Elizabeth Dalziel

A trip though the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal was like stepping into an imaginary rabbit hole that dragged us up and down narrow paths, a kind of Alice in Wonderland. We trekked through the bumpy back roads of Nepal, outside government control. Hoping to find Maoist rebels who opposed the monarchy and had taken up arms. When just about everyone else has given up on communism, this impoverished corner of the world finds it flourishing. The Maoists are building agricultural cooperatives and following programs once espoused by Mao Zedong. A short flight from Nepalganj took us into the mountainous district of Rukum, where despite the odds, the Maoists have created a place of their own. We passed the final military checkpoint started to walk. We were never alone. One or two people always attached themselves to us. They wanted to know where we were from, where we were going and what we wanted to see. Rudra, our fixer, warned us that they were spies. Spies seemed to be all over the valley, figuring out who was a government spy, who was a Maoist and who was just an extremely curious villager, bored by daily routine, was nearly impossible. After a three-day trek through the hills to meet the leaders of the movement. We met contacts who led us to new contacts. We were questioned by senior and junior Maoists. We became tiny against the tall mountains and long winding roads. This is a place set away from our globalized world, lacking in modern infrastructure. What you harvest is what you eat. The noise of cars and the refrigerators grinding are gone. A Maoist guide arrived at the mud hut where we were staying, We hiked for five days, following young Maoist soldiers, ideologues and an assortment of nameless faces, meeting up at seemingly random points. On the fifth day we made it to the town where we finally would see Maoist troops coming down the mountains. At 3 p.m., the 2nd battalion of the people's army came down from the lush mountains, 300 of them, fully armed and in uniform, dancing their way through the crowds and waving rifles in the air. Villagers draped their necks with flower garlands as they put their right fist up in the official Maoist salute. The villagers, who were polite but tense, danced with the militiamen Here communists wore capitalist symbols, Nike swoosh T-shirts, Titanic movie bandanas. Contradictions ran deeper: The festive atmosphere commemorated a battle in which many rebels were slain. Teenagers smiled, holding their guns, their faces scarred by war. "This is not the Everest trek, this is the Maoist heartland", a local man taunted us.They welcomed us. But warned: "The unassuming traveler can be caught between the crossfire of the government and Maoist armies." I wasn't caught in crossfire and I was never truly afraid. Like Alice, waking from her long and loopy dream, I wonder how much the characters and danger were real or imagined. Either way, it was a magical journey into a land of beauty that few people will ever see.

The beau­ti­cian from Chair­man Mao’s home­ town­ looks at her­self in the mir­ror and­ bursts into tear­s of joy. Forty pounds lighter, jaw slim­mer, eyes and nose re­fined, breasts lifted, 30-year-old Chen Jing has just been through an ex­treme makeover for a Chi­nese re­al­ity show called Lovely Cin­derella. It’s a sharp in­sight into China’s own makeover, as a con­sumer gen­er­a­tion moves ever fur­ther from com­mu­nist found­ing fa­ther Mao Ze­dong’s era of drab-is-beau­ti­ful aus­ter­ity. Men and women to­gether spent $12 bil­lion US on beauty prod­ucts in 2005, up 13 per cent from the pre­vi­ous year, ac­cord­ing to the China As­so­ci­a­tion of Per­fume, Essence­ and Cos­met­ics In­dus­try. The United States Cos­metic, Fra­grance, and Toi­letry As­so­ci­a­tion­ last year called China its “largest fu­ture growth mar­ket,” and­ com­pa­nies like Avon Prod­ucts Inc., Mary Kay Inc., L’Ore­al SA, and Proc­ter & Gam­bleCo. are­ all fight­ing for a share. HaoLulu, a Bei­jing fash­ion writer and as­pir­ing ac­tress, be­came a sen­sa­tion in the Chi­nese­ me­dia— which­ dubbed­ her the “Ar­ti­fi­cial Beauty”— af­ter she had 16 surg­eries to redo her eyes, lips, nose, cheeks, neck, breasts, up­per arms, but­tocks, thighs and calves. The risks some take for beauty can be har­row­ing, es­pe­cially in an in­dus­try that lacks reg­u­la­tion. Wang Jun­hong, a 37-year-old fash­ion re­tailer from Guangzhou in south China’s Guang­dong prov­ince, col­lected el­e­gant Euro­pean trousers that sheadored but couldn’t wear be­cause she was only 5-foot-2. So she spent $9,700 to gain five cen­time­tres in a pro­ce­dure that in­volved break­ing her legs, driv­ing pins into the bone and grad­u­ally crank­ing the pins apart tolengthen the­bones as they heal. “The­ more I thought about doin­g it, the moreI was con­vinced I had to do it,” said Wang, as she lay in a hospi­tal bed in 2005, her legs en­cased­ in­ bru­tal-look­ing frames with spokes that jabbed through her bones. Her treat­ment went smoothly, but Chi­nese­ me­di­a fre­quently re­por­t on ­bun­gles that re­sult in­ de­for­mity and ­in­fec­tion. In Novem­ber, the Health­ Min­istry banned the pro­ce­dure ex­cept for med­i­cal rea­sons. Lovely Cin­derel­la pro­ducer Wang Zhiyi said that while his show is meant as en­ter­tain­ment, it’s also cau­tion­ary. The footage is graphic, show­ing­ grotesquely swollen post-oper­a­tive faces and sur­geons vig­or­ously suck­ing­ fat fro­m a­ con­tes­tant’s waist. A video clip shows Chen, the beau­ti­cian, cry­ing out on the op­er­at­ing ta­ble for her hus­band and for more anes­thetic. Later, she is shown throw­ing up and weep­ing in her hospi­tal room be­cause shemisses her five-year-old son. But as she gazes at her­self in front of the stu­dio au­di­ence, the­ mem­o­ries seem to­ e­vap­o­rate­ like the the­atri­cal fog­ blasted out of fire ex­tin­guish­ers as she steps to the mir­ror. Text by Alexa Olesen

It was in Kenya, photographing Masai mothers and children, where I was struck by the power of the familiar and the mundane. By then I had spent most of the last 20 years working as a journalist, photographing everything from street battles in the West Bank to meetings of world leaders. But over a couple of weeks amid the rugged landscape and the cattle-herding families, I began to wonder: Why did I think mothers here were worthy of being documented and not the mothers in my own community? I realized I had turned a blind eye to the complex story right next to me: in the school runs, the trips to the store, the swimming lessons and the countless birthday parties. It is the world I navigate every day with my two young sons. Every couple of days, for instance, we stop at the supermarket, and there’s the battle to get the boys into the shopping cart. I take them through the aisles and navigate my options: Shreddies? Cheerios? The store brand? My thoughts crisscross with the shouts of brothers tugging at each other and at what they can grab from the shelves. I started to ask myself: Should this be forgotten? Isn’t this worthy of being photographed? I was exhausted by the daily marathon of motherhood. Ten breast feedings a day had made photography at home a low priority. Children and mothers inhabit a place that until a few years ago I didn’t know existed. Now my days are spent with costumed storm troopers patrolling my hallways. My evenings are filled with dinners and bath times and bedtime reading and tantrums and so much else. Taking pictures makes me stop and look. Now I think of the moments that I’ve already lost: the births, the early baby years. The ambulance trip we took in the middle of night after my younger son, Joe, held his breath and fainted. I had seen my share of dead babies in war zones by then. I had photographed them. But when my own child went white, his lips blue, his body limp, I did not reach for my camera. I reached for the phone to call for an ambulance. He was fine by the time it arrived, but the medics still insisted he go to the hospital. Photography and motherhood both offer lessons in loss. As a photographer, there is the loss of so many moments that you fail to capture. As a mother, there is the loss of personal space, of modesty, of identity. This work has allowed me to see how my life is reflected in so many other lives. I take a photo of handprints etched on the glass of the window, set against the afternoon sun, and another mother talks to me of her own life, her own choices, her own son’s handprints. During all those years I chased wars and summits I thought my work was personal. Only now do I see that I was always one step removed. Now the personal is obvious. There’s no need to claim journalistic objectivity. Here, in these photographs, are my frustrations, joys and insecurities with the choices I’ve made as a journalist and a mother. Here is the drama, beauty and humor of my backyard.

At a tiny courtyard mosque tucked down a back alley in China's Muslim heartland, Wang Shouying leads other Muslim women in prayers and chants. Every day, Wang dons a green velvet robe and white scarf and preaches to dozens of women at the Little White Mosque in western China's Ningxia region. Wang is a keeper of a centuries-old tradition that gives women a leading role in a largely male-dominated faith. She is a female imam or ahong, pronounced ah-hung, from the Persian word akhund for "the learned." "We need to train and educate our female comrades how to be good Muslims," Wang said between prayer sessions. "Women ahong are the best qualified to do this because they can relate to the female faithful in ways the male ahongs can’t." China's women imams are not the equals of male prayer leaders. They do not lead salat — the five daily prayers considered among the most important Muslim obligations. Those prayers are instead piped via loudspeakers into the female mosques from the male ones nearby. Still, the female imams guide others in worship and are the primary spiritual leaders for the women in their communities. Although it's not unusual in Islam for women to lead other women in prayer, China's female imams are part of a trend of greater leadership roles for Muslim women in many nations, said Omid Safi, professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Chinese Muslims are carrying on a tradition that fell away in many Muslim societies after national governments centralized religious institutions, making men the leaders, said Ingrid Mattson, an Islamic scholar at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. Women's equal status in work and religion is evident across Ningxia, which was settled by Muslim traders from the Middle East a millennium ago. The communist push for gender equality helped broaden Muslim women's roles. Women here work beside men in government offices, banks, shops and schools. Religious schools for girls are common. Often women maintain separate mosques, virtually identical to those led by men. "The Chinese Communist Party liberated us from the kitchen, and it gave us the same duties and obligations as men," said Wu Yulian, a 45-year-old Muslim mother of two and head of a kindergarten. "I believe that men and women are equal by nature and that the practice of restricting women in some parts of the Middle East, like not allowing them outside, not allowing them to drive or be seen by men is really unfair and excessive," she said. Down a dusty track on the outskirts of Wuzhong, 30 girls study at the Muslim Village Girl's School for Arabic Studies — a private boarding school set up by a local businessman. But drawing closer to worldwide Islam may come at a price in Ningxia, where a new generation of women may start to question whether their tradition of female imams is truly Islamic. TEXT by Alexa Olesen

I had recently given birth when I had the opportunity to document maternal medical care in the Masai tribes of Kenya. I saw the universal in our experiences. The setting was different, but there was the same camraderie among women, the same striving among medical workers for the well-being of mothers and children. It became a very personal subject. I tried to show that while childbirth is one of the world’s most common events, it can be deeply treacherous depending on where you are born. In London, where I gave birth, the doctors had fetal heart monitors and IV drips and surgical rooms readied for any emergency. In the Masai Mara, most women give birth at home in remote villages with the help of local midwives. When complications occur, it can take hours - or days - to reach the nearest hospital, where conditions and equipment are often spartan. Many women deliver on their way to the hospital. Like Susan Nani, a woman I photographed whose baby daughter was born on a roadside, and who faced significant post-birth complications. Nani was eventually picked up by a motorbike from an anti-poaching unit that carried her over rutted roads to a clinic.    Across rural Kenya, tradition says women should deliver at home. It’s how it’s always been done here, with village midwives who know so much about birthing babies. But centuries of knowledge cannot overcome the dangers of a home birth in tiny mud-walled hut. There is, of course, no “normal” pregnancy. Talk to any group of mums: We all have our war stories: the miscarriages, the induced deliveries, the complications followed by cesareans, the breastfeeding woes and the not-much-spoken-about post partum depression. Or perhaps you know a baby who was born prematurely and spent its first few weeks in an incubator. In towns like mine, and probably like yours, these stories often end happily. The surgeon rushes in to stop the bleeding, the neo-natal doctors save the tiny premature newborn. The problems are often not very different in rural Kenya. The difference is that in places like Sitoka, the babies often die. And sometimes, so do the mothers. One afternoon, in the town of Isiolo, I watched a young woman named Salome deliver her first baby, a 3-kilogram boy coming out in a slippery rush at a very basic green-walled delivery room, with sheets for privacy and two simple beds. A couple of nurses attended handled the delivery. it was dramatically better than what Salome would have had at home.  Kenya now offers free hospital births across the country, but many women don’t know that, and many men don’t want to pay for the transportation to get their wives to towns with hospitals.   One thing I learned: These Maasai women are tough. Within minutes of giving birth, Salome had hopped off the delivery bed and walked to nearby cubicle where a nurse brought her son to her to breastfeed him.    I wish I could claim to have been so tough when my boys were born.

Christian Aid commissioned me to go back to India, one of my favourite posts, to shoot a story about climate change in West Bengal. The region is facing more frequent flooding as the Earth’s temperature rises but, ironically, millions of people live off the electrical grid. If people there adopt alternative energies, they would avoid creating a massive carbon footprint. India was chosen as a focal point, because it represents a developing nation which is growing rapidly and therefore needs more energy to continue to grow. The business of coal – used to produce electricity - is currently high on the news agenda, with whispers of corruption surrounding its production and distribution, and continuing reports of the effects of coal fuelled power stations on climate change. We visited a tribal communities living in affected areas in the Sundarbans to see how they are adapting to the effects on their environment. The shrinking Mangroves, rising waters, and increased number of cyclones, increased salinity, tidal inundation, flooding, erosion, water logging, rising sea levels. The communities were provided training on different varieties of edible plants to grow, encouraged to rotate crops and create home garden and by introducing lift irrigation to create a fertile land on which to produce food for their families and surplus to sell at market.. Grass root NGO's are working to promote the use of sustainable energy, such as solar power, wind power, biofuels, to replace the reliance on fossil fuels. The hope is families will be able to rely on solar power avoiding the now widespread use of kerosene lamps and stoves which produce harmful fumes. A bird’s nest tangle of electrical cables in city slums will be a thing of the past along with a primitive form of biofuel: dung patties marked with handprints drying against a village hut.

When I was a child, my mother had a simple mantra: “Do not expect too much from men and you won’t be disappointed.” She expected very little. She moved to Mexico from California in the 1960s, bringing the children from her first marriage. She met my father, married again, had more children, including me, and got divorced. She stayed in Mexico and worked to support us. On most days, she was my father figure. I saw my father on weekends, but there were no hugs, no cuddling. He loved his children, but he was a Mexican man of his era, born in the 1920s, and he struggled to express affection. When we talked, I always used the respectful and remote “usted,” the formal Spanish word for “you.” It’s different in my house now. Watching my husband, Rob, with our two sons fills me with joy. He relates to them in ways that are beyond me: the love hidden inside roughhousing, the relentless teasing, the way they model themselves on him. They climb on him, asking any question that pops into their heads, a natural familiarity that would have felt awkward to me as a child. I’m not going to claim household perfection. My husband and I squabble about money and the division of household chores. We often disagree about how to discipline the boys. And I know we have it easy. There are tens of millions of women out there who don’t have anyone to share the parenting with, just like my mother didn’t. When Rob was born, his father wasn’t allowed in the room for the delivery. His mother went off to the hospital and came home 10 days later, with all the business of childbirth done and dusted. My father-in-law was a wonderful man and a caring father, but I am quite sure that he never changed a diaper, rarely cooked a meal and never took his children to another child’s birthday party. Rob hoped that one day he could replicate his wonderful childhood with a family of his own. But gender roles, both at work and at home, are not what they once were. And in less than a generation, men like my husband have had to learn a different way to be a father. Rob was in the delivery room for our boys’ births and shared in the burden of sleepless nights. That’s normal now in our London world of two-career couples, but it was unheard-of just a generation ago. The “Me Too” movement made plain how awful many men can be. So it can be easy to forget that men are also working to carve out their new place in the world. It’s at birthday parties where I think about this most often, and often most poignantly, as I watch dads in daffodil hats, or wrapped in toilet paper, finding their way among a crowd of mothers who have been navigating these waters for years. What will the world look like when my sons are adults? The idea of rigid gender roles is shifting in ways I couldn’t have expected just a decade ago. For now, I like to watch Rob and our boys and be reminded that there are some very good men out there. Contrary to my mother’s mantra, I can expect a great deal from them — and not be disappointed.

I’ve been living on my street for about 10 years, in a little market town outside London called Berkhamsted. In a very English way, I knew almost nothing about my neighbors. Everyone kept to their own business. My street is 322 meters (352 yards) long and over a century old, with late Victorian brick fronts, all similar in architectural style. But inside each house is a unique story. As the coronavirus lockdown tightened its grip and residents shut their front doors, a few neighbors created a Whatsapp group for the street. From there on, everything began to change. People began introducing themselves to one another online, sharing news, asking if anyone needed extra groceries, or offering surplus toys and baked goods. The group grew to 98 members. Kids who missed out on their birthday parties get a chorus of happy birthday songs up and down the block and balloons hanging from front windows. We’ve raised donations for women facing domestic abuse.It took social distancing to bring us closer. I’m originally from Mexico, with postings that have taken me from the Middle East to Asia and the Americas. When I arrived in Britain, I found myself in a little patch of England with its ancient buildings and Harry Potter woods that seemed no less exotic than anywhere else I’d been. When the pandemic came along, I did what came naturally as a photographer. One by one, I’ve been capturing the people living around me. Clare O’Connell, a concert cellist at Number 51, offers impromptu concerts from her front garden. On Victory in Europe Day, May 8, Nyree O’Brien directed a community band that played the World War II-era hit “We’ll meet again.” The youngest member is 5. Band members plan to play the Beatles’ “Come Together” next. “Because truly, that is what we all want to do,” she said. My town first appeared in written records in 970, and is included in the Domesday Book. It survived plagues that ravaged Britain in the 1300s and 1600s. Since my block was built, it has seen the Spanish Flu and two world wars. Long after we’ve gone, new residents will see things I cannot even imagine. But for now, here’s a record of my neighbors and the people I’ve grown to know, thanks to social distancing.

London and its environs are home to a notable diversity of faiths and flocks. Rites that have been the bedrock of their beliefs for centuries had to evolve swiftly during the pandemic lockdown to be safe and relevant for the faithful amid global uncertainty. In the village of Northchurch, Anglicans normally worship in the more than 1,000-year-old St. Mary’s Church. That ended March 24 when the Church of England closed all its buildings, and Rev. Jonathan Gordon began recording and broadcasting services via smartphone. “It posed an immediate and immense challenge,” he said. “We had to rethink how we did everything.” In Neasden, a London suburb, a magnificent Hindu temple of carved stone constructed according to ancient Vedic architectural texts usually welcomes thousands of visitors a day. Now the Mandir gets just a trickle of devotees who book appointments online to keep the crowds down. Everywhere there are reminders of the unusual times: smart screen devices flashing images of Hindu deities allow for contactless donations, and after each prayer session, workers in full-body protective suits swoop in to sanitize surfaces that may have been touched. At a suburban home in Hemel Hempstead, the Patel family dressed in their best saris watched attentively in their living room as Hindu s gurus spoke to them through their video screen. “That is what we would have worn to the temple,” said Hemali Patel, “so it felt only right to dress for the occasion.” Taking worship virtual has been particularly challenging for the Orthodox Jewish community, which are proscribed from using electronics on Shabbat, their day of rest. Rabbi Mordechai Chalk broadcasts video services from his home Fridays just before sunset. “L’chaim,” he toasted in Hebrew recently, connected to the congregation via Zoom. His children ran into the picture to peer curiously at his laptop, before Shira Chalk, his wife, whisked them away. The Buddhist Amvrati monastery decided to simply close its doors and retreat inward to protect the communal way of life of its yellow-robed monks. At the Cambridge Central Mosque in the city of the same name, Imam Ali Tos has found solace in a slow reopening. Mats are now spaced a meter and a half apart during prayers, and worshippers are asked to bring their own. “The mosque is not only a place of worship” the imam said, “it is the center of our lives.” But religions have endured trauma countless times before, and indeed, many of the tenets of faith held dear today were born out of hardship and suffering. And today’s pandemic has not been without its lighter moments. Rabbi David Mason, said he took joy from knowing tech-savvy volunteers were spending hours on the phone helping older community members get online. “My high point during lockdown was when a 90-year-old lady came onto a Sunday night talk and explained how delighted she was,” the rabbi said. “That’s how communal collaboration works. I watched it work, and it was just wonderful.”

A friend posted a picture on Instagram of her 11-year-old daughter wearing a school uniform, sitting attentively in front of a laptop and waving to her teacher during a virtual class. My experience lay in stark contrast. During home lessons, my youngest child, a 7-year-old, often ignores the screen and climbs on me whenever possible. Despite always finishing their homeschooling tasks, when asked what their favorite subjects are, my two boys usually respond in unison, "Break and lunch!" I'm dismayed every time I hear it. When schools shut down on March 23 due to COVID-19. There wasn't much discussion at home about how to approach this new reality. There was little preparation other than ordering five reams of A4 paper, printer ink cartridges and a packet of school exercise books. I quickly learned I wasn't as qualified as I had hoped. Patience is not one of my chief qualities. Nor is long division, coding, art, English literature, Mayan history or physics –topics I was suddenly "teaching," with the aid of materials posted online by their teachers. The fact that so much of school has gone on-screen has made me push even harder to make space for low tech. We created a little stage out of a cereal box in which the kids put on puppet productions of children's books. My younger son Joe relished the task of creating a mythical beast for an art assignment using photo collage. It sits comfortably on his homeschooling notebook next to his math assignments. Lockdown has made our family bond, wrapping us in a tight hug, though at times it feels like a boa constrictor's slow squeeze. It has allowed my husband and me a glimpse into how our children approach learning and knowledge. Laughter, it seems, is a great route to education. With no after-school activities we have the luxury of time, and the boys have found new interests. Ben has developed a love for early American history and Joe has been reading up on infectious diseases. I know our family is fortunate. No one has lost a job. We can pay the mortgage and buy groceries. None of us have been ill. But it's not easy, for anyone Nerves frayed from confinement — and the stress of insulating your children from pressure they only loosely grasp — make family interactions more tense and dramatic. A simple arithmetic problem can seem insurmountable, and with nowhere to escape, seeing your child melt down at the kitchen table makes you question whether you are fit to mold a young mind. If misery loves company, I've had plenty. Many parents have told me they've been reduced to tears, including one who spent three hours extracting one paragraph of writing from their child. Others have felt unable to stretch themselves to cover all of the demands pulling them in different directions. And some tell me they regularly head for a glass of wine as soon as the day ends. This may all be far from over, but I tell myself that if we can keep ourselves alive and sane during this period, we are all ahead of the game.