jake lyell photography (blog)

The streets of Dar es Salaam are a parking lot on the average day. Now that the World Economic Forum has come to town, they’ve become more like long-term storage. I’m on photo and video assignment with PSI covering events surrounding the WEF but much of my time is spent sitting in traffic. This allows for plenty of opportunities for street photography provided one keeps the camera strap firmly tied around the arm. There’s no shortage of heads of state (or even royalty) in town. On Monday I sat across from a personal hero, Morgan Tsvangirai, in a city cafe.

After combing through all the poultry photographs I had taken in the past month, I thought a special blog entry was in order. I then pondered all the chicken puns I could make but second guessed incorporating most of them here, not wanting to derail any future potential writing assignments.

BRAC, with whom I recently spent an entire month in four different countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, is the only NGO on the continent with a poultry vaccination program. As seen here in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Uganda, BRAC trains women from local microfinance groups in animal husbandry, health issues, and vaccinations. Members of the community queue up on vaccination days with their poultry and livestock and are charged a small fee for the service.

The program provides jobs for those performing the vaccinations and increased income for the small farmers whose poultry is no longer susceptible to many of the pests and diseases that can kill livestock or affect production.

Recently I photographed for the first time as a still photographer on a film documentary. The dynamic was a bit different working alongside a film crew and not having the subjects to myself. Still, I feel was able to get some compelling images. The documentary is produced and directed by Christy Turlington Burns (below, right), who in recent years has made efforts to bring the issue of maternal health in the developing world into the spotlight. Entitled “No Woman, No Cry,” the film highlights the difficulties of bearing children in four different parts of the world. I was happy to be part of the crew here in Tanzania.

Some photos from this shoot also appeared in Marie Claire. I also contributed to another Marie Claire article on UNICEF education programs. You can read that here. Look for the release of “No Woman, No Cry” soon.

I’m currently photographing on a four country assignment with BRAC, an NGO based out of Bangladesh. While I wish I could go there too, I’ve just finished up a leg in Liberia and am heading to Tanzania tonight. I first became familiar with BRAC after spotting their program signs at almost every junction in Tanzania directing highway travelers to nearby projects. They gained more attention last year after an agricultural grant from the Gates Foundation, another organization for whom I regularly photograph. Above, a mangrove swamp on the Sierra Leone River in Port Loko.

BRAC works in the areas of microfinance (small loans to individuals), sustainable agriculture, and community health. They primarily work with women and girls in these areas, as women of all ages are more vulnerable in the developing world, more likely to support their families and, as you can see from a past blog entry, doing most of the work here anyway. According to the Gates Foundation, women do about 80% of farm work in the developing world and, of course, a higher percentage of house work.

BRAC started programs in 1972 in Bangladesh, where they are based. Their approach was eventually recognized by the NGO community and began to spread to places like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Sub-Saharan Africa with the help of organizations/people like the Gates Foundation and George Soros. In 2009 BRAC began programs in two West African countries, Sierra Leone and Liberia, countries that were beginning the recovery process after years of civil war. Below, Eva and Rebecca, twin sisters in Jinja, Uganda.

Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee has expanded dramatically since its founding and now offers international programs in rural and urban areas. Most of my time in West Africa was spent in cities of more than a million inhabitants. Below, a bombed out army barracks in central Monrovia, Liberia’s capital.
I have to admit, I was a skeptic of microfinance before coming on this job. I wasn’t sure that debt in any form, no matter how small, could be beneficial to the poor. I was of the mindset that people in poverty should be given the start up capital as grants, not loans. But if I have learned anything from my time here in Africa, it’s that people seldom appreciate what they are freely given. Below, a young woman receives her first loan in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

For instance, when the World Bank wants to improve sanitation in the community, they don’t begin installing new, improved toilets in all village households. History shows that the toilets provided in this way won’t be cared for or used. The best way to go about improving sanitation practices in such a village is to first train local masons with the proper way to build more sanitary, improved toilets and to provide them with the tools to do so. The next step is to employ a group of local people to educate their community about the benefits of having these new toilets installed in (or just outside) their homes. The group then acts as marketers for these toilets. When a member of the local community decides to invest in one of these new toilets, it is used and cared for properly because the villager’s hard-earned money has bought it. I photographed this very scenario in southern Tanzania last year.

The point is that people use, people value, that which they pay for. The same goes for monetary loans. When women take out a loan in order to begin a small business, they work hard and usually make their payments on time. In Annie Walker’s case (pictured above), she began selling smoked fish on the streets of Monrovia, but with BRAC’s assistance that gradually grew into occupying a regular stall at the local market. Now her customers come to her.

There are a number of organizations in the developing world that have microfinance programs. Some of them are no more than banks. BRAC is unique, however. Many of the borrowers also participate in agriculture or community health programs, which I’ll touch on in later posts. BRAC borrowers meet every week in Freetown, Sierra Leone, as shown above, to pay installments on their loan and to discuss challenges and successes. If a woman is having trouble repaying, BRAC wants to know why and tries to help the family through without penalties, if reasons for default are legitimate.

It was a bold but fruitful move for BRAC to establish programs outside the well-trodden areas of East Africa like Uganda and Tanzania. The dynamic is different in the war-torn areas of Sierra Leone and Liberia, where infrastructure is either poor or non-existent. Above all, capital is being injected into some of Africa’s poorest areas, and women and their families are being empowered as a result.

I’m the farthest west I’ve ever been in Africa. I arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city, tonight, which proved no small feat. I waited pretty much all day to fly in from neighboring Liberia – planes around here take off when they want to, without a scheduled departure time. Freetown’s airport lies across a river (with no bridge – ferry is the only means of transportation) and two hours of snarling traffic through the downtown area to the nearest decent hotel. Hence, I had time for some visuals. One observation I’ve made is the similarity between Freetown and Haiti’s Port-au-Prince and Gonaives, with the rolling hills of the teeming cities’ leading down to the waterside and old wreckers lodged aground in the harbor. But unlike pre-quake Port-Au- Prince or Gonaives with buildings old and decrepit for lack of funds for repairs, the buildings here have been bombed or burned out during the 11 year civil war that ended in 2001. I’m here shooting for BRAC. I was in Uganda last week on a similar job, but I’m still working on those photos.

It’s not really what you think of as Africa, but neither is it the Middle East. The island of Zanzibar, otherwise known as Unguja, is in part its own entity, and the center of Swahili culture in East Africa. In an area of the world where political unrest is not uncommon, it’s a wonder Zanzibar has been in union with the Tanzanian mainland for as long as it has.

The Sultanate of Zanzibar, an archipelago nation off the Indian Ocean Coast of East Africa, merged with the East African nation of Tanganyika in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanzania, a hybrid name reflecting both countries. Earlier that year Zanzibar, a newly independent state itself, experienced a revolution in which over 12,000 ethnic Arabs and Indians on the island were massacred overnight. In the wake of the revolution most of Zanzibar’s wealthy and educated fled the country never to return. Its president, facing a potential coup by extremists and a devastated economy, had little choice but to join forces with the mainland country of Tanganyika.

Culturally, Zanzibar is almost quite literally oceans apart from its mainland counterpart. The population today is overwhelmingly unhappy with what they see as the destruction of their conservative Islamic culture brought on by relaxed travel rules between the island and the mainland and their limited autonomy as part of the union government. However, each cycle of elections, the results of which are usually disputed by international observers, sees victory for CCM, the party favoring closer ties to the mainland. The union government has survived to this day, but the marriage has never been happy.

These photos were taken over a four-day period while practicing my Swahili in Stonetown, known as Mji Mkongwe to speakers of the language. I intended to get out of Stonetown and photograph a bit more of the island, but the myriad of winding alleyways, hidden rooms and endless cups of fresh coffee brewed over open coals on the street were enough to keep me wandering around in town for more than a week.

While the numbers have yet to be determined, the prognosis is not good in Haiti. When I heard of a possibly catastrophic quake last night, my heart sank. Then came the email from my contact at CARE: “Are you down in Haiti yet Jake? If not are you ready to go?”

But instead I’m headed out to West Africa on another shoot with BRAC, and somewhat relieved I won’t be on such an intense, heartbreaking assignment. Port au Prince’s landscape will be forever changed by last night’s earthquake, with everything from the Cathedral de Notre Dame to the Presidential Palace razed. When considering the way most Haitians struggle to get by even without natural disaster, yesterday’s events seem even more unimaginable.

More like an ocean, Lake Malawi runs almost the entire length of this Southern African country. I went to one of the least developed parts, the northern town of Karonga, on my way down to a recent assignment shooting Gucci funded UNICEF projects for Marie Claire Magazine.