Essays and Features

Pakistan: Moonie’s daugther

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Wendy Marijnissen

The sad fact is that a huge number of women and babies are still dying unneccesarily in Pakistan due to lack of proper healthcare infrastructure, lack of skilled staff, use of traditional customs by dai, remoteness of their village, etc. During this trip, I’m staying with my host family, who all are doctors, mostly gynecologists, and who have been my guide and support in the past years. The experience is and has been heartwarming so far and gave me a totally different view on life here. You become a part of the household and slowly start to get to know the whole family and the staff working here. And the fun thing is that everyone starts to get to know me too. Moonie, our cook, for instance knows of my addiction to the incredibly tasty Pakistani mango by now and with love sets the table and cuts a piece of this delicious fruit for me.

8 days ago though, after breakfast when we were trying to communicate in our simple way, as we both don’t speak each others languages, she was called outside. A family member had come bearing bad news that something happened to her daughter in Hyderabad and that she had to come immediately. Returning in the house, I saw the shock and fear in her eyes as she scrambled to get her things together.

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Wendy Marijnissen

Later that day I heard the awful news that her daughter, who was 7 months pregnant from her 3rd baby, suffered complications during her pregnancy and both mother and baby died… Last week, while I was sitting on the terrace reading the newspaper, I saw Moonie returning to the house. I followed her in, where we hugged each other. It was an intense and devastating hug, Moonie crying from the depth of her soul… Feeling her pain, I couldn’t stop my tears either… For the first time in all these years, with seeing and experiencing many upsetting moments, this time it really hit home and became real and very personal.

The numbers of maternal deaths that pop up in various rapports by ngo’s all of a sudden got new meaning, as one of these numbers now is Moonie’s daughter. In this moment I feel utterly helpless… I’m not able to do anything for Moonie, I’m not even able to communicate and tell her how sorry I am. Yet I hope that all the work I’ve been doing here, will make a difference in the coming years, will educate people about the situation here and will slowly improve the conditions in which women give birth here.

Wendy Marijnissen is a freelance documentary photographer from Belgium, based in Karachi, Pakistan. For the last 7 years she has been working on photographing maternal health stories in Pakistan. She was also a finalist for the Fotovisura Grant for Outstanding Personal photography project 2010 and received a honourable mention at the Photocrati Fund 2011 grant with her work ‘Every woman counts’. Her work has appeared in media like Le Monde, Arte, De Standaard, and L’Express. Follow her work on http://www.wendymarijnissen.com.

Dreaming Singapore

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Nicolas Axelrod – Thomas Cristofoletti

Each year, men and women leave Aneda’s province in Indonesia in their hundreds to hire out as migrant workers– for places as varied as Kuwait, Hong Kong and Singapore. Foreign lands offer what home cannot – an escape from poverty.

But the dream of earning money abroad often goes awry. In order to leave, most take on large debts during the recruitment and training stage. These debts later create the conditions for a pliable workforce – willing to work long hours but afraid to complain about exploitative conditions.

Problems are especially acute for female domestic workers, who work in private residences and who make up the majority of Indonesia’s 6.5 million migrants. According to the ILO, up to 80 per cent of these domestic workers endure isolation, underpayment, long working hours, forced labour, human trafficing and violence.

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Nicolas Axelrod – Thomas Cristofoletti

Dreaming Singapore’ investigates the movement of migrants from Indonesia to Singapore, one of the busiest migratory pathways in Southeast Asia. 

It follows three different women at various stages of their journey: from training centres in Indonesia, to daily life in Singapore, and finally the return home.

http://www.ruom.net/portfolio-item/dreaming-singapore/

Published on RUOM, an organic collaboration between photographers, journalists, videographers, and researchers, drawn together by a passion for social documentary work.

Text: Micheal Malay

Photos: Nicolas Axelrod – Thomas Cristofoletti

 

Similan Islands: A Hymn for Poseidon

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Grant Stirton
Grant Stirton
As a dive guide and underwater photographer you live in the water.  It’s your job to dive almost everyday, in all sorts of conditions.  While working on a live aboard dive vessel in the Similan Islands National Marine Park, off Thailand’s west coast, there was one site in particular that had it’s own personality amongst the crew.  
Named Tachai, it is a series of pinnacles, rising from the bottom over 60M deep, to near the surface, slightly offshore between the Surin Islands in the North and the Similan Islands in the South.  It’s one of the most popular stops for dive operators in the marine park and renowned for it’s marine life encounters and varying conditions.  Offshore winds and swell can make for difficult entries and exits, along with strong currents in between the pinnacles. Off the boat and down a wavering buoy line to 16m quickly, without much visual reference, is the preferred method.  Whenever we dived at the site, the whole crew was extra vigilant. 
I had the opportunity as the vessels staff photographer, to dive the area many times over the season and to witness how significantly it can change from one day to the next.  I experienced that the ocean comes alive when the weather turns, and as night approaches and learned it was a privilege we don’t often experience.  This provided an understanding of how delicate the balance is between our marine life and their environment.  The photographs are encounters and behaviors I witnessed at those times, when the currents were strong, the weather gloomy or after dark. 
Grant Stirton
Grant Stirton

The sobering news is that this region, like most of the ocean, is in serious peril.  It faces an onslaught from a number of angles – pollution, overfishing, lacking resource management, political instability.  Conservation has become a necessity.  In what took hundreds of hours and a season to capture, could have been seen on a single trip, just a decade ago.  The agreed view is that our ocean’s are approaching critical condition.  Our megafauna are vanishing – sharks, rays, turtles, tuna, along with base of the food chain, the small planktonic plants and animals, that support the system as a whole.  Climate change is fostering conditions that are causing the acidity in our oceans to increase.  

Although not visible, this change is so significant that entire eco-systems are affected and species are disappearing.  All the animals depicted rely directly on these planktonic creatures to survive.  This area attracts life because of the nutrient rich currents that rise from the deep and wash over it’s pinnacles.  They represent the result of a cycle, that begins with the sun, descending to the bottom and returning with life from the depths to nourish and sustain. 

All pictures and text by Grant Stirton. Visit his website to see more pictures:

http://www.grantstirton.com/#!/portfolio/C0000EqR5uPwkfqA/G0000HsWvOL0Yu_A

Grant Stirton is a Canadian photojournalist based in Toronto, specializing in underwater and adventure. He is a passionate conservationist and has focused on issues looking at how people, marine life, environments and culture intersect.

China: Around Taklamakan

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© Raphaël Fournier

The province of Xinjiang (« new frontier » in chinese) is located in the far western region of China, it is the biggest province of the country and it is bordering 8 other countries such as Tajikistan and Afghanistan or India and Mongolia. Xinjiang has a long history of discord between China’s authorities and the Uighur ethnic minority. The Uighurs of Xinjiang are one of 55 minorities in China and they are ethnically and historically closer to the Muslim Turkic group of Central Asia.

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© Raphaël Fournier 

As Xinjiang is a significant source of raw material and energy (40% of China’s coal), the central governement of China has been working hard on controlling and exploiting the resource rich Xinjiang by establishing a tight social, cultural and religious regulation system and by resettling millions of eastern Han chinese (the ethnic majority in China) into the wild western region of Xinjiang. It is called the « Go west » campaign.

Read the whole story on Raphaël Fournier`s website:

http://www.raphaelfournier.fr/taklamakan

Raphaël Fournier: Born 1978, Paris, France. After completing a Master’s degree in linguistics, Raphaël taught French in the U.K., Hong Kong and in mainland China before turning to photography in 2008 after an internship at Time magazine photo department. He currently resides and works in Paris after several years spent in Asia and more recently a year in Turkey, two countries on which his focus remains strong. Raphaël also developped a significant interest for urban related issues and developments.