The kids of Ethiopia series, inspired by the wonderful Austin Augie YT episode.
Some time ago I finished watching one of Austin Augie’s episodes about his two week trip to India and decided that my next post will be about this my trip to Ethiopia. I love his documentary style of video and stills storytelling. And it doesn’t have to be something extremely exotic like this trip to India, he knows how to bring an amazing POV from his everyday life – about the living room studio in NY, about his dedication to BMX, his dog and his photography. And this trip to the India wasn’t an exception. The main reason of this travel was the wedding of his friend-client, which he should document of film – but this time with both – stills and motion film. Somewhere almost at the end he met a group of kids who followed him. And almost impossible to get exactly what they want from him – money, food, a picture or just an attention.
Somehow his pictures from the India trip reminded me that I have a bunch of unpublished photos that I really want to share with you, my friends. The first picture I took in Soroka village, which is located on the road to the northern area of Ethiopia and Sudan. This village is a kind of border between the Amhara and Tigray regions of the country. In a few years, this area became a Tigrayan war zone.
They came to our small camp in the fields just in a few minutes of our arriving. The team was busy with filming video and i tried to attract kids with some sport activity :-))
We brought a ball with us with the idea of giving it to the children we met that day. The happiness of the children was indescribable. So when you say how unhappy and unlucky these kids are just because they don’t have a smartphone in their hands, you should see these happy smiles just because they got the ball. These days, not many can be happy just because of small things that life brings to them. A “having everything” person has just lost this wonderful ability to be happy just because. Finally the ball found its thorn and was pierced, so next day we brought them another stronger ball.
Some of them saw their digital images for the first time on the display of a digital camera. And again, I have no idea how their telegraph works, but no matter where we appeared, they appeared almost simultaneously. Most of the children needed this attention. Some of them answered in very bad English, but all of them together repeated every sentence or word we said. The word “show” was the most popular – they wanted to see every single photographed image of them and tried to manage the camera buttons on them while looking through photos on the camera’s small screen.
Well, in Addis Ababa the kids were a little bit more business oriented and some tried to sell us something or just to ask for money.
