Uganda, where she was working on stories about AIDs orphans and child soldiers.   Within 36 hours of landing back in Philadelphia, before she had time to recover from jet lag, she was telling her stories and showing her images to about 100 students at Tredyffrin Middle School on the Main Line.
	Top photograph by Ron Tarver All other photographs by Joan Sara Klatchko

	Photographs by Joan S. Klatchko

Her hope is that understanding will breed compassion and that compassion will lead to peace.

She has a knack for sparking kids' natural curiosity.

She clicked the projector's remote control, and on the screen appeared a photograph of Charleen, an Australian girl, with her little sister, standing in a body of water.

"Charleen and her sister could be in big trouble," Klatchko said.
She asked the audience to consider what danger loomed, then advanced the next few images,  offering possibilities.
Flash: cavorting dolphins.
Flash: a camel drinking a beer.
Flash: an emu.
The children laughed.
"That emu almost killed me," Klatchko said, telling how she was caught in an enclosed pen with the bird. "It was coming toward me and I thought, great shot! But emus will kill anything in their pen that is smaller than they are." Her guide swooped her out of the way just in time.

Klatchko clicked her remote again. Echidna. Boxing kangaroos. Then she asked again: What could the dire threat be?
"Jellyfish!" the kids yelled.
"Poisonous sponge!"
"Good guesses," she said, then projected a close-up of a crocodile, so vivid you could see the hungry glint in its amber eyes.

"The thing about photographs is that there's always information in the details," Klatchko said. "How do you know this crocodile is not in a museum?"

Silence. Then a student called out, "There's a drop of water on its tooth!"
Klatchko was thrilled. It was just the kind of careful observation she tries to cultivate.


Her own worldview was shaped by her father, who was born in England and raised in Vienna by Russian parents. "He spoke five languages," she says. "He would take me to see opera in New York.

By her 20s, life in Levittown had become stifling, so in August 1977 she decided to take a trip to Spain.
"I had no idea what I was going to do," she says. She landed in Barcelona with two years of community college under her belt, two heavy suitcases, and a thin command of Spanish.

Klatchko, 48, has the kind of gutsy charm that serves as a hovercraft over choppy waters. She also has a poker player's ability to bluff, which is how she talked her way into a job teaching English to business executives.

"During the interview, I discovered that they were only hiring college graduates, so I said I went to Penn State and the guy said, "Hey! I went there!"
Then he started asking questions about her major, dorms and professors.
"I changed the subject. I said let's not talk about America. Let’s talk about Spain instead!”
She spent two years in that job and then set out again. Over the next 20 years, she worked and traveled, married an English writer and then divorced, fell in and out of love a few more times, learned to debone pigeons in a  Cordon Bleu cooking class in London,  cycled around New Zealand lived on a kibbutz in Israel, designed ads for a British tourist agency, produced television documentaries in Argentina, and became a magazine photographer based in Hong Kong.

This last job normally requires some formal training. Klatchko had taught herself how to use the old single-lens reflex her dad had given her and could handle the basics well enough, but she realized she needed help with lighting.

"So I offered to carry equipment for some photographers for four days so I could watch what they did." And that was enough. "It's not that hard. It's all mathematics," she shrugs. "I practiced in my living room."

As she honed her skills, Klatchko's photographs began appearing in dozens of publications including Time magazine, The Observer in the UK, Marie Claire and The Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday Magazine.

In 1998, she came home for what she thought would be a brief stay. She was content with her expatriate life, she says, and had no intention of moving back to the United States permanently.

But during the visit, her mother died and her father had a hip replacement. Klatchko stayed on for a few months to help her family. She began to examine her own backyard, and those months became years.

"I had always wanted to leave Levittown, but my whole view changed. I saw that it is a microcosm of America.  After taking the pictures, I would interview people and ask, 'What is your dream?' It was very powerful. I realized that these were people in the middle. Ordinary people. Not rich. Not poor. And I wanted to capture that moment of drama in the ordinary."

The resulting work about Levittown has been exhibited at the Michener Museum in Bucks County, was published in magazines around the world, and is being made into a book.

Between trips, Klatchko divides her time between Bucks County and the Jersey Shore. During her recent visit to Tredyffrin, she gave her standard presentation called "Kids Across the World," illuminating children's resourcefulness, challenging their assumptions of what it's like to live in poor countries, and showing the effects of war.

She told of a Muslim girl from Malaysia whose 50-cent kite flew much better than her fancy one.
A boy who lived in what looked like a primitive village in the rainforest of Borneo, but who had televisions, videos and stereos in his house on stilts.

A Cambodian musician who used to play for royalty, was sent to a work camp under the dictator Pol Pot, survived, and now teaches in an orphanage.

She showed pictures of the circumscribed play area. "They needed five acres to build the orphanage," she said. "When they cleared the land, they found 500 land mines."

In addition to the cultural anthropology, Klatchko taught about insects and plants. She also brought a display of toys that children had made out of plastic jugs, oil cans, coat hangers, and shoe polish tins.

Her trips grow out of serendipitous meetings with people. The most recent came about after she became acquainted with Lori DiGuardi, whose daughters attend the Shipley School.

Klatchko was giving a presentation last fall at Shipley when DiGuardi told her about the Braintree School in Uganda, where DiGuardi is a director. DiGuardi has promoted a sister-school relationship between Braintree, a private school primarily for orphans, and Shipley.

DiGuardi invited Klatchko to visit the Ugandan school.
"We have a tendency in America to be isolated," DiGuardi said. "Joan's presentation opened the minds of parents and teachers as well as children."

And, for the children at Braintree, DiGuardi said, Klatchko's visit was equally important.
"They were so moved to know that somebody cared about them. That's what Joan does. She tells people about your life."
Other schools are similarly appreciative of Klatchko's efforts.
At Bala Cynwyd Middle School, assistant principal Margery Andersen praised Klatchko for her sensitive way of addressing difficult subjects such as poverty and land mines.

"She has a wealth of knowledge," Andersen said.
At Tredyffrin, the bell rang before Klatchko finished her presentation. The students didn't stir.
"What do all kids need?" she asked rhetorically. "All kids need to go to school, and they love to play. They need friends and protection from war and poverty and abuse of work." She quickened her pace, showing scenes from Belize, Morocco, Ecuador. "They need clean water and access to health care. They need a family to give them love. That is what you have in common with every kid in the world."

Then the lights went on.