Check out this clip that I shot in southern Uganda with GoPro Camera… Ryan Booth used it in a quick piece he put together for Advent Conspiracy…
Sorry to all for getting this out so late… I’ve been in Africa and really on the run for over a month… mostly with very limited internet connectivity. This month’s desktop comes from Marsabit, Kenya. A couple days ago we were sitting on the back patio of the lodge, watching the elephants below this tree…While we were relaxing after our day of woodwalking, I exposed this frame over a period of about half an hour (these are the trails left in the sky by the stars, as the earth rotates.) Enjoy!
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I’ve spent the last few days working with an amazing organization called The Paradigm Project. Paradigm has a unique low-profit model in which they subsidize costs of efficient wood burning stoves to get them into the hands of women all over Kenya at significantly reduced costs.
In the deserts of northern Kenya, women are often forced to walk 40 miles or more in a day to retrieve firewood for cooking… and sometimes do this two or three times a week. They begin their journey at the crack of dawn and are back just as the sun is setting… and they all this just to fuel their stoves so they can feed their families.
The climate is incredibly dry, the landscape arid as can be, and walking in the 110°F temperatures with 80-100 pounds of wood on your back is near impossible. I got to experience (and shoot) this experience for an entire day yesterday… Today, I am incredibly sore all over… I have bruises on my collar bone from the ropes, my hips are locked up and my calves feel like rubber. Though it was difficult, I was deeply honored to get to experience this and share this time with the women…
Paradigm Project builds and distributes super wood-efficient stoves that reduce smoke levels inside the hut significantly and burn wood much, much slower… They work with organizations like Food for the Hungry and World Vision and they are really doing amazing stuff.
I definitely have a whole new respect for the women that are faced with these hardships all over the world, and a new understanding of the need for carbon and fuel efficient cooking solutions… Check out The Paradigm Project.
Woodwalk in N. Kenya from Austin Mann on Vimeo.
Today was a little slower so we took the Rhino (off-rhoading beast) about 10 kilometers up the road to some pretty epic waterfalls. They’re beautiful at first, but once you hike about a 1km back behind the first falls, there’s a beautiful pool with some stunning waterfalls hidden there. It was raining, too, which made it even more epic. Here’s a handful of images from the afternoon…
Driving the Rhino… this thing can handle just about anything… they have two of them out here, jealous.
Today was the first day we really had any contrast in clouds… every other day has been pretty much completely overcast. Nice to have some beautiful skies.
This dude was fishing in the run off of the pond we were swimming in… I wonder what kind of fish there were in there…
Native people to Burkina Faso are called Burkinabe. Can you find the Burkinabe?
This last weekend I had the opportunity to spend 4 days as a student at the annual Eddie Adams Workshop. EAW is unique in that each student is selected based on their portfolio and it’s tuition free… Some of the top names in the photography come out to invest in up and coming photographers from around the world… a few folks world renowned in this industry graced us with their presence: Bill Eppridge, Nick Ut, John Moore, Tom Bol, Ami Vitale, Sabine Meyer, David Griffin, Carolyn Cole and so many more…
Had an amazing experience and met so many of the faculty and students… excited be in touch with such fantasticly talented people stationed all over the world. It was four days of very little shooting, lots of shooting and a bunch of great presentations. If you want to learn more about it… or apply for next, check it out here: www.eddieadamsworkshop.com
Now, about the title of this post… I am writing to you from the coolest named city on the planet, Ouagadougou which is in the small west African country Burkina Faso. Tomorrow we are headed out to Mahadago, along the eastern border of BF…
I arrived at the airport a couple days ago to find that I was walking through a construction zone as soon as I was off the plane (literally, I needed a hardhat) and INSIDE the airport the floors were uneven, rough and broken concrete. Amazing. I had trouble getting through the customs because I didn’t have a Burkina Faso phone # to put on my visa, I listed a couple of Sudan numbers and Kenyan numbers trying to fake her out, but she wouldn’t have it unless it had the right country code prefix.
Finally after 30 minutes of trying to smile my way thru it, they said I was going to have to sleep in the airport unless I had a phone number with the proper prefix… so I busted out my phone, turned on data roaming, googled “Burkina Faso Phone Numbers”… found the prefix, and wrote down a completely random number (with the BF country code prefix.) They said OK and let me thru. Ha.
I am working on a project with Centre for Advancement of the Handicapped (their blog seen here) They work under the umbrella of the larger organization I’ve worked with before, SIM (www.sim.org.) Centre for the Handicapped works to provide medical care and transportation to people all over the Mahadago area… they currently have over 1700 open cases of people they working with!
Although their base is in Mahadago, each day they have team members that hop on their dirtbikes and go out into the bush to the people in need… Tomorrow we drive all day long to Mahadago and then we’ll soon be hoppin on dirt bikes of our own, riding out into the bush (w/ a ton of gear on our back) to capture what is going on with this incredible organization.
Project brainstorm over (surprisingly good) pizza in Ouagadougou.
Pumped to be working with my good friend Taylor Martyn, who I’ve worked with before in Sudan… and also Rob Morris, a new friend that is a media guy currently based in Nairobi. I’ll be shooting mostly stills, putting together one or two multimedia presentations (photo/video/audio) like you see on www.mediastorm.com. We talked about this a lot at the workshop and I’m really excited to try this new method of story telling…
I don’t expect I’ll be able to update my blog again til I’m in Kenya on October 30th but check back, cause i’ll have updates asap!
Thanks for all your prayers and support –
Austin
The project I was just on with Living Water International had me going around to about 20 different water well drilling sites (all of which were schools) in southern Uganda. Of course… I wanted the school kids in the video and although they are super happy and joyful about having clean water, sometimes they get a little camera shy. The number one rule to overcome that, as seen in this short clip, is… act like a CRAZY MAN(N)! 
Such a joy and blessing to get to work with kids like this, they radiate with energy.
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