These women were members of an extended family that lived on the streets near our house, where the family cooked, ate, slept, and sold trinkets from their makeshift home. Editor’s note: Sydney Kornegay was one of the first Cub Reporters for The Columbia Star while she was a student at A.C. Flora High School where she graduated in 2007. She was awarded Davidson College’s top merit scholarship. The John Montgomery Belk scholarship is one of the most prestigious undergraduate scholarships in the country and is valued at $170,000 over four years including summer stipends for travel and study. It recognizes academic prowess, integrity, passion for life and records of distinction in myriad areas of school and community life.

“Take pictures of people, not places,” my uncle advised me the night before I left for India.

I should have listened.

The problem was, once in Jaipur, I found that places were a lot easier to photograph than people.

Walking through the city was like being dropped into Oz; it was a place so colorful and lively that the rest of the world seemed black and white by comparison.

There were the Jaipur’s famous peach–colored palaces and forts that earned it the nickname, The Pink City, and lively bazaars full of bright colored clothing and fresh vegetables. There was the white Birla Mandir temple that glowed red at sunset, and the refreshing green trails of Central Park.

Thus, at first, the places and buildings of Jaipur made it easy to view the “Pink City” through rose–colored lenses. As the weeks wore on, however, I found that I was having to do more and more cropping in order to form the ideal image of India, focusing my photos — and my experiences — just right, so as to avoid looking at the not–so–photogenic pic- tures around me. That meant ignoring the beggars, for instance, and the children who would latch onto my legs and cry “Hungry, Hungry.” I had to avoid the teenaged guys, who would give my friends and I catcalls as we walked down the road. I had to dodge the homeless family on my street, to keep my eyes down and avoid their stares at my strange skin color.

Ignore. Avoid. Isolate. Those were my unconscious mottos. And I wondered why, after the first few weeks of living in India, I still felt like a tourist, simply sightseeing while staying disconnected from the people around me.

One day I finally got tired of the constant evasion of people. I was outside a temple with one of my classes, and, as usual, a group of beggars had formed around us, asking us for money. At the time, all I had with me was a notebook, so I ripped out a piece of paper, and folded it into a paper airplane.

Every Wednesday on market day, the three children, above and at left, would beg from shoppers and worshippers outside the nearby temple. In one toss, the atmosphere around us completely changed. Intrigued by the plane and the fact that we were actually interacting with them, the kids stopped asking and started laughing. We took photos, passing the camera around after every snapshot. We exchanged names. The vendors stopped shouting at us to buy their goods and asked to have their pictures taken. For a few minutes, we were able to shed our image as a money symbol, stop viewing the kids as an annoyance, and just interact as human beings.

It was a simple interaction, but one that turned out to be a breakthrough for me. It was, first of all, an inroad into getting to know the kids on the streets, and to interacting with their families. Instead of ignoring them on our walks to school, we stopped and talked, eventually getting to know them by name, teaching them a few English words, and learning Hindi.

It also made me realize that, despite my efforts at “Indian immersion,” through learning the language, wearing the clothing, and living with an Indian family — I was really only dipping my toe into the community. And while, yes, this woman may be incredibly well–dressed and well–fed to be claiming she was hungry, and yes, this child may be part of a scam, that didn’t give me license to ignore them all together. I could, at the least, stop and talk, acknowledge them, or make a paper airplane.