batti kids

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some of our youngest beneficiaries: their families received rainwater harvesting tanks or toilets through our project. we are targeting especially the poor families, among them so many woman headed families, having lost the husband/father in the tsunami or the war.

the stories you get to hear there are sad, sometimes hard to bear: one woman had lost her husband in the tsunami and 18 months later her son under unknown circumstances due to the war. the death toll of that conflict is now well over 70.000, and besides an end of the fighting on the battlefield no reconciliation is in sight, instead acts of violence and vengeance may deepen the trench between the ethnics. politics has messed up completely here, the reasons you can easily find on both sides.

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traveling...

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i had planned to post this before leaving to nanjing, china, for the world urban forum. but as quite so often the workload plus time for the kids and my wife consumed all reserves i had calculated and now i am in nanjing, after 28 hours traveling. so for today be it this shot, it has a good relationship with traveling.

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kalmunai students iv

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before you are afraid that this turns into a monothematic blog of kid pics - these are the last ones i'd like to show from kalmunai. sri lanka again experiences a wave of violence, and the east coast i visited 3 weeks ago is now more or less a no-go-area for foreigners.

those kids have grown up in the civil war, and whilst kalmunai itself has not been in the center of real war-like actions, road block everywhere and killings in the villages have always been present since more than 25 years.

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kalmunai students

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early morning hours are my most prolific time of the day. the fishermen, the outrigger boat, all these picture were created from 6 to 8 am. the light is soft at that time but does not have that orange cast of the sunset hours.

and the public is definitely different - only at that time you see the students in a light suitable for portraits. at noon, when they return, the harsh sunlight is everything else but pleasing.

those two kids are living in the battlefield of 2004's tsunami, there school, now rebuilt, is also in the zone of massive destruction. they seem to push aside their remembrance of that mayhem. but the smile in their faces can be misleading: talking with social workers shows the whole bandwith of psychological injuries, and the skin that has grown over these is still very thin.

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three graces

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taken during our holidays in croatia. whilst the color version is interesting in its own, i do like the graphical effect of the black and white here even more as it leads the eye more to the curve of the heads.

this abstract portrait i love for the patterns and shadows and clear areas. i am still undecided if i should crop it even a bit tighter.

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waiting for the thunderstorm

last day of holidays was the 2nd day with fairly good weather. in the late afternoon clouds gathered and formed a thunderstorm front over the valley of river Drau. when the first flashes appeared far away, the kids stopped playing on the beach and started watching out for the thunderstorm.

and the light was just great.

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towards the sun

my daughter on a swing just reaching out over mt. Hochkalter towards the sun.

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long shadows

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