Blog and Portfolio by Crystal Stafford
When I first met Mado in Febraury of 2016, she was a little over two years old. She was so severely malnourished that she couldn’t walk or even stand. She sat in her mother’s lap, lethargic and still. Her arms barely larger than my thumb in diameter. We were there with a team of community health workers, called RECOs in DRC, who had recently been scouring the village, going to every single…
SEVEN MINUTES I was living in a hospital in Kananga in Kasai Central Province in 2012, shortly before the start of ASSP. My church hired me…
I love photos like this, a true representation of the world right now. A healthy baby, bright-eyed and vibrant… and in this case a little confused. It…
This little girl was making waves in Goma, DRC. She was a young activist for women’s rights and she had just read a poem for her…
I took this photo on the way down to the local water source in Mutoto, a village a few hours away from Kananga in Kasai Central.…
This picture was only the beginning of a long day of mishaps during a field mission in Nord Ubangi, an equatorial region on the northern border…
I traveled to this little village in Nord Kivu to interview women who have survived sexual violence. The only way to get there was by UN…
I first moved to DRC for a job managing bed net distributions in the rural interior of the country. I was thrown into the fire with…
There’s not a lot to do in little village towns like Kananga. I think that’s why people work six days a week instead of five. So…
“Isn’t it dangerous?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked some variant of the above question. Especially while living and working in Congo,…