“In a remote corner of the country (Uganda), near the border with the DRC, I found it (Lake Katwe). At first light, hundreds of people appeared on the steep ridges around the lake. Slowly they made their way down toward the salt pans, the scores of square harvesting pools cordoned off by mud walls and sticks. Even at dawn the lake–four to six feet deep, a mile and a half long,so corrosively salty it hardly feels like water–was ominous.

I had come to see this natural wonder, this crater lake the explorer Henry Morton Stanley had written about, but I found my lens drawn more to the men, women, and children who brave it. Most bore scars or open sores that the water won’t let heal, yet all come back, day after day. For some, the seasonal rains offer the only respite. For many, as for their ancestor, this dangerous painful, and exhausting work is the onl way to survive.

Andre McConnell (andrewmcconnell.com)

“Africa is the continent where Homo sapiens was born, and with its worn-out soils, fitful rain, and rising population, it could very well offer a glimpse of our species’ future. For numerous reason–lack of infrastructure, corruption, inaccessible markets–the green revolution never made it here. Agricultural production per capita actually declined in sub-Saharan Africa between 1970 and 2000, while the population soared, leaving an average 10-million-ton annual food deficit. It’s now home to more than a quarter of the world’s hungriest people.”

“‘Families are either supported or destroyed by the social and natural environments around them,’ writes Susan Griffin in an Orion review of the documentary Darwin’s Nightmare. The film ’shows how the destruction of Lake Victoria’s ecology by the experimental introduction of predator perch, which proceeded to eat all the other fish, has resulted in the dissolution of the lives of those who have lived around the lake for generations. As fishermen are dying or abandoning their families in great numbers, women turn to prostitution to feed their children, and as these women die of AIDS in great numbers, the gangs of homeless orphans living around the lake grow.’”