Ecuador
Although my love for photography started long before Peace Corps, those two years in Ecuador (PCV ’99-’01) afforded me an amazing opportunity to photograph the people and places that I grew to love. With the advantages that came with language fluency and community immersion, I was able to take close-ups of people and events that I would never have had access to as a tourist. The patience, smiles, and humility that I learned while serving as a PCV came in handy on my future travels as well, giving me insight into how to get the shots I wanted in other settings.
I work in international public health, moving from population/environment programs to family planning and integrated HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment largely in the area of monitoring and evaluation. Sometimes, I think I wound up in this career to feed my desire to travel and take photographs, but feeling like I may be part of something beneficial also makes it worthwhile. I’ve had the good fortune to travel to over 20 countries for work, and I lived for 2 years in Ecuador, Brazil, Malawi, and Israel along the way. Now, I live full time in Seattle working on HIV prevention programs in Mozambique and Zimbabwe for I-TECH, an organization out of the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington. I also have a one-year-old; I must admit my travel schedule has lessened considerably for the time being.
Vietnam
For this post, the photos of Vietnam are from vacation time I took after presenting some data from my graduate work on cholera prediction. Traveling alone, I find it easier to make friends with women and children, and with some smiles (and often a purchase of a trinket or two), it is often easy to get some amazing photographs. When I travel for these short stints, I tend to take photos of hands and feet as they show how people live and work while avoiding offending people.
Malawi
The photos of the Chewa festival are from Malawi where I lived from 2010-2011. Malawi, in general, was a fascinating place. But, as I lived there like an “expat” working in an HIV clinic as their Monitoring and Evaluation Advisor, it was hard to get out to see and understand the village life that I had grown to love in other places in the world where I lived and worked. Luckily, I made a good friend in the Peace Corps there, and when she invited me to her village, I jumped on the chance! The festival was amazing – complete with dancing, singing, costumes, and too much nsima (the local corn porridge). You can read about my experience in Malawi in the essay I wrote for, Chasing Misery: An Anthology of essays by women in humanitarian response.
- Caryl Feldacker was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador from 1999 - 2001. She transitioned from Peace Corps to international public health, and has been traveling the world ever since.