India: Untouchable No More
If you are born to a shepherd family in India, you are forever labeled “untouchable’, and part of the lowest caste in India. According to that system, you and 150 million others are considered too impure to even drink from the same water fountains as the higher castes, and too [...]
Home: Summit 9 – A Time to Consider the Orphan
You see the photos of abandoned, neglected or marginalized children. Your heart yearns to help, to wipe away tears, to fill up a few bunk beds in your extra bedroom, to take a trip to a foreign land to love on the less-loved. But how do you do this effectively ? Would your bumbling, but well-meaning efforts [...]
World: Client Case Histories
I’ve updated my website with a new section called Client Case Histories. I wanted a way to highlight my clients’ vision and how collaboration and hard work brought about the results they desired. These are great people I’ve worked with. I count myself very fortunate to have them both as clients and friends. To see [...]
India: Cursed from birth?
“People said Vinay (a 3-year-old born with a cleft lip and palate), was cursed…that he did something wrong in the past. Children would not play with him. They would mock the family,” laments Vinay’s aunt, Parvatrani. Vinay recently returned to his village after receiving surgery at Central India Christian Mission from volunteer doctors of the LEAP [...]
India: Once an orphan, now a teacher
Living on her own as an orphan, Anamika was in danger of becoming a child slave like thousands of children in Chattisgarh, India. She often lived in the forest, home to Bengal tigers, with other children, scrounging for food and protection. But, an orphanage run by Central India Christian Mission intervened and gave her [...]
Ecuador: “I promised to return”
Carlos Guerrero was just a “normal little boy” that grew up in San Jose, Ecuador, a small village of a few hundred that snuggles up to the Pacific Ocean along several miles of flat pristine beach. He played soccer and fished as a child, but also shouldered the heavy responsibility of finding food for his [...]
Rwanda: the Gift of a Photo
Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee and their Do Good initiative are genuinely dedicated to personal relationships with their coffee growing partners. In a Facebook post, Do Good director Karen Akridge Houghton shows a boy receiving a copy of a photo I shot of him the last time I was there. Karen, and Land of [...]
India: Self Progress
For 14 hours a day Bora Vai sits on the hard packed cracked dirt floor in her village, her hands deftly rolling bidi after bidi, an inexpensive Indian cigarette. On good days, she may make as many as a thousand of the tendu leaf rolled smokes, earning around 50 cents and exposing herself to cancer [...]
India: Hope for the burned
When Arman was less than two months old, a pot of boiling water fell onto his arm. The intense agony at the time of the accident was only compounded by his mother’s financial and mental inability to take him to a doctor. During the healing process at home, his forearm fused to his bicep and [...]
India: 525 children living in a tiger preserve
In the middle of a tiger preserve, eighty miles from medical facilities, in an area frequented by Maoist terrorists, live 525 orphans and children at risk. They have no electricity and live in mud and straw homes. Yet, Central India Christian Mission provides food and education for them in the best way their current resources [...]
India: Rescued from a lifetime of rejection
Neighbors in her rural Madhya Pradesh village of 700 would have nothing to do with Ghansobai. Born with a cleft lip and palate, Ghansobai, 11, was ostracized in her village. Her neighbors blamed her horrible disfigurement on a curse by the gods for sins in a past life. Children were forbidden to play with her. Mothers [...]
India: Cemetery sunrise on Easter
Sakshi, 8, sprinkles flower petals on her brother’s grave on Easter morning in central India. Four-thirty on Easter Sunday morning, the cool pre-dawn air in the cemetery is infused with the sweet smells of incense and candle smoke. The cacophony of morning traffic and the dry heat of 100+ afternoons is still hours away. Stillness [...]
World: The Begging Conundrum
Begging. It makes us nervous. We squirm. We try to look away. We attempt to ignore. But many places I go in the world I can’t ignore those that are begging. My heart screams to help. My head, in frantic fits of logic tells me why helping is a bad idea. While the poverty is [...]
India: A success story for children
“We’ve found babies in the trash dumps.” “We’ve found babies in the train toilets, on the train tracks.” “We’ve found babies at our doorsteps.” “People leave babies at the hospital sometimes.” “In Hindi, the word orphan means ‘a godless child.’ So we call this place a children’s home. Bal Bhavan (the name of the home) [...]
India-Nepal: Four Faiths and a Lot of Questions
Four faiths all leading to the same place? The same end? Can everyone be right? Are there multiple roads to eternity that all join together as they near a place called heaven? Can I do enough good works to merit a place in heaven? What do I really deserve? Is it us vs them…a fight [...]
India-Nepal: Choosing the “right” lenses…at least for me…right now…until next trip!
The combination of lenses I use when I travel is constantly changing. On one trip I will go super light, so light that I, on purpose, don’t look like a pro. Other times I will carry everything from 14mm up to 300 and throw in a tilt shift and an extender just to test airline [...]
India: How can we understand the desperation?
This child is more fortunate than many babies abandoned in India. She and her twin sibling were found in a railway station and immediately rushed to the Mission Hospital run by CICM, Central India Christian Mission. Just two days old in this photo, the twins will become part of the growing family of children given [...]
Rwanda: Portraits Under Pressure
Have you ever felt the almost paralyzing fear of realizing you have 5 minutes to pull off a story-telling, engaging portrait and nothing seems to be working in your favor? There is no time to set up the lights you brought, even though you ditched your mantra of “carry-on luggage only” to bring the extra [...]
Rwanda: Farmers of Mbilima
While in Rwanda, working for Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee in Atlanta, I had the privilege of spending time with a group of coffee farmers that were thrilled with their harvest and excited to be working with the Atlanta based company. Before this trip, I knew little about coffee and only occasionally drank it. [...]
Atlanta: Under the Bridges
Matt Brandon of The Digital Trekker once asked me during an interview if I ever did any humanitarian photographic work in my own backyard, Atlanta. I was stumped. I have traveled days to get to a remote village in many of the 60+ countries I have photographed in. But I have never had an assignment [...]
Home: Drink Coffee. Do Good.
Drink coffee. Do good. This is not just a catchy phrase, but the premise by which Jonathan Golden started Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee Company just north of Atlanta in Roswell. An Anglican priest by vocation, he started a coffee growing business that also fosters healing among warring tribes in Rwanda. Former enemies [...]
Israel: The Art of War
I have only been to Israel once and harbor no pretense of truly understanding the horrors of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in and near Gaza. On a recent trip, I was shown the remains of the more than 6,000 rockets that were launched from Gaza into the Israeli border town of Sderot over [...]
Kenya: Outpouring for Orphan Care
A few days ago I received an email from a friend in Kenya telling of an emergency need for food and hospital care for several orphans. Vivian and I gave some, but knew more would be needed. I decided to share the need via Twitter and Facebook and within hours the immediate emergency need was [...]
Pakistan: Brick-maker Image Overlooked
During the process of looking through our archived images of Pakistan for another grant proposal we are making, I came across this image that I had totally overlooked. I normally mark images with one, two or three stars in the editing phase. This image had none. Yet, it tells so much about the poor laborers [...]