|
| Rial with her diploma Photo: Rick Fatica |
"Taking a chance and risking everything for your family's safety is pretty amazing. We don't know what that's like here."
Rial, BFA '98, a photographer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and new Ohio University graduate, knows what's it like. She spent three weeks in late 1997 chronicling Rwandan and Burundian refugees' lives on the run to Tanzania in central Africa. Her diary accompanied 45 photographs in a special Post-Gazett e section titled "Trek of Tears" that was published in late January. In April, Rial received her award: the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography.
|
| Brothers wait for a meal of roasted corn at the Mugunzu border station in northern Tanzania Photos: Martha Rial/Pittsburgh Post -Gazette |
Rial survived food poisoning and a 104-degree fever in Rwanda to experience one of her best shooting days at an orphanage on th e last day of her trip. On her way to Benaco, one of the world's largest refugee camps (with 500,000 people) on the Rwanda-Tanzania border, Rial was stopped by Tanzanian soldiers accompanied by tanks.
"The fact I was in a relief agency car was the only reason I got past the tanks that day and was able to make my photographs," she says.
|
<
/tr>
| A column of Hutu refugees escape from Burundi into Tanzania with cooking pots, food and a few chickens. |
"Many of the refugees, especially the women, have no concept of a world beyond their own," Rial says. "They're just trying to survive from day to day. And when we went to the border (of Burundi and Tanzania) to be with my sister, we were the first white people many of the children had ever seen.
<
a href="../jpegs/raped.jpg">
|
| A Burundian Hutu woman, 40, pulls aside her clothing to reveal the scars left after she was raped and stabbed by Tutsi soldiers. Her husband was abducted and killed and their home set on fire with their six children inside. Five died. |
April was a good month for Rial. Besides the life-altering news about winning the Pulitzer, Rial received her undergraduate degree in visual communication nine years after she first enrolled at Ohio University. A graduate of the two-year Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Rial studi ed in OU's visual communication program from fall quarter 1988 through spring 1991 before she left school to pursue a newspaper internship and career.
When she departed Ohio University, Rial and her visual communication advisers believed she was one class short of graduating a required junior-level English composition class. As it turns out, two English classes she completed at the art institute and a Pittsburgh community college gave her the required number of English composition courses, says OU Registrar Bill Jones. The university this spring waived the requirement that one of them be taken during her junior year.
 |
| One of Niyosaba's daily chores involves balancing a five-gallon jug of water on her head. |
Rial is the second Ohio University graduate to win a Pulitzer in photography in the 1990s. John Kaplan, BSJ '82, won the Pulitzer in feature photography in 1992 while working for Block Newspapers, which includes the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Kaplan has completed classwork for a master's degree in visual communication from Ohio University.
Rial's photographic journey to central Africa also won her the first Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award for photojournalism in February. Now, she's back in Pittsburgh, shooting neighborhood events and crime scenes and enjoying celebrity status.
"People have been very genuine in their praise and wonderful in congratulating me people I don't even know," she says. "Suddenly, I'm the center of attention and I'm stopped on the street. It makes you feel as though you r work is worthwhile. People care about what we do. They respect what we do."
--Bill Estep
