Home is Where I Am

In southern Bangladesh, just outside the town of Patuakhali, is a small, planned, residential hamlet where Muslim and Hindi families live side-by-side in modest homes just like this one. There’s a small mosque and a Hindu temple along the main road, but the rest of the town and its community grounds are intended to bring the religions together, and without government intervention.

This community has been left alone to become what it’s residences make of it. Though as poor and sparse as other villages in the region, this one has become a model neighbourhood, and everyone works hard to keep it that way.

This young man lives in one of Manila’s most challenging neighbourhoods. Barangay 310. It’s a network of tightly packed buildings that surround the perimeter and along the outer walls of the unforgiving and desperately overcrowded Manila City Jail.

Entrance to the neighbourhood laneways are barely visible from the street. Once you’re inside they quickly lose any semblance of direction, leaving you to wander aimlessly through the damp maze of concrete. One wrong turn or lapse of judgment will crash you head first into the very deadest of ends.

This young man knows exactly where he is. He knows where he stands in this city and in his life, and he’s aware of at least a thousand things that have already stacked up against him. But today, at this particular moment, he is far more concerned for people like you wandering around in a place like this. He’s come to help. You must be lost. He knows the way.

This man runs a small automotive repair shop in the eastern Turkish city of Gaziantep. The shop is attached to his home, connected to the living room where he sits now. A wood-burning stove anchors the room while bottles of motor oil seem as perfectly placed in the cluttered space as any ornament, teacup or propane tank.

As you might imagine, he’s the kind of person who is bothered by little and who feels at ease wherever he goes. It’s his general disposition in life. Important things come first. He’s more interested in art than politics, in his neighbours than his nation, in what he has than what he has not. The clutter in his life is not deliberate, it’s just the way things fall.

These two women live in the same 4-story walk-up in the Armenian city of Vanadzor. The buildings here and throughout the country are all Soviet-era construction with steep stairwells that make for tough climbs on hard concrete steps. For these women it’s a climb they need to prepare for. They will often sit here whenever they get home, thirty minutes or so, waiting to get their legs back.

For these two sisters, beauty is an imperative. They adorn the world around them in every way they can — a flower garden by the side of the road; a henna tattoo on a tired hand; bright colour paint on dull tin walls. They think of beauty as acts of kindness, small gifts they leave in our path to trip us up and lift our spirits. Rays of light on a hidden truth. They believe that life is beautiful, or that it can be. All they want is for everyone to see it, and so they spread the word wherever they can. Not like religion, but like a prayer.

This woman and her husband live in Tbilisi, the Republic of Georgia’s capital. They’re part of a small Russian population who remained in Georgia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and in their elder years they still live in the same tiny house where they’ve lived most of their lives.

Were you to walk the streets of Tbilisi today you would see a nation on the rise: crumbling buildings are being restored; boutique hotels are welcoming new tourists; and government programs are encouraging the development of a new digital economy to entice younger generations to settle here and grow the country anew.

But for the elderly, like this lovely woman and her husband, little has changed over the past 35 years. Most have only a small pension to live on, and little government assistance to help them. They have become this growing nation’s new class of the aging poor.

This small neighbourhood in the big city of Antalya is a close-knit community of lower income families who’ve all come to know one another well. During the day the front door is left open, replaced by a curtain that’s more for shade than privacy, and a few chairs are always kept outside as a standing invitation to stay a while. It may be far from the wealthiest place to live, but no one spends the day alone.

For much of their history the Kurdish people have thrived as pastoral nomads, living in tents throughout the summer months, and roaming from pasture to pasture as they tend to their herd of sheep and goats. Even though their way of life has been repressed for generations, all has not been lost.

Here in the remote regions of Hakkâri province some Kurds still live a nomadic life. They travel together as a small tribe of families, roaming the hillsides throughout the summer months, and feeding their herd on the open land.

This photograph is taken at sunset, an hour north of Hakkâri city. The workday has just ended, dinner will soon be prepared over an open fire, and an evening of song and dance is about to begin.

Trains run right through the city of Bogura at its north end. A two-kilometre embankment elevates the tracks to shoulder height and lifts the rail cars even higher to where the lens of this camera has found the frame of this photograph. — A husband and wife outside their home, standing as they do when the trains rumble by. Cargo trains. Everyday. Without passengers and without stopping. Without malice and without empathy.

The riverside homes of the Prek Ta Pov fishing village stretch along the north bank of the river for about a kilometer. They are suspended on stilts and layered three or four homes deep as they descend closer to the water. The walking path between them is made from wooden planks that wind their way down to the docks and connect the neighbourhood of homes together like a puzzle.

But there are pieces missing. A year ago the river bank eroded away from beneath a dozen family homes not far from this one. The road crumbled and stilts collapsed beneath the homes that now lay toppled together at the water’s edge. Tree branches still lay in a circle to cordon off the area that will unlikely be repaired.

As fishing villages go, this is as close-knit and peaceful a place as any village you’ll find in south east Asia, except for the fact that everyone here is now living on edge. Time is running out for Prek Ta Pov and everybody knows it.

Hidden within the mountains of south-eastern Türkiye and nestled against the borders of Iran and Iraq is the Türk province and Kurdish refuge of Hakkâri.

The climate here can be harsh: hot, dry summers and cold, snowy winters. The Kurds themselves will tell you that no one ever comes here, and even if they tried the rugged terrain makes travel difficult at best in the summer and impossible in the winter. They will also tell you that life in this small province of Hakkâri is like no one even knows they’re here. But in a good way. Over the years they have grown to accept that being hidden within these mountains and isolated from the rest of the world might just be their best chance to live in peace.