As a New Zealand humanitarian photographer and storyteller, I’ve had the immense privilege of having a front-row seat to the breathtaking beauty of motherhood around the globe. The strength and resilience of the women I meet never ceases to amaze me. What powerful stories they tell of the obstacles they’ve overcome and the way they fight for a better future for their children. From stories of tremendous hope and joy to deep trauma and unfathomable loss.
Here are three things I’ve learned from the mothers I photograph. Firstly, there’s no us and them, there’s only us. Before I started doing this kind of work I was tempted to imagine that mothers in developing countries who endured horrific things “on the news” were fundamentally different from me. Maybe, somehow, they just don’t feel things like I do. They’re “used to it”, numbed by the ubiquitous presence of suffering. Maybe they expect less, care less, hope for less, want less, or need less. But as I’ve come to know mums all over the world, and captured them and their children with my camera, I’ve come to see that as different as our cultures and contexts might be, the universal gifts and challenges of motherhood unite us. There’s really no difference in what we want for our children; only in what we can give them.
Secondly, why so fast? I don’t know if it’s because I move at the speed of a bat out of hell, but one of the main things I’ve learned about mums in the places I photograph, is that their pace of life is so much calmer than mine. I remember one mum in Uganda, called Kate, who told me, “Westerners seem to really rush with everything. They have a lot to do, and they feel like they have to get it done. For them everything is now, now. They keep time and for them it has to be exactly that time. I’ve heard that you have schedules for your children’s napping, and you get mad if the baby doesn’t follow it? We do what we do in a relaxed way. They’ll sleep when they sleep.”
Thirdly, simplicity with our kids is underrated. We live in a world that’s all about more toys, more gadgets, more after-school activities, more designer brands and more technology. But the mothers I’ve photographed have taught me by their example that a stick and a soccer ball made of plastic bags is more than enough to ignite a child’s imagination. They’ve also shown me that you don’t need to be in multiple after-school activities for your kids to hone what they’re good at.
Having personally lived and raised my children in Uganda for seven years, I’ve seen children with unbelievable talent playing drums on the bottom of buckets with no tutor in sight. I’ve seen aspiring weightlifters using yellow water jerry cans to practise lifting and 4-year-olds who can dance better than anyone I know.
