Tukombe Village, Malawi, has a medical clinic that serves over 200 people a day who wait for an appointment to deliver a baby or be checked for malaria. This place functions as a hostel because there are no emergency services, so if you are pregnant, you live here in the final trimester. Malawi had the third highest death rate from Aids which has decimated their adult population.

Some of our group of 19 women build two brick walls in one building, where guardians come to stay to wait for their loved ones. The fourteen women currently staying here are girls. Many of them don’t know sex makes babies, many had no choice to have sex in the first place. Some are having their first baby, some their second or third.

Outside they play a game like volleyball but without a net or jump rope. Some walk with buckets of water on their heads and babies on their backs. Mothers plow the fields, their children on their backs, or following close behind. Down the way, inside a brick building some of our group installed solar lighting made by high school students in our town. They install a light in the waiting room and one in a room where surgeries are performed because until now, nurses have delivered babies by cell phone light. 

Life expectancy for women is age 55, for men, 45.

We can meet our moments with love. We can build a wall, install a light, we can listen. We can realize how much we take for granted, drive away changed in a way that will take months to understand. Proceeds from these photographs go to TheSamburuProject.org.