Natasha Collins

Summer 2008

Nicaragua

GIIP fellow Natasha Collins had a busy summer working with domestic violence programs . Over the course of her internship, she completed a video documentary about domestic violence against women. Working directly with the grassroots organization María Elena Cuadra (MEC), Natasha’s work consisted of interviewing experts, including doctors, judges and journalists, as well as running mini-workshops for women to share their testimonies, knowledge and experiences. At the end, she and Ana Flores, the head psychologist for MEC, headed “chats” about domestic violence and presented the completed video.

The project required both hard work and flexibility on Natasha’s part.  She was able to interview doctors, journalists, and judges, but far more important to her were the first-hand testimonies of women from MEC. “Building solid trust-based relationships, I was fortunate enough to videotape these testimonies,” she says. “I’d  planned to put the interviews with doctors and journalists with them, but found that women were most responsive when listening to women tell their stories, especially when it was someone they knew, so I restructured the video to focus on them.”  It was that flexibility that made her project so relevant and interesting to the women of MEC.