Alone (O-Lane), the planetary lane, the way of the planet, how we are born and how we die. These truths are what make human connections we build while alive so utterly important, otherwise life would be nothing but a long cold walk. Our friends make it warmer, infuse it with joy, with pain, with sadness, with passion, with challenges, with drama and most importantly with companionship along the way.
To stand tall with your head in the clouds whilst your legs are planted firmly on the ground is to truly be living as a human dreams to live…
We are often asked by others about the place we call home, especially if we tend to move around the planet. Looking at this photo of a family in Phnom Penh in my archives, I realized that the answer is simple. This family has created a little home on the pavement of a big city, and when I look at it and when I remember what it was like, I know that at that moment, this was their home. For this little girl lying on the street next to her brother and behind the legs of her mother, there was a safety of being at home.
It is not our things only that define our home, it is much more the people we call family.
posting this from the airport on the way to Denmark… I will be posting as time permits between now and June 1st and apologies in advance for having no time to comment or respond till I go back home in about 8 days.
For ‘les enfants de la rue’, the children of the street in Kinshasa, a bit of ground in an enclosed secure place can make a world of difference where their safety is concerned. These children roam the streets by night in search of food, opportunity and means and ways. During the day, a center like this one (Cajed), is a place for them to be with people who care for a few hours. The can, eat, have lessons, play and most importantly rest. These 2 children were fast asleep during the whole of my visit and despite other children playing and running and jumping all around them.
I am quite behind in these Congo posts for April, because it gets more and more difficult each day to go relive this experience through the thousands of photos captured there. Each photograph forces me to relive the moments with all the emotions that accompanied it.
They are in every big city, the hosts of despair. They are the faceless people that cause us most of the time to grab on tightly to our loved ones and thank the heavens that we have a home. How does one get there? At what point in a life does it get so impossible to have a friend to turn to, a family member to take you in? And how many times out of 10 do we turn away at the sight of despair? This image is a tribute to all of those who help, who do something useful and real by sacrificing their time and effort to ending homelessness.
She has to lay her blankets down on the pavement every day, line up her jewelry, her necklaces, her bracelets, one by bone, in straight lines. She organizes by color, by style, every morning and while she waits for her customers of the day she knits for her child, stitch by stitch, line by line. I can only imagine how organized this lady’s mind must be and how lined up her thoughts are.