Posted 8:00AM on Tuesday, August 07, 2007 Pacific Time
Day 2 of photography just concluded. The project team met up with Reencontro in Bairro Ferroviario, a Maputo suburb considered one of the city's most impoverished. The roads are unpaved pathways of salmon-tinted loose earth. Vendors sit in chairs and on wooden stumps alongside the roads selling vegetables, charcoal, and baskets. One-story structures made of mostly cinderblock and corrugated metal paneling form the basic local architecture for homes, shops, and community buildings. The neighborhood has been hard-hit by AIDS, which has claimed lives and left children to raise themselves without their parents. Reencontro occupies a cozy space in a building with a community pharmacy. The organization uses its space to provide local orphaned children with job skill training, such as sewing and handicraft making. A medical clinic is run in a back room, and while we were there a nurse was giving treatment to a teen diagnosed with AIDS. Down the road, we met up with our kids and community members. There was a huge crowd of people who sang a moving folk song about "getting rid of the disease of the eighties." It is in the neighborhood of these people where the kids spent their first day of field photography. For some, this is home. Others live nearby. We are offloading images from twenty cameras now and expect to be uploading highlights to the website in a matter of hours.
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