Some of you might remember Phillip Tambala. I met him on my working trip to Malawi in November last year. I wrote a little report at the time.

One thing I knew I wanted to do this time, was to get a roof on his house. He had put up the walls, but couldn’t afford anything more.

It is a little late, but anything is better than nothing. It is late because the rainy season has been going on for a couple of months and a wall is collapsing in the little hut he, his wife, his two own children and four adopted children have been living in.

Word gets around and Phillip was waiting for me when I arrived. I knew he would be. I was prepared for it and was very happy that what I wanted to help with was exactly what he wanted help with. We hadn’t discussed it before.I didn’t have time to go to the bank so I sent him with some cash to change. It wasn’t enough, but he bought what he could and hid the sheets in the market for safe-keeping:

Believe me, if I tilted that camera upwards and caught some faces I would have left the market as an unhappy man.I took these on my lunch break and by then I had passed by an ATM and pulled out the rest of the cash so he could buy the remaining sheets. While we were at the market he introduced me to his sister:

He is holding the portraits from last year in his hand.I took some more of his sister because she wanted some too the next time I came down.

Just another view taken of her in her daily environment. I bought some cucumbers (5 for 75 cents) and some fruits.

I haven’t done much in the way of processing the images. I am using a laptop (untested) that I brought down. It has Ubuntu installed and I processed the Nikon raw (NEF) files using the GIMP and dcraw (both are available on GNU/Linux).

On Tuesday last week, Sept. 18, I was sitting on the train that had pulled into the station in Copenhagen. The train westward comes in early (it starts there) and I went on, put my bags overhead and started reading or staring out the window; I don’t remember.

People come and go as the train fills. There’s plenty of commotion. When I got off in Odense I discovered that my bag was gone. A sly “pick-pocket” had raked it off the shelf as we waited in Copenhagen. The train only stops once between Copenhagen in Odense, so it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

I had a Leica CL, 40/2.0 Summicron, 90/2.8 Tele-Elmarit (Wetzlar, not Canada), Samsung Digital (compact) and the Domke briefcase alone was worth more than the Samsung. Clothes, receipts, … a general insult.

I was away from home (if I really have one) the rest of the week without a camera. Came back over the week-end and tried to get a decent PAW:

The following were taken with an old Rolleiflex:

I wasn’t sure if that one, the one above, was really taken in week 38; it was on the roll, but was in the beginning of the roll and might have been taken during week 37. So for the main, on my PAW page I chose the following one:

There is a little collection of others from the same rolls in the shoebox.