I work for a non-profit , humanitarian organization that specializes in health care and poverty alleviation in East Africa. A large part of my job is to visit our projects each year and to document our work, bringing back photographs that tell the stories of the people we serve. When I am not working, I am exploring the towns and villages where we work and the places in between, attempting to create something personal along the way. This group of images is not intended to be a cohesive body of work. They are singles, without context, representing my personal relationship and perceptions of Africa – all of its strangeness and beauty and complex relationships among God, government, and colliding cultures. My love for this part of the world is equally complex. I’m a stranger in a strange land, and yet when there I somehow I feel more comfortable in my own skin–ironic, given that I’m glaringly aware that my skin is pale, vulnerable, and out of place. I feel a real freedom unlike the highly touted freedoms of home. And it doesn’t escape me that it’s likely because I am white, a visitor, and the rules there don’t apply to me in the same way. But I am respectful, even reverential, in all that I encounter. I know how precious these times are when I can be the minority, unable to blend, surrendering to the circumstances in which I enter.

 More of Jeff’s work can be seen HERE.

Jeff’s previous contributions to aamora.