I took this photo on the way down to the local water source in Mutoto, a village a few hours away from Kananga in Kasai Central. I passed by these cute kids who were on their way back up from the source with their full buckets of water placed comfortably on their heads. This was …
I traveled to this little village in Nord Kivu to interview women who have survived sexual violence. The only way to get there was by UN helicopter because rebels have cut off access to the region. You would never know by looking at this photo that war has wreaked havoc on the area for decades. …
I first moved to DRC for a job managing bed net distributions in the rural interior of the country. I was thrown into the fire with this, only out of grad school for ten days when I left. But somehow I managed to stay afloat and figure it (thank you Google) and a few weeks …
I knew I had found the best job in the whole world when my country director, Larry, walked into my office and told me he wanted me to go on a trip with him and three DFID folks to check out some of the work ASSP had been doing around the country. They had chartered …
This awesome lady was such a pleasure to spend the day with. She was one of the bright stars our nutrition team found in Kalonda West and trained to be a community relay. Long before our program began she took her love of gardening into her community and taught her neighbors how to grow their own …
Did you know that construction workers everywhere are all the same? I know that it’s not really PC to say such a thing these days, but seriously, for the most part, they are all the same. In Congo, in Costa Rica, in the US, construction workers will whistle and yell at any woman, and I …
In the United States, when you get a flat tire, it is quite possibly the worst possible thing that could happen to you. At least, that’s the way you often perceive it. But in Congo, flat tires happen so often that you just kind of let it roll off your back and you get out …
The mothers are always out and about making things happen and carrying things everywhere in Congo. I took this photo while we were trekking around in a field outside of a village where we were building a latrine out of local materials. Our project did a lot of really great work, but sometimes we had …
I hear a lot of negative opinions about aid work, but aid work WORKS. This is a photo of a severely malnourished girl that our nutrition team found six months before this photo was taken (see yesterday’s post). They taught her mother how to make a weaning food recipe out of locally available ingredients and …
It may not look like it, but this is what hope looks like. Community relays trained by our nutrition team found this young woman, Mado Betu and her malnourished daughter, also named Mado, while I was working in Kasai Central, DRC. The next day I followed them back to her house and filmed them as …