Round up July

Well hello. The month is over, so here's is summary of what I did this month on the photographic field. At the beginning of the month I got a call from a friend who said that a union strike was in progress. I went to the industrial area. When I arrived they were already busy with dancing and singing joyfully( I like these strikes).The employees of several steel companies wanted a 13% wages increase instead of the 7%, what they were promised. There are a lot of strikes here in South Africa, so this was not something special.

I also worked on various projects including the “Evaton” project which I try to discover the township Evaton.

And there was the New Life Centre project that I mentioned in a my previous post. I came in contact with the shelter because there was a fund raisin event at the beginning of this month I will do a follow up, but then with a different shelter. In township Sebokeng was a riot going on. Lazarus a local journalist which I do a lot of stories with and I went there and found a little xenophobia going on. Just after we arrived they arrested a man of Ethiopian origin because he allegedly raped a 10 year old girl. The local residents became furious that followed with several molestations on Ethiopians which a man was slightly injured. I made also pictures of arrests that were made after illegally tapping of electricity. The police invited us to join them, that resulted in a real police escort, that was pretty cool.
On the lighter subject. Omo (the washing powder) had an contest and asked me to make some pics of the winners of ZAR 10000, congrats.
During the weekend of 16 and 17 July, me and my girlfriend went away for the weekend to a game farm. The main reason we went there was because I was going to make a cover story about game hunt. In July the hunting season is in South Africa is fully in progress, so that was two whole days of being very quiet and concentrated when I followed the hunters. The cover story is now showing on my website, link here. As title “Survival Game”

At last there was Mandela day, Tata Madiba ( Nelson Mandela) was managed to become 93 years old, the man celebrated his birthday with his family and the country were doing good things for the community like providing goods for homeless shelters, painting churches or... whatever. This is just once a year, so for me I find it too hypocrite to mention.

See you next month.

New Life Centre

Hi all, Some times I can't stop to thinking of...why I'm doing this. But why not?

A few weeks ago I went to A shelter for children from 5 to 17 years old. The New life Centre is a shelter that currently has 18 children. It is running by Anton & Veronica Mocke. They are the good people who take the children from the homes that became to hardrd to live anymore. Because of several reasons. Drinking, drugs, abuse or all of them.

I went a few weeks ago to make cover story and what I saw were beautiful children, spontaneous, motivated and full of dreams. Everyone got their own story, from worse to very worse. Harry 16 years old is living at the shelter because he was a bad boy. He did drugs little crimes and ran a few times away from his aunt where he stayed. When you listened deeper to his story, he added that when he was 5 years old his father murdered his mother and sister when he was drunk. before he killed himself.

The shelter don't get any support from the government because the law don't allow to support "white' shelters.
cause the black empowerment law.