Emily Troutman

Writer-photographer Emily Troutman is pictured with some of her photographs from her trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the background. (Baltimore Sun photo by Karl Merton Ferron / October 27, 2009

By Arthur Hirsch Baltimore Sun reporter

October 29, 2009

The United States' first and only United Nations Citizen Ambassador lives in an apartment above her father's garage in Catonsville with a couple of Persian cats, a few sticks of furniture, cameras and several computers. She doesn't have a car, so there's no way to know if the customary diplomatic parking privileges will apply, nor do lavish cocktail parties appear to be in the offing.


Still, Emily Troutman cannot help seeing her new status as an opportunity to take her international pursuits to another level, and that is apparently reward enough.

"I have the ear of the U.N.," said Troutman, one of five winners of the first and just-completed Citizen Ambassador video competition, and the only one in the United States.

For a few years now, Troutman - a graduate of Catonsville High School with a master's degree in public policy from the University of Minnesota - has been traveling, taking pictures and blogging about her experiences. She drew on that experience to create a three-minute video in response to a U.N. call for submissions last month that took the form of a question: If you could speak to world leaders, what would you say?

U.N. public information officer Einat Temkin said the contest builds on the partnership the organization established with YouTube a year ago in an effort to "engage young people with the work of the U.N."

Now posted on YouTube, Troutman's "letter" to global officialdom begins by emphasizing the human consequences of government action: "Every day, I want you to wake up and know that you work for 6.7 billion real people, one person at a time. People with children and dreams and stories."
Troutman appears in the video reading her message, her image alternating with pictures she took during about five weeks last spring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Years of civil war in the central African country of roughly 66 million people have taken a catastrophic toll: more than 5 million dead since 1998, mostly from disease and malnutrition, according to the International Rescue Committee, and 45,000 still dying every month. Tens of thousands of women and girls have been attacked as gang rape has become a "tool of war," the humanitarian organization CARE reported. The U.N. now has about 17,000 peacekeepers in the country as fighting between the government and rebels continues, driving more than a million people from their homes to escape the violence.

Troutman, a freelance writer, spent her time in North Kivu, a province in eastern Congo close to the Rwandan border, working out of a house in the city of Goma rented by a representative of a humanitarian organization. Conditions for a photographer were hardly ideal, as the country is not only dangerous, but she was told about an official prohibition against taking photographs.

Enforcement of the restriction is apparently selective, as Troutman - traveling only with representatives of the U.N. and humanitarian groups - was able to take some 3,000 pictures.

Two months ago she made a five-minute video, "Why Congo Matters." This month, when she saw the U.N. notice calling for three-minute presentations for the Citizen Ambassador competition, she got quickly to work. She wrote her message in a day, recorded it at the Washington School of Photography in Bethesda, where she'd been a student, and did the editing of the images on a computer in her apartment.

"I want us both to agree to say one true thing out loud every day," Troutman says in the video. "To remember one real person. To remind ourselves that our tragedies - yours and mine - are lived and felt one person at a time; just like our hope, our renewal, our future can also be lived and carried out into the world, one person at a time. You have a chance to be that person."

At 30, Troutman is the oldest of the five winners, who also include two men and two women from Canada, Mexico and Brazil. The five - whose videos were selected by a panel of six U.N. judges from 477 initial submissions - gathered at U.N. headquarters in New York last week to briefly meet Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and to attend the annual U.N. Day concert dedicated this year to the organization's 115,000 peacekeepers.

As the Citizen Ambassador is a new creation, Troutman said the role is still being figured out.

"They're hoping that we're going to be able to spread the message" of global citizenship through online media, she said, adding that she hopes her success in this contest will expand her opportunities to travel. In the meantime, she plans to head back to the Congo in December, dismissing concerns about safety.

"It's hard to go anywhere if you're afraid," she said.