Pages:  Home | Photography | Bio | Contact | About | blog
Portfolios:  Daulatdia Brothel | Charcoal Kids | Cross or a Condom | Mennonites | Potosi | Chaqui Baths | cholitas | Heart Hanging | Colonias of Texas | Tearsheets

Cross or a Condom

Mary Lou, 33, looks out from her home in Ulingan. Her children work alongside their father Joe in the charcoal pits. She wishes life could be different for them and is one of the few families who enforces that her children go to school even if they have to work at such a young age.

Manila, the capital of the Philippines, is one of the fastest growing cities on earth and evidence of population pressure is everywhere. Tens of millions of people in the Philippines live in poverty and the country also has one of the highest birth rates in Asia. In this devoutly Catholic country there are moves to introduce a reproductive health bill to provide free contraception. The Church, fearing a breakdown in family values, is fiercely resisting the move, and blames the widespread poverty on bad government rather than population growth.