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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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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See what’s been happening lately in my work and life. Special thanks to Andrew Ladson from MCC for the photos of me from Namibia, and to Lauren Matthews for the wedding video.
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Three coffee shops next to each other on the same block? One right across from the other? This isn’t the left bank of the Seine or downtown DC. This is Ethiopia! Sure, coffee is grown and exported from other African countries like Tanzania and Kenya, but only in Ethiopia is coffee cultivated, harvested, roasted, and afterwards widely consumed by the public. In fact, coffee is deeply entrenched in the fiber of Ethiopian society. Long before the Italians came to attempt a takeover of the country (they failed), Ethiopians have been savoring sweet espresso, home-style. The Italian espresso machine did catch on, however, as it has elsewhere, and is nearly as ubiquitous in Ethiopia as the jabena, the traditional kettle in which coffee is prepared here. Coffee even originates from Ethiopia. It comes from a region known as Kaffa, from which most languages derive their word for the caffeinated essential. Below,[…]
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My latest video piece, which I shot for Lutheran World Relief, has given me premonitions of giving it all up and moving out to the country to be a farmer. That’s easier done than most people seeing as how I already live in Africa. Mina seems to like the idea. She used to only farm rice and corn, allowing her family to scrape by at best. LWR‘s agricultural programs in Bihar, India have allowed hers and hundreds of others’ crops to thrive in an otherwise dry and rocky environment. Hit play above and sway along with the saris and sitars.
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Whether you’re in a rickshaw or a limousine, in a city of fourteen million no one is immune to the horrors of traffic. India’s third-largest city, Kolkata (otherwise known as Calcutta, or কলকাতা), was my base for the last two weeks during dual video assignments for Lutheran World Relief and ChildFund. During journeys in and out of the city and on not-so-leisurely strolls, I spent a great deal of time in a teeming, chaotic muddle and thought I’d share some of it with you. Hit play below for 28 seconds of the city’s hustle and bustle. While the videos are still on my editing table, I’ll share some select stills from Kolkata’s streets, as well as shots from Lutheran World Relief’s agriculture projects in the State of Bihar, where smiles are plentiful and life goes at a much slower pace. Below I give a sneak preview of footage to LWR‘s[…]
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You may have had the unfortunate experience of having your seaside vacation interrupted by a thunderstorm, or worse, a hurricane. Imagine if such a storm were responsible for wiping out not just your vacation, but your family’s income and food supply for the coming year. This, while unthinkable for us in the developed world, is a menacing possibility each year for families in Madagascar, an island nation of 22 million in the Indian Ocean. With 3,000 miles (4800 km) of coastline, it’s hard for Madagascar to avoid being a stop on the itinerary for cyclones sweeping through the Southern Indian Ocean. I recently spent time here with CARE documenting some of their disaster risk reduction programs. A cyclone, as a hurricane is called in the Indian and southern Pacific Oceans, can destroy acres of the rice paddies that produce Madagascar’s staple crop. But what if farmers could harvest their crop[…]
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Every photographer will tell you that sometimes you have to wait around for the right shot; but don’t think there aren’t any shots while you’re just waiting around. I recently needed to photograph a girl from the Samburu tribe in Kenya whose family and community had been helped by ChildFund through the gift of a sheep. However, the livestock graze far away from her village and only come home around sunset. There was plenty to keep me occupied while I waited, but the sun was going down fast. The evening left me walking the sometimes fine line between fashion photography and photojournalism. PS. The sheep and the goats finally came home, and I got the shot I needed.
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