Global Lens Reflections on life, the universe, and everything
Americas
In praise of literacy
Following the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, one of the first priorities of the new government was to launch a massive literacy campaign throughout the cities and countryside. Political empowerment of the poor majority demanded the ability to read and write, and volunteers from throughout the world came to help. Run [...]
Guatemala genocide trial
Manuela Toj knelt in the mud at the bottom of the pit, the three skeletons before her covered with flower petals and burning candles. I knelt beside her, along with several of her neighbors, all of us gathered around the newly revealed skeletons. A Mayan priest intoned prayers for the dead while a young woman [...]
Hugo Chavez
I met Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in January 2000 in the aftermath of horrible mudslides that ravaged the steep hillsides of Caracas and the country’s northern coast. I covered the response to the disaster, and spent part of my time in a steep ravine where the Catuche River flows into the center of the capital. Over [...]
Colombian soldier
I’ve often said that the hardest part of photography is getting to the right place at the right time. Take a trip I made to Colombia in 2000, for example. I was interested in writing about the U’wa indigenous people. Tired of having their tribal land ravaged by foreign oil corporations, they had threatened a [...]
Morales’ morning
Most of the time I interview people who are powerless: victims of oppression, refugees and street children, sex workers and migrants. I do that intentionally, as their perspective is usually given short shrift in much of the media. Too many officials and wealthy people get quoted. But every once in a while I seek out [...]
Brazil: Remembering Dorothy
Antonia Silva Lima lives in a place called Hope. She came to the Amazon rainforest more than two decades ago, like hundreds of thousands of other migrants fleeing from poverty in other parts of Brazil. The settlers moved deep into the forest and cut down the trees to grow subsistence crops, only to be chased [...]
Advent waiting
Advent is a time when Christians practice the discipline of waiting. For many people in the world, however, waiting is more ordinary, the stuff of every day and not just special days. Waiting shapes who they are and how they see the world. For many who wait, impatience simply isn’t an option, perhaps because it’s [...]
Honduras: A death in the Aguan Valley
We found Carlos Martinez’ body lying in several inches of water in a far corner of the La Lempira palm oil cooperative that he and other peasants had seized from a wealthy landowner that they believed stole it from them. I had come to the cooperative early that Sunday morning, sitting for two hours with [...]
Haiti: Hatuey’s legacy
They were easy to spot from a distance because they all had on the same red shirts. As they neared my row, I cringed a bit, hoping they would continue on towards the back of the plane that was going to carry us to Miami. But then two women stopped and asked to get past [...]
Washington: Moms not criminals
No one in the trailer park would have opened their door if I’d been there on my own. People were clearly afraid, so they were either long gone or laying low. After all that had happened, opening their door to one more gabacho wasn’t a great idea. Fortunately I had a Latina with me from [...]
Haiti: Rubble Nation
The January 2010 earthquake generated a new word in the vocabulary of Haitians: goudougoudou. That’s the affectionate Kreyol term that Haitians across the board use to name the disaster that ravaged Port-au-Prince and nearby cities. It’s alternately written goudou goudou or goudou-goudou, and is supposedly–if you say it over and over again very fast–the sound [...]
Haiti: reconstruction in a time of cholera
In an overwhelmingly tragic landscape, the eye is naturally drawn to any spot of hope. That’s what visiting Haiti was like last week. It’s as if the big picture has been desaturated, all the color removed, and what remains is a stark portrayal in black and white of a population that remains incredibly vulnerable. Yet [...]
Cuba: Time to go
Have you wanted to visit Cuba for a while? President Barack Obama is expected to soon announce a loosening of restrictions on the rights of U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba. D’uh. It’s the least we can do. After five decades of blockading Cuba, the U.S. has nothing to show for it but hard feelings [...]
Haiti: Six months later
Six months ago the earthquake hit Haiti, and things changed there forever. At this six month’s vantage point, some church relief groups are claiming all is well, so please keep the money and volunteers coming. But that’s a pretty rosy picture that isn’t backed up by facts on the ground. Thomas Johnson, a humanitarian coordinator [...]
Honduras: Coup +1
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the coup in Honduras that ousted President Mel Zelaya. It’s been a tortuous year for Hondurans, as well as for U.S. citizens who hoped that the Obama administration was really going to change course after decades of doing the wrong thing in Latin America. Yet the right thing as [...]
Zipping through the Arkansas forest
I’m wrapping up two days of shooting in Arkansas, where the heat and humidity makes me wonder if people willingly choose to live here, or if they are forced to remain here by some ominous sub-plot of the infamous Whitewater conspiracy, serving as drones for the evil rulers of our dark age. I have no [...]
Size matters
My images get used in a variety of places. Photos I captured in Haiti after the quake, for example, besides showing up in church-related magazines and websites around the world, were also used in secular media like the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, Portland Oregonian, the Guardian, BBC.com, blah, blah, blah. A [...]
Life goes on in Haiti
I’ve been here a couple of weeks now. A few days ago I took a break from shooting for a couple of hours to put some sound and images together in a quick and dirty “slide show”. The music is from the capoeira program run by Viva Rio! in the Belair neighborhood, one of Port-au-Prince’s [...]
Haiti: witnessing hope amidst the ruins
Ena Zizi was rescued by the Gophers today. As her dirty and injured body–resting on a broken piece of plywood salvaged from the rubble–was carefully passed down over three stories of debris to the ground, the 70-year old woman began singing, a not very articulate song as she hadn’t had any water to drink for [...]