"Winter Landscape" - Ethiopian Highlands

CAPTION:  Food security problems are common in the barren, windswept hills of Gondar, located due north of Lake Tana, 
source of the Blue Nile, in the Northern highlands of Ethiopia. The image of this little girl was created in what can be, 
depending on the rains, a hot zone of malnutrition for Ethiopia. Typically you would think famine or food security issues 
only play out in the deserts to the south yet at times, this region in the cold north with poor soil and a land that is littered 
with rocks, makes it hard for farmers to properly plant food for their families. Children work just as hard alongside their 
parents, gathering grasses, watching over sheep or collecting and stacking piles of cow dung which is used for fuel with a 
small hand full of Kolo, corn..to sustain them.

A farmer I visited at the time was rushing to get a second planting and harvest in before winter set in.  His large oxen were 
whipped and whistled in between the rock outcrops, which made up most of his arable land, with his wife-her baby strapped 
on her back bent over, rooting through the packed earth searching for her reward of the smallest of potatoes. The whole family 
joined in the twilight harvest with a sense of urgency as dense storm clouds gathered overhead as a perfect match to the human 
drama playing out before me.  The potatoes in the bucket were no larger than golf balls and when asked what 
he'll do if his planting fails-he said without hesitation "we'll eat the leaves from the trees"...