Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • Illegal miners scraping for gold on the riverbanks of the Pra River outside of Prestea, Ghana, Africa.
    GOLDGHANA_20060925_02104.tif
  • Illegal mining in an underground shaft on Ashanti Gold land.
    GOLDGHANA_20060925_01280.tif
  • Headlights illuminate the small passage for illegal mining in an underground shaft on Ashanti Gold land.
    GOLDGHANA_20060925_01214.tif
  • Headlights illuminate the small passage for illegal mining in an underground shaft on Ashanti Gold land.
    GOLDGHANA_20060925_01190.tif
  • African guards watch as helicopter takes $7M worth of gold bars out of the Newmont mine in Ghana. old from a mine in Ghana is packed and sorted for transport.
    GOLDGHANA_20060925_01046.tif
  • Gold from a mine in Ghana is packed and sorted for transport.
    GOLDGHANA_20060925_00922.tif
  • Villagers carrying firewood outside Millenium Village - an experimental village run by the UN.  The UN tried to find a cluster of villages that lacked food security, and then tried to solve some of the problems in a controlled environment.  This village has been going for one year, and they just gathered benchmark data for the first six months.
    RANDY OLSON_BDGHANA_20060925_03156.tif
  • Fish are laid out to dry in a fisherman’s village right at the edge of the ocean in St. Louis, Senegal.  Atlantic bumpers are a crucial food source in Africa.<br />
<br />
Also known as Atlantic Carangid, Bumper, Goggle-eye, Little Bumper, Pacific Bumper, Plato, Rooter, Spanish Mackerel, Trevally, Yellowtail, Yellowtail Bumper.<br />
<br />
Found singly, over soft bottoms, of the continental shelf, or in schools, near the surface of estuaries and coastal lagoons.<br />
They feed on cephalopods, detritus, small fish, and zooplankton.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055378-3.JPG
  • Arranged stacks of Atlantic bumpers dry on racks. The fish are a crucial food source in Africa.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055378-4.JPG
  • Atlantic bumpers are a crucial food source in Africa. A tide of protein comes ashore on Senegal’s coast where the Sahara meets the sea. <br />
<br />
Fishermen often catch so many of these Atlantic bumpers that some days they take only half their boats out to fish. Such grass roots conservation is heartening. But even at the local level, global demand for fish continues to rise: 60 per cent of the world’s population lives within 40 miles of the sea.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055378-2.JPG
  • Atlantic bumpers are a crucial food source in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa, where 200 million people depend largely on seafood for their animal protein. Worldwide, fish sustain one billion people, many of them poor. As pressure on stocks increases, the challenge for developing countries—whose share of fish production is projected to increase to 81 percent by 2015—is to balance the need for revenue with the need for food.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055378-1.JPG
  • Atlantic bumpers are a crucial food source in Africa. Worldwide, fish sustain one billion people. Fish drying on racks appear to swim across the sand in Senegal.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055378.JPG
  • Senegalese fishermen haul in nets loaded with fish. With competition intensifying to supply mostly European markets, fishing grounds off West Africa are going the way of Europe’s: toward depletion. These Senegalese, who had hoped to catch desirable export species such as shrimp or sole, will throw away the fish in their nets—wasting valuable protein for Africa.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055376.JPG
  • A child holds a microphone at a morning assembly at a public school surrounded by other school children and war orphans.<br />
<br />
Half of Uganda is under the age of 15. <br />
The average African woman has nearly 4.5 children (and over 6 in four countries). One consequence of Africa’s high fertility is that a preponderance of its population is young. Twenty-seven percent of the world’s population is under age 15, but in Africa, the figure is 40 percent according to David Bloom, chairman of the department of global health and population at Harvard.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7890_1361059.TIF
  • A woman prepared food surrounded by colorful cloth in the beach settlement Saint Louis, Senegal.<br />
The town was once an important economic center during French West Africa, however, it still has important industries, including tourism, a commercial center, a center of sugar production, and fishing.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057922.JPG
  • A man with his goats in a beach settlement in Saint Louis, Senegal.<br />
The town was once an important economic center during French West Africa, however, it still has important industries, including tourism, a commercial center, a center of sugar production, and fishing.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057923.JPG
  • Workers lift a frozen coelacanth fish that is being transported to a museum. Coelacanths are the fossil fish that bridge the gap between fish and the mammals that left the sea to walk on land.  Their fins become legs.<br />
<br />
70 million years old, scientists previously considered the fish long extinct. In 1938, however, a fishing trawler brought up a live specimen. Since then more than 100 living coelacanths, remarkably unchanged since the Cretaceous period, have been caught off the coast of South Africa.<br />
<br />
The coelacanth is classified as vulnerable by the World Conservation Union (also known as the IUCN), an international organization that maintains a global list of vulnerable and endangered species called the Red List. A vulnerable classification means that the species faces a high risk of extinction in the near future.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057871.JPG
  • Artisanal fishermen off the coast of Tanga, Tanzania drop their traps to sell their catch to a Spanish company, “Sea Products.” Sea Products moves octopus, squid, and cuttlefish to Europe, mostly Italy and Greece. Yet, the east coast of Africa can't feed their own countries with fish. <br />
<br />
“If you buy fish in a store, do you know where it comes from?” asks a recent UN report on the alarming 100 percent rise in fishing piracy over the past decade. “It might be stolen from the poor. It could even have cost lives.”
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057950.JPG
  • Truckloads of rotting fish carcasses are sold to local markets in Africa after meatier parts of the fish are processed for European markets.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055372-1.JPG
  • Two Sudanese children, an adult and a donkey in a desolate landscape.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718258.jpg
  • Sugar cane workers, Sudan.These plantations were given to Osama Bin Laden in return for roads and airports.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718232-3.jpg
  • Nubian king's tomb from the 25th dynasty. El-Kurru was one of the royal cemeteries used by the Nubian royal family. Egyptian empire began to decay in 1000BC and in 660BC Kingdom of Kush ruled an empire stretching from central Sudan to the borders of Palestine.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718206-2.jpg
  • Baggara people on journey to the south.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714576-4.jpg
  • Seeking to win over the approval of visiting Western journalists, government officials gather at the home of the minister of information in the capital of Khartoum.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714567.jpg
  • The South Sudan war zone is cut off from outside aid. Without cows or supplies, the Dinka people around Biem are desperate for food. They have eaten leaves from the bottom of the trees and now climb up to gather from the tops to boil them in rancid swamp water.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714584-1.jpg
  • Dinka oil worker with scarification in the oil fields in Southern Sudan.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714570.jpg
  • Five soldiers who waited on the runway for five days with gunshot wounds hoping a plane would land. In the town of Jiech, the northern government of Sudan allows no flights, and planes are routinely shot down in this corridor. Rebels fight MIGS and helicopter gun ships with tractors and Kalashnikovs.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714582-1.jpg
  • Northern Sudanese friends converse in a restaurant where life is comfortable. In their civilized world, they are removed from the war in the south. Although removed from the conflict, Sudanese northerners travel to town for the weekly cattle market have suffered from inflation caused by high military spending.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714574.jpg
  • A Western writer talking with a group of refugee Sudanese men.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_715475.jpg
  • Nubian king's tomb from the 25th dynasty. El-Kurru was one of the royal cemeteries used by the Nubian royal family. Egyptian empire began to decay in 1000BC and in 660BC Kingdom of Kush ruled an empire stretching from central Sudan to the borders of Palestine.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_745538.jpg
  • Nubian king's tomb from the 25th dynasty. El-Kurru was one of the royal cemeteries used by the Nubian royal family. Egyptian empire began to decay in 1000BC and in 660BC Kingdom of Kush ruled an empire stretching from central Sudan to the borders of Palestine.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_745536.jpg
  • A group of Umbero people look with wonder at a polaroid photograph seeing their image for the first time.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718284.jpg
  • A man ascends stairs in the tomb of Piankhy, a Nubian king.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718248.jpg
  • Women carrying bundles on their heads, Sudan.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718232.jpg
  • Prison, Sudan
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718232-6.jpg
  • Most of Sudan's wealth flows to Khartoum, into the hands of a privileged few who have imposed strict Islam on the country and are exploiting southern resources.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718232-5.jpg
  • Osama Bin Laden home. Sugar cane  plantations were given to Osama Bin Laden in return for roads and airports.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718232-4.jpg
  • Sugar cane workers, Sudan.These plantations were given to Osama Bin Laden in return for roads and airports.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718232-2.jpg
  • Nubian king's tomb from the 25th dynasty. El-Kurru was one of the royal cemeteries used by the Nubian royal family. Egyptian empire began to decay in 1000BC and in 660BC Kingdom of Kush ruled an empire stretching from central Sudan to the borders of Palestine.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718206-1.jpg
  • The South Sudan war zone is cut off from outside aid. Without cows or supplies, the Dinka people around Biem are desperate for food. They have eaten leaves from the bottom of the trees and now climb up to gather from the tops to boil them in rancid swamp water.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714584.jpg
  • A satellite dish for international programs is in a courtyard.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_715468.jpg
  • Half the nearly four million southerners driven from their homes by war live around Khartoum in refugee camps.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714579.jpg
  • A Dinka girl abducted from her village awaits in a halfway house for former slaves and hopes to be liberated to return home in the south.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714577.jpg
  • Baggara people on journey to the south.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714576-5.jpg
  • Baggara people on journey to the south.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714576-3.jpg
  • A Baggara horseman on his journey to the south.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714576-1.jpg
  • Shifting sands of the desert covers much of northern Sudan.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714573.jpg
  • An aerial photo shows the Sudd swamp in Sudan that long isolated the south from Islam.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714571.jpg
  • Dinka oil worker with scarification in the oil fields in Southern Sudan.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714570-2.jpg
  • Dinka oil worker with scarification in the oil fields in Southern Sudan.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714570-1.jpg
  • Most of Sudan's wealth flows to Khartoum, into the hands of a privileged few who have imposed strict Islam on the country and are exploiting southern resources.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714569.jpg
  • Baggara people on journey to the south.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714576-2.jpg
  • Sugar cane workers, Sudan.These plantations were given to Osama Bin Laden in return for roads and airports.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718232-1.jpg
  • A 6th-7th century Kushite pyramid, one of the best preserved.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718212.jpg
  • A 1750-1550 BC settlement and fort of the earliest Nubian civilization
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718211.jpg
  • Living in the dust in warn-torn Sudan, a home remedy of cattle dung is all a boy has to treat a lice infestation.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714583.jpg
  • In the ancient Tombos quarry villagers skirt a statue from the seventh century B.C. when their Nubian ancestors ruled all of Egypt. Today, Sudan’s government does not control the whole country. Since independence from Britain in 1956, the nation’s northern leaders have fought to extend their power throughout the south in a search for resources.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714565.jpg
  • Dinka tribesmen and their cattle hide in acacia forests to escape attack by government forces. The Government of Sudan (GOS) dropped bombs nearby, wiping out an entire village and all of the livestock. Animals are a target because they are the last resource in times of famine.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714580.jpg
  • The Government of Sudan (GOS) dropped bombs from an Antonov, a Russian plane and one of the largest aircraft ever built, wiping out an entire village and all of the livestock. Government bombs killed five Dinkas and their herd of cattle near Biem. They target the animals because they know it is the last resource in times of famine. The goal of the GOS is to force southerners from their villages into garrison towns where the people can be controlled. They also kidnap the children.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714581.jpg
  • Shuffling through shallows, a southern Sudan girl who fled to the government garrison town of Juba eats a foraged mango. Living in fear, she hikes with her Dinka family on an island in the middle of the Nile River.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714585.jpg
  • Hoping to make a little money from Sudan's ocean of black gold, a woman sells tea to roughnecks at an oil rig near Bentiu. There are little encampments of refugees living around Rig 15 and moving with it as it moves.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714568.jpg
  • A man illuminates hieroglyphics on a wall in a Nubian king's tomb from the 25th dynasty. El-Kurru was one of the royal cemeteries used by the Nubian royal family. Egyptian empire began to decay in 1000BC and in 660BC Kingdom of Kush ruled an empire stretching from central Sudan to the borders of Palestine.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718206.jpg
  • Islam and Arab culture came to Sudan through trading centers like the ruined Red Sea and ancient port of Suakin. Sudan has long been ruled by a small circle of wealthy northerners, who, because of their Muslim faith and Arabized culture, consider themselves Arab instead of African. Islam and Arab culture came to Sudan through trading centers like the port of Suakin. Suakin was ottoman built but was possibly chipped into this perfectly round circle by the Romans.  Suakin was the main port from the 14th century until World War I and has never been excavated.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714566.jpg
  • Responding to an ad broadcast throughout Sudan--even in war zones--a southern man traveled hundreds of miles as a migrant worker to cut sugarcane on the Kenana plantation in the north.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714572.jpg
  • A Baggara horseman builds a fire under a tree on his journey to the south.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714576.jpg
  • Villagers in the far north of Sudan greet each other before a family wedding in Karima, a northern village. These men rarely see each other. There is no work for them in their villages and most of them work in neighboring countries. Sudan is a difficult place to live if you a not a member of the elite few in Khartoum.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714578.jpg
  • A wounded soldier hangs on to a pole to assist in his rescue while being carried to a waiting plane. He was one of five soldiers who waited on the runway for five days with gunshot wounds hoping a plane would land. In the town of Jiech, the northern government of Sudan allows no flights, and planes are routinely shot down in this corridor. Rebels fight MIGS and helicopter gun ships with tractors and Kalashnikovs.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714582.jpg
  • Markets line the streets of the Senegal fishing village of Saint Louis on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057938.JPG
  • A gold miner blasts soil into a sluice with a water hose.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6570_706636.JPG
  • Far from the war, Sudanese northerners in town for the weekly cattle market have suffered from inflation caused by high military spending. But these northerners just outside of Khartoum are unfazed by a war going on in the south. Northern soldiers kidnap southerners in the refugee ring around Khartoum and force them to fight for the north. The northern Sudanese were much less affected by the civil war than those in the south.
    MM6998_0006.tif
  • Responding to an ad broadcast throughout Sudan--even in war zones--a southern man traveled hundreds of miles to cut sugarcane on the Kenana plantation in the north.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998 RDP284F5.tif
  • In villages between Lake Victoria and the Serengeti Ecosystem, truckloads of rotting fish carcasses are driven to the local markets and sold. <br />
<br />
The filets were cut off in the processing plants in Musoma and shipped to Europe overnight, and Africans get only the bones. <br />
<br />
This is a cotton production region and these people have just sold their crops.  They have money to buy good food, but don’t have the option to buy their own fish from their own lakes.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055372.JPG
  • Mbuti boys sit together, painted for the nKumbi manhood ritual ceremonies in the Ituri forest.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_972262_2.TIF
  • Mbuti Pygmies at a forest hunting camp in the Ituri forest. The future for indigenous tribes is threatened by logging, mining and urbanization moving into the forest.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976412_2.TIF
  • Tourists take in the view from an overlook.
    RANDY OLSON_RF4319_1114401.JPG
  • A wildebeest in the savannah.
    RANDY OLSON_RF4319_1114400.JPG
  • A Pygmy woman does chores for a wealthy family in Beni. <br />
She is the daughter of Kenge-known because of a book, "The Forest People." Kenge is possibly the most famous pygmy.  His daughter was traded off to a wealthy Bantu family
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976477.TIF
  • A Pygmy woman mops the floor and does a multitude of chores for a wealthy family in Beni.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976476.TIF
  • Clearing room for a garden, Mbuti men hack through tropical hardwood. A logging company hires Pygmies to cut down their own forest which they depend on for their livelihood.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976474.TIF
  • Refugee Pygmies at their camp. The indigenous tribe retains skills to build structures as they move out of the Ituri forest where they maintain a hunting and gathering lifestyle.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976473.TIF
  • Refugee Pygmies near their leaf huts are threatened by logging companies and a broadening modern world. .
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976471.JPG
  • The building front of the Save the Pygmies Foundation which is an effort to protect one of the few remaining traditional tribes of the rainforest.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976469.TIF
  • Refugee Pygmy children and sleeping puppies surround a charred campfire.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976468.JPG
  • The mud-choked road to Beni is nearly impassable in any vehicle during the wet season.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976465.TIF
  • A Pygmy woman hauls a piece of mahogony from the Ituri Forest.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976462.TIF
  • A Pygmy preacher at the Pentecost Church in Epulu.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976461.TIF
  • Women with young children walk through the unpaved streets of a gold mining town in northeastern Congo.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976459.TIF
  • Villagers in the war-weary Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo scrape for gold in a shaft dug decades ago by a Belgian company. Armed groups controlled Ituri’s rich mines, using gold to buy weapons. Hundreds of people from Congo and Uganda come to work at the mines.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976458.TIF
  • Gold mining near the town of Quarantesept in northeastern Congo. Hundreds of people from Congo and Uganda come to work at the mines.<br />
<br />
Villagers in the war-weary Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo scrape for gold in a shaft dug decades ago by a Belgian company. Until recently, armed groups controlled Ituri’s rich mines, using gold to buy weapons.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976457.TIF
  • Pople walk by modest homes that line the unpaved road in a small gold mining town in northeastern Congo.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976456.TIF
  • The mask of a medicine man at the door where  Pygmy boys are secluded before the rituals signifying their manhood.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976455.JPG
  • A woman holds her child safely during a domestic dispute incident amon Pygmy family members.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976454.JPG
  • A Mbuti boy endures a ritual scarification by razor blade. It is the last of the manhood ceremony that follows months of training to learn skills and live independently.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976452.TIF
  • Mbuti boys endure whippings during a puberty ritual ending the manhood ceremony.<br />
Women carry whips to meet the men halfway through the village, and a melee ensures where they beat each other. Women try to control the destiny the child but the men traditionally win, and each boy is paraded through the village for the scarification ritual.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976451.TIF
  • Mbuti boys wait to be whipped during an initiation into manhood. The Salate is at the end of the nKumbi Pygmy manhood ritual.  The men watch over Pygmy boys who have been secluded for 5 months preparing for this ritual.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976448.TIF
  • A Mbuti boy displays welts from being whipped during a puberty ritual. The belief is that the harsh treatment makes them stronger to survive the challenges of life in the Ituri Forest.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976447.TIF
  • The Chief of Salate makes his way through the Ituri Forest to a secluded camp for the nkumbi manhood ritual.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976446.JPG
  • Mbuti boys sit on a log in the Ituri forest and endure rites of manhood alongside their peers.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976445.JPG
  • Tribesmen Steer a boat across the remote Ituri River watershed deep in the Ituri Forest in DR Congo.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976444.TIF
  • Bantu tribespeople living a more urban existence in permanently build homes decorated with more modern items and wear western-style clothing.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_976443.TIF
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