I’ve had so many assignments in India lately that I might as well move there (I’m due back in Delhi in a week’s time). It’s a nice idea, but I can only take so much curry & spice. Here a few stills from wanderings in Delhi and Lucknow, along with a video and stills on ChildFund’s Books, My Friends program in Udaipur District.
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“You need a medium to tell people. When I show pictures and video, a client understands the information so much better. Mere verbal information does not have credibility and authority.” These words are not lifted from one of my recent sales pitches to potential clients. Rather, they were said by a community health worker named Sunita in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh. Sunita now uses a phone app to facilitate her work from house to house among pregnant and nursing women. Uttar Pradesh currently has some of the worst maternal and newborn mortality rates in all of India. When the government launched their ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) program in 2005, the goal was to place one such community health worker in every village in the country in order to reduce maternal and newborn deaths associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Today, with nearly 900,000 ASHAs, India has more[…]
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Passion fruit, that is. Mabel is breaking Uganda’s gender barriers as a small business owner and passion fruit farmer.
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I’ve lived in Africa long enough to watch some kids grow up. I’ve seen a boy struggle with the effects of HIV through his formative years only to succumb to it at the age of twenty. But I’ve also seen an orphan rise to the top of his class, graduate university and go on to be the owner of a successful business. With so many of the children that I encounter here each day, I can’t help but wonder what will become of them in ten or twenty years. Emali, Kenya is divided by the Nairobi – Mombasa highway. It’s not only a physical boundary, but a geographic one as well. The south side of the road marks the boundary of the blistering, flat planes, home to the Maasai tribe, that receive little if any rain at all during the year. The north side marks the beginning of the hills[…]
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Take a tour of the coffee process as it occurs before it reaches your machine. Your guide, Atandi, is a small farmer in Kenya who tells of the lucrativeness of her new cash crop. Above, boys fish at sunset off the shores of Lake Victoria in Kisumu. Other stills from my time among the coffee growers of Western Kenya:
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My latest video for Catholic Relief Services is the third of a trilogy showcasing the IMPACT program in Malawi. This piece, an excerpt from which is shown below, deals with community-based child protection programs. In Malawi, one out of three children has experienced abuse before they reach the age of 18. Malawi, in and of itself, is no more dangerous for children than other countries in the area. The problem has been that those working to protect children, from the next door neighbor in the rural village to the Malawi Social Welfare Department, have not been working in coordination with one another. Children have suffered as a result. In some instances cases of abuse have gone unreported, and perpetrators have gone unpunished. IMPACT has successfully connected the various stakeholders through the deployment of family care volunteers and the mobilization of an Orphans and Vulnerable Children Committee in each community where[…]
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Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll quit as soon as the net you’ve given him breaks. It’s not uncommon when driving across rural Africa to see a hand-pump well that has not been used for some time; not because the water supply has been exhausted below, but because a proper system was not put in place for the construction and maintenance of that well. A well is an expensive thing to build, but it becomes even costlier when a community ceases to receive benefit from it. In remote Bukwo, Uganda, most people still draw their water from unclean and unprotected sources like rivers and streams. Because proper hygiene and sanitation practices are not widely followed, the people that use this water are exposed to diseases like diarrhea and typhoid. “It used to take me two hours to go[…]
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Farmland that had reverted to dust after years of drought is being reclaimed through innovative methods. Thanks to Matemai Mbira Group of Harare, Zimbabwe for the use of their beautiful music in this piece.
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Want to know what real hunger is like? Don’t ask an American. The video below, narrated by Sevu, a small farmer in Kenya, gives the most poignant description of hunger I’ve ever heard. Luckily, that’s not all this video is about. It used to be that the seasonal river that runs through Sevu’s village would quickly become dry again a few days after the rain. Now, however, a series of small sand dams stationed throughout its course have kept the river flowing and have allowed Sevu and his family to farm year-round, thereby increasing their income and access to food. Sevu and the family are doing so well now, in fact, that he was able to place an international phone call to me yesterday just to see how my wife and I are doing. The dams are part of a larger program introduced in the area by Lutheran World Relief to[…]
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The dawn of the new millennium cast a dark pall over the Southern African nation of Malawi. The county faced a food crisis that was, in part, fueled by the loss of agricultural workforce due to AIDS-related deaths. The national HIV prevalence rate was at 16%, and as high as 30% among pregnant women. With the coming of anti-retroviral medication (ARVs) in 2003, NGOs and systems of government rushed to educate HIV positive people, who had by now organized into peer support groups within their communities. Essential steps taken by these groups to living positively with the disease included good nutrition, practicing abstinence and safe sex, proper ARV adherence, as well as learning how to give home-based care to bed-ridden HIV positive peers in the community. Ten years later, support group members are not only some of the healthiest-looking people in their communities, they’re also talking to their negative or[…]
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