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Wamba Education Project

Wamba is a small towm in the north of Kenya with a hospital that has to care for people even 500 km north of Wamba, people from Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan. The hospital is the reason why there is a little bit more than nothing in Wamba. Not only sand, dust and stones. The people here have a hard life to live. The rain season did not came for a longer time and the prospects are not high. Especially for the young children it’s a tough life with no real chance for education in the region. And it’s a very poor region of Kenya, what means that most of the parents have no chance to afford their kids a good education what means a better life. Education is also here the key to get out of poverty. Combine that drastic prospects with the epidemic HIV/Aids (more about it here), what kills many before their kids get even in the age to care for themselves, and you look deep into a powerful crisis.

In February 2009 we came to Wamba on a field trip and met Theresa, Alice and William. They had lost parts of their families or both of their parents to Aids and were facing a life without future. Theresa for instance was living at her uncle and he wanted to push her into a forced marriage, a absolute horror as you might understand. And this was not even badly thought by her uncle. He just could not give her a chance for education or not even care for her because of poverty.

We started the Wamba Education Project in these days to give this three young now-students the chance for a better life. It’s a start and some might say: There are more fates like that, it’s a drop on a hot stone. But where to start? You could not change to whole world. But you could do something. And doing something is always better than nothing. And especially when you know exactly where your support is going to and you could follow how it helps. So visit the website for more information and feel free to donate, to give these children the chance for a better life.

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HIV/Aids prevention

Two month ago i was working for this NGO called the Baobab family in Mombasa, Kenya to capture their projects, which is beside an orphanage mainly about HIV/Aids, two subjects which are standing in a very close conherence (as you could see here). On the one hand they support HIV+ women to give them the power again by giving them the feeling of not being alone with it and also with giving them the chance to work and care for their families that way by doing a little bit of money. But another big part of their work is doing prevention and reconnaissance work to fight the stigmatisation of HIV/Aids in the community and create a new understanding of the disease. They start with it at a very young age now, in the schools, doing little clubs where they write poems and do little theater about the theme. For me, as said before, it seems like that education is the only sustainable way to get out of this when you look at it on a larger time scale.
I was happy to join some of these clubs in the small school at the end the Bangladesh slum. So what you can see below is just a pretty rough cut of one of the plays the kids wrote and performed in the clubs, to fight against HIV/Aids and shout out loud that is something everyone is effected by in one way or another, so nothing what should be stigmatized.

[Vimeo 4586316 w=500&h=282]

Sand & Sorrow

I wrote about the Darfur crisis one or two times before, a crisis which is, beside Congo, maybe the biggest forgotten crisis in the world. 200.000 people died in this conflict in the last years, being killed or dying because of starvation. 2.5 million people are living in the IDP camps, most of them in the nearby Chad, without any chance to live a normal life. We don’t hear about all that here in our world what we sometimes think is THE world, in daily routine we forget about that there are human beings being killed, raped and suffer because of famines. Is there one world? Can we believe in that? And if your answer is yes, isn’t it our responsibility to listen, following the thought that when you listen you get involved and when you get involved things may have the chance to change?

While in Rwanda i started reading the book ‘Darfur- the ambiguous genocide’ by Gerard Prunier, a deep inside look into the roots of this conflict and the role of the international community as well, which i can highly recommend.

Also i’ve seen this two films in the last days about Darfur. Don’t be recoiled by the fact that there are also some celebrities involved, it is fine balanced i would say.

Darfur NOW

Sand and Sorrow

Always north

Just came back from a short trip to Denmark to visit my girlfriend and spent some days in the beautiful house of her parents south of Copenhagen on a little island. Perfect place to relax and feel the wind cleaning your head.

Enjoy a little picroll here.

Fifty people, one question

If you could wish for one thing to happen by the end of the day, what would it be?

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An easy but brilliant idea they had. Ask fifty people one question and film their responses. Is there a better way to get to know how diverse the people and their lifes are? If you would like to join this, visit fiftypeopleonequestion.com and give your answer.

Wax & Gold

Directly after the meeting for the Bronx Rock Invitational i drove to Bonn to help two friends doing the finalization (lots of finalization recently…) of a movie about a field trip to Ethiopia last year. The movie had his premiere yesterday evening in front of a crowd of 300 people, who wanted to get to know more about this country at the Horn of Africa. If you also would like to get to know more about it, here is the chance! Enjoy!

[Vimeo 4411491 w=500&h=375]

Editing by Simon Peth & Christian Sefrin, movie in german…

Bronx Rock Invitational ’09

Yesterday we finalized the last bits and pieces of the format for the Bronx Rock Invitational 2009, held on the 15th of August. The Comp will be held outdoors this time with six women and six man on new build artificial structures…

Check out the BRI-blog for more information here.

What makes you happy?

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Update time

(click on the pictures to get to the links)

A couple of month ago i met Fred Moix somewhere in Switzerland. We were shooting Toni Lamprecht together that day in The Dagger, one of the hardcore classics in Ticino (read the article here.). A couple of days later i got an email from Fred asking me to join bouldering.info. Bouldering.info is a collective of climbing photographers, really high-class as i would say, so i was pretty stoked about that invitation. It took some time now and the site is right now a bit under construction, ’cause we have a couple of ideas how to make things better, also for clients. But have a look if you find the time. It’s worth it for sure…

Another great thing where you could watch a small selection of my pics is on a website called seen.by. Seen.by has only fine art photography, which is also possible to buy as prints. The standards are pretty high. So also beside my pictures it’s worth it a visit.

And all the good news did not end here. Another collective i joined is VII Visionaries, founded by VII, a photoagency with famous photographers as James Nachtwey, with a focus on conflict/ humaiterian photography. So there you will mainly find pictures from me of harder topics…

And to the end there is one last thing to mention: I opened a group on facebook for FLOW MEDIA. So if you are on facebook, join me there to get frequent updates.

I also updated the climbing gallery. So click on the picture below to see the new one.

Tilt-shift timelapse

A couple of years ago a friend of mine gave me a book by Miklos Gaal, a finnish photographer who used the classic tilt-shift lenses, normally used to avoid the falling lines when shooting architecture, to create kind of little playmobil lookalike landscapes by changing the blur in directions which are normally not possible. I really liked the book and till now it is lying on my little booktable.

The process became pretty famous in the last years, mainly by doing it afterwards with photoshop. Maybe not the real deal, but if done well with kind of the same results and quite easy to create.

Today i found this nice little timelapse flic by Keith Loutit from Sydney. Keith is doing a whole series of short films with this technique, putting together the photos for a stop-motion film (also something what became famous in the last time). Really well made!

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If you wanna see more of this, visit Keith’s video channel here.

Another day in the park

Rain, rain, rain, that is kind of the motto of todays bouldering session in Glees. We ended up with just walking around and trying to find a little bit of grip on the wet stones in the forest… But nice to be in the woods anyway…

Found Songs

After the hard topics of the last time, here is something to calm dowm. Ólafur Arnalds, a great composer i mentioned earlier in this blog, started a week of power working with his new project ‘Found Songs’. For one week he wil produce a song everyday, from composing it to produce it. The songs are available as a free download at the end of each day. Now, after the first three days are already gone, it looks like that it got kind of minimalistic, a little bit sad sometimes maybe (depends on your mood i guess) and with much piano. And i like it. Not as epic as his other songs, but some really nice relaxed pieces of classic music. Enjoy it here!

Lost childhood – Aids orphans in Africa

He was standing with his small eyes outside in the bright sun on the dusty road. His eyes were swollen and his cloth were not more than frazzles. Five other kids were playing around him as i came to him. They were shouting the normal ‘Give me money, give me sweets’ as always when a Muzungo, the rich white man, comes. John was a bit more shy, more silent, more watching then the other kids, but in his face was so much character as well as so much pain. It was early in the morning what normally means that there is a chance to talk to this streetkids, before they start sniffeling glue again to fight the feeling of hunger and get high to escape from the brutal reality of daily life. John, as many others, is one of the many Aids orphans living on the streets, kids who lost their childhood because of the epidemic Aids.

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Read a short essay here and watch the pictures in high resolution here.

Inside DR Congo

The first steps into a place where the maybe biggest humaitarian crisis on earth is going on was quite different. This young guy brought me to the border on his bicycle and i walked into DR Congo. After some discussion with the border guards i walked into a town famous for one crisis after another since years. But it did not really felt like that. There were a big hotel directly at the lakeside where all the generals of the UN peace forces drank their coffee and the NGO staff had breakfast, just 100 meters after the border. Quite normal and not really what you expect at this place. The real face of Eastern Congo should come into my sight later that day…

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Read the essay here and watch the pictures in high resolution here.