Holi. India’s famed festival of color. A raucous celebration of the coming of spring where revelers across northern India don old clothing and douse each other in colored powders and water. Needless to say, anyone attending subjects themselves to the same fate. Enjoy the faces and color!
It takes more than pencils and textbooks to be a schoolgirl in Afghanistan these days. It also takes tremendous bravery and tenacity. While Afghan girls are theoretically free to attend school, they are stymied at almost every turn by militant attacks, a lack of adequate facilities and teachers, and even their own parents’ reluctance to break from the tradition that says “girls belong at home.” Millions of girls have entered school since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, however their status as students is threatened by the deteriorating security situation and the international community‚ focus on stabilization and counter-insurgency rather than on long-term development.
Trust in Education (TIE) is supporting those Afghan girls by building schools and supporting after-school programming in art, science and physical education. They tackle with work on a grassroots level, their Afghan staff working directly with the local population, and that is why I decided to work with TIE. Without much infrastructure or overhead, a substantial percentage of dollars donated directly impact programming on the ground. My work with TIE put a face on their projects, most for the very first time. I visited projects and villages, documenting the organization’s current work as well as the condition of schools and classrooms in target areas. Traveling to remote villages, unannounced and anonymous, witnessing the girls’ enthusiasm underscored for me the great risk the students and teachers take everyday, and the passion and dedication with which they push forward from the repressive Taliban-era to modernity.
The far northern part of Kenya, bordering with South Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda, is known as Turkana and is home to a tribe of Nilotic people of the same name. The land is harsh, arid and rocky expanses of flat plains with rough mountainous patches. Drought is common, a natural phenomena occurring every ten years or so, but the rains always return.
The Turkana people are pastoralists, living with and by their animals. They move their herds and manyattas with the weather, following the rains, which provide their livestock water to drink and grass to graze.
The world is changing faster than the Turkana people. Borders have been drawn, wars fought, and in the past decade, even the climate has changed. The last great drought they remember in 2001. And since that time, they haven’t seen rain the way they once did, what was once forest and green plains, is now desert. Spartan rains have left the soil parched and cracked, rivers and vegetation dried, and life is a struggle.
The past year has been the worst, over ten months without a single drop of rain. The Turkana are surviving solely on the international community, their only water coming from the few bore wells and with most of the livestock having starved to death, the only food is international aid.
The Amazon… she is an immense, lush, sultry, sweaty, dangerous rainforest, and a powerful, vast, convoluted river which both gives and takes of life. Her forests cover over 1.6 million square miles and span the borders of eight South American countries. Her over 40,000 species of plants and trees produce more than 20% of the world’s oxygen and rivers carry more than one-fifth the fresh water in the world.
The Amazon is also home to over 300 species of mammals, 1,500 species of birds and 300 species of reptiles, with an average of 120 new species discovered each year. She is as impressive as inhospitable, and we humans cling to her shores in stilt villages to protect again the floods. Each year, when the rains come, her waters rise and fall with the rains, up to 30 feet, inundating thousands of square miles.
Right now is the time of flooding in the Amazon Basin, and last week I made my first visit to photograph and write a travel story for Traveler Overseas Magazine.
Shortly after graduating from UCLA, I moved to Senegal, West Africa, to spend 27 months serving in the country as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It was my first time in Africa and in a Muslim country, and at first, I was terrified. Our group of 68 volunteers became a community, in that bygone era of no cell phones, internet and email, and Senegal became our home. We assimilated quickly into the local culture, living with Senegalese families, eating local food, traveling on public transportation and speaking the local languages. We learned the joys of Africa – the music, dance, laughter and community – and the hardships as well – poverty, infant and maternal mortality, devastation by curable illnesses, and even our own vulnerability in a world with no harsh climate and no infrastructure.
I returned to the US a different person, older, much wiser, more confident and with a part of me now tied to a distant village in Africa, a way of life and a family who had taken me in as their own and loved me. I finally returned to Senegal last month after 12 years to visit my family and was welcomed with open arms. They had moved to a larger town, my brothers and sisters had grown up and had families of their own, and though the time had passed, I felt like I had never left. Here are some scenes of my latest trip.
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A land of snow, rock and ice, dramatic landscapes, unpredictable weather, and turbulent seas. I had always dreamed of visiting Antarctica, and yet, not until I saw her did I know that I would be back at any and every opportunity.
Goma, DRC
Voix de la Paix took the project one step further, screening Pray the Devil Back to Hell to women leaders and holding a two-day workshop in Kinshasa, Goma and Bukavu. Abigail Disney, Leymah Gbowee and Alissa Everett traveled to the DRC to show PRAY to diverse women leaders such as nationally elected government officials, heads of women’s associations, church leaders, policewomen, soldiers and activists. It was the first time women leaders across all sectors of society had come together to discuss the state of their country, region and individual lives.
The women discussed the strengths and weaknesses of their current womens’ movements and created strategies for future growth. They also confronted prejudices within their own communities, as one slender, soft-spoken women in Kinshasa roared, “You women in civil society: you are doing violence to yourselves. You do not work together. You only look after your own interests. It is not until you stop the war of women on women that you will have any chance of ending the war at all. We must end this conflict and begin to work together!!”
May is here and it is time. I will be holding workshops with Abigail Disney and Leymah Gbowee, from Pray the Devil Back to Hell. From seeing the film a year ago, proposing to Abby that we bring the film to eastern DRC, meeting with women leaders and holding preliminary screenings to see if the atmosphere was right, we are finally at holding workshops, strategy sessions really, with women leaders, activists, female politicians, police, army, humanitarians and journalists in Goma, Bukavu and Kinshasa.
If you don’t know this film you should. Click here for the trailer – Pray the Devil Back to Hell
It is a powerful, important documentary piece, not only on an under-reported women’s movement, but it is one of the first pieces of its kind to shine a true light on African women. Most media portray African women as victims, suffering, illiterate, dirty, barefoot, pregnant with a bucket of water on her head. This film shows the other African women, the intelligent, articulate, groomed women who are up to something in the world. These are true faces of African women with spirit, dimension, dignity and pride. They are strong and very able.
Me with Goma ladies from the “Voices of Peace” workshop.
