A photographers encounter in Kroo Bay

Recently while working in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone to document maternal and infant mortality issues, the ministry of health was launching a free health-care program for pregnant women and children under five. I had planned to stay after my contract was over, in hopes of sharing more time with Sierra Leone mothers and their families and to make known the difficulties they live every day.

My plans quickly changed after meeting a wonderful family who lived underneath a small bridge in Freetown. I was surprised by the amount of raw sewage and the lack of clean water. After visiting this family a couple more times they told me there were communities in Freetown much worse.

This was when I first heard of Kroo Bay, a difficult slum filled with good families and shanty structures overrun with garbage, extreme sanitation issues, and a long list of health conditions due to the lack of clean water. Some of the biggest issues they are facing are polio, ringworm, typhoid fever and malaria, not to forget a high incidence of child malnutrition.

For little over a week, I spent as much time as possible documenting the community. These families lived in some of the worse conditions I have seen, yet they opened their makeshift homes and offered what little they had. Many homes had hard packed dirt floors, no windows, no doors and with poor roofing materials to shelter them from the heat and rain.

Within minutes of entering the community, I stood shoulder to shoulder, making pictures of children digging in heaps of trash and pools of blackened water. I walked slowly introducing myself with a soft voice and sometimes placing my hand over my heart to show my respect. As I walked deeper into the neighborhood and slowly made pictures, I was feeling overwhelmed, almost frozen. At that moment I heard a man screaming from maybe 25 feet away, I lowered my camera slowly and saw no one moving except one, he was marching towards me. He was enraged. He had open sores all along his arms and was built like a malnourished body builder. At this point I was reminded I had broken my first rule of always creating a simple exit (just in case), there was nothing I could do except to face him.

He unloaded and was venting his frustrations. After a few minutes, I interrupted him and told him, your anger is why I’m here! It silenced him for a second and then he burst loudly with laughter – he laughed with his mouth wide open pointing towards the sky.

He then asked me: you want to know the truth? We’re all suffering here in Kroo Bay. He began talking about the water issues again and showing me his arms with open sores, “you see these, they move at night” – he was talking about the worms in his body. I continued listening humbly as he talked, after a few more minutes he was aware we could help one another and began introducing me to his family and friends.

My hope is never to take pictures or shoot pictures, but to share the experience and the moment with the people I’m photographing. It’s important to me that they feel I am not there to take something from them.

Photos and story by Dominic Chavez

“This article was previously published in GLOBAL HEALTH magazine, www.globalhealthmagazine.com.”

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