I did some photos for One Mango Tree, a group that empowers women in Gulu, northern Uganda, by providing them with a market for their products in the USA. Check them out!

(Remember the Happy Lady in Gulu? She’s an OMT tailor.)

(Here’s the text in English)

And check out the One Mango Tree website.

And the One Mango Tree blog…

This is what you see:

This is what I saw:

Telling this story:

Doesn’t tell this one:

Zooming out on this image:

Looks like this:

Getting this picture:

Involves this:

And, for good measure:

From the file of strange things printed in local newspapers that may or may not be true.

That’s right.

Andrew Mwenda, journalist and activist, has started a blog – mainly a collection of things written about him at this point, but a space to watch.

Saudi Arabia’s first girl rock band. Great story – wish there were a photo….

A story on BBC questioning pitfalls of aid. It’s stirring up quite a bit of badly needed discussion.

An article on mobile phones and poverty in Tanzania, in Guardian UK.

Great compilation of (sometimes contradictory) advice to young photographers on the Magnum blog: wear good shoes.

These are most of the notebooks I’ve used while I’ve lived in Uganda. There are a few missing. I left one behind at the Nsyambya Youth Center when the power went out in the early evening and I didn’t see it on the dark table when I left. I dropped one in a puddle when I was reporting on floods in eastern Uganda, fall 2007. Another notebook was left behind on a matatu.

I finally put up a website on www.glennagordon.com, with several dozen photos. As I snap images, my camera keeps track of them by number, counting as I click. It starts at zero and goes until 10,000 and then back to zero.

In the past year alone, I’ve gone from zero to 10,000 several times.

I will soon be leaving Uganda. In about two weeks, I’m off to the USA for a month and then I’ll pop up in West Africa in January. I’ll keep blogging here for a bit, and then next year maybe at a new url, but the lion will come with me.

Some people don’t get the lion. When Tumwi saw the lion in person last week, she was surprised. He’s kinda ugly. And scrawny. And hollow. And the paint’s chipping off him.

But I found the discarded toy on a day I was looking for something about two years ago. I didn’t know much about lions or about Uganda, but I knew I liked this guy, and I had a feeling things would work out.

So I went with it. And I documented it on this website. Here, you’ll find where I’ve gone, what I’ve read, what I’ve done, and what I’ve thought. Creating this kind of content has helped me process and understand these things in a way that recording always does.

Creating records is not something I just want to do. There’s a level of compulsion, a level of expression, and a little something, well, feline.

So, thanks for reading here what started as several dozen notebooks, tens of thousands of photos, two websites, and a scarlett lion.

Finally: www.glennagordon.com. Take a look.

(Fast internet – or a lot of patience – required for viewing.)

The Spoils: NYT feature on mining in Congo

This is Africa’s resource curse: The wealth is unearthed by the poor, controlled by the strong, then sold to a world largely oblivious of its origins.

On if Obama ran for president of a country in Africa. (Hat Tip: Africa is a Country)

And if Obama were an African and an candidate for the presidency of an African country? His opponent (any of Africa’s George Bushes) would find a way to change the constitution to prolong his mandate beyond the expected term… being a candidate of the opposition party, he would have the opportunity to campaign. They would threat him, for example, as in Zimbabwe or in Cameroon: he would be physically attacked, arrested again and again, have his passport withdrawn. The Bushs of Africa do not tolerate opponents, do not tolerate democracy.

According to the WSJ, we just need better (American) policy to stop pirates in Somalia:

As Somalia falls apart and the pirates proliferate, it’s been left to the U.S. and the rest of the civilized world to police them… Though relatively small, the pirates are a challenge to established authority in a way understandable to all. If the high seas are allowed to degrade into a no-man’s land, the world’s thugs will notice and press forward elsewhere. It’s going to require an exercise of U.S. power to push back, or allow global piracy to flourish.

Need internet where there is none? Get one of these nifty guys:

This device, called a Network Relief Kit, weighs less than four pounds and “is a grand slam invention,” Mr. Lopes said. “It’s portable, light and brings the outside world to the most remote, disconnected places.”

It was created by NetHope, a collaboration of nonprofit organizations and technology companies working to improve humanitarian aid around the world. Founded in 2001, NetHope, which is based near Washington, has engaged in relief efforts after natural disasters like storms and earthquakes, as well as armed conflict.

(As a side note, I’ve used a similar device called a BGan when filing photos and text from remote areas to editors in Nairobi. It’s an amazing device, but quirky. It has to be pointed east or west, not north or south, have a direct and uninterrupted line to the sky to pick up satellite signals, and disconnects if someone walks in front of it and interrupts the line to the sky. It also gives said interrupt-er a low dose of radiation. Regardless of these quirks, it was pretty awesome to update my Facebook status from the bush on the Sudan-Congo border.)

And from xkcd:

To write two brief sentences like these,

When Annette Onsha, 25, saw the five-year-old daughter of her neighbor being raped by rebel soldiers in their shared garden on the outskirts of her village in eastern Congo, she decided to leave Congo. Forever.

I have to ask more than a dozen questions:

1. What’s your name?
2. How old are you?
3. Where in Congo did you live?
4. When did you leave?
5. Why did you leave?
6. You saw your neighbor’s daughter being hurt?
7. What were people doing to her?
8. Who were those people?
9. Why were they doing that?
10. Where was she at the time?
11. Where were you at the time?
12. When did you come here?
13. Why did you come here?
14. How long will you stay here?
15. Are you sure?
16. Could you ever see yourself going back to Congo?

When journalism is at its best, many questions and answers are distilled into one or two compact sentences that tell the story of one person as it represents the story of many people.

Last week, I went to a town on the Uganda-Congo border called Ishasha. There were about 5,000 Congolese refugees there, give or take 1,000. That’s nothing compared to the 250,000 who are displaced internally in DRC, but it’s a lot of people for one small transit camp without any sanitation facilities, food, or other resources.

I’m pretty accustomed to arriving in a situation, taking half a second to look around, and then asking questions and taking photos in a whirl-wind of activity that results in published material just a few hours later.

But it’s hard to ask questions about five-year-old girls being raped. It’s hard to intrude into someone’s life, into someone’s story, and demand information that even when shared, doesn’t directly or immediately help the person sharing it. It can re-traumatize them, it can embarrass them to say these words in front of their friends and relatives, it can make them another name in another wire story, forgotten before it has even been published.

I talked to about ten people at the border, and not one woman told me that she had been sexually assaulted, but every woman and every man told me that they had seen someone else being sexually assaulted.

You can do the math – some of them were probably assaulted too.

But I thought I had asked enough questions.