Sarah Crowe

Ouraye Sall holds up a razor blade and begins to describe, with the detachment of a surgeon, how she once used the tools of her former trade. She breaks the razor clean in half, then snips off the sharp corners. There’s no irony in her voice when she describes the great care she went to to avoid inflicting too much pain with the lethal instrument.

The tsunami turned attention back to one of the most forgotten emergencies in the world, Somalia. It was a deadly tsunami wave from far away, that put this odd-shaped peninsula back on the map. Broken buildings, broken fishing nets, tattered boats and smatterings of ragged clothes blend in with the historic remains from before.

In a touching display of muscular singing and rhythmic dancing on stick-like legs with the aid of crutches, the handicapped adults of Theis in Senegal are drumming up their own style of social mobilisation campaign, calling on people not to let their children end up in wheelchairs and be crippled by polio like them. Joining the chorus from mosques and minarets, the word has gone out across 23 sub-Saharan African countries.

"We were in the village to speak to Aids orphans, to put a human face to the lifeless, numbing statistics: out of a population of 2,2-million people, 93 000 children have lost at least one parent to Aids. What does it mean to have 10% of the child population orphaned?" Sarah Crowe investigates.

It has pride of place in the quiet Basotho village. Large as life, freshly painted and set on lush rolling lawns with luxury cars in the garage, its ochre-coloured walls stand in sharp contrast to the shabbier, grey dwellings of Thaba Tseka. It can only be the best and only hotel in town, or so you think until you drive closer.