Best of In The Fray 2015. As they head into what should be their golden years, many older immigrants still work low-wage jobs and remain undocumented. Unable to save up or receive benefits for the elderly, they can do little but hope they stay healthy and employable. Part two of a two-part series.
“Nursing homes are sad places. People are abandoned there,” says Gloria Murray, sixty-six, a Jamaican immigrant who worked for more than two decades as a health aide at a nursing home. Over the course of her career, Murray became close to many of her clients. It was important to her that they be shown kindness and respect. In Jamaica, she says, “we take care of our old.”
Yet as Murray grew old herself, she quickly learned that no one was going to take care of her. In 2010, a fire destroyed her home in New York. Homeless for two years, she struggled to navigate the city’s shelter system. Life there was unbearable, she says: “It was drugs, pimps, the whole lot. I never knew it would come to this.”
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
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Best of In The Fray 2015. Embracing the last stage of life is a challenge for all, but especially so for those growing old outside their homeland. Part one of a two-part series.
Tucked away in Staten Island’s Clifton neighborhood is a fourth-floor apartment painted in drowsy greens and browns. A blend of savory aromas—fish gravies, okra, fufu, stewed bitterballs—fills the air as brightly dressed women chat over bowls of chicken stew with rice.
Monah Smith, a small, wizened woman with a quiet smile, has been cooking for them. Smith sells home-cooked meals from her apartment in Park Hill, a low-income housing complex. The place never seems to be empty. Staten Island is home to the largest Liberian community outside of Africa, and many of Smith’s fellow immigrants drop by—at almost any hour of day—for the traditional, slow-cooked dishes she makes.
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
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Paris, 2011: We saw him in different areas of the city with his two dogs. He kept a big water bowl for the dogs, and lots of water on hand. If he was awake, he gave us a big smile. Here, he and his dogs lie on the grounds of Notre Dame, cuddling in their sleep.
I saw them everywhere in Europe: street people traveling with their dogs. How can a homeless person who can barely take care of himself take decent care of an animal? With love.
Jim Ross
I first noticed them in Paris: dogs accompanying homeless street people. I saw a man in a heavy winter coat sitting on the stone ground of a bridge while his dog—a rust-colored lab puppy—rested, curled up, on a blanket beside him. A sign said the dog was for sale. It hit me hard: he was obviously caring for this animal, but it was mid-October, and there was a chill in the air. Surviving the winter can be a challenge for human beings, let alone animals.
A year later, I visited Europe again with my wife and our two adult children. My daughter said she wanted to create a calendar of dogs, so I fell into the pattern of taking photos of street dogs. Occasionally, dogs traveled with human companions, and I photographed them, too. Usually, the street people were alone with their dogs, or with one other street person. Occasionally, we saw them gathered in large numbers. One image that has stayed with me is the thick crowd of street people and their dogs that formed in front of the Matabiau train station in Toulouse at sunset, waiting for a van that delivered blankets and provided health care after dark.
I made several more trips to Europe over the next few years. Everywhere, I kept seeing street people and their dogs—more, it seemed, with each trip. The photos for this essay were taken between 2010 and 2013 in a variety of cities: Paris, Toulouse, and Lille, France; Brussels, Belgium; and, Edinburgh, Scotland.
To my knowledge, no one keeps a formal tally of the number of street people who travel with animal companions. Anecdotally, the number appears to have gone up in many parts of France over the last two decades, says Charlotte Nivelet, a French ethologist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The young, she adds, are more likely to be what the French call “travelers”—the untranslated English word used in that country to describe street people accompanied by animals, usually dogs.
In France, being a traveler has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, an emergency shelter will not admit a homeless person who has an animal. On the other hand, traveling with that animal provides a measure of protection—and not just the security of a watchdog to scare off attackers or wake you up when there’s trouble. If the police happen to arrest the human companion, they cannot jail the animal one, nor can they just abandon it on the streets. “Instead, they must house the dog in a special dog hotel,” says Sandrine Guilhem, a community activist in Toulouse. “For most offenses, that’s too much trouble and costs too much money, so the police simply do not prosecute travelers for minor offenses such as riding on a train without a ticket.” (The same goes for psychiatric hospitals, Guilhem notes: they can’t forcibly institutionalize a homeless person without providing separate lodging for the animal.)
Coming across so many of these travelers during my trips to Europe made me think about the relationships they have with their animals. Many people might ask, for instance, how a homeless person who can barely take care of himself can take decent care of an animal. The more cynical might even accuse the homeless of using their animals to milk the sympathies of passersby. What I observed was something different. The homeless people I met were with their animals day and night, looking out for their welfare at all times. They didn’t leave their dogs in cages all day—the way some people do when they leave for work. The man with the sign in Paris was the only street person I ever saw who was selling an animal.
The loyalty the homeless people showed their dogs, in turn, seemed to be avidly reciprocated. The dogs protected their owners against attacks at night. They served as peacekeepers when large numbers of street people gathered at sunset, as in front of the train station, and tensions rose. The dogs, who knew each other well, would walk in intersecting circles, helping maintain a safe distance between their respective masters until tempers calmed.
Whether the homeless have the financial wherewithal to adequately care for their animals is another matter—and one that some advocacy groups are trying to address. In France, the IFAW has been developing ways to assist homeless animals (usually dogs) and humans in tandem, so that the animal is cared for while the homeless person is taking steps toward reintegration into society: attending training, going to job interviews, seeing a doctor, and so on.
In the United States, Pets of the Homeless operates a nationwide network to help street people and their animals stay together. Among other things, the nonprofit organization provides the homeless with free veterinary care and food for their animals. “We get lots of calls from people who are about to become, or just became, homeless,” says Genevieve Frederick, the organization’s founder. “They’ll ask, ‘What am I going to do about my dog?’ They don’t want to be separated.” As Frederick notes, homelessness is usually a temporary condition, which means there is little reason for street people and their animals to be permanently split up.
Legend has it that street people first traveled with dogs in large numbers in the French town of Montpellier. If this way of life really began in Montpellier, there’s something curiously wonderful about that. Montpellier is the birthplace of St. Roch, a fourteenth-century mendicant pilgrim and ascetic, the patron saint of dogs and dog lovers.
According to accounts of Roch’s life, the governor of Montpellier—Roch’s father—decreed on his deathbed that his son would succeed him. Roch would have none of that. Instead, he gave away his wealth to the poor. When he fell victim to the plague, Roch hid in the forest, expecting to die there. As the story goes, a dog began to visit him every day, bringing him stolen food and licking his wounds. (For that reason, depictions of Roch usually show his left hand lifting his tunic to reveal a wound on his thigh, while his right hand accepts stolen food from an attentive dog.) After the dog nursed him back to health, Roch traveled throughout Italy healing others.
In a sense, today’s travelers are much like Roch: outcasts nursing wounds. For them, says the IFAW’s Nivelet, animals are “a lifeline, a family, a safeguard, an antidepressant”—a way to cope with an intensely precarious and disheartening state of being. “At times it is this bond,” Nivelet adds, “that represents the final safety net before a total break from society.”
University of Colorado sociologist Leslie Irvine has conducted interviews with people who live on the streets with their animals. In her 2013 book My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals, these individuals describe their animal companions as life changers and lifesavers—sources of unconditional love who encourage them to be more responsible caretakers, silent witnesses who keep them from falling back into risky behaviors.
In turn, animals can help the homeless stay connected to the rest of humanity. As Frederick points out, people who normally never approach a homeless person living on the street react to them differently when they see them with an animal. They will first interact with the animal, petting it or talking to it, and then, once they feel more comfortable, they will begin to chat with the animal’s human companion. “Having an animal helps homeless people open up communication with non-homeless humans, who see them as caring,” Frederick says.
I like to believe that having an animal companion deepens the compassion of homeless people, who often live relatively solitary lives. And perhaps seeing these travelers with their dogs also deepens the compassion of those of us just walking by. If at first we’re drawn to the dog, with any luck we get to know its human companion, too. We recognize and relate to that age-old bond between human and animal. And maybe we walk away changed, having known the homeless not as panhandlers or social burdens, but as other caring human beings.
A health researcher by profession, Jim Ross has published stories and photos in the Atlantic, Friends Journal, Pif Magazine, and Lunch Ticket, among other publications. He resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. He can be reached at jamesross355@gmail.com.
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Best of In The Fray 2014. Through photography, journalism, and social media, Onnik Krikorian is chipping away at the cross-border hatreds that once escalated into a vicious war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—one that has never really ended. Over the years he has seen little progress toward peace at the highest levels of government, but at the grassroots and among the young, he says, there is hope for change.
When the Soviet Union began to crumble a quarter-century ago, more than a dozen of its former republics gained their independence. But in the South Caucasus—that much troubled limb of land that, depending on your perspective, either connects or divides the Eurasian continent—the withering of Soviet rule meant the escalation of war. In the early nineties, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, landlocked region inhabited mainly by ethnic Armenians but recognized by the United Nations as part of Azerbaijan. The conflict left as many as 25,000 dead and a million displaced from their homes.
Since then, attempts to broker a lasting peace between the two countries have failed. Ethnic hatreds go far back, entangled as they are with Armenian hostility toward Turkic people and anti-Armenian sentiment that fuelled the Armenian genocide conducted a century ago in the Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire. Although Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a ceasefire in 1994, dozens continue to die each year in frontline skirmishes. And the situation has worsened in the past few months, with the fighting intensifying and the threat of a large-scale conflict becoming more palpable. “We expect war every day,” said the commander of Karabakh’s defense forces, Movses Hakobyan, in a recent interview. “And the goal of our army is to stand ready for it.”
Onnik Krikorian is a British-born journalist, photographer, and media consultant who has worked for years to promote peace between the two countries. His independent-media platform Conflict Voices brings together grassroots activists, bloggers, and citizen journalists from around the region, who use social media to challenge stereotypes and encourage dialogue between ordinary citizens of both countries.
“There was this horrible hostel in Yerevan, and this beautiful little kid in rags. I ask to take a picture and her mother says, ‘No, no, no!’ And she drags the kid away, takes her into the only other room, and then emerges with her in this clean, immaculate dress. I’ve got a picture of the mother with the kid sitting on her lap, brushing her hair, and she’s dressed beautifully, because they’ve got pride still.”
Normally, Azerbaijanis and Armenians have very limited contact. Armenia is an oligarchy, rife with electoral fraud and poverty; Azerbaijan is a dictatorship. Each country routinely demonizes the other in the media. Krikorian, whose ethnic surname comes from his Greek Armenian father, emphasizes the need for an alternative view of the conflict, one not swayed by the propaganda on either side. Through his work with Conflict Voices, his role as a consultant and trainer, and his own writing and photography, Krikorian has sought to build that “third narrative” piece by piece, documenting life in communities where ethnic Azeris and Armenians still live and work together peacefully.
Nowadays Krikorian is based in Georgia—a country he describes as something of a neutral ground between its two warring neighbors. He has reported extensively on his city of Tbilisi, including recent pieces on the lives of its street kids and an environmental protest camp in Vake Park devoted to stopping the construction of a hotel. Yet his work as a journalist has also taken him to the farthest corners of the region. His photography tells the stories of the forgotten people of the South Caucasus: those living in remote villages, foraging landfills, or dwelling in institutions.
In The Fray spoke with Krikorian about his days toiling on Web 1.0 websites, his first awkward but breakthrough meeting with young Azerbaijani bloggers, his hopeful pragmatism about the ongoing conflict, and why he thinks photojournalism is, at its heart, about empathy.
How did you first get into photography, and what was the process that led you to the South Caucasus, doing the kind of work that you do?
When I was in my early teens I saw the work of Don McCullin, a British war photographer, and Dorothea Lange, who photographed poverty in the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930s. It just blew me away. These images for me represented what the power of photography was. They weren’t just of foreign wars, they were also of poverty in the United Kingdom, for example, and it had a major effect on me. That was what really pushed me into photography.
I started at the Bristol Evening Post doing paste-up and sub-editing. Eventually I decided to move to London. I got a job at the Independent newspaper, but again on the production side of things. It was then that I got to the South Caucasus. The ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh had just been signed, so I went to the picture editor and said, “Listen, there’s a humanitarian-aid flight going to Nagorno-Karabakh. Let me go.” And the guy said, “Sure, okay.”
When I came back, Mosaic—the web browser that popularized the Internet—had been released. I took a look at this web browser and thought, Wow, I understand where this is heading, and I need to do this. So in 1994, I set up my first Internet site, on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. I also became involved with the Kurdish Human Rights Project, following a chance meeting with some Kurdish activists in London.
In 1998 they asked if I’d like to go to Armenia to research the human rights situation of the Yezidis, the largest minority in Armenia [a Kurdish religious group now in the news because of their persecution in ISIS-dominated Iraq —ed.], and while there it was obvious that there was very little reliable information coming out of the country. I was struck by the poverty, the corruption, and other issues that no one was really reporting on. So that’s when I decided to write. Because ultimately, I felt that these issues need to get out there. I was offered a job with the United Nations Development Programme and moved to Armenia in 1998. That’s when the sort of work I do now started.
What languages do you speak?
I speak English and some Armenian. I learned Armenian when I was in Armenia. While my dad is ethnic Armenian from Greece, my mum is English. My parents divorced when I was about a year old, so I was never brought up by Armenians, and I never had any contact with Armenians until I was about twenty-one, when I got in touch with my father again. I don’t know what that really says. Maybe I have a different view of how identity works.
This concept of ethnicity in the South Caucasus is a concerning thing. People relate to each other here based on their ethnic group, rather than, you know, “You’ve got the same biological makeup as me.”
Children pose in an abandoned van in Stepanakert, the capital of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, soon after the ceasefire was signed in 1994.
How did Conflict Voices come into being?
In 2007 I was Caucasus regional editor for an organization in the United States called Global Voices. I would put together posts about issues that were underrepresented in the regional and international media from the South Caucasus—for example, about gay rights, women’s rights, or the flawed process of elections in the region. But in 2008, Facebook started to emerge in the region, and then things really got interesting. You could basically form relationships across borders online.
I was still based in Yerevan, Armenia. As the regional editor for Global Voices, how could I do anything referring to Azerbaijan without knowing what was really happening there, or without even being in contact with any Azerbaijanis? It’s just not professional, and it’s definitely not possible to have a clear view of the region if you don’t speak to people from the other countries. So I ventured up to Tbilisi and made contact with some Azerbaijani bloggers at a BarCamp. It was very interesting. You had the Armenian contingent, who would be standing about twenty meters away from the Azerbaijani contingent. They were just totally separate. I thought, Well, this is bloody stupid! So I decided to approach the Azerbaijanis. I had my camera on me. They thought, This looks like a photographer, let’s give him our cameras and ask him to take pictures of us together.
I handed them their cameras, and they said, “Thanks very much, where are you from?” I said. “I’m from England.” They said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Onnik Krikorian.” Deathly silence. But people are people, and there’s always that initial thing when you have stereotypes and whatever. You don’t know how to react in such a situation. After ten seconds, they say, “Thanks, stay in touch. Could you send some of the images you took with your camera?” So I found them on Facebook and made contact with them. Suddenly, a world in Azerbaijan through young Azerbaijanis was opened up to me. And not surprisingly, they weren’t very different from Armenian youth.
They’re not totally preoccupied with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and they have the same interests as any young person does—mainly posting about music, films, university, or whatever. I saw the potential of social media to break down stereotypes and thought, if only a young Armenian in Armenia could see what a young Azerbaijani is doing. They would see that actually each side is not a monster, each side is not perpetually thinking about armed conflict. In that sense, social media was incredibly revolutionary.
I had a foot in the door of Azerbaijani social networks. And as a journalist, the more they saw my work, the more I think they understood that I wasn’t a threat. Trust and relationships were built, and my material was shared. I thought, okay, something really has to be done now, something proper, because this is a very wonderful, personal tool for connecting people.
Has this affected your view of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict?
Yes, it’s changed my view of the conflict. Don’t get me wrong—it’s also a really depressing situation, with no solution anywhere in sight. In 1994, when I returned to London from Nagorno-Karabakh, analysts were telling me, “In twenty years, the conflict will be solved.” Well, it’s now twenty years since then, and the conflict is nowhere even close to being solved. I’m not even sure it’ll be close to being resolved in another twenty years.
So do you just envision a continuing standoff, or do you think something else is going to happen?
I think the standoff continuing is, unfortunately, a safe bet. What some are concerned about, however, is whether hostilities will resume. I think the consensus is that no side will start a new war, but that there’s a danger of an accidental war when a skirmish on the border spirals out of control. But despite how depressing the situation looks, I can at least see in the interactions I have with Azerbaijanis and Armenians, that there is a—albeit small—group of progressive, open-minded people on both sides.
They communicate with each other, and some meet face-to-face. In Georgia, of course, you have ethnic Armenians and Azeris who have absolutely no problem with each other at all.
You have now been based in Georgia for two years. Was this a tactical decision?
Georgia is very different from Armenia. There’s a more liberal and freer environment here. I’d been visiting since 1999, and even then—when it was a failed state, when it was criminal, when there were problems with electricity—there was something about Tbilisi that I really loved. Yes, I knew all the problems, and it was inconceivable that the Rose Revolution would happen and things would start going in the right direction. There was something I liked about the place, and I always knew I’d probably end up here. My Armenia-Azerbaijan work is another reason. This is the center of the South Caucasus, the place where everyone can intermingle.
It’s difficult for Azerbaijanis from Azerbaijan to get into Armenia, and it’s even harder for Armenians to go to Azerbaijan. It’s a horrible conflict and people don’t mix. People-to-people contact is an incredibly important—if not the most important—component of reconciling differences and finding a peaceful solution. And it’s the one thing that the citizens of both countries are prevented from doing—except in Georgia. There are Armenians from Armenia and Azerbaijanis from Azerbaijan mixing here. Not thousands, but it does happen.
I think this is the strength of Georgia. It’s always been the heart and soul of the South Caucasus.
Ethnic Armenians in the Georgian village of Tsopi. Situated close to the country’s border with Armenia and Azerbaijan, the village is 70 percent ethnic Azeri. The rest of the villagers are ethnic Armenian. Integrated villages like Tsopi challenge the notion that the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is merely an ethnic one.
You know, you have this in Georgia. But when you have really intense nationalism and propaganda in Armenia and Azerbaijan, both sides cannot see eye to eye or find any common ground. Some would argue this is by design. Both governments have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because it allows them to cling onto power. They’ve come to power on the back of the Karabakh conflict, and presidents have lost power on the back of it, too. These are the things that have defined the leadership in both countries. But there are alternative voices emerging, and that’s the most important thing for me. Ten years ago these alternative voices didn’t have a space, online or off, but now you have alternative media outlets in both countries. I would even argue that despite there being more anti-Armenian sentiment in Azerbaijan than anti-Azeri sentiment in Armenia, there’s an even larger group of alternative young Azeris who are more open-minded than their counterparts in Armenia.
There could be very many reasons for this. It could be because there’s a more oppressive regime there. But the youth movements, the alternative voices in Azerbaijan are incredibly impressive—and they face the greatest risks in the entire South Caucasus for what they’re doing.
I stumble upon something and see there’s something wrong and that no one is covering it. Actually, the problem of vulnerable children in residential care started in Armenia, as part of a big project I did on poverty in Armenia. There’s a lot of poverty. I saw this and I was very shocked by it. I worked with organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], and that took me into the issue of the institutionalization of children. In 2007 I came to Georgia to look at the situation here. They had the process of de-institutionalization, so it was an interesting contrast.
Vake Park was an impressive display of a non-politically partisan social movement that managed to attract the involvement of everyone. I’m used to movements in Armenia being politicized, and for me that’s not the way you achieve social change. Maybe it’s a part of it, but you need grassroots nonpoliticized movements. Vake Park is still going on, the hotel has not been constructed, and they’ve still got their camp. It was a pleasure to document something like that, as well as an interesting story.
The street kids project is ongoing. There’s a lot of kids on the streets of Tbilisi. These kids are not necessarily sleeping on the streets. The majority do have homes, but are from poor families. They’ve got no choice but to beg on the street from early morning until late at night. The street is not a safe place for a kid. Under UNICEF’s definition, they are still street kids. They’re great kids. I really enjoy hanging out with them.
It seemed that you had a strong rapport with those kids—and, in other stories, with the people who live by salvaging from landfill sites, or who live in small villages like Tsopi and Sissian. How do you create a level of trust that allows you to take such intimate portraits?
You don’t necessarily try to gain their trust. You either have empathy with them, or you don’t. A lot of photojournalism is about empathy with a subject. Unless, of course, it’s a battle raging around you, or police beating protesters—then you don’t really have empathy with the policeman—but for those sorts of social issues, you need empathy. You can tell if someone’s being open with you or not. Also, it takes a lot of work. In some cases you have to spend days for them to get to know you. There were times documenting poverty in Armenia and especially at the landfill sites that I wouldn’t take any photographs, because they didn’t want pictures taken. Why would someone who’s taking rubbish off a landfill want their picture taken? Why would someone who’s living in extreme poverty want their picture taken? Of course they don’t want their picture taken. There was this horrible hostel in Yerevan, and this beautiful little kid in rags. I ask to take a picture and her mother says, “No, no, no!” And she drags the kid away, takes her into the only other room, and then emerges with her in this clean, immaculate dress. I’ve got a picture of the mother with the kid sitting on her lap, brushing her hair, and she’s dressed beautifully, because they’ve got pride still. Maybe that picture works because it shows that. I can’t go into someone’s home and intervene in their lives, then just walk out. I would also go back many times, to see if their lives had improved.
Have there been any improvements?
A family living in a run-down hostel in the Erebuni district of Yerevan, the Armenian capital. The little girl, Isabella, sits on her mother’s lap. She died a week later, after falling seven floors in an unsafe stairwell.
The poor people, no. There is the building of the homeless shelter, but that’s not really a major success story, because the government, being the Armenian government, decided to build the homeless shelter right on the outskirts of the city, where no homeless person can actually get to. Homeless people stay around markets, and there’s a reason for this, and that’s because homeless people go through the bins later looking for discarded stuff. And buses won’t take homeless people. And taxis, even if they could pay, don’t take homeless people. So it seemed like a success, but in reality it didn’t really do much to achieve a solution.
I guess the main success story for me is the number of Armenians and Azerbaijanis that I’ve managed to connect who would never have done so without me acting as a bridge. You need someone to break the ice and to bridge that divide. I think that’s the most successful thing I’ve managed to do. Of course, the conflict is nowhere near resolution, and however many people I manage to connect, it’s still not a critical mass. I was recently at a closed meeting on Nagorno-Karabakh, and a very bright guy from Azerbaijan simply noted, “There’s no peace movement. There’s no demand for peace. And NGOs, it’s time for you to stop sitting around, patting yourselves on the back, talking about the projects that you’ve done, because they’re really not changing much. There really is no genuine grassroots peace movement in the South Caucasus, and especially Armenia and Azerbaijan, and now you guys need to work on creating one.”
Maybe that’s what I hope I can contribute to. To try and make this bigger. Obviously I can’t do it on my own, but maybe as part of a bigger process that can finally sort out the mess that is the Nagorno- Karabakh conflict. It’s a major obstacle to the development of both countries. The conflict will be over one day. It cannot last forever, and so I’d like to think that my work can be part of the process that brings that day sooner. Of course, whether I’ll see it in my lifetime is still unclear.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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I had thought Burning Man would be a nonstop hedonistic party. But when I arrived at the arts festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert last summer, I realized it was really about building a community—one art installation, and one person, at a time.
Story by Hannah Albarazi Photos by Sari Blum
As I approached the gate to Black Rock City, a young man came up to my car and greeted me with a warm “Welcome Home.” I had arrived at Burning Man: a week-long arts festival in the Nevada desert held annually since 1986.
Before I became a “Burner”—what the festival calls its attendees, almost 70,000 strong this year—I had dismissed it as a drugged-up, hippie rave in the desert. Months later, certain images of the festival’s spectacle have stayed with me: the skydivers falling onto the sand dunes, the parade of hundreds of topless women on bicycles, the square-rigged pirate ship sailing across the desert on wheels, the skateboard park shaped like a heart. But what stands out to me most about my first visit there is something else: the real and vital community I was surprised to find among the festival’s motley crowd of academics and soldiers, financial advisors and college students, Silicon Valley techies and artists.
At the Burning Man festival at the end of last summer (captured in the accompanying photos by Sari Blum), I came across men and women like Raymond Raven, who was volunteering as a medic. Burning Man does not allow any monetary exchanges except for buying ice and coffee. Instead, attendees swap goods and services, or just offer them for free. Raven, a forty-two-year-old hand and upper extremity surgeon from Burbank, California, didn’t mind that his physician skills weren’t being compensated with dollars. The informal nature of his dealings with other Burners meant that there was no insurance and legal paperwork to process, and it gave Raven the chance to put into practice his conviction that health care is a “right and not a privilege.”
More importantly, it connected Raven with the people he treated in a way he couldn’t at his day job. “Hugs and gifts are by far the best payment I have ever received,” Raven says. The festival, he adds, encourages people to remember “just how connected we are to one another.” (It also helps that there is very limited Internet and cell phone service, keeping Burners focused on each other, not their LCD screens.)
Gift-giving is a crucial part of building community in Black Rock City. Gifts often come in the form of jewelry, massages, advice, or just a swig of water. Your food may be a gift as well—from the woman who chased you down at sunrise to offer a hot breakfast from her tiny cart.
Sometimes the gifts take more elaborate forms. The city—built anew with every festival, only to be torn down at the event’s end—consists of a main camping area, formed by a series of concentric and radial streets, and an area reserved for art installations. There, the enormous wolf you can climb inside of is not just an object of art, but a gift to the Burners from the artists among them. At night, colorful lasers shoot across the night sky, and atop an art installation you can see a sea of neon lights spread out across the desert. When you walk through a tunnel made of plastic and emerge into a giant dome for a communal shower with about a hundred naked people and a DJ spinning—that experience is also a gift, and, potentially, the only time you might bathe that week.
Gillian Grogan, an MIT student and musician, says the gift-giving is contagious, making her want to reciprocate in kind. People in the outside world, she says, “have forgotten how to accept and give anything, either material or immaterial.” Feeling that warmth of giving and receiving without the intent to profit encourages Burners to see each other in a different light—as if they are truly at home, among friends. Grogan says she hopes that the altruism she experienced in Black Rock City will continue to “rub off” in her life beyond its gates.
Artists watch the sunrise from the hood of their “art car.”
Sociologist Katherine K. Chen has written (in this magazine as well) about the unconventional and intense ways that Burning Man gets ordinary people involved in what amounts to an international social movement. (A quarter of festival-goers come to the event from overseas, according to a 2012 census conducted by the event’s organizers.) Volunteers devote months of planning and preparation to building a community from the ground up and making it function—and inspire—as an idealistic, alternative vision of life beyond the outside culture of consumption and status-seeking.
That alternative, DIY ethos is at the heart of the festival. Across the “playa”—what festival-goers call the dry lakebed in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where Burners gather every year—the thumping electronic dance music reminded me of other large festivals, such as Coachella in California and Ultra in Miami. But those events are sponsored by corporations like Heineken and Red Bull, while the elaborate stages and massive art installations at Burning Man are all constructed by the festival-goers themselves.
As Chen writes, Burning Man breaks down the divide that separates formally trained artists and professional managers from everyone else, letting people find their own ways, however large or small, to be creative and contribute—whether that means assembling a stage or art installation, building one of the altered “mutant” vehicles that traverse the playa, performing dance or music, or volunteering the many other skills they use, or don’t use, in the outside world.
Of course, there are also plenty of drugs and exhibitionists at Black Rock City, true to the outside stereotype. But that’s not what I, or many other festival-goers, really got out of our Burning Man experience. Mickey Larsen, seventy-two, a retired high school teacher from Santa Cruz, California, was “dragged” to this year’s festival by his son and friends. Before he arrived in Black Rock City for the first time, Larsen had assumed the event would consist of “loud music, drugs, and pseudo-mystic gatherings.” But there was much more to it than that, he says. He describes the festival as an “intellectual and spiritual playground,” a coming together of immense amounts of energy and creativity to create and nurture an “authentic cooperative community.”
That’s what stayed with me, too, when I returned to “the default”—a term Burners use to describe life outside Black Rock City. Burning Man was less about the partying and more about creating a strong and open community, one without judgment, where radical self-expression is not just accepted, but encouraged as an end in itself.
That spirit carried on to the fiery end of the festival. Of the dozens of art installations assembled in Black Rock City every year, the highlights are two towering wooden structures, the Temple and the Man. In the Temple, Burners leave notes throughout the week that describe the suffering they are dealing with. The Man is seen as a symbol of conformity and oppression.
On the festival’s final weekend, both structures were burned to the ground. The next day, the temporary community of Black Rock City folded up its tents, and the people left the desert, taking their possessions with them and, perhaps, something more.
Hannah Albarazi is a journalist currently based in San Francisco, where she covers breaking news. Sari Blum is a freelance photographer also based in the San Francisco area.
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Best of In The Fray 2013. Raised in small-town Minnesota, college student Shelby Wolfe traveled to Ethiopia to shoot images for a documentary about poverty. There she met Rahel, a fourteen-year-old girl orphaned by AIDS.
By Scott Winter Photos by Shelby Wolfe
She was shy, and that’s what drew aspiring photojournalist Shelby Wolfe to her. Her name was Rahel Nunu. Fourteen years old and hidden beneath a green scarf and brown skirt, she lived in a compound in Addis Ababa for Ethiopian children turned into orphans by the AIDS pandemic. Living HIV positive in a country where the disease is so stigmatized had taught Rahel the value of discretion. It was May, the hottest month in the Horn of Africa, but she insisted on covering her arms with the scarf: her skin had erupted with rashes and sores, side effects of the powerful antiviral medications she took. Today she’d also skipped school, not wanting to take the risk of her condition being scrutinized by her classmates, who didn’t know her secret.
Inside the AHOPE compound for HIV/AIDS orphans in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Shelby, a college freshman from small-town Minnesota, was visiting the compound as part of a photojournalism fellowship. She gravitated toward Rahel the moment she met her. The quietest girl in the orphanage, Rahel was an observer when alone or in groups, keeping her distance from the other children as they crowded around the compound’s TV to watch soccer matches and American music videos. Shelby was quiet herself, and she could relate to Rahel.
Sitting down next to Rahel, Shelby pulled out two sketchbooks and a pile of pencils she’d bought on the street. Shelby knew Rahel could draw. She had recently done well in a local art competition. With pencils or crayons or paint, she would draw the other girls—her sisters, as they called each other—or the beautiful women she saw on TV.
Shelby hoped the sketchbooks might get her to start talking about herself. Without speaking, Rahel drew a mother with the willowy look of a model.
Shelby drew an elephant. “Does my elephant need anything else?” Shelby asked.
Rahel took the sketchbook and added a baby elephant next to Shelby’s elephant, making it a mother.
Rahel Nunu in front of a painting she made on one of the orphanage’s walls.
Shelby was one of ten students from the University of Nebraska who were visiting Ethiopia on a three-week fellowship. For the past few years, donors had covered the overseas travel costs for a group of the university’s student photojournalists and videographers and a few of their professors (disclosure: I was one of the professors on Shelby’s trip). There were two conditions. First was that the students use the opportunity to capture Ethiopia’s stories of poverty and help bring about change there. Second was that they show their fellow Americans a new Ethiopia, a different kind of country than the one that Sally Struthers and company had brought to public attention in the 1980s with horrifying television images of famine victims.
Shelby had just twenty-one days to finish her assignment: shoot a batch of photos and videos that would impress her professors and wind up in a documentary and related blog the class was making about poverty in Ethiopia. Shelby needed a subject, and Rahel was the girl she chose. But Shelby didn’t have the reporting experience to get Rahel to open up to her. Shelby’s past work at her college newspaper was something altogether different from documenting a life-and-death issue like HIV/AIDS in Africa—and truth be told, Shelby had struggled to pass her reporting class that spring, right before she left for Ethiopia. She had never done anything like this before.
And then there was the heartbreak of the orphanage. She saw kids curled up on bunks, clutching their stomachs; the toxic medication they took seemed to make them as sick as the disease it was meant to fight. She saw babies, too, sleeping in rows of cribs, as nurses shuttled about the room caring for them. (“They’re our children,” one nurse told her.) For Shelby, the wild swings in emotion were difficult to take. One moment, she was watching kids playing ping-pong and twirling on a tire swing in front of walls painted with Dora the Explorer and Dr. Seuss characters—one of them drawn by Rahel. Another moment, Shelby found herself in the dark office of the orphanage’s assistant director, listening to Addis Bogale’s sobs as she described the most recent death of a child. “You don’t forget them,” Bogale said.
Shelby was overwhelmed by it all. She worried about whether she could handle three weeks in such grim surroundings. And yet she also knew that Rahel, and all her orphan brothers and sisters, didn’t get to leave.
Shelby slid the sketchbooks over to Rahel.
“You can keep those,” Shelby said.
Outside the compound, located near the Vatican Embassy in a residential area on the city’s west side.
Shelby Wolfe grew up in Minnesota. Her hometown, Owatonna, population 25,000, is the kind of heartland community that urges citizens on its Facebook page to make flag-themed fruit dips—strawberries, bananas, and blueberries—for the Fourth of July holiday. Her family lived an hour’s drive away from the Mall of America, one of the world’s largest shopping centers. As a kid, Shelby danced at an upscale studio. She had the same boyfriend for three years in high school. But she also loved Vietnamese food, especially a dish of grilled pork over vermicelli, and liked going to shows at First Avenue, a music venue where Prince used to play. Inspired by her globe-trotting older sister, she had hiked the Rocky Mountains and backpacked through Germany.
Shelby went off to college at the University of Nebraska. Away from home, Shelby pierced her nose. She started hanging out in coffeeshops. She became obsessed with her photojournalism class, to the point her other grades dropped and she had to do some explaining to her parents.
But that passion for photography also brought her to Ethiopia. The orphanage is funded by AHOPE for Children, a nonprofit based in Virginia. On her first day there, Shelby and her professor met with assistant director Bogale, who walked them through the part of the compound for younger children and then to a nearby group home. Bogale’s creation, the group home was a new project to integrate the children into the community so that AHOPE could get rid of the orphanage altogether. But that dream was a generation in the making.
Then Bogale brought them to another part of the compound, where Shelby met the teenage orphans. Sitting alone in one corner, watching the other girls watch music videos on the TV, was Rahel.
Rahel watches other children play basketball.
Addis Ababa is a modern city, only a century old. The capital of Ethiopia, it houses the headquarters of the African Union and is also known for being the home of beloved twentieth-century emperor Haile Selassie, known as Ras Tafari, who became the muse for the reggae movement half a world away.
Shelby saw little of the city. She spent each day at the compound. Nights, she met up with the other nine student photographers and three instructors, and together they critiqued the day’s photos. Those sessions were often as stressful for Shelby and her fellow students as the orphanage itself.
The group looked over the photos on Shelby’s laptop of Rahel sitting on her bed, watching TV, and showing off her artwork. It was clear to everyone that Shelby had some good shots, but she didn’t have a story.
Shelby was growing anxious. She didn’t have many days left. Her professors told her to keep shooting photos. Keep changing perspective. Keep asking questions. Shelby threw herself into the work, getting absorbed by the technical aspects of her craft. She kept telling herself that the story wasn’t about her. She should quit focusing on her own fears. What were they compared to Rahel’s? This girl wasn’t with her family—though she had one out there somewhere, unlike many of the girls in the compound. Not even the teachers at her school knew about her HIV. Being an orphan was enough of a stigma; she didn’t need the kids to know the rest.
Rahel and her AHOPE sisters walk to school, where only one teacher knows that the children are HIV positive.
One morning, Shelby followed Rahel to her school, where the staff put Shelby in front of all the kids and gave her a microphone to explain who she was and why she was there. The students lined up to meet her one by one. Then they lined up again to give her pink, orange, and white flowers. “Miss, I love you,” one girl said to her with a smile. The students giggled and begged Shelby to take their photos.
No, she could not fail at this.
One day at the orphanage, Shelby sat on the ground while Rahel rocked in a swing. Names of the world’s cities, countries, and landmarks were written in chalk on the walls of the compound. Rahel asked Shelby about the Coliseum in Rome. Shelby’s sister had been to India, and Rahel asked about how beautiful the country was. Rahel said she’d seen New York in a movie and wanted to see it for real.
Shelby asked her if she knew anyone who had visited other countries. Rahel said some of the other children had been adopted by families in the United States.
“Does that make you sad?” Shelby asked.
“Yes, but other children come.”
Rahel had been in the orphanage since she was five. Every child there, she told Shelby, was part of her family. “All I know is here,” she said.
Rahel and her friends laugh after making fun of some boys.
“I realized this is their life and these kids are making the best of it,” Shelby told me later. “I couldn’t imagine not having a family. But at the same time it was really touching that they are each other’s family.”
Her time with Rahel made Shelby think about how fortunate she was. Shelby is close to her older sister, who is always up for going with her to concerts and hikes and bonfires. She has a dad who is a periodontist and a mom who works at a pharmacy, and they lovingly take care of all her needs—from the Ford Focus she drives, to her out-of-state college tuition, to all the dance costumes in her closet.
Rahel had none of that. She could only rely on her “family” at the compound—assuming her sister-friends didn’t leave for a home of their own. When she prayed, Rahel said, she prayed for everyone at the orphanage. She prayed for the many mentally ill among the city’s street people.
“What do you pray for yourself?” Shelby asked.
Rahel said she’d ask God to help her help others. She’d ask to go to a better place, somewhere with a family that would make her their own. God can do anything, she said.
Rahel and her AHOPE sisters on the van taking them to field day at the Worldwide Orphans Complex.
Near the end of Shelby’s time in Ethiopia, Rahel and her classmates went on a trip. AHOPE and some of the other local orphanages had organized a soccer tournament, and the girls were set to play matches against the other orphanage teams—some with HIV and non-HIV kids, some with no HIV kids. As they rode to the soccer field in a red passenger van, the girls were noticeably giddy, happy to leave the compound for something other than school. In her field notes, Shelby described what happened next:
The girl sitting next to Rahel began vomiting into a narrow crevice between her seat and the doorway. The laughter and singing stopped, replaced with the sound of violent heaving.
Rahel placed her hand on her sister’s back, but her eyes were peeled forward, and her smile was gone. She handed the girl a tissue to wipe her mouth. The girl was embarrassed and turned to Rahel to say thank you. Rahel smiled slightly at her and withdrew her hand, collapsing it into her lap like it was too heavy for her to hold up on her own.
The van ride was silent for the rest of the way to the soccer fields, where they would face hundreds of other children who do not know they are HIV positive. It was as if they had forgotten, and then been reminded, of the burden they hold trying to hide their status from the world.
When they arrived at the sports complex, the girls put on their best game-faces and stepped out of the van one by one. They stuck together as they walked slowly toward the fields of children already playing.
The photos that day were strong. The van ride. The soccer match. The sidelines. The kids played games, and clapped and sang together. But most striking was an image of shy Rahel, having forgotten momentarily about the camera, dancing with her sister-friends in front of Shelby.
Rahel and her AHOPE sister, Ruth Tesfaye (middle left), compete in a race during field day.
The fellowship ended, and Shelby completed her assignment. Her professors were pleased. But in her field notes, Shelby was ambivalent. My work and being there for the last two-plus weeks was insignificant and maybe even selfish, she wrote.
When Shelby met Rahel before leaving through the front gate for the last time, she teared up and said, “I’ll see you later, Rahel.” But that wasn’t true.
Rahel said goodbye and waved hesitantly, with a solemn look on her face.
Then Shelby went home.
Scott Winter is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Shelby Wolfe is a sophomore photojournalism student at the University of Nebraska, where she is a senior photographer at the Daily Nebraskan. In November her project on Rahel will be released in a seven-minute multimedia video. Twitter: @UNL_scottwinter
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Best of In The Fray 2013. Each spring, hundreds of foreigners converge on Mount Everest, hoping to conquer the world’s highest peak. With them come jobs for Sherpa guides, porters, and guesthouse workers—and lethal risks for those stuck on the mountain’s crowded slopes.
Ever since 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, many more have aspired to follow them to the top of the world. Every year, hundreds of foreign adventurers climb Everest—at 29,029 feet, Earth’s highest peak—each paying tens of thousands of dollars for the opportunity.
For these tourists, conquering Everest is often a lifelong ambition. But for their local guides and porters, it is a mere job—albeit a dangerous and well-compensated one. A porter carrying goods to the Everest base camp on Nepal’s border makes an average of nine dollars a day, more than three times the daily wage of a typical worker in Nepal. High-altitude workers can earn much more: hiring a Sherpa to climb with you costs $5,000 to $7,000, plus tips and bonuses.
And yet few workplaces boast as high a mortality rate. Just last year, eleven people died attempting to scale Everest—the largest death toll since 1996, the mountain’s deadliest year, when over two days alone a blizzard led to the deaths of nine climbers (a disaster documented by Jon Krakauer in his book Into Thin Air).
The photographs above document my travels last summer through the mountains of Nepal. I began my journey in the northeastern district where Everest is located, Solukhumbu. Later, I spent several weeks with a team of Nepalese mountain guides training in Kakani, one hour north of Kathmandu. In exploring the trails and talking with numerous guides who have worked the Himalayan peaks, I gained a sense of the ambivalence that locals have about the growing international popularity of Everest, which in recent years has brought them rising shares of both bounty and danger.
One of over 120 ethnic groups in Solukhumbu, the Sherpa ethnic group has come to control the tourism and mountaineering industry in the district, and their name has become synonymous with the trained personnel who help foreigners up the slopes (Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa, paired up with the New Zealand mountaineer Hillary on Everest’s first successful ascent). For some Sherpas, the work they do above the clouds is a calling. “Some people like to drink; some people like to climb mountains,” says Indra Rai, a Nepalese mountain guide in his mid-twenties. “I like the mountains.”
A Nepalese porter takes a wooden door up to the Everest base camp.
Everest is not for amateurs. Foreigners who seek to scale it from the south must first make a two-week trek to the base camp and then spend six to eight weeks acclimating their bodies to the thin mountain air before the five-day climb to the peak can even begin. But as grueling as the journey is for Everest’s newcomers, the veterans who lead them skyward have a much more challenging task: setting up fixed lines and ascenders—secured ropes, and the metal devices that clamp onto those ropes, which climbers use to hoist themselves up the mountain.
“We climb twice,” says Chhiring Dorje Sherpa, a Nepalese mountain guide in his early thirties. (The ethnic group’s name is also used as a surname in Nepalese culture.) “First, we go up to set the ropes and camps, then we go down to collect our clients and take them to the top.” Often, those fixing the ropes are not just Nepalese Sherpas, but mixed teams of Nepalese and Pakistani guides—working together in spite of the language barrier.
The demand for these mountain men (and women—Sherpas are known to be relatively respectful of gender equality) is increasing. On May 23, 2010, there were more successful ascents of Mount Everest—169—than had occurred in the three decades since Hillary and Norgay first reached the peak. The influx of climbers in recent years has been a boon to Solukhumbu’s economy. Foreigners do not simply employ Sherpas on the mountaintops; they also stay at the family-owned guesthouses scattered along the path to Everest.
Pasang Karesh, forty-five, owns one such guesthouse in Gorak Shep, the Nepalese town closest to Everest’s southern base camp. He speaks of how the tourist boom has transformed the area: the trails are becoming more commercialized, he says, with the outsider-driven demand for accommodations and food supplies spurring gentrification. The recent changes include the construction of a mobile tower in Gorak Shep several years ago—explicitly built to cater to those on the mountaintops who wanted an alternative to costly satellite phones.
As more people from around the world muster the resources (and recklessness) to scale the world’s tallest peak, Everest has itself become commercialized. Privileged Westerners come by the droves to “climb for a cause”—from child poverty to water conservation. Scaling the peak has become just another goal for some to check off on their life’s bucket list.
More worrisome, the mountain’s slopes have become crowded, a situation that veteran mountaineers deplore as dangerous. More than 200 people have died on Everest, and even though fatalities happen less frequently these days, the recent surge in climbers has meant that more than a quarter of those deaths have occurred since 2000. There is a very narrow window between May and June when Everest’s slopes are relatively less perilous, and during that time hundreds of climbers can crowd the so-called “Death Zone”—altitudes above 26,000 feet, where oxygen becomes scarce and mental faculties quickly deteriorate. (Climate change may also be making the climb more lethal, as the mountain’s layers of ice and snow melt and leave the path rockier and more treacherous.)
Last year, an expedition went up Everest to clear debris and retrieve the abandoned corpses of previous climbers. The five-person team ended up having to wait four hours in the Death Zone, as climbers going up “Hillary’s Step”—a sheer rock wall just below the summit—jammed the path down. A South Korean climber died, one of Everest’s four fatalities that day.
Nima Sherpa, a twenty-nine-year-old medic, ticks off the many afflictions that beset those who venture into Everest’s unrivaled altitudes: frostbite, snow blindness, hypothermia, delirium. The Sherpa guides who risk their lives climbing the Himalayas’ toughest peaks cannot dwell on these dangers, though: they have families to support. “The pay is good, and this is their work,” he points out.
And yet that is, perhaps, part of the problem. “When your family needs that money,” another guide says, “sometimes you don’t insist a weak climber turn back.”
Stephanie Lowe is an adventurer and storyteller. She is the founder of Playfull Productions, a firm dedicated to educating and empowering through play.
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Home to one-third of the world’s poor, India attracts hundreds of Christian humanitarian groups seeking to do God’s work in its slums and hinterlands. But while these groups make up in vital ways for the failings of government and markets, their work comes with a consequence: conversion.
On a sun-kissed Saturday morning in March, Rahul Kumar whips through a squalid Delhi neighborhood, his ashen buttoned-down shirt tucked into his dress pants and thick black hair gelled back from his forehead. He is headed to the Sanskar Centre, a bare, one-room school run by a Christian nonprofit in the city’s Shahbad Dairy slum. Every day, Rahul walks to the schoolhouse for his lessons, the best education to be had for many of the district’s poor migrant families.
Just twelve years old, Rahul is already a leader among the neighborhood children, who flock to his side as he walks, eager to embrace him. Though short for his age, he has an outsized ambition: one day, he says confidently, he will dance in Bollywood’s biggest productions. But first, Rahul says through a translator, “I need to get a job to help my family. I need to study hard.”
Rahul’s family moved to Delhi from northern India several years ago, lured by the prospect of a better life. But the situation for Shahbad Dairy’s 100,000 residents is overwhelmingly grim, their opportunities circumscribed by severe, endemic poverty. While some parts of the district enjoy government support—a public school, a maintained latrine, a health care center—most of the slum’s inhabitants live in jhuggis, or slum dwellings, without running water or proper sanitation. A thick expanse of garbage and sewage surrounds the slum and is patrolled by scavenging children and feral pigs alike.
“[Shahbad Dairy] has the dynamics seen in every ghetto or slum,” says Alfred Gnanaolivu, special projects director for Cooperative Outreach of India (COI), the Christian group that runs Rahul’s school. “You have turf warfare. You have the influence of drugs and alcohol … Unfortunately, the main victims are the children.”
A nongovernmental organization, COI works extensively in Shahbad Dairy’s slum blocks, offering clean water, food, and education to local families. Children account for 50 percent of the district’s population, Gnanaolivu notes. That’s where COI—along with the hundreds of other faith-based NGOs operating in India—can have an impact: educating the children of impoverished families that are neglected by the Indian government.
But like many NGOs working in India, COI has a slant. It provides the 500 children enrolled in its schoolhouse an education—but with evangelical undertones. Young boys and girls recite Christian hymns during class, not conscious that they are being indoctrinated. Their faith-driven education is reinforced by COI’s pastoral care workers, or religious counselors, who help the slum’s families with their economic and personal problems using a Christian form of therapy. COI says this “results in transformation of the communities.”
Rahul Kumar, twelve, outside his home in the Shahbad Dairy slum in Delhi, India.
While Shahbad Dairy’s families—most of which are Hindu and from India’s lower or scheduled castes—are aware of the Christian sculpting, they believe that COI is giving their children a better chance at life. And as their relationship with their Christian benefactors deepens, some families are even converting.
“Very often, children are lured in the name of providing [a] good education,” says Chandan Mitra, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) representative in India’s upper house of Parliament. “They don’t understand very often why they have become Christians until they are older.” Religious conversion is banned in many Indian states, but the laws are “violated frequently,” Mitra adds. (In Delhi, conversion is legal.)
Of course, proselytizing Indians is not a new phenomenon. Christianity has existed in India for centuries, and Protestant missionaries have been working in Delhi since the early eighteenth century. Today, Christianity is India’s third-largest religion, with approximately twenty-four million followers.
What is different today is the growth of a politically independent, economically powerful India, a rising nation of a billion-plus people that has become more comfortable asserting its culture. In India (and Indian America) today, there is a willingness now to question the outside influences that for many years were tolerated as the price of doing business. Meanwhile, India has become home to roughly a third of the world’s poor, according to World Bank data. As a result, the country is a magnet for humanitarian aid organizations, many of them Christian.
The conversion of destitute Indian families to Christianity enrages many Indians, and on blogs wild accusations fly that Christian NGOs are committing “culture murder” in India. Mitra—whose Hindu nationalist party is one of India’s two major political forces—takes a more evenhanded stance. Christian NGOs may be indoctrinating children with Christianity, he says, but they are also educating and feeding an entire community that would otherwise remain overlooked.
For its part, COI believes that its religious message helps break down some of the barriers that keep Shahbad Dairy’s residents in poverty. “The caste system has dehumanized human beings,” says Ramesh Landge, COI’s executive director. “We need to help these children, give them a reason to live, and provide them with a childhood.” Among “the few hundred families that have adopted our changes, our teachings,” Landge adds, “we’ve seen success.” He notes that before COI began working in the slum, none of the children had birth certificates, making it nearly impossible for them to enroll in government schools.
Donald Miller, a professor of religion and sociology at the University of Southern California, points out that the evangelical Christian organizations working in India today tend not to fit the colonial-era stereotypes: brazen missionaries coming over to save souls by any means necessary. “Conversion by these groups is more often a side effect as opposed to a direct, manipulative attempt to indoctrinate people,” says Miller, who studies the social ethics of religion. It’s not that they don’t want to see conversions take place. But today’s faith-based humanitarian work, particularly by evangelical organizations, “has much more language about partnership and shared goals,” he says.
Before it was a slum, Shahbad Dairy was cattle country, settled by a Hindu Haryana community of dairy farmers. In 1987, the Indian government ceded a small parcel of land to the local inhabitants to build slum dwellings. Today, most of the shanties in Shahbad Dairy are illegal. Their occupants are immigrants from across India, who left their villages to find work in the sprawling city of Delhi, India’s second largest.
Rahul’s family is originally from Uttar Pradesh, a state about 500 miles to the north. His mother, Reena Kumar, supports the family by extracting the iron from automobile tires to sell as scrap metal. Asked why she moved to the slum, far from her ancestral homeland, Kumar’s response is simple: “To survive.”
The Kumar home in Shahbad Dairy amounts to four scantily constructed shacks, which house Rahul, his mother, and five siblings. A lone television is mounted in the master bedroom, powered by stolen electricity patched in from a nearby power line.
Back from school, Rahul navigates the Indian airways to his favorite Bollywood channel. His brothers, sisters, and friends pack the tiny room, waiting to watch him perform the dance steps.
Gnanaolivu watches the children with a smile. The work that his Christian group is doing, he says, will give children like Rahul much-needed opportunities, so that one day they can achieve their dreams—in Bollywood and beyond. “If they can be given that direction and sustained love … then we can save them.” In the end, it still comes down to saving souls.
Among them, Jeffrey Deskovic, Kian Khatibi, and Fernando Bermudez spent forty-three years in New York prisons. All were eventually exonerated—freed by DNA evidence, confessions, and recanted testimony. Their photos before and after incarceration speak to lives transformed, years lost.
This photo essay is a companion piece to Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald’s article, Freed, but Scarred. Click on the links to Flickr below to view the captions.
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
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Best of In The Fray 2012. Around the world, protesters decry the inequality and excess of free-market capitalism’s “race to the bottom.” But in East Africa, social entrepreneurs are planting the young roots of a new, cause-minded capitalism.
By Jonathan Kalan
For all their flaws, capitalism and its profit-maximizing private enterprises have created enormous prosperity and wealth over the past century, improving living standards around the world. Yet as globalization accelerates a global “race to the bottom”—as integrated markets push down on regulations and wages—the shortcomings of the free-market system have become harder to ignore: growing income inequalities, a stark clash of classes, exploited labor, exhausted resources, and permanently altered ecosystems. Today there are protests on Wall Street, riots in Greece, bailouts on both sides of the Atlantic—seemingly everywhere, political upheaval and social unrest.
Across national, social, and economic boundaries, the capitalist system is being cut open and exposed, criticized and amended. Couch surfers and Craigslisters alike build barter-based economies. Shoppers respond to “cause marketing” efforts and pay more for fair trade. Harvard academics propose new forms of corporations that “create shared value.” Corporations tout their social responsibility programs and social impact assessments.
While these are all noble strategies, they ultimately don’t change a simple fact: the fundamental motivator of the capitalist corporation is profit.
Enter the social entrepreneurs that are bringing about a rebirth of capitalism—this time, in the emerging economies of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. These “new capitalists” are pioneering private-sector solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges in health, water, sanitation, and energy. They are following the blueprint laid out by the late professor C.K. Prahalad, who called for tapping into new markets and fortunes at the bottom of the economic pyramid, and drawing inspiration from recent success stories, such as “Banker to the Poor” Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, winners of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
Social enterprises find profits in poverty, but their zeal for providing essential products and services to the poor—in parts of the developing world shunned by most major corporations—means that a much broader population benefits as well. By carefully balancing economic and social profits, these businesses—and their cause-minded, capitalist founders—are rewriting the global narrative of “pity” for developing countries, cultivating the potential even within formerly marginalized societies for intense levels of entrepreneurship and self-improvement.
For over a year, the (BoP) Project has traversed East Africa, exploring how these new models of private enterprise are addressing some of the most crucial issues in the region. From the slums of Kampala, Uganda, to the pulsing heart of Nairobi, Kenya, to the rolling green hills of Rwanda, these photographs and stories reflect the promise of the entrepreneurial energies at the base of the economic pyramid.
In Kitui, Kenya, I can still recall the emotion of the moment when Masaki John, a widowed Kenyan farmer, offered me a live chicken for taking a photograph of her and her three sons. Her eight beehives produce honey that is guaranteed to be purchased, at fair market prices, by Honey Care Africa, a social enterprise.
I still remember the shock I felt when Veronica, head cashier at an Ikotoilet facility in the central business district of Nairobi, Kenya, told me she once helped deliver a child in a bathroom stall. These high-quality, public, pay-per-use toilet and shower facilities, located in urban areas of Kenya and built by the social enterprise Ecotact, are not only the best option in town for a shave, toilet, and shower, but apparently on multiple occasions have been used by women going into labor, because of their highly sanitary conditions.
I remember the swell of excitement in the crowd as we pulled in just after dusk to the village of Musubiro in Central Uganda, with Ronald, a “solar entrepreneur” working for a social enterprise called Barefoot Power. As he set an array of home solar products on the hood of the car, the blue LED lights from these rugged little devices illuminated the faces of the children in front. For the cost of just two-and-a-half months of kerosene, a Firefly provides enough clean lighting for almost two full years. Across Uganda, there are over 160 solar entrepreneurs like Ronald, and collectively they’ve sold over 200,000 Firefly kits.
Each of these memories, illegibly scribbled in a stack of well-worn Field Notes Brand notebooks and buried at the bottom of an old rucksack, reminds me why these social enterprises exist. Behind that veil of poverty, beyond the images broadcast to the Western world of poor, helpless people in need of your charity, there is an incredible potential waiting to be recognized and rewarded.
Next year would have been the one hundredth birthday of Nobel Prize-winning economist and free-market apostle Milton Friedman. At this critical juncture for capitalism, it’s worth harking back to one of Friedman’s most important points: private enterprise is the foundation of economic prosperity. If private enterprise was the foundation of economicprosperity over the past hundred years, perhaps a little tweaking of the capitalist model will turn private enterprise into the foundation of social prosperity for the next hundred. Where multinational corporations and embattled governments have failed, social enterprises will hopefully find success.
Jonathan Kalan, founder of the (BoP) Project, is an internationally published journalist, photojournalist, and blogger specializing in social business and innovation in emerging markets. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, he is a staff writer for NextBillion.net, a regular contributor to Dowser.org, and a 2011 finalist for the Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards.
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