Current Photo Contributor: Rima Vesely-Flad
Rima Vesely-Flad is the founder and director of the Interfaith Coalition of Advocates for Reentry and Employment (ICARE), a faith-based advocacy project focused on changing employment barriers for people with criminal convictions. She also teaches part-time in a college-level program at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, N.Y., and consults for nonprofit organizations and congregations. Rima has traveled throughout Africa and Latin America, and lived for two extended periods of time in Cape Town, South Africa, working as a journalist, scholar, and teacher. She speaks regularly at churches and interfaith gatherings.
Rima may be e-mailed at nyicare@earthlink.net.
"Capetown Rally" -- Capetown, South Africa, (c) Rima Vesely-FladRecent Photo Contributor: Jim Dugan
Jim Dugan (or jimdugan.com as his friends call him) is a photographer and web designer living on the Maine coast. His photography ranges from fine-art to commercial, tourism to conservation, sailing to sea-kayaking. He has photographed how-to books of woodworking, sea kayaking and fly-tying. Web design is, for him, a way to fill time when he can't be taking pictures, though he enjoys a well-turned line of code as much as the next guy. This summer, he'll be teaching photography aboard a schooner. Jim is a Registered Maine Guide and can roll his kayak 18 times in 60 seconds.
I took this photo at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. No scuba tanks were harmed in the making of this photograph.
Monhegan Island is a windblown chunk of rock 12 miles off the Maine coast. In summer, it's home to several hundred tourists, rusticators, artists and a few locals. In winter, about 70 people live there. In 1991, I was granted a six-week artist's residency there and I've returned many times since. "Waterfall" was done in winter; I was invited for either Thanksgiving or New Year's. I remember how cold it was. This picture is taken from a cliff, looking straight down at a receding wave. I hesitate to tell you that, as there's something to be said for mystery and vertigo in a photograph, I think.
Recent Photo Contributor: Jutta Meier-Wiedenbach
Jutta Meier-Wiedenbach studied photography in Berlin and has contributed images to German, Mexican and US publications and NGO reports. Jutta has many years experience working for peace and justice, including more than four years in Chiapas, Mexico, where she published two collections of photographs about the human rights situation in indigenous communities. In 2001 she traveled to Iraq to document the effects of the UN sanctions on the civilian population; the resulting photographs were published in a calendar in Italy. Jutta currently coordinates the Colombia Program of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and has contributed images to a travelling photo exhibit of Colombian Peace Communities: http://forusa.org/programs/colombia/photoexhibit.html
The "Peace Community" of San José de Apartadó in northwestern Colombia is one of many communities that have taken the courageous stand of not allowing any armed presence -- neither governmental military, nor left-wing guerrillas, nor right-wing paramilitary units -- in their communities. Recently, on April 1st, many people in San José de Apartadó were displaced from their homes because the Colombian Police -- part of the armed forces -- disregarded the Peace Community's principle and disrespected protective measures issued by the Inter-American Human Rights Court. La Unión is a settlement that is part of this Peace Community, and, despite the political and social conditions, just like anywhere children are children. This young girl I know as a happy spirit who is always ready to laugh at anything. I hope she does not lose that ability even though she lives in a community that is constantly threatened and attacked because of its nonviolent resistance to war and injustice.
I took this photo during an intense visit at the Ameriya shelter that was bombed by the US in the first Gulf war, killing 408 civilians. So the photos are actually photos of some of the children that were killed and they hang all over on the blackened walls inside the shelter. One man, whose wife and children died in the attack, kept asking us, a group of mainly US citizens, "Why? Why? What did these women and children do to you?"
Public hospitals suffered tremendously from US imposed UN sanctions on Iraq in the decade between the two Gulf wars. Medical supplies that were supposed to be sent to Iraq through the food-for-oil program were often vetoed by the US with the reasoning that they could also be used for military purposes - so-called "dual-use". This meant that the civilian population had no access to adequate medical care in a country that before the sanctions had a very high medical care standard.
In Chiapas, waves of forced displacement swept through the countryside as government-supporting paramilitary groups became more and more active as a response to the Zapatista uprising in 1994. A woman told us: "When we left... we covered the mouths of my little children so that the soldiers and the police wouldn't hear them." Visiting the refugee camp on a miserably cold day in November, a community member told me that they had fled in the middle of the night with just the shirts on their backs. Now, all they had to eat were a few dried corn tortillas.