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from Photographers Blog:
The children of Dadaab: Life through the lens
Through my video “The children of Dadaab: Life through the Lens” I wanted to tell the story of the Somali children living in Kenya’s Dadaab. Living in the world’s largest refugee camp, they are the ones bearing the brunt of Africa’s worst famine in sixty years.
I wanted to see if I could tell their story through a different lens, showing their daily lives instead of just glaring down at their ribbed bodies and swollen eyes.
It was a challenging project. As one senior photographer asked, how else can we tell the story without showing images that clearly illustrate the plight of the starving millions? Few photographs cover all aspects of life in the camps.
Many of Dadaab’s children are dying. And then there are others who, despite living in the world’s oldest refugee camp, embrace their childhood; they play, go to school, care for their siblings and collect water for their families. I wanted to incorporate all of these aspects of life for Dadaab’s children into this project.
To tell the story, I combined Reuters photography captured during the height of the famine with footage I had collected when I was in Dadaab six months ago, before the severity of the crisis hit international headlines.
The point is, when news of the famine made it to the front pages, the children I had filmed in Dadaab were now only perceived as children on the frontline of famine. Not just as children who were excited with the furor we brought to the camp.
Must we see rape in Britain to understand rape in Congo?
I was left somewhat traumatised after going to see a screening of a controversial new Hollywood-backed short released this week, aimed at highlighting the link between minerals mined for British mobile phones and the use of rape and murder as weapons of war in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The highly graphic campaign video – appropriately called Unwatchable – starts with a little English girl picking flowers in the garden of her family’s multi-million pound mansion in a picturesque Cotswolds village.
This tranquil scene is shattered in an instant when armed men descend on the house, gang-rape her sister on the kitchen table and then murder her parents. It ends five minutes later with the girl running for her life.
“We placed it in a sort of cliché idyllic countryside, and tracing it back to mobile phones would make it relevant to people on the street,” Marc Hawker of production company DarkFibre told AlertNet.
“It’s a foreign story and that’s how people think. We wanted to target 16 to 30-year-olds who know nothing about what is happening,” said Hawker, who wrote and directed the film.
The film is based on the story of a woman from eastern Congo, Masika, and her family’s suffering at the hands of militia, re-enacted in rural England. According to Hawker, Masika was made to eat her husband’s flesh before the rebels mutilated and killed him, and then raped her and her daughters.
“We wanted people to imagine what is going on in the Congo,” said Vava Tampa, director of Save the Congo, a human rights group made up of London-based Congolese students and professionals which is backing the campaign. “If they can imagine what is happening on the ground then perhaps we will be compelled to take more action.”
It is good that someone cares enough to do something to stop the atrocities. I hope that after seeing this re-enactment, more people will care and pressure manufacturers to do the right thing, applying pressure where it will help. I hope that this re-enactment will encourage and embolden people to raise awareness of this important issue, and lead to the understanding that rape of African women is just as intolerable as rape of blonde-haired, blue-eyed women.
PHOTOBLOG: Children in Kenya and Haiti forced to grow up fast, if they survive
I had a flashback the other day when I was looking at photographs from Haiti of 15-year-old Fabianne Geismar, shot dead in the head after stealing wall hangings from a Port-au-Prince store, crushed in the Jan. 12 earthquake.
The image of Fabianne sprawled on the ground, blood trailing over the paintings she’d grabbed, took me back to my own childhood in Nairobi and the sight of a 7- or 8-year-old-boy – probably the same age as me at the time – who was caught stealing sweets from a street vendor and was beaten and burnt with rubber tyres. They called it mob justice.
To this day, I’ll never understand why that poor boy had to die such a violent and senseless death for something so trivial. I feel the same way about Fabianne – she survived one of the most catastrophic events in living memory, only to be shot in the head for petty theft. And for stealing wall hangings where there are no walls.
Fabianne’s childhood was brutally stolen from her and it got me thinking about how quickly so many young people in places like Africa, Asia and the Americas have to grow up, forced to fend for themselves through child labour or prostitution, denied an education and exposed to violence, disease and hunger at an age when they should be learning and playing.
Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 1 billion live in poverty and experience violence annually, UNICEF figures show, meaning nearly half the children in the world don’t get to have childhoods. There are also an estimated 132 million orphans in the world, UNICEF says.
Children under 18 make up almost half of Haiti’s 9-million population and the country faces the highest rates of infant and child mortality in the Western hemisphere.
Officials fear thousands of children have been separated from their parents, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by child traffickers, being illegally adopted by other countries or forced into child labour in order to survive. Around 150 million children worldwide aged 5–14 are engaged in child labour.
this is a very sad thing indeed.
it makes me wonder,”are we Africans, the children of a lesser god?
i think not?
i saw more horrid images of brutalities when i was growing up in the slums of Nairobi.
nice and powerful story.
What hope for Somalia?
Fighting in Mogadishu. Kidnaps of foreign aid workers. Hijacks by pirates. Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The news from Somalia seems to be relentlessly negative, writes Reuters Somalia correspondent Guled Mohamed. So it has been for the best part of 17 years since warlords overran the country in 1991 to usher in the modern period of chaos in this part of the Horn of Africa.
African Union peacekeepers have been unable to stem the violence; peace initiatives come and go with little impact; and the 14th attempt to restore central government is struggling as the Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government finds itself up against a resilient insurgent movement including former members of the Islamic Courts Union that briefly held Mogadishu for six months in 2006.
However, tales of hope, entrepreneurship and solidarity abound among Somalia’s 9 million people.
How do you think Somalis can move forward? Can the diaspora wield its economic power to help? Has Ethiopia’s military intervention helped or hindered? Do the Islamic Courts represent the people as their fighters say? How can the world help, or should it just stay out and let Somalis sort things out themselves?
Have your say …
I say on open seas impose a law similar to Texas’s Castle Law. Arm the ships and handle the pirates as they want to handle you. Leave them floating, sharks gotta eat too. The millions being paid out would more than cover armed personel and or anti piracy equipment. These people could care less about you, me, or anything but money. Even the elders look up to these criminals. If the shipping companies would start throwing a little lead at them,things would change. They know that the worst thing they have to face is a firehose. Big Deal!!
