Photos for Millennium Development Goals for UN week Sept. 21-26 2014

I was asked by FHI 360  in collaboration with Women Deliver, Girls’ Globe and Johnson & Johnson to contribute some of my photos from my upcoming book: Faces of Courage to present during this year’s UN General Assembly opening session the week of September 22-26 in...

Domestic Violence in India Part 3

RANIRani had the misfortune to marry Mukesh, who turned out to be an alcoholic. He has beaten her many times, going so far as to slash her arm deeply with a blade. She was the sole earner in the family and in order to escape the misery of living with her husband, she...

Domestic Violence in India Part 2

Meera  A neighbor noticed a emotionally distraught Meera sobbing outside her urban slum home and immediately called HUMSAFAR. Meera told the caseworkers a harrowing story: her mother was a sex worker who practiced secretly, her brother was a petty thief and they were...

Domestic Violence in India- Part 1

In December of 2012 the brutal gang rape and murder of a young college student by six young men in Delhi, India made international headlines. In January of 2012 I had traveled to Delhi to document cases of dowry abuse. As I followed the news and read more about the...

Planned Parenthood Global- Youth Peer Providers

Last year, I had created a library of images for Planned Parenthood Global, which works in rural and urban areas of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Peru, Ethiopia, and Kenya. In all of these countries, rates of unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortions remain very...

Teenage Pregnancy in Guatemala

In Guatemala, half of all young women marry before the age of 20. Only five percent of them use an effective method of birth control. Forty-four percent of women become mothers before they reach 20; the proportion of young mothers is even higher among women without...

Educating Child Brides in Rajasthan India

This past January, I had another opportunity to work with EducateGirls India, an NGO that works in Rajasthan, where gender inequality is especially high. EducateGirls has intensive programs to educate as many girls as possible. Their goal is to encourage them to...

Planned Parenthood Global and Soccer in Kenya

(The following text has several contributors- primarily Joyce Ho, a Graduate Media Fellow from the Stanford School of Medicine and Leila Darabi from Planned Parenthood Global). In Kenya, Planned Parenthood Global (PP Global) works with several local soccer leagues to...

Kibera

This past year I had two opportunities to photograph in Kibera, Kenya, which is the second largest slum in Africa and the third largest in the world. Even though I have witnessed poverty, the physical landscape of Kibera was, to put it frankly, quite overwhelming. The...

A few 2011 highlights

I had the privilege of working on some very satisfying and rewarding projects this past year. I documented the Novartis Malaria Initiative and a few of my photos were recently used in an ad for Novartis in the Dec. 19th issue of the New Yorker. Here is the ad and I...

Girls Education- Educate Girls Globally in Rajasthan, India

This past January I documented a girl’s education project in Pali, Rajasthan, India. Educate Girls Globally (EGG), founded by Lawrence Chickering, is focusing on Muslim communities, where “the education of girls and empowerment of women have lagged badly.” Here are...

7 Billion Unique Stories

A new report from the UN comes just ahead of a demographic milestone: the world’s population is expected to pass 7 billion in late October, only a dozen years after it surpassed 6 billion. The UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) is about to release a new campaign...

Nigerian Chronicles X- PPFA in Gboko II

This is the concluding chapter in this series, and will focus on healthcare training and an AIDS clinic at the NKST church headquarters facility.  Some personal impressions will follow the visual presentations. The NKST reproductive-health project recently upgraded a...

Nigerian Chronicles IX- PPFA in Gboko

So far I have been documenting family planning in Muslim communities in Northern Nigeria.  This next post brings us back together with Thank-God Okosun and PPFA’s activities in an evangelical Christian community in Gboko, Benue State. The NKST (Nongo u Kristi u k...

Nigerian Chronicles VIII- Social Networking

In a small village an hour outside Kano I was asked to photograph a large congregation of people inside a small courtyard. Apparently this was the beginning of a wedding ceremony where Traditional Birth Attendants take the opportunity to dispense birth control...

Nigerian Chronicles VII- Hospitals

Abortions are illegal in Nigeria; nevertheless, abortions occur and as they happen under non-medical conditions, serious complications are all too frequent. Murtala Mohammed Specialist Hospital (MMSH) is the primary public sector hospital in Kano State and has the...

Nigerian Chronicles VI: Bixby Girls Education

An hour outside of Kaduna, we arrived in a small village to document the Bixby Girls’ Education project. It was raining, and as we waited outside a small mud structure, a few women came to sweep out the water that had accumulated on the floor and then proceeded to lay...

Nigerian Chronicles V: SWODEN in Kano

SWODEN is a foundation supported by the Packard Foundation that operates in Kano, the second most populous Nigerian city after Lagos, which has an estimated population of 2.1 million inhabitants (from the 2006 Nigerian census).  SWODEN is a multi-faceted NGO, whose...

Nigerian Chronicles IV- PPFA in Maiduguri

In Maiduguri, PPFA ( again supported by Packard Foundation grants) had set up a Reproductive Health Information and Services Center run by youth peer educators. PPFA considers peer to peer interaction very critical for successful youth and adolescent reproductive...

Nigerian Chronicles III- PPFA in Gwoza

Gwoza is a community in northern Nigeria that is over 90% Muslim. As recently as six years ago it was inconceivable to imagine any birth control or family planning options. They were regarded as taboo. The accepted norm was that  “God gives children and God will...

Nigerian Chronicles II- Yola Nomadic Schools

These schools were funded by the Packard Foundation.  According to the foundation, the education of girls is the best indicator of reproductive health outcomes as they mature into women of child bearing age. The plan is to make sure these children will receive an...

The Nigerian Chronicles- I

This past July I was assigned  by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation to photograph their maternal and child health care programs in Nigeria. The Packard Foundation had made an executive decision to terminate their programs after ten years of very multifaceted...

Dr. Rick

The highlight of my trip to Ethiopia was meeting Dr. Rick Hodes, an American physician who has lived and worked in Ethiopia for over 20 years. Dr. Rick, as he is known, treats patients with very advanced stages of their disease. He is an expert on spinal diseases,...

Ethiopia-Pfizer-ITI-Carter Center

Photographing the trachoma prevention program in Ethiopia was a very unique experience. I have photographed in many countries on health related issues and in Ethiopia I was to document health care workers in 3 rural clinics in the Tigray region and also photograph two...

Ethiopia- UNICEF/ Columbia University AMDD program

My next major assignment in Ethiopia was documenting health care workers in a small rural clinic in Northern Ethiopia for Columbia University School of Public Health- in particular for their AMDD (Averting Maternal Death and Disability) programs. Here are a few...

Ethiopia- UNICEF/Columbia University AMDD program

One of the most difficult experiences was seeing children who were so malnourished that they were barely holding onto life. The  next series of 4 images show attempts by a health care worker to insert an IV so the infant can get life-saving nutrition intravenously....

UNICEF- Columbia University- Health Care Workers I

Below you will find a small gallery of images of some of the health care workers. The first image of the small yellow room is very typical of  the rooms where patients are seen. They are very cramped with hardly any of the basic medical instruments we are used to...

UNICEF-Columbia University- Health Care Workers II

I was asked to do some hero close-up photos of the health care workers. Here is a selection of some of the "unsung heroes" who tirelessly do the day to day work in providing the only health care for most young mothers- they probably will never be seen by a physician....

Ethiopia-EngenderHealth October 2009

IN late fall of 2009 I had the privilege of working in Ethiopia on various projects. My first assignment was for EngenderHealth documenting some fistula clinics near Bahir Dar. These fistula clinics were very small, consisting of no more than 3 beds and each one had...

Formidable contender seeking support

Capital of Hope, a visual documentary on the effects of microfinance in Africa which I recently completed, has been entered into the Photography Book Now International Juried Competition sponsored by Blurb. You can preview the book and vote for it in another...

Progress Report—UNFPA

I recently completed a project for UNFPA documenting the work of the organization in Guatemala in February. The head of the program liked my work so much that she recommended me to her colleagues at their headquarters in New York. As a result, I was fortunate to have...

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