The Butte, MT Power Grid
Power and its presence in the hundred years’ past boomtown of Butte, Montana.
Uptown spires / heights may not be as advertised.
Splitting the Hillside "M" of Montana Tech.
Headframe gateway atop "the richest hill on Earth".
Tangled supply chain.
A gentleman's bet. The spiral staircase races the mountaintop to the sky.
Electricity arrived early to the Copper King Mansion, one of Butte's 6000+ listed buildings that together form the largest National Historic Landmark District in the United States.
Implements of power at the intersection of Main and Broadway.
Mercury / heavy metal.
End of the line.
Power Wash overlooking the Berkeley Pit, a one-time open pit copper mine that is now the site of the largest Superfund clean-up in the country.
Electricity descending / electricity submerged.
Quarryscape dominance.
Portraits of a Rising Zimbabwe (3 of 5)
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This is part three of a five part assignment for IOM International Organization for Migration on the rebuilding of Zimbabwe after an unprecedented economic and civil collapse. Photos Copyright ©2009 Austin Andrews / International Organization for Migration (IOM) except where noted. Not to be reprinted or reproduced without permission.
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This past August, Will van Engen (blog link) and I visited Zimbabwe on a photographic assignment for IOM International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to promoting safe and humane migration in high-risk nations. Few countries recently have been in the headlines as much for migration issues as Zimbabwe, a failed state wracked by economic implosion where one third of the population now lives abroad, much of it illegally in neighbouring South Africa.
As a photography trip, it was ill-conceived: IOM organised an itinerary that compressed an entire country’s worth of far-flung project sites into one week of shooting. A Land Cruiser sent us tumbling down some of the worst roads in the world, chasing light and perpetually behind schedule. For every ten minutes spent travelling we’d be lucky to have a minute shooting. But as an experience it was one of the richest and most worthwhile trips of my life. I look back on the photographs below with rose-tinted fondness.
Part three takes us to two separate project sites on opposite sides of the country with different focuses on the same issue: safe migration.
PROJECT ONE / AWARENESS
IOM volunteers suit up at a UN World Food Programme distribution gathering in rural Masvingo province, an area that has seen an alarming percentage of its population flee into neighbouring South Africa. Their mission is to promote safe migration, raise awareness of hazards and prepare would-be migrants for the difficult journey ahead.
Spirited.
Locals crowd around an IOM volunteer distributing information on safe migration.
"Are you thinking of migrating?"
IOM volunteers distribute and play a game of Safe Migration Snakes and Ladders.
Eager fingertips await information.
Tattered.
PROJECT TWO / MIGRANT PROCESSING
An IOM billboard demarcates the dusty border between Zimbabwe and Botswana outside the town of Plumtree. A hotspot for illegal crossings, IOM operates a migrant processing centre on the Zimbabwean side of the border.
A truckful of deported migrants rounded up in nearby Francistown, Botswana arrives back in Zimbabwe at the IOM processing centre. The centre sees an estimated 3000 failed migrants a month, not accounting for those who attempt the dangerous border crossing more than once.
First steps back on Zimbabwean soil for a few of the 3000 illegal Zimbabweans captured and deported monthly from Francistown, Botswana.
Zimbabweans walk toward an immigration office for processing after being deported from Botswana.
A Zimbabwean immigration official addresses a room of would-be migrants deported from Botswana for illegal immigration.
The immigration official addresses the group to ensure no Botswanan citizens were mistakenly rounded up.
Migrants await repatriation papers in a processing queue in the IOM compound.
A dance troupe entertains the repatriated migrants while they await transportation back to Harare and Bulawayo.
Portraits of a Rising Zimbabwe (2 of 5)
——
This is part two of a five part assignment for IOM International Organization for Migration on the rebuilding of Zimbabwe after an unprecedented economic and civil collapse. Photos Copyright ©2009 Austin Andrews / International Organization for Migration (IOM) except where noted. Not to be reprinted or reproduced without permission.
——
This past August, Will van Engen (blog link) and I visited Zimbabwe on a photographic assignment for IOM International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to promoting safe and humane migration in high-risk nations. Few countries recently have been in the headlines as much for migration issues as Zimbabwe, a failed state wracked by economic implosion where one third of the population now lives abroad, much of it illegally in neighbouring South Africa.
As a photography trip, it was ill-conceived: IOM organised an itinerary that compressed an entire country’s worth of far-flung project sites into one week of shooting. A Land Cruiser sent us tumbling down some of the worst roads in the world, chasing light and perpetually behind schedule. For every ten minutes spent travelling we’d be lucky to have a minute shooting. But as an experience it was one of the richest and most worthwhile trips of my life. I look back on the photographs below with rose-tinted fondness.
Part two in what I’ll admit is an only occasionally compelling series focuses on IOM’s livelihood and employment programs for families and returning migrants in rural Manicaland, near the Mozambican border.
A family crowds around as water gushes from a deep borehole pump in rural Manicaland.
Stalks of dead grass line a child's walk back to her family's small rondavel village.
A midday scene between terms at an IOM-built, government-run school in rural Manicaland. This compound was once part of a white-run commercial farm that fell into disrepair after President Robert Mugabe's forced land grabs put it in the hands of urban blacks with no previous experience in farming.
Attentive eyes know.
Lessons for Wednesday 26 August 2009.
An uncertain hand rises in the back of the class.
The women behind the scenes of a local bakery, one of the many employment schemes IOM runs for returning migrants in the rural Mutare area.
Bread's last daylight as dough.
Hot loaves, hand delivered.
Hot loaves, hand delivered II.
Replacing the now-defunct Zimbabwean dollar in April as the country's street currency, a single US dollar now buys what 10,000,000,000,000 (10 trillion) Zim dollars once did.
Another IOM initiative, this community garden provides growing space, seeds and water access for its 28 members. The residents of these sunbaked rural highlands otherwise has little access to fresh vegetables.
Children work away in their family plot.
Prudence.
The fingers and shadows of ownership.
Construction implements and evidence.
Portraits of a Rising Zimbabwe (1 of 5)
——
This is part one of a five part assignment for IOM International Organization for Migration on the rebuilding of Zimbabwe after an unprecedented economic and civil collapse. Photos Copyright ©2009 Austin Andrews / International Organization for Migration (IOM) except where noted. Not to be reprinted or reproduced without permission.
——
This past August, Will van Engen (blog link) and I visited Zimbabwe on a photographic assignment for IOM International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to promoting safe and humane migration in high-risk nations. Few countries recently have been in the headlines as much for migration issues as Zimbabwe, a failed state wracked by economic implosion where one third of the population now lives abroad, much of it illegally in neighbouring South Africa.
Part one focuses on IOM’s homebuilding programs in remote rural communities for returning migrants.
Boys look out from behind a gate in an IOM-built community outside Mutare, an MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) stronghold near the Mozambican border.
IOM vests supervise a project site near Chiredzi. Here, locals build their own homes from materials provided by IOM.
Staring contest at the washing station. Photo ©2009 Will van Engen / International Organization for Migration (IOM).
A woman sits in her living room under wall-mounted pages from the Qur'an. With electricity sporadic at best, the television sees little use.
Foot traffic outside a new IOM-constructed brick house situated in a community of traditional rondavels.
A father and son make their way through the home-specked flatlands off the grid in Zimbabwe's remote Eastern Highlands.
Chasing the day's last golden light, an IOM convoy makes its way through the bush toward a far-flung building project.
Construction gang on the left, residents-to-be on the right.
Earthly Hands / Materials of Habitation.
Rim tracks in the path to a new home.
A family pauses midway through moving furniture into their new IOM-constructed house.
Cut Scenes from Zimbabwe’s Dark Decade
This past August, Will van Engen and I visited Zimbabwe on a photographic assignment for IOM International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to promoting safe and humane migration in high-risk nations. Few countries recently have been in the headlines as much for migration issues as Zimbabwe, a failed state wracked by economic implosion where one third of the population now lives abroad, much of it illegally in neighbouring South Africa.
The following are cut scenes from an upcoming photo series on the slow rebuilding of Zimbabwe after one of the darkest decades in recent African history.
With the cooling towers of the Bulawayo Power Station looming behind them, residents of Zimbabwe's second-largest city wander township streets.
Main street bustle in the town of Chiredzi. With goods back on shelves after a long period of uncertainty, shops have reclaimed their status as community hubs.
Families stream in and out of a rural general store in the hills surrounding the border town of Mutare in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands.
A cattle drive by morning light.
A long-haul busliner. Vehicles like this one are a common sight on the nation's roads, with most domestic routes plied by dilapidated buses that are more than a half century old.
T-shirt ballot.
Sunset split.
Suggested treatment at Harare's Parirenyatwa Hospital.
Reminders of 2008's controversial elections still haunt many of the streets of capital city Harare.
Roaming from driveway to driveway, two buskers stop to play a streetside tune in the affluent Avondale neighbourhood.
A group of suburban youth wander home after a Friday night hanging out at the Avondale shopping centre.
Once a popular diversion for middle-class Zimbabweans, the nation's cinemas have fallen into disrepair and neglect in recent years.
Round-the-clock electricity still eludes Harare, with power cuts stretching for six hours or longer on most days. Her computer down, a cashier tallies up orders by hand at a Nando's fast food restaurant in Avondale.
As good a sign as any of the nation's topsy-turvy currency, the runaway hyperinflation of the Zimbabwe dollar has given way to stability as the nation shifts to the US dollar.
Another indication of the stabilising economy, shops are reopening as hard currency trickles through the population.
Dark City Daylight
Johannesburg’s densely-populated Alexandra township has held many roles since its inception in 1904, from its early days as a freewheeling freehold kingdom where blacks could buy their own land to a centre of activism against encroaching apartheid policy in the 1940s and 1950s through to its position as South Africa’s “Beirut” under the nation’s State of Emergency of the 1980s. Today Alexandra is among South Africa’s highest profile townships and is a place where historical prejudices and modern day open-mindedness form an uneasy truce.
The following street portraits are from a day spent exploring the township.
- Foot traffic outside a decaying worker’s hostel. Re-envisioned during the height of apartheid as a “hostel city”, only three of the single-sex behemoths were ever built. Each house an estimated 10000 people and are all still in operation.
- Residents tend to early morning washing in an Alexandra squatter camp.
- Sunrise bottles clear and green.
- Township dwellers buy still-warm ‘fat cakes’ on their morning walk to the taxi rank.
- Police presence.
- The rooftops of a recently-electrified shanty block.
- A morning walk against rainbow flats.
- Rainbow washing against rainbow flats.
- Comings and goings. Only one toilet serves this thirty household “yard” of shacks.
- Alexandra resident George Mashile sorts through clothing in his one room shack.
- Hail.
- Fresh faces and fresher paint.
- Tuck shop commerce outside the women’s hostel.
- Standing water in the brick jungle.
- A child runs through one of the sweeping courtyards of the women’s hostel.
- A kettle boils as two girls do dishes in one of the hostel’s industrial-sized kitchens.
- Sunlit parallelogram.
- Laundry under the watchful eye of Jacob Zuma.
- Pedestrian routes along the Jukskei River.
- Burnt tones.
- Opposing faces on either side.
- Expectant taxis waiting at the taxi rank.
- Two boys follow a bottle cap as it flows down a roadside gutter creek.
- Two silhouettes and an obstacle.
- Kids watch a tyre fire from a ridge of dredged-up construction materials.
- A hand points to an abandoned and unfinished housing project in Alexandra’s Far East Bank extension.
- Island in a road in a frame.
Check out Will’s blog Steeltown Blues for another angle on the same day’s exploration.
A Township in Flames
Tensions between riot police and the citizens of the Siyathemba township in Mpumalanga province reached a fever pitch yesterday in a stand off that saw police fire tear gas and rubber bullets at violent protestors. The nation’s eyes descended on the the rural township after a spate of xenophobic attacks earlier in the week — the first since a wave of violence killed 63 in May 2008 — erupted from broken election promises and poor housing delivery.
An armoured police Nyala watches over a restless citizen congregation during an address by the mayor of neighbouring Balfour. Later that day the same crowd burned his house down.
Jeers from behind a mesh fence.
Peace, for now.
Watching through a hole in the fence.
Headspace
Fired-up township dwellers take to the streets after the disappointing address.
Protestors storm the streets in riot configuration.
Riot police move in to defuse the situation.
A man throws a stone at police from behind the safety of a private residence.
Protestors run from approaching police Nyalas.
Guns at the ready, police scour the township for protestors brazen enough to show themselves.
Armed with rocks, protestors flee from approaching riot police.
Photographers Alon Skuy and Thys Dullaart of The Times take cover from crossfire.
A man runs from an armoured police Nyala rounding the corner.
A policeman guides a Nyala around hastily-erected roadblocks.
Standing in the Nyala's path, a protestor holds a stone at the ready.
Photojournalists take shelter from crossfire behind a Times car.
The Township as Spectacle
The South African township holds a curious appeal for many photographers, myself included. For all their talked-about poverty and crime statistics, townships are also home to a vibrancy and sense of community rarely found in the gated palaces of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. People here pass their days in the public space; on streetside curbs, at friends’ stalls, forever milling and browsing. The hand-scrawled signs and labyrinthine incompleteness to the space lends photos instant production value. And for the outsider there’s never a shortage of places to explore.
Scroll down for selections from a morning spent in the Johannesburg East Rand townships of Katlehong and Thokoza.
Vanishing point / a morning commuter train to Vereeniging.
Minibus taxis prepare for the peak hour commute at the Thokoza taxi rank.
Transiting silhouettes at the taxi rank. Most of South Africa’s townships were originally built as labour pools for pass-carrying blacks who were employed in the cities but prohibited under Apartheid from living in them. In the absence of public transportation these cheap and reliable taxis became as much a fixture of township life as the sangorma faith healers and ubiquitous streetside vendors.
An informal spaza convenience shop peeks out from a landscape of shanty shacks.
Curious kids in a township crèche (pre-primary school).
A woman walks past graffiti’d reminders of the township wars of the early 1990s, when anti-Apartheid uprisings in Thokoza were violently suppressed by the state police force leaving thousands dead. The East Rand townships were also the epicentre of last year’s xenophobic attacks that saw 100 killed and over 100,000 displaced.
A streetside barber hangs his shavers up after a customer.
Shadow inconsistencies at a streetside salon.
Salon styles.
An enterprising spaza shopkeeper at his phone booth.
Holler.
Power pole kings over a hawker market.
An interested buyer at a streetside clothing stall.
Busy hands at a sidewalk butcher.
Shopping bag.
Business hours.
Pedestrian traffic at a busy Katlehong intersection.
Flames and heat shimmer in an RDP neighbourhood. These one room houses are a common sight in the modern township with over 1.1 million built by the incoming ANC government in the early years after 1994.
Homeowners out front of their RDP house.
Living quarters.
The view out over the centre compound of a single-sex workers’ hostels. Formerly reserved only for pass-carrying black labourers, the hostels of Thokoza were notorious cesspools of crime and abject squalor during the dark days of Apartheid. Although most are still overcrowded and gang-ridden, this particular hostel retains little of its edge today.
Orange vendor.
Orange transport.
Orange delicious.
Diagonal kids / slide queue.
Fatherhood.
Tombstone Factory (and Kitchen Tops!)
Detritus and overflow from a burst sewage line.
Rusting, out of commission taxis at the taxi rank.
Long distance bus rank.
Salon shadows.
Sweeper’s shadows.
A Black Hole in the Rainbow Nation
My photography project on the Zimbabwean refugee crisis, most of which appeared on this blog in March, has found new life as a thirty shot multimedia slideshow. Check it out and don’t forget to turn the pesky captions off.
The slideshow can also be viewed in high resolution on the Medecins Sans Frontieres site and on The Times‘ online multimedia portal.
Special thanks to Thato Mogotsi and Alon Skuy at The Times and Zethu Mlobeli at MSF for helping put it together!
Stadium Spectacular
Crew and extras on the set of The Human Factor, an upcoming Clint Eastwood-directed rugby film starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon.
An endfield Tuesday.
An endfield Sunday as crowds arrive at Ellis Park for the African National Congress’ final rally before Wednesday’s general elections.
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The following article was written by my friend Sarah about our experience attending the rally. Keep scrolling for more photos.
Text © Sarah Godsell / BusinessDay
Photos © Austin Andrews / The Times
Zuma Dispels a Sceptic’s Notions
I am a young South African, 23, and while I am very excited about voting tomorrow, I’m confused and a little disillusioned about who to vote for.
In this state of mind I, almost by accident, attended the African National Congree (ANC) rally at Coca-Cola Park in Johannesburg on Sunday.
I’m not an ANC supporter (well, specifically not a Jacob Zuma supporter) and I was expecting to have a day of grinding my teeth through speeches. Instead, I had an overwhelmingly positive experience, which, while not converting my vote, left me feeling much calmer and more positive about the country and its leadership after these elections.
The experience started with my Canadian friend, a photographer who invited me to the rally, and I walking to the stadium together with throngs of singing people. The atmosphere was celebratory, and anticipatory. I got caught up in it very quickly, although we stuck out in two ways. We were the only ones not wearing ANC T-shirts, which made us more conspicuous than being the only two white people in the crowd.
On our way into the stadium, having now acquired ANC T-shirts, I was reminded about the diversity of ANC supporters – the pace of the civilised crush was slowed by older people walking with sticks and young children, their ANC shirts reaching to their knees and toes.
The reception I received from the people around me was overwhelmingly positive. The area of the stadium in which I was sitting was so full that people had crammed onto the stairs; a jigsaw puzzle of people with a common purpose. The middle-aged women I was sitting next to were friendly and concerned, and offered me half their seats. And there were many idiosyncrasies that surprised me, and which made me smile.
While, as far as I could see, we were the only white people in the stadium (apart from members of the media on the field), the only languages on the posters were English and Afrikaans. But the crowd’s response to the Afrikaans prayer was positive (even the prayers were diverse, with a prayer by an imam, a rabbi and Christian ministers). At the end of the Afrikaans prayer the woman sitting next to me said: “In die naam van God,” (In God’s name) and leaned over to me and said: “Ek probeer.” (I’m trying).
I went to the rally strongly opposed to Zuma, with my arguments against him neatly lined up in my head. It was only when he started speaking that I realised that I had never actually heard him speak (I’m not counting the choice 30-second extracts shown on the news), and I was pleasantly surprised.
He spoke of a country where every colour and every gender feels comfortable and is not discriminated against, and reassured people that even if the ANC gets a two-thirds majority, it would not change the constitution.
His speech was not life-changing for me, but it did challenge my preconceived negative notions of the person who is probably going to be our president. I am grateful for that. And while some of my friends pointed out that words are just words, what else can you have in a speech?
I was also impressed by the spectacular organisation. There were at least 100 000 people gathered in the two stadiums and the areas outside, but everything was completely relaxed and peaceful. I had watched as the organisers stopped letting people into Coca-Cola Park and started sending them to the Johannesburg Stadium next door. I expected people to get angry. I expected lines of policemen. But there was just one line of security personnel, firmly standing holding hands and directing people to other areas, and people obeyed them. It made me so happy to live here.
Leaving the stadium was also very relaxed, my friend and I both in our ANC T-shirts. We were a bit of an oddity in the crowd, and people kept testing us, saying amandla. At first I was shy about responding; I never know whether it’s my right or not. But seeing people’s responses when I did respond, I carried on. And why not? Power to the people, to these people, the everyday people. And my hope, my prayer, is that the people in power remember every single day whom they are here to represent. I had definitely forgotten what the ANC stood for.
All in all, it was an intensely positive experience. And an intensely democratic one. I felt comfortable and proud to be South African. Everybody says that we have lots of work to do, and it’s true. And we don’t know what kind of president Zuma will be.
I still don’t know who to vote for. But I do know we’re going to be okay. And my friend and I can have some fun shocking all our friends by going out in our ANC T-shirts!
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Mugs and brims.
Sea of arrivals.
Supporters crowd the entrances for a view of the festivities.
The view from the upper tier.
Cascading crowds/opposing diagonals.
Decked out in ANC yellow and green, a helicopter flies over the two stadiums to raucous cheer.
Obey the corner.
Thumb-eyed.
Flag-faced.
Misty-eyed supporters recite the national anthem Nkosi Sikelele.
Point.
X
Brim message.
Crowds react to the surprise appearance of former president Nelson Mandela.
Face times four.
A News Story From Beginning to End
My first instinct is to apologise for this post. As thrilling as it often is to chase a big story as it unfolds and explodes, it’s also rather difficult getting pretty frames (which I’m a sucker for) out of hard news shots (which I’m not). The result is a brand of photography different from what generally appears on this blog, and in my eyes a little less interesting. But still worthwhile, I hope, all the same.
Here, that big story was the minibus taxi riot that yesterday brought down Johannesburg to a near-standstill. Thousands of taxi drivers protested en masse against a proposed public transit network they fear will put them out of business, blockading highways and wreaking city-wide havoc to build momentum.
I can’t be bothered properly recapping the event myself so read on for an excerpt from The Times’ extensive coverage. The paper had seven photographers –myself included– covering the madness across the city. Full source article here.
Protesting drivers beat motorists, stone cars and pull passengers from buses
TAXI operators have threatened to bring the entire country to a halt with a strike lasting more than a week if their demands are not met.
Bus commuters were beaten and at least one bus driver was shot yesterday before angry, striking taxi drivers and their bosses handed a list of their demands to the ANC and the Gauteng department of transport.
[...]
Earlier, hundreds of taxis caused massive traffic jams, blocking busy intersections and driving at a snail’s pace on the M1 freeway. Armed with sticks and knobkerries, they beat motorists and pulled commuters off buses.
The police fired at them with rubber bullets. There were reports of looting in the CBD.
At the Grayston Drive offramp on the M1, taxi drivers pulled passengers out of a Greyhound bus, beating some with knobkerries. Others threw stones at passing cars. A section of the highway was closed to allow ambulances to attend to injured passengers as other taxi drivers threatened to smash cars with bricks.
An all-lanes roadblock of stationery minibus taxis chokes the M1 highway south to Johannesburg from Pretoria.
Copper chopper overhead.
An angry taxi driver tests the photographer’s bias. He passes, although not without bending a few truths along the way.
The M1 at Corlett Drive.
A story of hands.
A conspiracy of taxis.
The transiting convoy approaches the Johannesburg CBD.
Election posters line the buildings of Braamfontein on the way across the Nelson Mandela Bridge.
Parking lanes, Newtown.
Have a nice day.
Impassioned protestors march to Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown.
The shadows’ complaints.
Signs former boxes.
Megaphone messages as mounted police circle the scene.
The protest continues into the CBD with thousands of taxi drivers marching with escalating tempers to the ANC (African National Congress) headquarters.
Implements of the new and old South Africa.
Guns at the ready.
Taunts and chants.
Tactics.
Hands clap for a taxi dance.
Window in cardboard.
Riot/melee.
The skyward eye.
Backup.
Ever watchful.
Memo for peace.
More Stories From the Central Methodist Church
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This is the final installment of a five part assignment for Médecins Sans Frontières on the migration of refugees from impoverished Zimbabwe into South Africa. Photos Copyright ©2009 Austin Andrews / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Not to be reprinted or reproduced without permission.
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(a variation on the following text first appeared in the earlier blog entry entitled In Bishop Paul We Trust)
There are over three million Zimbabwean refugees living in South Africa, a number that rivals the oft-publicised flight of Mexicans to California, with 6000 more entering illegally through its porous border every day. Life back home has become unbearable for most, and a collapsed economy and dire humanitarian conditions have driven many to either starvation or prison. A cholera epidemic has ravaged the cities and farms, with 87000 infected and 4000 already dead. And a messy power-sharing battle between the two main political parties has the country in a dead grip, with UN officials saying the number of asylum seekers is higher than ever.
Under the leadership of Bishop Paul Verryn, the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg has become a place of refuge for Zimbabweans seeking a new life in South Africa. Some 5000 line up here every evening for a place to stay safe from the xenophobic violence that has dogged Johannesburg’s townships, spilling out onto the pavement of neighbouring Smal Street when all the floor space inside the church is gone.
Lately the situation has been worsening and the role of the church has become more important than ever. Two weeks ago the Home Affairs department of the South African government announced that it was closing the “showgrounds”, an informal refugee-processing facility at the border town of Musina seven hours north. Transportation was arranged within days for the 5000 asylum seekers living on the small plot of scrubland, with most of them destined for Johannesburg, and most of them destined for Bishop Paul’s church.
This is the story of a return visit to the Central Methodist Church.
Schoolchildren on their way to class at the FLOC (For Love of Children) primary school in the church basement.
Kid confab inside a six stair halo.
Day labourers construct the final stage of a fence designed to keep refugees from sleeping on the Smal Street mall.
Refugees queue outside the MSF clinic.
Returning from a day spent begging at a traffic light in far-flung Krugersdorp, a cancer-stricken man waits for medication outside the clinic.
The street scene outside the church as refugees begin returning for the evening.
Late afternoon foot traffic at the intersection of Smal and Pritchard streets.
The same scene again three hours later as refugees arrive back at the church from their days spent in town.
Clutch.
Attendance at the daily refugee meeting.
Church boys.
Remido, 17, displays the scar from the operation that saved his life. A year earlier in Zimbabwe, he and his brother were poisoned by their stepmother in a wanton act of malice. His brother died but he survived, remaining in Harare just long for his condition to stabilise before beginning a treacherous, months-long journey to South Africa. Snippets from audio interviews with Remido and others will be launching on the MSF site in the coming days; links forthcoming.
Shadow of a caretaker.
Roughhousing in the halls.
Inside the vestry, a dorm room of sorts for some of the several hundred unaccompanied minors, an MSF worker checks with her registry book before distributing the nightly ration of e’Pap, a dehydrated maize porridge mix donated to the church by the Red Cross.
Two in yellow.
Eager eyes as packets of e’Pap changes hands.
Boys look on in worried anticipation as an MSF worker flips through the registry book looking for their names.
Corridor dinnertime.
Sleeping stairwell stories.
Sanctuary in the Sunburned North
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This is part four of a five part assignment for Médecins Sans Frontières on the migration of refugees from impoverished Zimbabwe into South Africa. Photos Copyright ©2009 Austin Andrews / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Not to be reprinted or reproduced without permission.
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As the world’s worst humanitarian crisis outside a conflict zone, the collapse of Zimbabwe has had profound consequences reaching far outside its borders. They’ve been better documented elsewhere so I’ll just skim their surfaces here.
Perhaps the most visible sign has been the mass exodus of people from the cities and towns, most of them escaping to weather the economic storm from the relative stability of neighbouring Botswana and South Africa. Some estimates put the current population of Zimbabwe below 8 million, down from a peak of 12.5 million at the turn of the millennium, with as many as 3.4 million recent emigrants residing in South Africa alone.
This is a visit to the border regions of Beitbridge in Zimbabwe and the nearby refugee camps in the South African town of Musina.
A razorwire fence frames a view of Beitbridge, a Zimbabwean bordertown of 20000 and last port of call for would-be refugees migrating to South Africa.
Guards at a South African border post near Musina.
The three-fence electrified border between Zimbabwe and South Africa retreats into the distance toward Botswana. The border patrol employs a full-time team of workers to patch up sections of the fence snipped during illegal crossings the night before.
Snipped razor wire tailings and a discarded Coke bottle.
The main obstacle to Zimbabweans preparing to cross the border, the crocodile-infested Limpopo River in Matabeleland South is also a stronghold of the Guma-Guma, a gang of rebel bandits who prey on migrants hiding in the scrubland.
Riverscape. A human form camouflaged by reeds prepares to cross the Limpopo (centre of the image to the right of the waterlogged tree; click to enlarge).
15km from the border back in South Africa, the showgrounds in Musina were until recently an informal camp for as many as 4000 homeless Zimbabwean refugees awaiting their asylum papers. The showgrounds were formally closed two weeks ago, although several hundred still sleep every night on its dirt pitch.
Showground girl.
The tap awaits.
Fresh drink.
Social circle between rope links.
Wire link drink.
Suds and shoes.
Queue for asylum papers at a mobile Home Affairs branch.
Washing station at the Uniting Reform Church, a transit shelter for orphans and unaccompanied minors.
Writing practise.
Key combinations.
Pew berths.
Towel-clad boys walk to the shelter shower.
Moving places.
Share plate.
Supply tent.
A sunset toilet installation inside the men’s shelter.
Rock dust in a sunset haze.
Several major NGOs operate out of Musina; in addition to MSF, organisations with a base here include Save the Children, the International Organization for Migration, Oxfam, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and, pictured here, one of several chapters of the Red Cross.
Sunset boys.
A car snout peeks out behind children at a refugee camp.
Twilight washing outside the women’s shelter.
Women’s shelter in a Catholic church.
A story of shadows. Dinnertime at the men’s camp.
A story of shadows II. Settling in for sleep at the men’s camp.
——
Part five, a return visit to the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg, will be posted here tomorrow.
——
Crisis Clinic
——
This is part two of an ongoing assignment for Médecins Sans Frontières on the migration of refugees from impoverished Zimbabwe into South Africa. Photos Copyright ©2009 Austin Andrews / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Not to be reprinted or reproduced without permission.
——
Since opening their Johannesburg operations in December 2007, MSF has operated a medical clinic at the Central Methodist Church, a downtown transit camp for over 5000 Zimbabwean refugees fleeing turmoil in their home country.
In its first three months of operations the clinic saw nearly 2895 cases and made 294 clinical referrals for HIV, TB, and other chronic diseases.
Story of a passerby.
The longbench queue.
Contagious or severe cases go to the isolation ward. Since opening the clinic has seen five cases of cholera, a disease that has infected over 87000 Zimbabweans in recent months and killed over 4000.
“You won’t feel it, barely.”
Post-test paperwork.
An MSF counsellor prepares a patient for the prick of an HIV blood test.
The nurse administers the blood test.
Awaiting results.
The test came back negative for HIV.
Triage nurse.
Doctor’s office.
Stomach cramps.
The scene out front of the Central Methodist Church.
——
Part three, a late-night visit to a refugee camp outside the Department of Home Affairs, will be posted here tomorrow.
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In Bishop Paul We Trust
——
This is part one of a three part assignment for Médecins Sans Frontières on the migration of refugees from impoverished Zimbabwe into South Africa. Photos Copyright ©2009 Austin Andrews / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Not to be reprinted or reproduced without permission.
——
There are over three million Zimbabwean refugees living in South Africa, a number that rivals the oft-publicised flight of Mexicans to California, with 6000 more entering illegally through its porous border every day. Life back home has become unbearable for most, and a collapsed economy and dire humanitarian conditions have driven many to either starvation or prison. A cholera epidemic has ravaged the cities and farms, with 87000 infected and 4000 already dead. And a messy power-sharing battle between the two main political parties has the country in a dead grip, with UN officials saying the number of asylum seekers is higher than ever.
Under the leadership of Bishop Paul Verryn, the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg has become a place of refuge for Zimbabweans seeking a new life in South Africa. Some 5000 line up here every evening for a place to stay safe from the xenophobic violence that has dogged Johannesburg’s townships, spilling out onto the pavement of neighbouring Small Street when all the floor space inside the church is gone.
Lately the situation has been worsening and the role of the church has become more important than ever. On Tuesday, the Home Affairs department of the South African government announced that it was closing the “showgrounds”, an informal refugee-processing facility at the border town of Musina four hours north. Transportation was arranged within days for the 5000 asylum seekers living on the small plot of scrubland, with most of them destined for Johannesburg, and most of them destined for Bishop Paul’s church.
This is the story of a Friday night in the Central Methodist Church.
——
Street food vendors socialise outside the church over suppertime. 5:45pm.
Mash and chicken bits.
Cross and crowds.
Latecomers to the weekly refugee meeting file into the Main Sanctuary Hall.
Refugee meeting in the House of God.
Bishop Paul Verryn opens the meeting with news of the eviction in Musina, and that buses carrying the first 1000 refugees are expected at the church later in the evening. More are due to arrive later in the week.
Seven rows.
A captive congregation.
As the Friday meeting wore on, text message reports began coming in with the news that Morgan Tsvrangirai, Zimbabwe’s elected leader and the only opposition voice against longtime dictator Robert Mugabe, was being rushed to hospital following a car crash that killed his wife. The Bishop led a heartfelt prayer for Mr. Tsvrangirai and the people of Zimbabwe.
Ceilingscape.
Comfort under the cross.
Meeting minutes.
Talk and thought.
Refugees sleep off to the sidelines.
With the meeting underway inside, droves of newcomers begin arriving to the front doors of the church.
Standing room only.
Latecomer.
Closing notes, 9:30pm.
Meeting adjourned, refugees flood the corridor outside the hall to stake out a space to sleep.
Names remembered.
Third floor sleepers.
Pew positions.
Vacancies.
A needle and thread.
Request.
Shirt slogans.
Feet in a row.
A church volunteer establishes ground rules in the boy’s dorm.
Contradicting eyelines.
Fingernail inspection.
Boys empty a closetful of blankets and bedding as they get ready for lights out.
Floor space.
Traffic in the stairwell as dishes are brought down to the washroom for rinsing.
Sleep queue outside elevators.
Covert conversation. 11:00pm.
——
Part two, a look inside an MSF medical clinic operating at the Central Methodist Church, will be posted here on Wednesday.
——
Tourists at a Tourist Attraction III
Elongated subject.
Leapfrog dare.
Six fingers.
Two times two.
Sneaker market.
Nuclear.
Awe. Cloud Gate, Chicago.
—-
The Shops of Main Street
Exploring the shops and storefronts between Little India and Chinatown on Main, November 2008.
Autumn canopy. Main & 53rd.
Black market typeset. Main & 52nd.
Star sign. Main & 52nd.
Ten Digit Dialling. Main & 51st.
Fancy. Main & 50th.
Weatherproof. Main & 49th.
Former glory. Main & 48th.
Red alert. Main & 46th.
Getaway route. Main & 45th.
Bygone community centre. Main & 43rd.
Codes blue. Main & 41st.
Combo Deal. Main & 41st.
Shout out to the regulars. Main & 39th.
Eat in/take out/boarded up. Main & 37th.
Colourfast inks. Main & 35th.
Second floor sale. Main & 34th.
No cards accepted. Main & 33rd.
Past perfect. Main & 32nd.
No parking weekdays after 3pm. Main & 32nd.
Replacement bulbs. Main & 30th.
Drawn blinds. Main & 29th.
Colour geometrics. Main & 28th.
Flash flood. Main & King Edward.
Festive faces. Main & 22nd.
A (yellow) shade of green. Main & 20th.
Calling cards. Main & 19th.
Rusty pinky. Main & 18th.
Value. Main & 16th.
Fast Font. Main & 15th.
Mixed messages. Main & Broadway.
Geodesic domes. Main & 6th.
Angles of incline. Main & 5th.
Letter columns ABC / ABPCB. Main & 3rd.
Celebration banners. Main & 2nd.
Hemispheres. Main & 1st.
Co. Ltd. Seeds. Main & Industrial.
Pacific Central Station. Main & Terminal.
Girl. Main & National
Skyscraping text. Main & Keefer.
Leading lines. Main & Keefer.
Watchful characters. Main & Pender.
Team Colours
I don’t obscure these pages with issues-oriented coverage often, so when I do it’s nice to think the issues might count for something. Yesterday’s snap federal election, called five weeks earlier by Conservative PM Stephen Harper in a bid to convert his party’s minority hold on the House of Commons into a majority, was unfortunately not one of those issues.
$300 million dollars in spending and five weeks of media saturation later, and the make-up of the Commons looks much the same as it did after the previous federal election in 2006. Harper failed to win a convincing majority and I failed to photograph anything more than a dull smattering of signs and speeches.
Oh well. We’ll both have another shot in a couple years.
Conservative propaganda at party headquarters in Vancouver Centre.
Turf wars along Main Street.
Painters $14/hour.
CBC on site at a Liberal rally on the eve of the election.
Vantage point.
Viral voting.
Adrienne Carr, deputy leader of the federal Green party and MP candidate for Vancouver Centre, addresses a crowd of party faithful as the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge announces election results behind her. Despite garnering nearly 7% of the popular vote the Greens failed to win a seat in the 308-member Commons.
Word of mouth.
Polls open.
Liberal propaganda at party headquarters in Vancouver Centre.
Stephane Dion, leader of the federal Liberals, entertains a media circus.
Minimum voting age.
Dion speaks to supporters at a last minute Liberal rally held in a failed bid to win the battleground Richmond riding for incumbent Raymond Chan. The riding was one of seventeen new seats ceded to the Conservatives.
Dion raises a victory fist as incumbent Vancouver Centre MP Hedy Fry looks on.
Dion in the public eye.
“2010 Homes Not 2010 Games!”
“Spirit” of Resistance. Anti-Olympics protestors flocked by the dozens Sunday to the departure of the CP Olympic Spirit train from Port Moody on the start of its cross-Canada campaign to raise support for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
Octogenarian Vancouver mayoral candidate Betty Krawczyk addresses fired-up protestors.
“The people united will never be defeated!”
Media focus.
Field recordings.
The Target.
An aboriginal woman dips into a box of household noisemakers as the protestors attempt to drown out the live entertainment with metal clanging and rally cries.
Focus.
Determination.
A policeman stands with hands folded behind a police line laid to keep protestors off the main stage.
Middle finger salute.
Semi-anonymous.
A protestor checks the phone number of the group’s legal counsel after an altercation at a police station.
Tools of uprising.
In the Mouth of Madness: Burma after Cyclone Nargis
Pictures and text: ©Austin Andrews / ZUMA Press
For a region that four months ago witnessed one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory, the waterlogged highway descending into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta reveals little of what it saw. Uniformed children skip to school in sync, passing the same motley assortment of stray dogs, wayward goats and discarded rubbish endemic to all this impoverished nation’s roads. Overstuffed buses, some still carrying advertisements for distant Western cities — their last homes — bounce passengers from pothole to pothole along the eight hour, 80 mile journey to colonial capital Rangoon. And reminders of the paranoid military are everywhere, eyes burning from behind the AK-47s and highway checkpoints designed to keep foreign press and big city samaritans out of what has quickly become the biggest disaster zone in the country’s history.
Cyclone Nargis made landfall not far from here on the night of May 2, 2008. It arrived unannounced from the Indian Ocean, ripped the mouth of the nation open and, shoving a fire hose down its throat, claimed as many as 200,000 lives before it traced upcountry and dissipated into a thick seasonal storm somewhere near the Thai border. But if the highway keeps its secret well, even the proverbial man who’s lived under a rock since April wouldn’t need to stray far before the scale of the disaster, and the amount of work still to be done, becomes apparent. Felt across 20,000 square kilometres of tarp-and-tent villages, Nargis has left Burma with US$10 billion in damage and over two million lives and livelihoods shaken, shattered or lost.
The highway ends in Bogale, a muddy city of 100,000 walled in on all sides by a web of rivers and tributaries. Before Nargis, this was the spoon to Burma’s “rice bowl”, preparing the staple crop and feeding it into roads and waterways to be fought over by a hungry nation. Today, Bogale has all the feel of a makeshift UN refugee base in a war zone, which, in a way, it is. A who’s who of the world’s international aid organisations operate out of tin hovels and hastily-erected hotels; logos for Unicef and the International Red Cross are as common a sight here as Marlboro and Coca-Cola billboards are in other Asian cities. An atmosphere of civic brotherhood pervades even the simplest exchange. One could well imagine lines from the city’s inner monologue: “you’re all in this together,” maybe, or “wait just a little longer, the nightmare might still pass”. Nargis is never far from anyone’s lips.
If anything, Bogale is one of the few places in the delta to have grown in population this year, as heartsick villagers stumble through seeking opportunities to rebuild their lives. Kept on a short leash by the image experts in Rangoon and in the public eye by relief organisations, Bogale looks and feels alive.
The Irrawaddy Division has as many villages as a leaking water bucket might have drops: 11566 in 2005. It was here where, between noon and midnight on May 2, the wickedest wars were waged. Untold thousands of villages were washed out to sea by a four metre tidal wave and peak winds that topped out at 215 km/h. Many have since been rebuilt, with donated blue tarpaulins and camping tents woven into the familiar patchwork of palm frond roofs and bamboo walls. Others have disappeared from the memory of all but a handful of survivors; not enough, in any case, to pick up the pieces and start over again.
The story of Pyin Song Kyay, a small community adrift on a thin strip of land between Bogale and Laputta, is typical of the Irrawaddy Delta, albeit with different numbers and different heroes. One-fifth of villagers here perished, including 21 schoolchildren. Describing the night of Nargis, one man tells me that “looking around I thought we were in the middle of the ocean, all I could see was water”. Another man swam to a floating palm frond to stay afloat, only to find himself clinging to the top of a tree as daylight broke and the water level subsided. With their boats wrecked and crops destroyed, and far enough from any population centres that it was forgotten, the village’s 600-odd survivors subsisted off patience and coconut flesh for eighteen days as they waited for the outside world to arrive.
A walk through the village reveals deep scars. The gentle smiles carried in public by most Burmese are fewer here, replaced by a dull-eyed weariness that suggests that, although their houses have been rebuilt and fields sowed, these peoples’ spirits may take a little longer to mend.
Sixteen kilometres away, near the village of Aung Hlaing, a Buddhist monastery was reduced to a mound of twisted metal and wood splinters. The night of Nargis, ten monks and sixty villagers clutched pillars and each other’s arms as the torrential waters rose past first their ankles, then their knees, then their waists. They didn’t know when, or if, it would stop. U Sittama, the hyper-animated septuagenarian monk who has made this monastery his life’s work, wonders and worries whether he’ll be able to salvage it. Four months after Nargis it looks just as the receding waters left it and it breaks his heart. The “razorblade winds that sliced off treetops” sliced off its upper level too. A stack of tin roofing sheets, donated by a Japanese shipyard, sit unused, too few to cover more than a corner of the structure. Wood for floorboards is still scarce this deep into the delta. For now, U Sittama has neither the materials nor the labour to rebuild his dream.
With most of the two million delta dwellers left homeless by Nargis still waiting for their worlds to return to normal, the rest of Burma waits with flickering hopes for their chance at a brighter future. The ham-handed rule of an iron-fisted military junta runs the gamut of adjectives from negligent to barbaric, making a third world mockery of a country that was once among Asia’s most prosperous. International watchdogs hoped the fallout might be enough to usher political change, similar, perhaps, to the events following the 1970 Bhola cyclone in neighbouring Bangladesh, when mismanagement of the disaster drove an angry populace toward independence. But instead, Burma’s xenophobic junta has wrapped itself up even tighter inside its borders, initially rejecting or hoarding international aid and flexing its military might to frighten a restless people further into submission.
As the international media retires the story of Nargis, Burma retreats back into the shadows of its tragic obscurity. Sixty years into an uneasy independence, and eighteen years after the election that was meant to restore it to democracy, its people resume their generations-long wait. What comes next, no one knows.
A boatman sits on the prow of his newly-repaired fishing boat at the jetty in Bogale, tarps donated by NGOs doubling as storm roofs. 90% of the city’s infrastructure was either destroyed or badly damaged by Nargis’ raging crosswinds and waters.
A temporary school rises like a fluorescent apparition across a seasonal floodway from two new bamboo-and-wood boats.
Villagers and schoolchildren pose for a photo along bamboo runners.
Lessons and a distraction.
Schoolchildren wait for their teacher to arrive and the day’s classes to begin under the light of the blue tarpaulin roof of a temporary school.
Bracelets and bare feet.
Two cyclone survivors, wary of the photographer.
Drop puddles.
A young boy looks over from his lessons.
New mothers pose with their babies. All were at one point presumed dead during the frenzy of Nargis.
A fallen jewel-and-gold umbrella was the only damage incurred by this Buddhist zedi on the banks of the Bogale River.
A novice monk stands with hands folded in front of his destroyed monastery near Aung Hlaing.
76 year old monk U Sittama opens the door to what was once the upper level of his monastery.
Two monks, U Sittama at right, describe the winds and rains of Nargis.
U Sittama sits with two novices in their temporary sleeping quarters.
A zedi under repair.
A villager stands in front of a fallen coconut palm tree.
A convoy of Unicef trucks haul aid into the Irrawaddy Delta from Rangoon.
Repair work continues on a damaged home on the main street of Bogale.
Reflected moonlight shimmers off a new tin roof during a windstorm.
Palm fronds and scaffolding encircle a zedi under repair.
Misery Road: Vancouver’s Third World
Pictures and text: ©Austin Andrews / ZUMA Press
Vancouver, to many people, is paradise found. An oasis of snow and sand set in Canada’s most comfortable climate, it boasts a calibre of natural splendour and rugged good looks matched by few other major cities in the world. With the 2010 Olympics just around the corner, its streets are alive with excitement, the civic pride palpable. A diverse economy fuels a growth rate more than twice the national average. This year, as in the five before it, The Economist ranked Vancouver the world’s most livable city.
But with one wrong turn Vancouver reveals a set of gnashing teeth unlike any seen elsewhere in Canada or, indeed, the western world. For ten blocks east of Cambie Street, paradise decays into an open air drug market and catwalk parade of lives battered, broken and lost, with each block revealing stories and scars more tragic than the one before it. Novelist Douglas Coupland put it best when he advised outsiders visiting the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood to “bring sturdy footwear and an open mind”, and he ain’t kidding.
The Downtown Eastside goes beyond the traditional definition of working class to dip into a level of abject poverty typically reserved for outside judgements on the developing world. It’s Canada’s poorest postal code, sure. But at an estimated 40%, the HIV rate among its 10,000-odd residents is the highest in the industrialised world, a vestige of decades of needle sharing and free market prostitution. The United Nations recently declared it a crisis zone, with UN spokesperson Patricia Leidl saying, “It’s one of the worst areas of urban blight that I’ve ever seen and I’ve travelled all over the world.”
But it would be doing the neighbourhood a tragic disservice to dwell on the tabloid sensationalism of drug abuse and poverty at the expense of its unique sense of community. A visit to the Only Seafood Cafe on East Hastings –a restaurant so named because it was the city’s first place for a meal of fish and chips when it opened a hundred years ago– reveals a scene that wouldn’t feel out of place in an early Martin Scorsese film, with elderly pensioners and retired dockworkers eating alongside booths of cops working the beat and the occasional contingent of brave office workers who wander down from anonymous glass-and-steel skyscrapers of Vancouver’s financial sector. One man tells me it’s the “last true community where everyone knows each other.”
Creeping gentrification threatens to change that. In a race to tidy up the neighbourhood before the world comes knocking in 2010, the provincial government has snapped up many of the neighbourhood’s slum hotels and social housing with an eye toward developing a loft apartments and hip cafés. Pawn shops and XXX outlets today, the heritage buildings of the Downtown Eastside have a very different future awaiting them. The rest of the city hopes its residents do too.
Street art adorns the side of a condemned building along East Hastings Street. Two days later the portrait — and the wall — were both gone.
For their efforts, the demolition crew share $225 for every palette of bricks recovered from the site.
Pedestrian crossing at a roadblock on East Hastings at Main Street. Towering across the street, the Ford Building, constructed in 1912, was recently converted into low-income, single room apartments for neighbourhood residents.
Dave’s hobby is women’s fashion, and he often takes local prostitutes to Model Express to buy them lingerie or a new pair of shoes in exchange for their services. At an estimated 40%, the HIV infection rate in the Downtown Eastside is the highest in the industrialised world, on par with the impoverished African nation of Botswana.
Dave is addicted to cocaine. He spent ten years clean but the allure of the drug drew him back to the Downtown Eastside, which he dubs in a rare moment of clear expression “an open-air drug market where everyone buys, even the sellers”.
Squad cars on an alleyway drug raid. The Vancouver Police Department has a high-profile branch half a block from the dangerous crossroads of Hastings and Main but residents are split as to whether increased police presence has made their neighbourhood — long Canada’s poorest — any safer.
Passerbys and police look out over the intersection of Hastings and Cambie. This corner marks the boundary between the trendy Gastown district and the Downtown Eastside, Canada’s poorest postal code and tonight the scene of two unrelated shootings.
Police tape blocks access to one of the Downtown Eastside’s infamous alleyways. Behind me, a drug dealer explains the situation to an associate on the phone, muttering “this isn’t good for business, this isn’t good at all.”
Phil left a crumbling family life in Montreal five years ago for a fresh start in Vancouver. Instead, he ended up in the Downtown Eastside. “They’re all my choices, but it starts to feel after awhile that it isn’t a choice anymore, if you know what I mean.”
Dope sick and broke, Phil “gets better” in the alley behind Insite, the government-funded supervised injection site. He doesn’t like shooting in the alleys, where police take a harder stance, but would rather take the chance than queue for a spot inside. “Ten minutes is a long time to wait when you’ve got heroin in your hands.” The high is gone in another ten.
The spoils from a morning’s panhandling buy two rocks of crack cocaine at Pigeon Park.
Octogenarian Vancouver mayoral candidate Betty Krawczyk addresses fired-up protestors at a rally for Native rights.
One-buttoned.
Cracked paint mars the facade to the Balmoral, one of the neighbourhood’s grand heritage hotels built in the years before the First World War when East Hastings was still the address of choice for visiting elite. Today these two dozen or so “slum hotels”, owned by overseas landlords and overrun by drug lords, shelter an estimated 3000 people on a month-by-month basis.
Dormant neon marks the entrance to The Ovaltine Cafe, a WWII-era Vancouver landmark. Once a dining hotspot, the district still clings to a few restaurants from its glory days…
…while others have vanished under mounting layers of boards and bills.
A monk disappears through the barred doors of a monastery. The district borders Vancouver’s Chinatown and despite its large ethnic population racial tensions often boil over into violence.
Every Valentine’s Day, the residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood band together to remember the women who have been targeted and picked off their streets by serial killers and rapists. This year’s march took on particular significance as it coincided with a court date in the trial of Robert Pickton, a Vancouver pig farmer accused of killing as many as 49 neighbourhood prostitutes and drug users.
Organisers discuss the route. The march began in Gastown and steadily grew in numbers on the way to its destination at the Vancouver Eastside Police HQ.
A rose in the crowd.
Mike’s life story is echoed by many in the Downtown Eastside. Orphaned to a neighbourhood soup kitchen aged eleven, his adolescence was lost chasing heroin’s fleeting euphoria. It began when “somebody stuck in a needle in my arm” as a joke in the night at an age when most kids are leaving primary school.
To finance his addiction, Mike resorts to breaking into cars and stealing whatever he finds. Now 28, he recently entered a methadone program to curtail his $200-a-day habit but worries he won’t be able to stay clean.
A client enters Insite, North America’s first government-funded safe injection site for drug addicts. The facility has drawn the ire of many, being derided by the Bush administration as “state-assisted suicide” and repeatedly being threatened with closure by Canadian PM Stephen Harper. With five years’ operation behind it, Insite has seen no fatalities.
Protest smear at a street festival in support of Insite.
Stilt pirouette.
Billboard dreams.
A longtime user, Kenny dreams of cleaning up and becoming a high school drug counsellor.
Kenny picks at itchy skin lesions with a rusting crack pipe. He hadn’t taken his shoes off for a full week before this photo was taken. His parting words: “God be with you, kid.”
Tungsten alley.
International Village
A centerpiece of the Vancouver city council’s much-ballyhooed attempts to resurrect the derelict downtown eastside, the upscale International Village shopping mall has become a classic example of how not to draw suburbia-bound shoppers back to the city core. Positioned upmarket toward a breed of cosmopolitan shopper not seen in that particular neighbourhood for years, the mall boasted a large concentration of boutique fashion retailers and high-priced specialty shops when it opened in December 1999. But the project amounted to a gross miscalculation of demand and resources, and by the end of its first year its floundering shops began closing down and packing up, leaving the mall a vacant shell of its developers’ dreams.
Today, the mall’s 300,000 square feet of floor space function mainly as a labyrinthine transit corridor for moviegoers travelling between the underground parkade and the third floor Tinseltown cinemas, passing along the way dozens of vacant shopfronts and failed businesses.
‘Anonymous’ Activists Raid Vancouver Scientology HQ
Worldwide branches of the Church of Scientology came under attack today from members of the loosely-knit internet collective ‘Anonymous’. Bound by a mantra of “We are anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us”, the global protest was arranged in under three weeks after a leaked Church video sparked outrage among detractors. Tens of thousands turned out in over fifty cities worldwide.
The following photos are from the Vancouver raid, which took place this afternoon at the Church’s downtown eastside headquarters.
Masked protestors congregate on the sidewalk directly opposite the Church headquarters armed with signs and rally cries. The swelling crowds soon spilled out to all four corners at the intersection of East Hastings and Homer. Estimates put the peak turnout around 200.
Members of ‘Anonymous’ were encouraged to wear matching Guy Fawkes masks, immortalised in the 2006 film V for Vendetta. Costume shops in many of the host cities reported selling out days in advance.
Masks ranged from the standard issue…
…to the colourful and unusual…
…to the outright theatrical.
The crowd periodically erupted into chants of “Don’t pay bills, scientology kills!” and “Show us Xenu!”, in reference to a Scientology demigod.
Many passing vehicles — including city buses — showed their support by blasting their horns, despite a civic bylaw banning protestors from encouraging honking in signs.
A protestor plays dead as police inspect the scene.
The ‘target’ remained undaunted, with Church members continuing their practice of handing out leaflets to passerbys.
[photo removed by request]
A dark-masked protestor distributes leaflets to cars stopped at traffic lights.
An unmasked protestor converses with a Church member outside the front doors.
More information and a further eyewitness account on Xander’s blog Childish Things.
Tractlands
Words found in sales brochures for various planned community, circa 1951-1959.
“The Budgeteer. This is a brand new idea in duplexes. Each house rents from $65 a month. They are not for sale. Available only to employees of designated defense companies. Leases are for one year and tenants must deposit a cash security of $130.”
“Look through these pages for the modern answer to your housing problem. See how beauty, utility and craftsmanship have been combined to give you the glamorous exteriors and the unique, new floor plans from which to choose the home you have always wanted.”
“In this final year of construction, four wonderful houses are being shown, all in limited quantities: the Jubilee, the Pennsylvanian, the Colonial and the Country Clubber, which, at moderate additional expense, can be completely air-conditioned.”
“No single feature of a suburban residential community contributes so much to the charm and beauty of the individual home and locality as well-kept lawns.”
“Homeowners are encouraged to plant a natural fence of privet hedge or evergreens.”
“Your first impression … and it stays with you … is one of quiet, spacious beauty. The gently curving streets with modern lighting are uncluttered by cars … Everywhere you look, your eyes rest on the loveliness of well-kept lawns, majestic shade trees, fruit trees and flowering shrubs.”
“Road layouts have been planned so that no child crosses a main road to reach school. Wide, parked boulevards crisscross the town to make every house easy to reach. Even street names have been keyed to make sense. For instance, Sweetbriar Lane (and any road beginning with “S”) is in the Stonybrook section.”
“As an innovation, these three houses are being intermingled side by side rather than being built in separate groups. In other words, no longer do we have a section of “A” houses, another of “B” houses, and a third of “C” houses. Instead we are building all types in the same neighbourhood, right next to each other, to provide greater variety and a more pleasing appearance.”
“Every house includes a General Electric refrigerator, automatic washer, electric range and oven, screens for all windows, and complete landscaping. In addition, the “C” house includes a General Electric dryer.”
“No booklet can be a substitute for seeing with one’s own eyes. All this can do is give a few facts and figures to supplement a personal visit.”
“Elsewhere in this booklet you will see pictures of the homes to be built, but you can see the houses themselves at the Exhibit Center on Route 13. Go into the Display Building and see everything—every nail, every bolt, every last item of equipment—that goes into their construction.”
“To you, Mr. and Mrs. Homebuyer… first things come first, and the first thing you want to know is – Is This House a Good Buy?”
“Question: When is a dollar more than a dollar?
Answer: When it’s used in Levittown, the most perfectly planned community in America!”
“There once was a place where neighbors greeted neighbors in the quiet of summer twilight. Where children chased fireflies. And porch wings provided easy refuge from the cares of the day. The movie house showed cartoons on Saturday. The grocery store delivered. And there was always that one teacher who always knew you had that special something. Remember that place? Perhaps from your childhood. Or maybe just from stories. It held a magic all of its own. The special magic of an American home town.”