[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
images: Katie Chandler, and Katie’s photo courtesy Katelyn Coffman”][/title]
In Newhope, Arkansas, there are approximately 100 residents, including an eleven-year-old girl named Katie Chandler. There is one store inside the town’s boundaries. There are six chicken houses on the piece of land where Katie lives. There are three horses in the pasture. There is one dog that barks a lot, and one creek that winds its way into the woods.
Inside her house, Katie learns all she can about the world from her mom, Amanda, who homeschools both Katie and her younger sister. But there are some things you can’t learn inside the walls of your own home. There are things you need to see for yourself, up close, and stories you need to hear. Every year, Amanda searches for one big project that will help Katie grow both as a student and as a person. Last year, Katie raised one thousand dollars for “Jesus Wells,” an organization that uses the donations to install wells in places where clean water is scarce. Katie’s money went to India, and during the entire year she studied the poverty stricken South Asia country.
This summer, Amanda was on Facebook looking at the “Humans of New York” page, which has over ten million followers, and posts photos and quick bios of people in that city. She searched and found there was no such page for Arkansas, and the wheels started turning. Katie, who wants to be a photographer when she grows up, had a Canon Rebel camera she got for her ninth birthday. She was also a little shy, and Amanda thought that if she had to interview people, her timidity might go away.
In July of this year, she and Katie set up “Humans of Arkansas” on Facebook. Since then, they’ve found a family with a pet deer, a girl who once broke her arm on a hay bale, a woman who turned an abandoned school gym into her pottery studio, and a man who ran track in high school against opponents who went on to play pro football.
And while some of her posts make you smile, many will cause you to stop and consider what a fortunate life you have. One of the first people she interviewed was a cowboy on horseback, riding for the Semper Fi Fund. The post is gripping. In it he told Katie, “After completing two tours of duty in Iraq, and after spending all night sitting at a table with a gun, I almost became one of the twenty-two veterans per day who commit suicide. Instead, I decided to ride two mustangs across the United States to raise money for wounded veterans.”
It is amazing that people will tell Katie the kinds of things they do. They seem unafraid to open their hearts. Amanda, who’s always with her, thinks it’s because Katie’s intentions are so transparent, and that she’s just a little girl working on a school project. “If it was a man, six-foot-seven with a cowboy hat on, asking questions, they might not open up as much,” Amanda says.
In the beginning, approaching people was hard. “Not too long ago I was super shy, and wouldn’t talk to people,” Katie says. “If they asked me a question, I’d just nod my head. Here lately, since I have to walk up to people, I’ll ask them if I can take their picture, and I’ll tell them what it’s for. Some people are different, they’ll flat-out say no. But I think the rejection’s good, because you have to learn rejection in life.”
One of the keys to Katie’s success is that she intuitively knows how to interview people. She watches them before she approaches. If they’re smiling and make eye contact, they’ll probably be receptive. “I’ll ask them what’s interesting about themselves, what they’ve overcome,” Katie says. “If it’s an older person, I’ll ask them what’s sentimental to them. If they came from a different country to Arkansas, I’ll ask them why they had to move. And that gets emotional, because sometimes something sad happened in their country.”
Sadness, as we all know, knows no boundaries. On this day, Katie is about to post the story of a woman who lost her five-year-old son to drowning. “I asked her to share something about herself and she told about that, and about her brother getting killed.”
Since launching the page, thousands of people have taken notice. Katie says a national award winning photographer, who works out of Little Rock, has offered to coach her. Lately, people have been sending her messages, wanting her to interview them.
Katie doesn’t seem to grasp what a grand thing she’s doing. It’s not easy to interview, take great photos, record the session, then go home and transcribe what was said. There is such honesty and beauty in what she does. There are love stories of the long-married, harrowing tales of drug use and recovery, examples of how extraordinary every life truly is.
While she tackles some tough subjects for a girl of eleven – there is a story of meth use on the “Humans of Arkansas” page – there is also a consistent thread in the stories. Every one of them ends in redemption. The woman who lost her legs in a drunk driving accident is now a public speaker. The woman whose son drowned is raising money for awareness. And the woman who was a meth user conquered her addiction and fled an abusive relationship.
One of the sweetest posts is from September 14. Mr. Marvin Hill stands in front of his pickup with his cowboy hat on, holding a black-and-white photo of himself and his wife from years before. He’s a sharp dresser, and an avid hunter. On December 27, he’ll turn 100. He offered this advice. “Be good, don’t do nothing wrong. Mind your parents, and prolong your days on earth. Don’t take foolish chances. Just drive a little bit over the speed limit. Don’t do like I do and drive ninety miles per hour. I bought a 1941 Ford in 1941 and gave $800 for it. My new truck cost $37,000. I really like it. It is as handy as a pocket on a shirt… I never saw a car until I was five-and-a-half years old.”
It is in these snippets from other Arkansans that we start to feel the connection to every generation. As for Katie, she has no plans to stop “Humans of Arkansas” once this school year is up. She takes her camera everywhere, even on trips with her mom to the grocery store. Her goal now is to travel the state, taking photos and asking people to open up about their lives.
Already, she’s planned a trip to Kingsland, where Johnny Cash’s boyhood home stands. She’s getting ready to travel to the Fayetteville area for the wedding of Jessa Duggar (from the TLC show 19 and Counting) to Ben Seewald, who’s a family friend of Katie’s. And she’s trying to set up an interview in Camden with a woman who’s 115 years old, the oldest woman in the United States, Katie believes.
Amanda says this project is helping Katie soar as a student. “We’re in learning mode all the time. We’re free-range learners. We’re not like a cow that’s in a pen. We’re that free-range cow out in Wyoming. The world is her classroom.”
Right now, that world consists of visits to Texarkana and Mena and Hot Springs and Little Rock to find people to showcase. Katie loves every trip, every introduction that leads her to another revelation. What she believes is that most of us are just waiting to share what we’ve learned, what we’ve overcome, what we love. All we need is for someone to ask.
You can find “Humans of Arkansas” on Facebook.
