The Faces of Senegal

After spending a few weeks in Senegal Africa, I’m excited to start sharing some photos with you all! I went to take photos for a non-profit called Andando – Andando’s goal is to alleviate poverty through micro development – meaning they are investing in rural villages in Senegal helping build community gardens, digging wells, setting up health clinics and many other programs.

The photos I took while there will hopefully help Andando get grants, support and just show off the amazing work they are doing – I was excited to get to be a part of it. In future weeks I’m planning on blogging about that side of the trip, talking more about the programs Andando is working on, and share more photos – some of the photos below may turn up again as I talk about people and projects.

But for now I wanted to start out by sharing about a personal project I was able to do while in Senegal. Because the area Andando works in is so remote and impoverished I knew that most people likely didn’t have many (or any!) printed photos of themselves or families. I wanted to be able to take some portraits and family photos and gift them to the local people. So I purchased a small printer that would run off batteries and packed it along with me.

While we were out and about in the villages I captured photos of people and groups and was able to print, put into small portfolios and pass them out. It was so much fun to see their excitement when they were given their photos. Traveling to remote locations and taking family photos is something I would love to spend more and more of my time doing – Stay tuned for how that goal plays out!

This first photo shows the printer hard at work, printing photos late at night by solar lamp. The rest are the ‘Faces of Senegal’ – some of the photos I took of the people I met – I’ll stop the commentary here and let the photos do the talking.