This week I have been tasked with redesigning our project website. It’s a safe job that requires no adventures into the bush, which is good because I am 30 weeks pregnant. This has been a fun project because it is forcing me to go back through the past four years of photos. It’s also forcing me to re-process them all.

Wow, how I have grown as a photographer in the past four years.

This is one photo I found in the archives, buried under poor lighting. I took it in 2014 on one of my first trips to the field to do a bed net campaign. Although I was a rookie with the camera the one thing I did know was to always shoot in RAW. RAW provides a cushion for error. This photo, for example, was just a dark blob in Lightroom. I upped the exposure and behold, a beautiful portrait of a village woman, hard at work, as always.

These women are an inspiration to me, especially now that I am pregnant. I have seen these women in their last months of pregnancy carrying another child on their back and harvesting their homegrown vegetables from the field in the hot, equatorial sun, then piling them up into a basin, as high and as full as possible, lifting it from the ground to their head, and walking miles back to their home. I find it hard at my 30 weeks to walk around the block without some pain erupting inside me.

They have also inspired me to adopt a new way of thinking about child rearing. A child is not something that ties you down. It’s something you tie to yourself and you keep on moving. I am forever grateful for the lessons I have learned from these strong women, and I am sure my children will be grateful too, for they will never be treated as something too precious to be taken along for the ride. They will be strapped to my back, experiencing life with me, right from the beginning.

Magic 23/365, The Pillar, Tshikapa, DRC, 2014