Jens Honore's Work with SOS Children - Donating Photography to Charity

Photographer Jens Honore regularly does some incredible work with SOS Children’s Villages. He had the opportunity to help once again just before the new year. Take look at some of these new images and his experience of photographing that kind of poverty. The realities of these people's situation and the good that comes from donating your time, efforts, and work.

Where have you recently been shooting?

I shot in the SOS’s villages in Nairobi and Eldoret. Numerous neighborhoods in Kibera. And in a slum area in Eldoret.

How did you get in touch with the organization?

I made a book (Goodbye to a Black and White World) about the 2015 UN millennium goals. The money from the sales of the book was donated to SOS Children’s Villages and I also had additional books printed, which are still being sold on the Danish SOS web-shop. Since I really like the work SOS is doing around the world, the CEO at the time, Hanne Rasmussen, and I agreed on an ongoing process where I would donate my work to SOS by photographing the activities and environments the organization are involved in. The images are made available for all SOS offices world wide, with no restrictions.

What has been the best part?

There has been two best parts.

1. To see it matters to help.

2. To experience my photography being used in such sensible ways.

What has been the hardest part?

Children are innocent and still they pay the highest price.

Do you have a favorite image(s)? Why?

No, not really. Every time I return home from a trip and have to edit I find it very hard to pick my favorites. But generally I find the portraits to be the strongest images. But an older image of the girl photographed in Ethiopia is one of my favorites. It also was used on the cover on the last edition of the annual report.

Any stories?

Many:-) Every time I travel for SOS I get emotionally engaged and some times find it hard to grasp the hardness of poverty.

This trip to Kenya I meet a woman who was part of the FSP. She’s was a single mother with 3 small children. Her husband left her shortly after she gave birth to their third child. She had a hard time making ends meet, also because she’s disabled with some kind of back issue and walks with a cane. SOS has helped her financial so she could buy a sewing machine and start up a small business to support her family. Her appreciation was real. Her smile and attitude was real. On our way out of the slums we happened to pass her and I waved to her and she waved back and gave me that smile once again. Like to tell me, she is in a good place and will get by. Such an inspiration.

Anything else you would like to share?

The day I don’t get touched or feel that same joy, I shouldn’t be doing this. However I couldn’t see it ever being that way. Luckily.

But I hope my little contribution can change what some people think of the poor people I meet and being helped through SOS programs - that somehow they end up in these situation by choice. That somehow it is a deliberately choice and if you just work hard enough you’ll make it. I see what extreme poverty does to people and why they some times do desperate things. 

Operation Christmas Child - Lauri Laukkanen

As the Holiday's come to a close and the New Year begins it's good to be reminded of more than holiday leftovers, getting back to work, and putting away the Christmas decorations. It's never a bad time of year to pay attention to those in need. Our photographer Lauri Laukkanen had an amazing opportunity this year ----

Four months ago, in August 2104, the Finnish division of Operation Christmas Child contacted me, and asked me if I would be interested in joining them on their gift-distribution trip to Romania in December. My family has been preparing shoeboxes for the Operation Christmas Child-project every year for the past 5-6 years, so the organization and their cause was already familiar to me. I was more than happy to join them on this trip, and after making sure I could fit the trip in my calendar, we locked the dates, and four months later I was sitting on the plane, flying to Romania with the team 

Our trip lasted ten days. We arrived in Cluj, Romania on Saturday the 13th of December, and stayed in that part of the country for the first four days. On Wednesday we spent about 10 hours in our van driving from Cluj to Vaslui (the poorest county in the whole of European Union), where we spent the remaining five days. 

In Cluj we delivered gifts to local gypsy-churches, villages and families. We were able to visit a gypsy-village called Pirita - they don't allow visitors to enter their village so the the local church hadn’t been able to visit them before. But they made an exception with us when we told them about the shoebox-gifts that we would be giving out to them. This village was one of the saddest places I’ve ever seen in my life. People living in shacks built out of cardboard boxes and other trash. Dogs, cats, children and adults all living together in a muddy, dirty, and wet environment. Children walking in old dirty t-shirts, without shoes. But I’ll never forget the joy and happiness that I saw in these children’s faces when they received their Christmas-gifts! It was their first real Christmas gift, ever. 

The best part about this trip to me was the fact that I got to work and connect with small children. I have always loved playing with kids, and fooling around with these kids was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. Bringing joy to these children felt amazing, and taking photos of them (and selfies with them) seemed to amuse the kids almost as much as getting the shoeboxes did. :)

As a whole, the trip was pretty tough, both physically and emotionally. We worked around 10-12 hours every day, and spent a lot of hours commuting from one place to another, driving on some of the worst roads in the world. Watching these people live their lives in some of the worst conditions I’ve ever seen, was also a very tough thing to go through, emotionally speaking. But even in these bad conditions we always saw happy children, eagerly waiting for their gifts. And that’s what made this trip really worth it all. :)

—

This here is one of my favorite photos from the trip - it was taken in the village called Pirita – that muddy, dirty town. In the middle of the crowd, I spotted this girl, patiently waiting for her gift, while people around her were running, shouting and trying to make their way to the men handing out the shoeboxes. For a brief moment, her eyes connected with mine, and I smiled to her. She looked back at me and smiled a little. This was a beautiful moment that I won’t ever forget. 

Another photo that I like a lot, was also taken in Pirita. This photo tells the viewer a lot about the life and the living-conditions of Pirita. The boy is holding the hand of his mother, who is pregnant, waiting for another baby. Their clothes are old and dirty. The ground is muddy. And behind them, in the background, there are a lot of people just like them – all living in the same poor conditions.

Each and every photo I took on that trip has a long story behind it, and it would take a hundred blog-posts to go through all the stories, but here are some of my favorite moments that I managed to capture during our trip: