Melanie Wasserman

Meanwhile, the Transylvania Community Arts Center is hosting "The Migration Transitions Project: Photonarratives with Latina Immigrant Women," an exhibition by Deborah Bender and Melanie Wasserman of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Public Health.
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To collect the information and perspectives for the exhibit, Bender and Wasserman visited Spanish-language churches in four counties in the Piedmont, where they invited Latina immigrants to serve as community photographers for the project.

"The Migration Transitions Project" is a photo narrative of Latina immigrants by Deborah Bender and Melanie Wasserman of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Public Health.

This tale comes from Melanie Wasserman (Niger 1994-96), who is now a doctoral student in health policy and administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, focusing on immigrant health.In the Peace Corps, Melanie worked as a nutritionist.It was in the village of Azerori where she first heard the tale of "The Calabash Princess."

“The Tuareg people told me this tale,” says Melanie Wasserman (Niger 1994–96), who worked as a nutritionist in the village of Azerori.
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Melanie Wasserman is now a doctoral student in health policy and administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, focusing on immigrant health.

The Migration Transitions Project: Photo-narratives with Latina Immigrant Women is an exhibit coordinated by Deborah Bender and Melanie Wasserman of UNC-School of Public Health.
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During the data collection stage of the project, Bender and Wasserman visited Spanish-language churches in four counties of Piedmont North Carolina.
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To be sure they had addressed the particular concerns of women, Bender and Wasserman also invited a sub-sample of Latina immigrant women to participate in the project as community photographers.
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In the conceptualization of the project, Bender and Wasserman were influenced by the work of documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, whose rendering of the lives of displaced women and their families during the Great Depression told a story more powerful than statistics alone could do.

The researchers -- professor Deborah Bender and doctoral student Melanie Wasserman -- wanted to study two things: how many non-immigrants Latina immigrants in the Triangle area knew and how those "bridge people" helped the newcomers adjust, particularly in terms of getting preventive health care.
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Wasserman wanted to study immigrants, in part, because two of her great grandmothers were from Italy and Russia.

The study found only half the woman knew non-immigrants and only about one in three had gotten support from agencies like El Centro Hispano in Durham or El Centro Latino in Carrboro, she said.Even when Latinas did know someone, it didn't necessarily help them get preventive health care.The people helping them needed to be trained or given access to information via Web sites and other means, she said.

But there are some things that no amount of training will take care of, one immigrant woman suggested in a photo she took of her three children and a niece at St. Thomas More Catholic Church.