jake lyell photography (blog)

Election day in Uganda passed peacefully for the most part, with only a few scattered incidents of reported violence. This does not come as a surprise, however. The announcement of the presidential winner, due no later than Sunday evening, is what will draw the most reaction from the streets.

Peaceful does not mean that the vote was without irregularities, however. As opposition leader Dr. Kizza Besigye stated in a press conference today, “it is already very clear that there have been widespread malpractices in the electoral process.” I witnessed not only voters providing names that clearly did not match the picture provided on the voting register, but also the coaching of voters in the polling queue by party officials or their hired hands. Below, poll workers and local officials in the town of Mbale argue over apparent typographical errors on the register.

One colleague of mine reported and photographed the blatant handing out of cash in exchange for votes. Below, police arrest Jackie Nabulu, the campaign manager of MP candidate Dr. James Mtende, in the town of Mbale. Ms. Nabulu was accused of improper interference at the polls.

Of greater issue was that many voters’ names were absent from the register despite having confirmed their status as a registered voters and having received voters’ cards. After Patrick Achou went to the polling station where he voted in the town of Soroti during the 2006 election, he was shocked to find his name missing from the register. He was then directed to several other different polling stations in town but was never able to vote. “Last election I voted very well. I feel very bad, I wanted to vote for my candidate,” says Mr Achou, shown below. I witnessed at least a dozen other such incidents where voters, even with valid voter’s cards, were turned away at the polls because their names were missing.

The local media has reported this as a widespread problem, especially in the eastern part of the country, where these images come from. The east, especially the town of Mbale, happens to be an opposition stronghold. Below, Mr. Elamu Michael (26) casts his vote for Dr. Besigye in rural Soroti district. He wore a Barack Obama shirt to the polls in the spirit of ushering in fresh leadership: “I want change. We have seen big problems here,” he says.

Many voters in the east echoed Dr. Besigye’s call for change. After casting her ballot for one of the seven presidential candidates running against incumbent Yoweri Museveni, the voter shown below, who wished to remain anonymous, remarked, “We’d like to see what the difference looks like.”

Even if protests do erupt on the streets following the announcement of results, it’s difficult to envision the weeks of Middle-East style resistance occurring in Uganda that Dr. Besigye is calling for. Ugandans are generally more complacent when it comes to government. Whatever the official tally of the vote, I genuinely feel that Mr. Museveni, whose massive campaign fund faced a divided opposition, has the support of the majority of the population. Below, poll workers count votes the old-fashioned way at the close of the polls in Mbale.

I honestly thought she would make it. I’m not even sure I would have started this story if I knew she wouldn’t have. Wednesday after midnight I got a call from Sarah. “Mtoto yangu amekufa,” she repeated over and over again on the phone hysterically, “My child has died.”

I went immediately to the hospital where I was the only one there to mourn with Sarah. Several times I almost pulled my camera out of my bag to start shooting but it just wasn’t the time. As the sun came up, I rode in a taxi with Sarah to the village of Abia, where she returned with Grace’s body to bury her along side her late husband. Here, friends of her late husband mourn with her. Grace was the last surviving member of her father’s family, all of whom fell victim either to the AIDS virus or to LRA invasion four years ago.

One of these days I am going to have to get a car, but I’ll hold out for as long as I can. I came to East Africa in part seeking a simpler lifestyle. I enjoy chatting with people around me and getting to know the culture in-depth. I watch in fascination as the preachers and hawkers board at one town, shout and sell to their captive audience and disembark at the next. Getting across the country is cheap and my clients appreciate the transit fees on the final invoice. But bumping around on buses is starting to wear on me. Above, a busy Kampala street as seen from the window of the Teso Coach to Soroti.

The last month has seen me traveling from the shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania to the remote and mountainous Uganda-Sudan border and various places in between, much of the way spent with my camera hanging out the window. Above, pedestrians on the streets of Lira, Uganda. Below, after months of arduous journey, I reach the source of the Nile.


Toward the end of June I was in Bukoba, Tanzania, on the western (and least accessible) side of Lake Victoria. There I did photo and video work for Computers 4 Africa. C4A takes second-hand PCs and ships them to a school, hospital or institution in Africa that can make use of the machine you thought was out of date. It’s an excellent concept and needs to implemented en masse in order to both create jobs and improve productivity on the continent. Above and below, students from Rugambwa Girls’ Secondary School are recipients of computers from C4A.

Take a moment to experience the hub-bub of the bus park in Mbale, eastern Uganda:

Let’s hope no one’s waiting on this bus for their next paycheck.

Above, open-air passenger lorry in Karamoja. Below, motorcycle taxis, or boda bodas, in Lira.


In Uganda the landscape changes quickly from plains to mountains to bustling towns within a span of a few dozen kilometers. For the northern leg to Kidepo National Park I had to hire a 4 wheel drive, as roads tend to resemble craters more than anything else.

I know I’m not breaking any new ground in wildlife photography, but I am starting to pay more attention to the fauna around me. Stock photo sales, of course, contribute to my motivation. Above, Vervet monkeys in Entebbe, Uganda.

It’s important to travel with in convoy or with armed escort in the Karamoja region of NE Uganda. Though bands of armed cattle raiders are more under control than in the past, they’re still operating. Karamoja is the least developed area of Uganda, and one which I plan on exploring more thoroughly in the future.



Weighing up to 900kg (2000 pounds), the Cape Buffalo is reported to kill the most people in Africa each year, though the hippopotamus is a close rival for this accolade. They travel in massive herds and are able to defend themselves against predator attacks, sometimes even killing lions. On the other hand, giraffes eat leaves and really don’t have to worry about much.

Lastly, a rain storm looms on the horizon. I was caught in this same deluge five minutes later- lucky for that waterproof camera bag.

It’s a great time to be in Cairo. During my five days here the city has constantly been alive with energy at all hours. On Saturday night Egypt’s Pharaohs won a crucial victory over its bitter rival Algeria. However the winning margin (2-0) was not enough to qualify outright for the World Cup, so the two must face off again in Sudan on Wednesday. Tensions between the two teams are so intense that four members of the Algerian team were injured when their bus was stoned upon entering Cairo on Friday.

Most of Cairo’s 20 million residents were huddled around TV screens set up on the city’s sidewalks on Saturday night. Some clamored on car tops or telephone polls to catch a view of the match, returning down to the street to revel during commercial breaks.

Once the win was secure the droves crawled from the sidewalks to the city squares, ultimately converging into one major shebang in the Midan Tahrir, Cairo’s central plaza. The hoopla lasted well into the morning hours. Unlike the welcome given to the Algerian team, most of the celebration was peaceful and fairly non-destructive, except for an unfortunate mannequin I saw ripped from a shop window and torn into pieces. However, we’ll see what happens on Wednesday after the final match. If Egypt looses, I’m not sure I want to be around for the aftermath.

Frank & Salome got married recently. While I photographed their wedding as well, I thought the images from the farewell were a bit more interesting. The farewell is when the bride formally says goodbye to her family and is embraced into that of the groom’s.

In this case, there was a lot more hoopla and fanfare here than at the wedding, which occurred two days later. The day showcased a melange of tribal customs; Salome is a Masai, Frank a Chagga. My favorite of these was the lavishly ornate, roasted goat, also known as “the cakie”. The event, which took place on the slopes of Mt. Meru, served as a reminder that while Africa is modernizing, its deep-seated traditions remain.

It’s become an annual tradition in my circle of friends. Although one year we deviated and fried a turkey instead, New Year’s day 2009 saw the third annual Pigroast in James & Jennifer’s back yard in Church Hill, the oldest part of Richmond.
Warning: some faint-hearted vegetarians may wish to avert their eyes.

James & Jennifer are currently missionaries in Scotland, but are renting out their house to Leah & Jeremiah, James’ sister and brother-in-law. Thus, the tradition was able to continue without interruption. Most of the day was spent hanging out in the back yard around the pig pit in eager anticipation of the advent of the barbecue later that evening.

Jeremiah put the pig on the fire around 6am New Year’s morning. During the 13 hog-roasting hours that ensued, plenty of tortilla chips with homemade salsa, as well as several rounds of keg-drawn Yuengling, were had by all.

A notable guest this year was first time attendee Jackson Catrow, who received almost as much attention as the pig that was carefully watched on the fire. Hopefully he wasn’t dispirited by all the poking and prodding and will want to continue the tradition for the next generation.

Parts of Haiti are under 16 feet of water this week. Over the past month the country has been inundated with heavy rains brought by four storms: Fay, Gustave, Hanna and Ike. Caribbean nations are often the first to bear the brunt of these powerful storms that form in the Atlantic.

Last December I photographed for ten days in Haiti. Most of the time was spent in the Northern port city of Gonaives, where these photos were taken. Today Gonaives is the scene of some of the most widespread devastation wrought by recent storms in this developing nation that sits just a stone’s throw away from the Florida coast.

Gonaives occupies a low plain between the bay to the west and the mountains to the north and east. Haiti is known for its extensive deforestation, and the mountains around this city are representatives of this trend. When rains come, the surrounding hills become quickly saturated, soon flooding the town below. A witness in Gonaives during the recent tropical storm Hanna described this scenario as a “river of mud” flowing off the hills and into the town.

Above, this is what Gonaives looks like on a good day: trash piled up around pools of standing water. Even when rains have long since passed, flooding is a problem in this city. Most of Gonaives has no organized trash collection, nor any structured drainage system. The water crested this week at 16 feet and has now gone down to about chest level.

This is a busy city of 300,000 to 500,000 depending on how much of the surrounding area one takes into account. If you can look past the garbage and sewage in the street, it has a bit of an old world charm. Most of the activity centers around the lively port and market which are in close proximity to one another.

Back in December I discovered that the Haitian government had commissioned a French private contractor to build drainage canals throughout the city in order to channel water from the hills outside town to the bay. These canals were begun, but very early in the process the funding disappeared and the project was never completed.

In addition to a terrible eye sore, these canals became a dumping ground for the city’s waste and a breeding pool for disease carrying mosquitoes. Now that these cesspools throughout the city have flooded, the humanitarian catastrophe will surely be compounded. For more on these canals see my post from last December.

It’s difficult to asses the full scale of the disaster in Haiti as flood waters have yet to fully recede and some areas still remain inaccessible. Higher estimates put the death toll in the 700s. Gonaives remains largely deserted as people continue to stay in shelters outside town. Those that remained were forced to stay on the rooftops of their houses in order to fend off looters.

Though the recent storms in Haiti have proved disastrous, the destruction they leave behind is still not on the scale of the worst hurricane in recent memory: Hurricane Jeanne. In 2004 Jeanne pounded Haiti’s northern mountains with rain before it came sweeping into Gonaives killing 2800 of the city’s residents.

After all this it is clear that Gonaives’ finest asset is its people. They are patient, tenacious, and most of all, resilient. In this the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, most have no choice but to return to town and attempt to rebuild lives with whatever the storms capriciously left intact.

Rusty ghost ships linger in the city’s harbor, left over from the days of François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude, who ruled the country from 1957 to 1986. Despite it being common knowledge that these presidents looted tens of millions of dollars from Haiti’s coffers, there is a longing for the return of the old leadership. The New York Times recently reported growing frustration by Haiti’s poorest who have seen security lapse, food grow scarce and garbage pile up in their streets. Life was more stable under the rule of harsh dictators. Reforms introduced by current president Rene Préval have been slow to take effect.

The national government has such little power here, it cannot coordinate disaster preparedness or response in such emergency situations as were experienced in the past month. It is forced to rely on humanitarian efforts of the UN and other NGOs for relief efforts. Such is life in a fledgling democracy that seems to take more orders from the wind and the rain than from the people themselves.

CARE is contributing to the relief effort in Gonaives.
Words & Images Copyright 2008 Jake Lyell Photography

Not exactly an assignment, but still mostly a working week, I’ve recently been in Ireland. The occasion: my friends Ryan and Aoife gathered the closest of their friends and family from throughout the world for a week-long convergence in County Wicklow, just south of Dublin. At the end of the week the two bonded in holy matrimony on a hillside near the town of Blessington.
Though we’ve known each other for about 15 years, Ryan and I became good friends when he returned to Richmond a couple years ago after living in Chicago, Italy and Ireland, respectively. A talented web and graphic designer, we’ve collaborated on a few projects as well. He is the architect of this blog and my forthcoming website. Both of us well traveled, we share a love of other cultures and ways of life. Shown above on the windy moors, Ryan holds on for dear life.

Aoife, from Dublin, was studying abroad in Chicago when she and Ryan met. She then studied in Italy and Ryan went with her. Along the way, the pair (shown above) have made friends everywhere they’ve gone, many of whom came to the wedding in Ireland, where at least seven nationalities were represented.

This is the first year that I have begun to take my camera everywhere I go. Not just when I’m in a foreign country but to a party, or movie, or even the grocery store. In many ways, I think it’s changed the way I look at things. For one, I now feel that I’m always on assignment, that I’m always charged with the task of taking interesting photographs, whether or not someone has commissioned them.

As a photographer who seldom takes a photograph that doesn’t include a human being, I concentrated more on the people of Ireland and their environments than on it’s beautifully green landscapes. Here I was able to gain more confidence in approaching subjects to ask if they’ll allow me to photograph them, and seldom was I turned down. Carrying my camera with me at all times forced me to be so bold, lest I return to the hotel empty-handed. Above, a retired man outside his tenement building north of the River Liffey. Below, school kids take the bus from Dublin to Blessington. “Are you some sort of famous photographer?” the girl asks. “Not yet,” I jokingly reply.

To call me a devoted U2 fan would be an understatement. Though we stayed out in the countryside, I made several day trips into the band’s hometown of Dublin, keeping my eyes peeled the entire time for U2 landmarks and even once sipping a pint of Guiness in a bar owned and frequented by Bono and The Edge. U2′s Dublin was a Mecca of sorts to me. Never am I so berated for the love of a band than among my own circle of friends in the US, who constantly poke fun at Bono to annoy me. It was great to be amongst allies.

Though this is the first time I’ve visited, it is apparent that today’s Dublin is not the same city of the 80s and 90s. Although in some sectors it has not lost its working class and industrial flavor, Dublin is in many ways a posh and metropolitan European capital. It is clearly undergoing an identity crisis. Despite being Europe’s fastest growing economy and a top destination for immigrants from Eastern Europe, voters recently rejected the Lisbon Treaty, a European Union constitution-of-sorts that streamlined EU integration and further centralized power in Brussels.

Ireland is dotted with ancient and medieval sites. On a day trip I visited Glendalough along with Bill, Jeremy (fellow Richmonders) and Andreas of Germany. The site of an ancient Christian monastery, it was founded around 600AD and today contains ruins of churches, towers and countless headstones. Above, Bill strolls through the graveyard at Glendalough.

Never without a song when there’s a pint in your hand, the week was peppered with Johnny Cash, Guns N Roses and U2 singalongs. These groups seemed to elicit consternation on both sides of the Atlantic, but became the glue that bound our various cultures together.

At the end of the week, a dapper Ryan (above with the best man, Barry) wore less conventional attire for the wedding, even riding into the ceremony on his future father-in-law’s bicycle.

Above, Aoife walks to the altar with her father. She and Ryan were married in a stone enclosure on a country hillside, where friends and family encircled them. The guests then used bits of rope to tie an unbreakable knot around the enclosure, recalling Ryan’s years of training to be an Eagle Scout.

Every step of the wedding was planned by Ryan and Aoife, and it remained true to form for the couple. Shunning tradition and employing symbolism, Ryan even baked the wedding cake (although with some last minute help from his mother).

I’ve shot a fair amount of weddings in the past. I’ve approached them as any other cultural event that I document -as a story to be told. Lately, however, my schedule has been so packed with overseas assignments that booking a wedding has become logistically impossible (I’m writing this entry from an internet cafe in Ecuador).


Ryan now lives in Europe. I hope that during my travels I’ll still be able to visit him and Aoife from time to time. The fact that so many of their loved ones traveled thousands of miles to be at the wedding in Ireland is a testament to the kind of steadfast and upstanding friends that they are.

Good times ahead.