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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Paid jobs are a rarity in most parts of rural India. In S. Rajasthan children are often either enticed by wages or forced into the grueling labor of the cotton fields in the neighboring state to support their families. A child’s small and delicate hands are gentle on cotton plants and actually assist in their cross-pollination. Girls are more likely to be targets, as their education, compared to boys, is looked upon as expendable. ChildFund International’s anti-trafficking programs, detailed in the above video, work both to rescue children who are victims of trafficking, as well as to provide alternative incomes for families in communities where the phenomenon is most common. Thanks to Christine Ennulat for the assistance on the post-production of the video piece.
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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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While on my way to some rural areas of Maharashtra state, I took a moment to see how some of Mumbai’s 21 million residents spend their afternoon. I’ve made it to India at the height of summer, but I much prefer the 100°F+ dry heat of June to the extreme humidity to come in July and August, which has rendered my lenses useless in the past. India is both the extraordinary and the execrable, and sadly I’ve grown much too acclimated to the latter. The level of poverty seen here brings about a feeling of hopelessness. But as I’ll show from a couple of video pieces I’m creating now, even at unlikely odds, the battle is winnable.
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