Dec. 15, 2010

In summer 2009, Watoto, an organization in Kampala, Uganda, that is changing the lives of thousands of orphans and widows through international sponsorship as well as the teaching of the gospel. Funds raised through sponsorship are used to feed, clothe and educate orphaned children and vulnerable women, giving them new hope for the future.

On my final day of working in the home for babies, just before I came back to Edmonton for school, I learned there was also a volunteer photographer position. Needless to say, once I graduated from NAIT’s Photographic Technology program in 2010 I returned to Kampala for two and a half months to volunteer in Watoto’s marketing department, providing quality images for the website, brochures and promotional materials.

I spent one special weekend up north in a village called Gulu, where we went on photo shoots covering a Watoto program called Living Hope. This program provides biblical counselling, medical assistance and basic small business classes to teenage mothers, returnees from abduction and HIV-positive women who have lost their husbands, many of them to the civil war from which the village is struggling to recover.

We were given the unique opportunity to photograph two ladies in this program, along with each of their five children, in their homes. Because of the business classes, one of the ladies was able to grow enough beans not only to feed her family but also to sell at the market, earning extra money to start saving to buy a tractor.

Now if only I could take a class on how to avoid cow pies while simultaneously shooting and walking through cassava fields!

Jeanette Janzen
Photographic Technology ’10

See the gallery below for more of Jeanette's photos.