The View from Here

In the small Cambodian city of Kracheh, on the very outskirts of town, these young children are all growing up together. They live right here in this house and the neighbouring homes around it, overlooking the river and farmlands where they play at the end of the day and where they’ll will work when they get older. Unless something unusual happens in their lives or to this place, they will probably never leave here. With sunsets like this it’s not a given they’ll ever want to, but the real question is, what would they do if the choice was theirs?

Hidden within the mountains of south-eastern Türkiye and nestled against the borders of Iran and Iraq is the Türk province and Kurdish refuge of Hakkâri.

The climate here can be harsh: hot, dry summers and cold, snowy winters. The Kurds themselves will tell you that no one ever comes here, and even if they tried the rugged terrain makes travel difficult at best in the summer and impossible in the winter. They will also tell you that life in this small province of Hakkâri is like no one even knows they’re here. But in a good way. Over the years they have grown to accept that being hidden within these mountains and isolated from the rest of the world might just be their best chance to live in peace.

Trains run right through the city of Bogura at its north end. A two-kilometre embankment elevates the tracks to shoulder height and lifts the rail cars even higher to where the lens of this camera has found the frame of this photograph. — A husband and wife outside their home, standing as they do when the trains rumble by. Cargo trains. Everyday. Without passengers and without stopping. Without malice and without empathy.

The neighbourhood of Chorkor lies on the western edge of Accra and stretches roughly two kilometres along the Atlantic coast. It’s primarily a fishing community and these five people are part of a crew that fishes the waters just offshore. This is the rest hut they have built for themselves, where they plan their course at the start of each work day and decompress at its end.

The pile of rubble on which they and their hut stand has not been washed ashore. It has not arrived by accident, it’s rubble that’s been gathered from nearby city dumps and laid down as a makeshift foundation for an eroding coastline. The waves of the Atlantic have got to break somewhere.

If you could step back from this frame until the full two-kilometre stretch of Chorkor came into view, you would see that these five crew members are not the only ones to have engineered a new coastline to stand on.

This woman lives along the road that connects the city of Harar to the village of Mido Ado in eastern Ethiopia. It’s an old cobblestone road that passes through three small communities where the homes are still made from wooden sticks woven together into a lattice-like structure and covered by a mixture of mud and clay. In the Amharic language these mud houses are called “Chika Bet.” This one is hers.

From the mud-covered shore of the Rupsa river this woman has climbed into this boat with grace and ease. She now stands steady at the bow as though it were her rightful place in life. — The water was rough not a moment ago with wind all morning and waves all day. But the air turned still as she stepped from the shore, the sky becoming clear, the water like glass.

A pair of large, black ravens have now taken position directly above her, circling in silence and on guard. It has been this way her whole life, and she had felt it always: Protected by the world around her. Nothing to fear.

Across the southern Ethiopian Highlands and beyond, the Friday market in Butajira really does go on forever.

The city of Gaziantep is known as one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities of the world, and it is built on rolling limestone hills just west of the Euphrates River, sixty miles north of the Syrian city of Aleppo.

For the Turks, Gaziantep is considered to be the home of the finest cuisine in all of Türkiye and, in better times, is a popular destination for food lovers throughout the country. For the Syrian people, however, Gaziantep is more simply thought of as a home away from home. Over the past ten years of war in their country, the Syrian population of Gaziantep alone has grown to 500,000 – a quarter of the entire population of the city itself – and it is estimated that there are currently 4 million Syrians living or taking refuge out here in the south-eastern part of Türkiye.

For the last 25 minutes this young boy has been preparing his kite for take-off, running down the hillside that leads to this launch pad, and harnessing just the right amount of wind for this perfect moment of flight.

This is his city of Mardin, built on the southern-facing slope of a mountainside that overlooks the limestone plateau of the Syrian border, and the horizon of a world beyond him.

He flies his kite from here every day, watching it climb high as his imagination soars. On the days he craves adventure he rides its wings across the world to learn what lives beyond him. On the days he feels alone, he holds his kite straight and tight and steadies it above him like a beacon of light, a chance for the world to find him.

At the very southern tip of Hakkâri province is one of the most isolated regions in all of Türkiye. The cool, picturesque mountains that surround and protect villages in the north have collapsed into this barren, dry landscape of the south with summer temperatures hovering around 40°C. — But this is home for the people of Derecik, a small Kurdish village where no one ever comes to visit, and where most of the people who live here can think of a hundred places they’d rather be.

While this small, coastal town of Winneba is historically known as an indigenous Effutu fishing village, it is now widely recognized as home to the University of Education, Winneba — Ghana’s premier teacher-training institute.

Since its establishment in 1992, the university has changed the trajectory of Winneba. Though fishing is still an essential part of the town’s culture and economy, the university attracts many future teachers from across Ghana and the wider West African region. Moreover, it has established a number of primary and junior high practice schools right here in town to help with graduate placement and training. Winneba now has higher childhood education levels per capita than any small town in Ghana.

Quiet streets and blue skies: a morning walk through the costal city of Berbera on the Gulf of Aden. The Horn of Africa.

If you were to walk out along this pier and slide down the remains of this slowly deteriorating waterslide, you would splash into the magical waters of the 3-million-year-old Lake Ohrid, the oldest and deepest lake in all of Europe.

In today’s world, Lake Ohrid belongs to the people of modern-day Albania and North Macedonia who treasure it for its beauty and take pride in its history. But this is also home to 200 species of plants and animals, marine life that is endemic to these waters, and that can be found nowhere else on earth.