Tag Archives: Photography

Nutrition and Hygiene Training in India

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In order to complete Cornerstone Training, groups involved with Heifer International must first receive several mandatory trainings. India’s office has recently added “Nutrition and Hygiene Training” to its existing set, and luckily for me it was debuted during my field visit.

Avni Malhotra, India’s Country Director, visited a women’s group in the state of Bihar. They talked about water safety and discussed techniques for washing foods and utensils hygienically. The class was a success and everyone had a good time. I probably had the best time of all, so much so in fact, that I was too busy to get photos of the finished product: the amazing home-cooked meal!

Nutrition and Hygene Training 1 from Maggie Carroll on Vimeo.

 

 

From Little Rock to Big Delhi

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I’ll be working at Heifer International’s India Country Office for the next few months. I will take photos for their upcoming publications, make short videos, conduct interviews for an article in World Ark Magazine, and facilitate a citizen journalism project with some of the women involved in Heifer’s field projects. Can’t wait to share my experiences!

I’m here- I have arrived in New Delhi, India! After approximately 3,000 hours of travel (okay, 26) I have settled into my new home comfortably. The city is beautiful, vibrant, and exhausting. Although I hail from the giant metropolis of Little Rock, Arkansas, Delhi is definitely a big change.

People, cars, trucks, rickshaws, auto rickshaws, bicycles, motorcycles, buses, and cows fill the streets. For the first couple of days, Heifer India’s driver kindly chauffeured a bewildered, geographically lost Maggie to work each day, and then back home again in the afternoon.

The entire India-based Heifer staff is extremely welcoming. The work environment is relaxed and open to my slew of questions. Lunch is eaten together, family-style, at the large meeting room table. I recently had a taste of pickled, spicy pepper at the suggestion of my boss, Avni. Hopefully I’m training my taste buds to handle even spicier Indian cuisine.

As I sipped on endless cups of green tea, I read-up on the group’s work in the various territories it currently works in; Rajasthan, Bihar, and Orissa. Last year, between initial acquisition and Passing on the Gift, over 25,000 goats and 26,000 chickens were given to 1,672 families in the field!

I have been reading and reviewing case studies of the individuals, families, and communities the Heifer India staff has worked with and it has me aching to go out into the field myself. I’ll have to wait until next week for that. I look forward to contributing substantial work to this well-oiled machine and hope to learn all that I can from them.

Stay tuned for my adventures with Heifer and spicy food in next week’s blog post!

Capturing the Faces of Heifer

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It would be impossible to tell the real stories of Heifer participants’ lives without our freelance photographers, a point highlighted by a recent blog post celebrating the work of Dave Anderson, who has traveled to Haiti, Ecuador, Peru, Tanzania and Romania to document the lives of Heifer participants.

I was lucky enough to accompany Dave to Tanzania to visit a Maasai camel project for the Holiday 2010 issue of World Ark magazine. The country director at the time asked us to set aside at least 10 days so he could show us the real work. Visitors are always in such a hurry, he said. They want to see the real work, but they never want to travel more than a couple of hours from the airport!

Dave and I had no such problem. Our itinerary took us from our arrival in Arusha in the northern part of the country, all the way to the south-central plains and then back to Dar es Salaam for departure, nearly 2,000 miles on the road by the time we boarded the plane headed for home. We collected dozens of stories of Heifer work all over the country, best highlighted by this video that Dave captured while on the trip.

We got pulled over for speeding at least four times and stuck once trying to cross a handmade bridge made of large sticks roped together on the way to a blind fish farmer’s house. We walked the last mile or so to the house, with a neighbor woman offering to carry large photography equipment on her head. One hostel we stayed at out in the boonies of Tanzania had cockroaches the size of a child’s tennis shoe that would not be cowed by the waving of an adult-sized flip-flop.

We saw herds of buffalo, giraffes and baboons as well as elephants and other wild critters from the road and had logistical challenges of the amusing variety such as a fire ant attack at a farm built on the steep slopes of Mount Meru and a motel that forgot to dry our laundry so we had to haul a pile of wet clothes around in the car for days after.

Click here for a few behind-the-scenes shots from a blog on the road I posted that shows just how “involved” photographers can be. Just after the first photo in the zero-grazing pen, Dave tipped backwards into the fragrant muck, illustrating just how important efficient laundry services can be.

Do you have any favorite photos from recent World Arks or blog posts? Email us or comment here to let us know what you’d like to see in future World Ark photos.