Words For My Pictures

Accidents don't happen for a reason they give you a reason. In February 2016 I thought I had it all. I was happy with my life, work and everything I do. Everything was going my way exactly the way I want it to go. I was in control. There were no surprises or misfortunes. Physically I was in good shape, I go to the gym at least three times a week, play basketball three days a week, swim almost everyday and mountain biking for two or three times a week. I juggle different responsibilities at work. My colleagues think I was working hard but I had never felt that I was working hard because everything I did was done with passion.  I was high with life, I was invincible, I was on top of everting until that cold February morning which paused everting.  On the morning of, February 16,2016  I had no plan to cycle or do some mountain biking. On the previous night, I had a good run playing basketball and it was a late-night pick-up game at the German Embassy school. S...

The Churches of Lalibela are rock-hewn churches in Lalibela Ethiopia built by king Lalibela to depict the holy land, Jerusalem. Lalibela built the churches by hewing monolithic rocks from the top to the bottom making the churches unique in the world for being the only buildings constructed from the roof to the basement, not the other way round as conventional buildings are built. Lalibela is an astonishing work of construction but what more astonishing is the advance drainage system that all the churches have.   Most of the Churches are literally carved out of stone from the top part down to the basement making them below the surrounding landscape. We all know that water drains all the time from high elevation to the lowest and if it doesn’t have access to flow to the next lowest point it will accumulate.   We all know that even in this age basements have water problems because most of the time our basements are below the surface and we have to use advanced waterproofin...

I usually don't talk about myself let alone write but it is my birthday and I will let myself and be egotistical and write about me.   Yes, it is another birthday again! Keeping my revived tradition of having a birthday portrait, I am doing a self-portrait again. It is amazing how time flies especially when you are getting older and when you are dealing with four seasons a year which is now my case. Living where you have distinct four seasons is making my year go by much faster. I lived most of my life where we had technically four seasons but the difference is not that significant, you hardly notice one season changing into another if you are not a farmer. The only thing we notice is whether it is raining a lot or not, summing up our seasons into just two. The rainy season and the dry season. We hardly pay attention to the small rains in between the long dry season. Now I have to deal with four weather patterns every year which makes the year feel shorter than I was us...

Why do I take pictures? A simple answer is I take pictures simply to be in the moment. On the picture above, you have a clock with time at 4:09:09. After I took the shot the clock turned to be 4:09:10. The time captured on the picture will not be repeated again forever. We will have the same time after 24 hours but it is a totally different time because it is on another day. The moment that I have captured will not be repeated again. That is exactly why I take pictures, to capture moments while I am present in them too. That moment will not repeat because everything evolves and nothing is permanent.  Photography helps me to be at that moment since I too will be evolving every second. In Japan's Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, there is a watch that stopped working at the exact time the Atomic Bombe dropped over Hiroshima exploded seventy-four years ago at the end of the second world war. Because the watch stopped working at the exact moment it is now an important exhibit in a ...

Markets have been there since humans started living in communities. Markets are universal, wherever you go around the world you have markets were people buy and sell. Before the age of online shopping and big corporate mega-stores, markets were not just places were people traded they were places of social interaction. People go to markets to meet people and be around people of course sell and buy from them too. Even though the convenience of online shopping is challenging the real markets, local producers and individuals still trade at small markets like Sunday Markets and Farmers Markets. This is the reason why I like these markets, even if I don't have anything that I want to buy, I go to this markets to take pictures of people doing their business as generations have done before them. Every transaction is a social encounter, you don't just click and buy you will be interacting with the seller and make some kind of connection. You might even decide not to buy if you don...

Most of Ethiopia's arable and fertile lands are located on top of high plateaus. For this reason, these parts of the country are highly populated and the land is overused by thousands of years of subsistence farming which mostly depends on rain coming from the two rainy seasons each year. The short rainy season which starts at the end of March and ends in April and the long which starts in June and ends in around the second week of September, any disruption to the rain pattern causes huge difficulty for farmers and the farming economy were more than 80% of the population is directly dependent on. Overpopulation deforestation and global climate change are making these disruptions a regular occurrence. Population growth without an economic growth matching it is the biggest challenge that the country faces now. Farming had been hiding a very high unemployment rate of the youth for 4 decades but it is now at a point which it can no longer do so. Subsistence farming alone can no l...

Peugeot 404 is a car introduced to the world in 1960 by the French car manufacturer Peugeot. The car was manufactured in France from 1960 to 1975 and under license in many African countries and Latin America until 1991. The Peugeot 404 is uniquely an African car not because it was manufactured in Africa but for its superior resilience under harsh African road conditions and lack of conventional roads. The 404 is not associated with only francophone' Africa, it was and is still used throughout the continent. In Ethiopia, the 404 is still being used as taxis and intercity suttle mainly in the eastern part of the country. When the rest of the countries taxis gradually switched to Soviet Ladas in the 1980s and '90s, the Peugeot 404 remained as the choice of taxi owners in the east due to its reliability in the dry and arid conditions of the eastern region of the country. Since winning its first 5000 Km Safari rally in 1963, the Peugeot 404 has proved itself as Africa'...