Salgado Photo No. 8

This photo depicts a man aiding a fellow gold miner who has been injured during the work day. The injured man lost the tip of his right thumb and damaged one of his eyes.

When I see this picture, I see a man, beaten down, who has had little or no opportunity to become the person he could have been. Maybe he could have one an Olympic medal. Maybe he  could have found a cure for cancer. Maybe he could have been a brain surgeon or that teacher that changed your life or a diplomat that changed the world. But due to his circumstances, he ended up in a high-risk, low-return job with no room to grow.

Each of us holds within us a spark that can grow into something bright and scintillating and beautiful. Some of us are born into an environment that fosters the growth of that spark--in a good home with a good education. But some people are born into a place with no air to feed the fire.

Sometimes, when we experience success in our education or our career, we look down at those who aren't experiencing success and think, "if they just worked harder, they wouldn't be having such a hard time." But you never know: maybe that person would be leaps and bounds above you if they had the same resources that you did. That's not to say that you don't deserve success if you work hard--I just think that we should keep in mind that we ALL have a spark--we all have the potential to make a difference. So use what you have to make a difference for those in the world who have a spark but nothing to help it grow.

Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. New York: Aperture. 343. Print.

Salgado Photo No. 7

What do you see when you look at this photo? When I first saw this picture, I saw happy children, maybe at day care while their parents are working high-powered jobs in the city. In fact, that's what I've seen every time I've looked at this picture over the past few months (which has been quite a few times). I thought the picture was just an artful depiction of normal kids who would grow up to have normal lives.

But it's not. Each of the nearly forty children in this picture were abandoned on the streets or given up by parents that could no longer care for them. Four hundred and thirty children lived at the pictured facility, an FEBEM (Foundation for Child Welfare, now called CASA) center. Those four hundred plus children didn't have much chance for normal lives later either. Many of the kids would become street children, roaming São Paulo at night, addicted to crack or sniffing glue. 

10% of children were abandoned for a long time in São Paulo, but approximately when this photo was taken, in 1996, that proportion jumped to 35%. The population shift to the city is partly to blame for this huge abandonment rate. With thousands of people moving to the cities, so many people are seeking to share the same space that resources become scarce. Terrible though it is, families are sometimes forced to choose which mouths to feed when there isn't enough to go around. Children are sometimes forced to go into prostitution or other illegal activities in order to provide for themselves or their families.

Children live on streets in conditions like these all over the world. Even here, in Utah, homelessness rates of children have gone up in the past few years. These homeless children have a high possibility of committing juvenile crimes and then growing up and committing felonies. 

These types of problems that affect what our children will grow up to be, and what the world will be tomorrow, should be at the top of our list of things to solve. These types of problems are difficult to find a solution to; children need to be helped, but they also should be taught so that when they grow up, they don't perpetuate the problem by falling into old habits. I certainly don't have an answer. I only know that there are children that need help.

And what wouldn't you do to help a child?

Bello, Marisol. "Report: Child Homelessness up 33% in 3 Years." USATODAY.COM. USA Today, 13 Dec. 2011. Web. 18 Mar. 2013. 

Lyon, Julia. "Number of Homeless Utah Kids Skyrockets." The Salt Lake Tribune. The Salt Lake Tribune, 14 Oct. 2010. Web. 18 Mar. 2013. 

Salgado, Sebastio. "Landless Voices: The Sights and Voices of Dispossession." Landless Voices: The Sights and Voices of Dispossession - Error. School of Modern Languages, 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 18 Mar. 2013. 

Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. New York: Aperture. 314-15. Print.

"Street Children." Childhood USA. Childhood USA, n.d. Web. 18 Mar. 2013. 

Salgado Photo No. 6

This girl is an Ecuadorian from the community of Yaracruz whose parents were among a group of farmers that tried to acquire a fertile plot of land in 1983. The farmers agreed to pay fifteen percent, 3 million sucres, or about $120, of the total 20 million sucres and the Ecuadorian government agreed paid the rest. The farmers paid the 3 million, but the rest was never paid. Meanwhile, inflation soared out of control until, fifteen years later, the property was worth 3 billion sucres. The landowner claimed that the farmers had to pay the rest of the 450 million sucres (around $17,000) that was the new fifteen percent. This pressure due to this disagreement built up and led to the destroying of the farmers' homes, crops, and in some cases, lives.

When the farmers first tried to purchase the land, Ecuador was just coming out of a seven year period of military reign. Those first few years of democracy were unstable, and the economically shaky years that followed added to that instability. In fact, much of the huge inflation was caused by the then President of Ecuador, who changed the official currency from the sucre to the dollar, leaving the wealthy wealthier and the poor scrambling to try and change their useless sucres into dollars.

This, to me, stands as a warning against excessive government involvement in the economic activities of a nation. While government has it's place, uncontrolled participation in an economic system often has dire consequences for that system and those affected by it

"Ecuadorian Sucre (ECS) Currency Exchange Rate Conversion Calculator." Calculator for Ecuadorian Sucres (ECS) Currency Exchange Rate Conversion. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Mar. 2013. 

Halberstadt, Jason. "Ecuador Government Overview & History." Ecuador Economy Government. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Mar. 2013. 

"History of Ecuador." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Feb. 2013. Web. 07 Mar. 2013. 

Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. New York: Aperture. 270-71. Print.

Salgado Photo No. 5

Pictured here are refugees from Mozambique. These lucky survivors have lived through cholera epidemics that have left many children motherless and alone in the Malawian refugee camps where they were probably born. In acts of great love, many mothers who survived took on these orphaned children as their own. Salgado said that, "sometimes a mother appears to have twins, but in fact she has taken in one of the children in an act of solidarity."

These women are significant examples of selflessness and charity. Imagine their situation: they are raising their probably fatherless children in the questionable conditions of a refugee camp where they have had to take shelter from the war tearing their own country apart. They've lived through fear, sickness, hunger, and other trials. Yet, when they see the need of another child, though they may barely be able to provide for their own, they take that child on and give it the love that it needs.

I love the peaceful look on the baby's face in the front of the photograph. It looks as though nothing in the world is wrong or hard; it could be a well-cared for child in an affluent family that will want for nothing and grow up to have many opportunities and privileges. Yet this baby's future is uncertain and maybe even bleak. The child's expression reminds me that all children have potential to grow up into something great, even if their situation doesn't allow for them to reach the same heights that another child's situation does. 

The mothers in this picture knew of this potential in those children whose situation left them orphans. Raising any child is an enormous challenge, and agreeing to raise an extra child is a great sacrifice, but the women who stepped up to the challenge in Malawian refugee camps didn't see it that way; instead, they knew that each child deserves to be loved and that each child has the potential to change the world. Think of how the world would be changed if everyone saw that potential in everyone around them.

Collins, John S. "An Analysis of the Voluntariness of Refugee Repatriation in Africa." Thesis. University of Manitoba, 1996. University of Manitoba. Web. 6 Mar. 2013. 

Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. New York: Aperture. 233. Print.