The halls of prejudice Apartheid is alive and well on University campuses across the new South Africa SHOULDER to shoulder the white Afrikaan's teenagers sing as one. Right hands clutched to their broad chests, tears of nostalgia well up in their eyes: "On a mountain in the night we lie in the darkness and wait," they boom. "In the mud and blood I lie cold, grain bag and rain cling to me and my house and my farm burned to ashes, so that they could catch us. But those flames and that fire burn now deep, deep within me. De la Rey, De la Rey. Will you come to lead the Boers?" Invisible as ghosts the elderly black "Squeeza's" or cleaners move in and silently fill the empty common room, the voices of the undergraduates still hanging in the air. Clearing greasy plates, mopping floors and dusting long rows of faded sepia portraits of varsity sons in the JBM Hertzog Residence they work in hushed silence. The faces of other young men, graduates from the last century, stare down on the township women with Aryan frowns. Sharp blonde side-sheds, wire frame glasses, cold green eyes. Masters of a former universe. The architects and enforcers of Apartheid rule. Grave Digging for Mugabe Zimbabwe's Cholera Crisis On the same day that President Robert Mugabe, declared cholera did not exist in Zimbabwe, I secretly entered a hospital teeming with men, women, and children fighting for life, some on the verge of succumbing to the infection. In December 2008 I travelled to Zimbabwe to document how cholera was devastating a country already in collapse. Decades of corruption and neglect had led to a blocked and broken sewage system. Cholera spread into the streets polluting drinking and washing water. It was reported that 4,000 people died. This was suspected to be at least half the real number – many were too sick to make it to clinics for diagnosis let alone treatment (the Red Cross estimated 46% died en route). In a country with so many already weakened by HIV and hunger, the disease ran rampant. In Harare’s largest cemeteries grave diggers told me they used to dig around 45 adult graves a fortnight, now it was 300, and in the infant section it had gone from 3 a day to 15. Mugabe accused Britain of infecting Zimbabweans with cholera as part of a strategy to invade the country. Many ordinary Zimbabweans would welcome western intervention to bring to an end a regime that is steadily destroying their country. The halls of prejudice Apartheid is alive and well on University campuses across the new South Africa SHOULDER to shoulder the white Afrikaan's teenagers sing as one. Right hands clutched to their broad chests, tears of nostalgia well up in their eyes: "On a mountain in the night we lie in the darkness and wait," they boom. "In the mud and blood I lie cold, grain bag and rain cling to me and my house and my farm burned to ashes, so that they could catch us. But those flames and that fire burn now deep, deep within me. De la Rey, De la Rey. Will you come to lead the Boers?" Invisible as ghosts the elderly black "Squeeza's" or cleaners move in and silently fill the empty common room, the voices of the undergraduates still hanging in the air. Clearing greasy plates, mopping floors and dusting long rows of faded sepia portraits of varsity sons in the JBM Hertzog Residence they work in hushed silence. The faces of other young men, graduates from the last century, stare down on the township women with Aryan frowns. Sharp blonde side-sheds, wire frame glasses, cold green eyes. Masters of a former universe. The architects and enforcers of Apartheid rule. THE DARK SIDE OF DENIM Suppliers to Gap and Levi’s poison the heart of one of Africa’s poorest countries Maseru, Lesotho NOTHING grows here in the shadows. There is only desolation in the tired soil at Paballo Marumo's cracked and filthy feet. Her shoes, the thin plastic sandals worn by children across the townships of Southern Africa, are gone. "Stolen!" she tells me in her language, SeSotho. At eight years old she sits, hopelessly, on the very bottom rung of the third world rubbish dump hierarchy. "Gap! Gap! Gap! comes the sudden cry from the 12-year-old leader of the destitute army of ragpickers patrolling the vast waste-dump before us. Barefoot Paballo is the quickest off her feet darting towards her quarry, a long trailer overflowing with the discarded remnants of Lesotho's garment industry. In the twilight of dusk I can make out her tiny frame as she runs between collapsed and burning pillars of denim and cotton. As they reach the trucks the youngsters plough fearlessly, headlong, into the refuse as it pours violently from the heavy loaders. With stern concentration they fight for scraps with each other, sifting through filthy piles of garment industry waste as they sweep it into their bags. Above them thousands of Gap Inc and Levi's labels, stonewash Jeans buttons and studs, tonnes of heavily dyed cotton and denim pile down onto their heads, burying them up to their belly buttons. WHY DO THE ITALIAN'S HATE US? Under siege - Roma on the ragged edge of Europe Naples, Rome, Florence, Italy PULLING each other by the hair, the Roma children scrap as they take turns at flicking their skinny wrists over the flaming funeral candles. Before the same Orthodox Christian shrine, their grandmother recites the Lord's Prayer in a gravelly Romany tongue. 'Am Mora Dat con san ando cheri.' The words leave her mouth in whispers as she crosses herself and kisses a gold crucifix around her neck. The smallest child, no older than four, runs towards me, sticks out her tongue, and gestures a V for vaffanculo - the ubiquitous Italian fuck off - and disappears outside. The damp ceiling of the two-room prefabricated hut the Gypsies call home is on the verge of collapse. The plastic-film windows, looking out on to the drab exterior walls of Naples's most infamous prison, are so flimsy they wobble in the faint breeze. There are mattresses everywhere: on the floor, propped up against the sink. Like the inhabitants, they are thin and threadbare. The only nod to modernity is a gigantic home entertainment consul in the corner, spewing out a DVD of distorted recordings of Balkan folk songs. The wake we are attending in Naples's most notorious Romany camp has been going for 10 days. Alcohol is scattered around the room; clear, foul-smelling moonshine sits overflowing from plastic cups and reclaimed Peroni bottles; a half-blind mongrel sleeps fitfully among the detritus of a thousand hand-rolled cigarettes. SCOUTING FOR BLACK GOLD The trafficking and exploitation of child footballers in West Africa Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire. Accra, Ghana. Paris, France WADING into the yellow foaming shallows of the West African Atlantic Papa Samuel gags and splutters as he untangles his fishing nets from the starboard of a brightly painted skiff. Raising his flaring nostrils above the thick oily residue of raw sewage that laps around his hollow wooden longboat he looks hopefully towards land. Back on-shore, from underneath corrugated tin shacks and battered cobalt blue United Nations slum tarpaulins, comes the distant metallic clatter of early morning chores. The promise of plantains and hot milk; Breakfast. As the wind changes the acrid smell of the first firewood of the day floats towards us; out to sea. Defying their mothers the local children are already on the beach playing football; skipping intently through puddles of sandy brown water they kick tightly wound balls of rags and elastic bands among piles of shattered bricks, shards of asbestos siding and broken glass. In the watery light of dawn their skinny chests bare the torn strips and faded club crests of teams from across Europe: Schalke. Ajax. Torino. Portsmouth. Benfica. Behind the children, on Accra’s dusty beach road, a giant weather-beaten billboard poster of Chelsea star, Michael Essian stands guard over the foul littered bay: Holding out a ball dotted with black stars, his country’s national symbol, the Ghana midfielder beckons fans to “Be Proud.” “We Ghanaians are haunted by the past,” says Papa Samuel, distracting my gaze from the sweep of fleet-footed young players. As he talks the fisherman points a bony finger towards the nearest headland and the curving whitewashed walls of Elmere Fort. Dominated by rows of huge iron canons, their great muzzles stamped with the seal of the King of England, the towers once protected West Africa’s most valuable commodity – Slaves. “Millions passed through that fort; Through its ‘Gate of no return” and onto the ships,” my guide tells me, jumping back aboard and pulling the greasy cord of the outboard motor, his skin glistening with watery grime. “The fish are clever. They know well to stay away from this haunted place. Those who left Africa and died still haunt the shore. Listen from the shore. You can hear their muffled cries at night, the clink and thud of their iron chains, scraping on the wooden pier. The waters here have been long dead of any life.” As the engine creaks life and we put-put away from land the children’s cries and yelps of excitement grow fainter. By mid-afternoon the youngsters will still be on the beach, skipping school or their chores, as they dream of becoming the next African millionaire to play in the Champions League for Chelsea; but by dusk their games will be less carefree. At the children’s’ side, egging them on to run, pass, think quicker, will be a growing legion of unlicensed agents and coaches, intent on finding one thing and one thing only: The next Michael Essian. The next multi-million pound golden ticket out. The child’s education, his right to play and grow gently into adulthood are all deemed irrelevant. They are being trained to leave everything behind and when the most talented leave and pass through a 21st century version of the Gate of No return, their lives will similarly change forever. WE ARE NOT THE DEVILS CHILDREN In Nigeria child witches are singled out for cold-blooded murder Port Harcourt, Nigeria In the South Eastern Nigerian state of Akwa Ibom children and babies are being branded as evil by evangelical pastors. Thousands are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities. Behind the smartly painted church doors these ‘Men of God’ make a living by 'deliverances' - exorcisms - for people beset by witchcraft, something seen to cause anything from divorce, disease, accidents to job losses. An exploitative situation has grown into something sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children - naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush. It is estimated that around 5,000 children have been abandoned in this area since 1998 and many bodies have turned up in the rivers or in the forests. Many more are never found. The more children a pastor declares witches, the more famous he gets and the more money he can make. Parents are asked for so much money that they will pay in instalments or perhaps sell their property. While Nigeria’s wealth is pumped out of oil and gas fields to bypass millions of it’s poorest people, tension and poverty has delivered an opportunity for a new and terrible phenomenon being done in the name of Christianity. Full text and edit images available on request. To help go to www.steppingstonesnigeria.org THE BOATSWAIN’S LAST STAND Tuvalu is sinking and its residents lives determined by the tides Funafuti, Tuvalu LIKE THE last boson standing on the twisted iron wreck of the Titanic First Mate Keviki mock salutes the distant horizon and jolts his back upright as the warm debris strewn water of the Pacific sloshes around his knees. Across his 1920's style sailors hat the words of his so-called 'ship', the remote coral Island of Tuvalu, have faded in the relentless sun that bleaches the tiny spit of land we are standing on. The fourth smallest country after in the world after Vatican City, Monaco and Nauru, and one of the least populated, Tuvalu, a tiny Island halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, is drowning and fast. Today it's 13,000 residents are the most environmentally aware people on earth; their daily lives determined by the tides and the greasy salt water that gathers around their feet every day. As Tuvalu's children skip to school the spray of salt burns their skin; as the local doctor cycles to morning rounds at the island hospital he glides through heavy puddles of sea water; the fishermen, who once hauled their boats out to sea from a pristine beach, now stagger and stumble over rocks to their battered craft. The castaway desert island beaches are gone - replaced by broken stones and dark sinister looking water that shadows the islanders every move. The worst case scenario. In the next decade Tuvalu, like many other islands around the Pacific, could be a distant memory on an out-dated world map. The cap Sailor Keviki is wearing on patrol a museum exhibit behind a glass cabinet, his uniform a star attraction in an ebay auction. On the road with the Moscow Mules Meet The Glotelli. Women who smuggle pure Afghan opium to Moscow in their stomachs. Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Moscow, Russia AS THE late autumn sun descends on the Afghan border it brings with it a sudden chill and the early promise of another harsh winter; In the yellowing gloom a young boy, dressed in oily rags, goes from vehicle to vehicle at the crossing point selling single cigarettes to bleary-eyed truck drivers slumbered over their steering wheels, their cargo’s of contraband Chinese electronics and rotten vegetables ground to a halt at the muddy crossing; Another child sells tiny broiled quail, cooked whole. The blackened corpses rested in piles of scorched wings, feet and skulls, their little black eyes sunken in their scorched sockets. Death comes cheaply here in the dark shadows of Central Asia. Earlier in the day, as the first light of dawn had crept over Dushanbe, the bleak Post Soviet capital of Tajikistan, our torturous route from the city to the border had been explained in Russian by our driver, Samir, as he grinned through gold teeth and traced a dirty fingernail across a worn map on the bonnet of his Soviet Era Lada jeep. Written in indiscernible Cyrillic the text offered us little clue to how hard the going would be. The elaborate symbols which adorned it made more immediate sense. They, above all else, brutally referred to the job in hand: Not so much a route but a complex web of impassable glaciers, mule tracks, mountain passes and high altitude. Like the landscape it charted there was no colour in the map, only monotone with no contours and the sketchiest of topography. I could make out the distant Pamir’s and beyond what I assumed to be the epic soaring ranges of the Hindu Kush. The same map is in front of me now, folded inside a copy of the Koran, bookmarking the words of the prophet: “Oh God, protect me and those who travel with me.” We have journeyed into the one of the wildest and most desolate places on earth, shadowing the footsteps of Markhor mountain goats and hardier still, the flourishing army of Opium traffickers responsible for the West’s deepening heroin misery. LIFE IN A “RAPE CLINIC” IN WAR-TORN EASTERN CONGO An estimated 100,000 children have been born of rape in the DRC in the last four years Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo FALLING softly into the distant horizon the fading African sun pours through splintered wooden shutters, casting thin strips of light on Basemae Madmbi’s deeply anguished face as she lies motionless on a rusting iron hospital bed in war-torn Eastern Congo. As the warm glow penetrates the room she moves slowly, at first her hands twitch and then, straining out her neck, she attempts to bask in the momentary wonder of the light. Within moments the sensation is gone and she places her head back on the pillow, leaving her once again in the shadows. Basamae tells me later that watching the sunset was once her favourite part of the day, a time when she washed and combed her hair, looking on as the children ran around the village throwing water at each other. The best she can hope for now is the feeling of the setting sun as it passes over her face – it is one of the few joys she has left. Raped by a group of rebel soldiers on the outskirts of her remote village at the height of the Eastern Congolese war six months ago Basemae made the “mistake” of calling out the name of one of her rapists, who she recognized during the attack. Her punishment was savagely brutal but also coldly calculated. Recognised by his victim the soldier took out his knife and gouged out both of Basamae’s eyeballs, later kicking dirt in the hollowed stumps of her face and goading her to identify him. Left to die on the outskirts of her village Basamae was saved only by the intervention of a local priest who carried her to the main road. WELCOME TO MY WORLD Deep Ecologist Doug Tompkins is saving Patagonia fjord by fjord with his own wallet Pumelain, Patagonia, Chile A DARK intertwine of deep Green fjords stretches beneath us towards the horizon where the confluence of the glacial current merges with the black stillness of the open sea. Far to the south, where the waves lash Cape Horn's cold granite cliffs, three great oceans: The Pacific, The South Atlantic and The Antarctic meet in a cacophony of restless waters, conflicting winds, turbulent waters and deadly squalls; The stormy heart of the most unpredictable micro-weather system on Earth. “My Patagonia,” in the words of the Chilean Poet, Mario Miranda Soussi, “Is a landscape of infinite water, torn apart by a torrent of love, navigating a single river swollen by miracles.” The verdant terrain we are crossing at five hundred feet above the Patagonian rainforest canopy is no less violent – fern covered jurassic mountains crashing into each other, snarling vegetation suffocating the trees, roaring rivers tossing huge boulders and rocks. Fleetingly we pass over a few small corrugated tin houses, their pillar box red roofs glinting in the late evening sun; Remote dwellings only there, it seems, to show how vast the terrain is; even the mighty Andean Condor, with its three metre wingspan, appears in this landscape no bigger than a humble swallow. The shadow of the plane that carries us is lost on the side of an enormous glacier as, without warning, we begin to lose altitude. As the single prop dips and weaves in the soaring thermals we approach the tree line, cutting the uppermost branches off a soaring 200 year old pine tree, as we hurtle towards the dusty runway. Our pilot is Doug Tompkins, the most controversial American in South America, a multi-millionaire conservationist who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying up a Northern Ireland sized slice of Patagonia, a man who through a series of grand purchase has practically split one of the world’s longest countries in two. TO HELMAND AND BACK The Fijian soldiers fighting and Dying for a foreign land. Suva, Fiji. London, England THE RISEN CHRIST died for our sins! We deserve our punishment here on this earth...we deserve to feel pain and sadness,'proclaims the preacher breathlessly. Unrelenting he bangs on the pulpit and waves his fist at the congregation of God-Fearing middle-aged women crouched and penitant on the long palm mat before him. 'He died for us......he died. Amen Lord. Praise be to Jesus.......' As the hoarse rhetoric soars a sudden cloudburst takes everyone by surprise enveloping the lush greenry of the church garden in a celestial looking mist. Behind the altar heavy flumes of rainwater pour from racked plastic gutters directly into a plug socket which cracks and fizzles. As if electrified by the static in the air an elderly woman lunges forward in her fervour, speaking in tongues....ghajababgoooddbakakak.... fainting in the humidity of dusk she is helped to her feet by applause and tears, warmly and roundly congratulated by all for allowing the divine presence of god withing her soul. The drama over for the evening Sera Vakabua clutches her bible and walks out into the rain. Bookmarking Psalm 27:1-3 is a faded photograph of her youngest son, Edward, in his British Army uniform. He is standing in front of a makeshift signpost in English and Arabic saying Mortar Platoon. His 4th Batallion Rifles fatigues stained with sweat but he is smiling in front of one of Saddam Hussein's Palaces. She reads the words to me from memory as we walk to her home: 'When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies attack me they will stumble and fall. Though an army besiege against me my heart will not fear.' This was my son's bible,' Sera says, handing me the old testament for inspection. 'It was at his bedside when he died. He had highlighted Psalm 27 with a pen. I know he read it every night. Like the others my son was terrified. He feared the terrorists more than he feared God himself.' CHINA’S EXECUTION ORPHANS The travesty of the forgotten children left behind by China’s Execution Policy. Xian Province, Central China GOU GIAN HOU places the stained scrap of paper on the scarred wooden school desk of an orphanage in Central China and flattens it out with shaking wrinkled hands. In broad, vertical, Chinese script it says “Hsiao Mieh?” or “Disposed of” He is showing me the death notice of a condemned man. There are two ways The Government executes men and women here in mainland China, he says: “They are either taken to a killing ground, a remote open grave, where a guard points a rifle at the back of their head and asks the prisoner to open their mouth so the bullet can pass out through his mouth. Or they are dragged into an ambulance and “finished” with a cocktail of three drugs: Sodium Thiopental to make the condemned unconscious; Pancuronium Bromide to stop the breathing and lethal Potassium chloride to stop the heart. Lethal injection is becoming more and more common, thats how they kill them now.” As he speaks through my translator Hou reaches out and strokes the thick black hair of six year old Zhaing Sai. Behind him the sound of childrens laughter floats towards us as four other orphans swing happily on a rusting climbing frame. “The certificate belongs to this boy. The name on the paper is his mother. It is all he has left of her and he can’t read. Here in the orphanage there are forty others like him, young girls, adolescent boys, all orphans of execution with parents either dead or on death row. Across China there are tens of thousands more, most or fending for themselves. They are the ones who really suffer from execution.” FROM RAPE VICTIM TO VIGILANTE Bosnia's rape victims still await justice in the courts Sarajevo, Bosnia Hertzegovina THE atmosphere inside the bitterly cold office in the rundown urban outskirts of Sarajevo is awkward and brittle. At first nobody utters a word and then the thick black coffee and cheap Russian cigarettes arrive and the women become manic and talkative. 'This is the database,' says Bakira Plesic, pointing to the clumsily assembled rows of shelves behind her; stacks upon stacks of sky-blue books and folders. Inside the files, she says, are tens of thousands of testimonies of women and girls raped during the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. 'Some of the victims in the logs are as young as 7, others as old as 65,' Bakira, 46, adds with a blank expression. In a corner a student volunteer patiently types the latest testimonies into a bulky desktop computer that has seen better days. On the wall behind her grainy newspaper photographs and crude photocopies of former Serbian soldiers stare out defiantly. 'These men are the Nazi's of our time but are roaming free,' says Bakira, drawing heavily on a cigarette and waving her hand towards the pictures: 'It is our job to find them, nobody else cares' Thirteen years after the civil war in Bosnia ended an estimated 80,000 women, raped and brutalized by soldiers during the fighting, still await justice in the courts. Today many of the victims remain in the same communities as the men who attacked them. Now, as the tiny Balkan nation looks towards taking back responsibility for prosecuting war crimes from an International Court in the Hague, a group of Bosnian rape victims are finally making a stand against their attackers, and, amidst growing frustration with the legal system, hunting their attackers down themselves. THE ONLY WAY OUT IS TO SWALLOW ACID! Abused, beaten, raped and murdered. Beirut's domestic servants Manila, Phillipines. Beirut, Lebanon. London, England In 2009 an estimated 300 million domestic workers from the world's most impoverished countries are scattered across the globe from Kensington, West London to the wealthy Hamra District of Beirut, serving the rich and supporting a population back home that is at least twice as large. The remittances from this silent army of modern-day slaves provides an estimated $300 billion a year, nearly three times the world's foreign-aid budgets combined, bringing Morocco more money than tourism does, Sri Lanka more money than tea and the Phillipines just under a tenth of its GDP. But behind each hard-earned dollar sent back are tales of abject exploitation and sorrow, sexual abuse, violence and murder. Over the past six months British Foreign Correspondent of the Year Dan McDougall and the award winning Observer photographer, Robin Hammond, have followed the migrants painful journeys from the Phillipines to the Middle East and London, a city which has increasingly come to represent the end of the road - the promised land where their dreams of a better life finally flounder. ABDUCTION IN THE NIGHT Kidnapped and forced into Islam hundreds of Christian Girls in Cairo are missing Cairo, Egypt NAEMA KHARDES carefully removes her daughter’s photograph from a tattered leather bible as the first light of dawn creeps out of the great desert and through the awnings of the fifth century crypt. As she softly mouths her first prayer of the day shafts of sunlight illuminate particles of dust in the air around her. It is silent but for the clinking sound of a tiny altar bell. In the recesses black-veiled women clutch fat round rosary beads and mutter to themselves, seeking solitude and holy water on their way to work through Cairo’s bustling labyrinthine streets. Naema is lost in thought, clutching a photograph of her daughter, Naegle Adli Azme Attiahk, to her heart. As she does so her first tears of the day drop onto the ancient wooden pew below her chin. “Naegle is gone, lost to me at nineteen,” cries Naema later as we leave the church. “She is forced into Islam, forced to wear a black cloak. She is invisible. She could pass me on the street each evening and I wouldn’t know. Only god knows where my daughter is.” Stuck between a rock and a hard place Egypt's estimated 8 million Coptic Christians are the Middle East's largest non-Muslim minority but are also one of the saddest victims of today's war between the West and Islamic extremists. The epicentre of the campaign against the Christians is the volatile Egyptian South, the heartland of fundamentalist activity and home to the majority of Egypt's Copts. Coptic leaders say the fundamentalists are determined to drive the Copts out of the southern villages, whose emerald green fields they have tilled for centuries. But in the past few years a new target for the fundamentalists has emerged: Hundreds of young women like Naema, born into Egypt’s minority Christian Coptic community, have simply disappeared or left home under mysterious circumstances. Across Cairo and the Nile Valley police and media have reported scores of missing Christian women: Surrounding most disappearances are allegations that the women have been kidnapped by Muslim men and forced to undergo conversion to Islam. A conversion carried out with intimidation violence and rape. THE CHILD LABOUR BEHIND YOUR EGYPTIAN COTTON SHEETS Picking the cotton that makes the world's finest bed linen Cairo, Nile Delta, Egypt THE musky scent of cheap patchouli rises from a cracked clay incense burner in the tiny courtyard of Shaban Abdulal Zarhel's decrepit mud and brick home. In the corner, next to the scraggly livestock, his wife, clad from head to toe in a sombre black burka, squats on the floor, smearing the deepest indigo dye on her youngest son's forehead. Alongside, her four other children sleep off their relentless morning labour in the fields. By 2pm, after a meagre meal of rice and flatbread, they will return to the boiling heat of the meadows. 'Indigo has been used to ward off harm to male children since early Islam,' my translator, Said, tells me without prompting. 'It is a Bedouin tradition adopted by the Arabs.' Here in the Fayoum oasis, 90km south across the Sahara from Cairo, fear of the evil eye, like locusts and drought, is a constant in people's lives . 'They call the evil eye 'ayn',' Said continues. 'Protecting the boys, the next generation of workers, is the most important thing for these families.' Assembled on the ground next to the family stove are amulets, charms and talismans engraved with Koranic script. Shaban Abdulal's wife is pregnant. They are hoping for another boy. Outside, the couple's eldest son, one of four boys, erects a barricade of tightly woven palm branches, known as tabia, to keep the wind-blown sand out of the family home. We have been with the family since the fi rst light crept out of the great desert and into the cotton fields that surround Zawyat Al Kardsha, the farming community in the oasis that they call home. Looping down from the chaos of the capital and linked by road, Egypt's crescent-shaped chain of five oases – Fayoum, Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla and Kharga – have provided refuge and safety for two millennia. Like hundreds of thousands of other people across the Nile Valley, Shaban Abdulal and his family are bonded to their fields. THE NEW SAUDI ARABIA AT THE END OF THE EARTH The new energy frontier will be the race for lithium La Paz, Salar Du Uyuni, Bolivia. Calama, Chile “As we indigenous peoples understand it, the earth is a mother and you can't, for the sake of accumulating capital in just a few hands, turn Mother Earth into a commodity.” Evo Morales. Bolivian President.” DARKNESS FALLS across the Andes turning the distant snowcaps from blinding white to nothingness in the blink of an eye. From the East the night races across the bleak Altiplano towards us as the temperature plummets to below zero leaving the windswept plains of the planet's largest salt-plain in a vast cold shadow. Above our heads the sky changes to a hazy and then a deep blue hue, revealing the clearest view of the milky way to be found anywhere on earth; a dreamlike band of crystal light arching gracefully across the entire celestial sphere: Gemini, Orion, Vulpecula, Taurus, Sagittarius. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon on 20th July 1969 one of the first sights they encountered from Space was the wilderness where we stand. As the earth turned they were captured by a vast patch of white across the lower South American continent which they instantly took to be glacial but was in fact Southern Bolivia’s Salar De Uyuni, a little-known desert of cactus, dust, rainwater lagoons and home to ten billion tonnes of salt covering nearly 5,000 square miles. Since then the Salar, which straddles an altitude ranging from 20,000ft at its peaks and ridges to about 12,000ft in the plains, has remained a largely forgotten corner of one of the most remote and inaccessible plateaus in the world; a destination for bewildered travelers heading to the Chilean border the long way from La Paz and intrepid astronomers intent on using the clear night skies above the salt plains to study the mysteries of the galaxy. But all that may be about to change. Energy economists in London, New York and the Middle East predict that this unlikely windblown patch of salt in the Andes, a sea of emptiness with barely 60 tumbledown adobe villages encircling it, could, over the next two decades, become the next Saudi Arabia. Like the Persian Gulf before it in the 1920's the Salar de Uyuni, or more specifically the vast quantities of Lithium beneath its Northern Ireland size salt table, could hold the answer to the future of transport but the fight to secure it could be one of the most defining energy issues of the next decade.
SHOULDER to shoulder the white Afrikaan's teenagers sing as one. Right hands clutched to their broad chests, tears of nostalgia well up in their eyes: "On a mountain in the night we lie in the darkness and wait," they boom. "In the mud and blood I lie cold, grain bag and rain cling to me and my house and my farm burned to ashes, so that they could catch us. But those flames and that fire burn now deep, deep within me. De la Rey, De la Rey. Will you come to lead the Boers?" Invisible as ghosts the elderly black "Squeeza's" or cleaners move in and silently fill the empty common room, the voices of the undergraduates still hanging in the air. Clearing greasy plates, mopping floors and dusting long rows of faded sepia portraits of varsity sons in the JBM Hertzog Residence they work in hushed silence. The faces of other young men, graduates from the last century, stare down on the township women with Aryan frowns. Sharp blonde side-sheds, wire frame glasses, cold green eyes. Masters of a former universe. The architects and enforcers of Apartheid rule.
On the same day that President Robert Mugabe, declared cholera did not exist in Zimbabwe, I secretly entered a hospital teeming with men, women, and children fighting for life, some on the verge of succumbing to the infection. In December 2008 I travelled to Zimbabwe to document how cholera was devastating a country already in collapse. Decades of corruption and neglect had led to a blocked and broken sewage system. Cholera spread into the streets polluting drinking and washing water. It was reported that 4,000 people died. This was suspected to be at least half the real number – many were too sick to make it to clinics for diagnosis let alone treatment (the Red Cross estimated 46% died en route). In a country with so many already weakened by HIV and hunger, the disease ran rampant. In Harare’s largest cemeteries grave diggers told me they used to dig around 45 adult graves a fortnight, now it was 300, and in the infant section it had gone from 3 a day to 15. Mugabe accused Britain of infecting Zimbabweans with cholera as part of a strategy to invade the country. Many ordinary Zimbabweans would welcome western intervention to bring to an end a regime that is steadily destroying their country.
NOTHING grows here in the shadows. There is only desolation in the tired soil at Paballo Marumo's cracked and filthy feet. Her shoes, the thin plastic sandals worn by children across the townships of Southern Africa, are gone. "Stolen!" she tells me in her language, SeSotho. At eight years old she sits, hopelessly, on the very bottom rung of the third world rubbish dump hierarchy. "Gap! Gap! Gap! comes the sudden cry from the 12-year-old leader of the destitute army of ragpickers patrolling the vast waste-dump before us. Barefoot Paballo is the quickest off her feet darting towards her quarry, a long trailer overflowing with the discarded remnants of Lesotho's garment industry. In the twilight of dusk I can make out her tiny frame as she runs between collapsed and burning pillars of denim and cotton. As they reach the trucks the youngsters plough fearlessly, headlong, into the refuse as it pours violently from the heavy loaders. With stern concentration they fight for scraps with each other, sifting through filthy piles of garment industry waste as they sweep it into their bags. Above them thousands of Gap Inc and Levi's labels, stonewash Jeans buttons and studs, tonnes of heavily dyed cotton and denim pile down onto their heads, burying them up to their belly buttons.
PULLING each other by the hair, the Roma children scrap as they take turns at flicking their skinny wrists over the flaming funeral candles. Before the same Orthodox Christian shrine, their grandmother recites the Lord's Prayer in a gravelly Romany tongue. 'Am Mora Dat con san ando cheri.' The words leave her mouth in whispers as she crosses herself and kisses a gold crucifix around her neck. The smallest child, no older than four, runs towards me, sticks out her tongue, and gestures a V for vaffanculo - the ubiquitous Italian fuck off - and disappears outside. The damp ceiling of the two-room prefabricated hut the Gypsies call home is on the verge of collapse. The plastic-film windows, looking out on to the drab exterior walls of Naples's most infamous prison, are so flimsy they wobble in the faint breeze. There are mattresses everywhere: on the floor, propped up against the sink. Like the inhabitants, they are thin and threadbare. The only nod to modernity is a gigantic home entertainment consul in the corner, spewing out a DVD of distorted recordings of Balkan folk songs. The wake we are attending in Naples's most notorious Romany camp has been going for 10 days. Alcohol is scattered around the room; clear, foul-smelling moonshine sits overflowing from plastic cups and reclaimed Peroni bottles; a half-blind mongrel sleeps fitfully among the detritus of a thousand hand-rolled cigarettes.
WADING into the yellow foaming shallows of the West African Atlantic Papa Samuel gags and splutters as he untangles his fishing nets from the starboard of a brightly painted skiff. Raising his flaring nostrils above the thick oily residue of raw sewage that laps around his hollow wooden longboat he looks hopefully towards land. Back on-shore, from underneath corrugated tin shacks and battered cobalt blue United Nations slum tarpaulins, comes the distant metallic clatter of early morning chores. The promise of plantains and hot milk; Breakfast. As the wind changes the acrid smell of the first firewood of the day floats towards us; out to sea. Defying their mothers the local children are already on the beach playing football; skipping intently through puddles of sandy brown water they kick tightly wound balls of rags and elastic bands among piles of shattered bricks, shards of asbestos siding and broken glass. In the watery light of dawn their skinny chests bare the torn strips and faded club crests of teams from across Europe: Schalke. Ajax. Torino. Portsmouth. Benfica. Behind the children, on Accra’s dusty beach road, a giant weather-beaten billboard poster of Chelsea star, Michael Essian stands guard over the foul littered bay: Holding out a ball dotted with black stars, his country’s national symbol, the Ghana midfielder beckons fans to “Be Proud.” “We Ghanaians are haunted by the past,” says Papa Samuel, distracting my gaze from the sweep of fleet-footed young players. As he talks the fisherman points a bony finger towards the nearest headland and the curving whitewashed walls of Elmere Fort. Dominated by rows of huge iron canons, their great muzzles stamped with the seal of the King of England, the towers once protected West Africa’s most valuable commodity – Slaves. “Millions passed through that fort; Through its ‘Gate of no return” and onto the ships,” my guide tells me, jumping back aboard and pulling the greasy cord of the outboard motor, his skin glistening with watery grime. “The fish are clever. They know well to stay away from this haunted place. Those who left Africa and died still haunt the shore. Listen from the shore. You can hear their muffled cries at night, the clink and thud of their iron chains, scraping on the wooden pier. The waters here have been long dead of any life.” As the engine creaks life and we put-put away from land the children’s cries and yelps of excitement grow fainter. By mid-afternoon the youngsters will still be on the beach, skipping school or their chores, as they dream of becoming the next African millionaire to play in the Champions League for Chelsea; but by dusk their games will be less carefree. At the children’s’ side, egging them on to run, pass, think quicker, will be a growing legion of unlicensed agents and coaches, intent on finding one thing and one thing only: The next Michael Essian. The next multi-million pound golden ticket out. The child’s education, his right to play and grow gently into adulthood are all deemed irrelevant. They are being trained to leave everything behind and when the most talented leave and pass through a 21st century version of the Gate of No return, their lives will similarly change forever.
In the South Eastern Nigerian state of Akwa Ibom children and babies are being branded as evil by evangelical pastors. Thousands are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities. Behind the smartly painted church doors these ‘Men of God’ make a living by 'deliverances' - exorcisms - for people beset by witchcraft, something seen to cause anything from divorce, disease, accidents to job losses. An exploitative situation has grown into something sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children - naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush. It is estimated that around 5,000 children have been abandoned in this area since 1998 and many bodies have turned up in the rivers or in the forests. Many more are never found. The more children a pastor declares witches, the more famous he gets and the more money he can make. Parents are asked for so much money that they will pay in instalments or perhaps sell their property. While Nigeria’s wealth is pumped out of oil and gas fields to bypass millions of it’s poorest people, tension and poverty has delivered an opportunity for a new and terrible phenomenon being done in the name of Christianity. Full text and edit images available on request. To help go to www.steppingstonesnigeria.org
LIKE THE last boson standing on the twisted iron wreck of the Titanic First Mate Keviki mock salutes the distant horizon and jolts his back upright as the warm debris strewn water of the Pacific sloshes around his knees. Across his 1920's style sailors hat the words of his so-called 'ship', the remote coral Island of Tuvalu, have faded in the relentless sun that bleaches the tiny spit of land we are standing on. The fourth smallest country after in the world after Vatican City, Monaco and Nauru, and one of the least populated, Tuvalu, a tiny Island halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, is drowning and fast. Today it's 13,000 residents are the most environmentally aware people on earth; their daily lives determined by the tides and the greasy salt water that gathers around their feet every day. As Tuvalu's children skip to school the spray of salt burns their skin; as the local doctor cycles to morning rounds at the island hospital he glides through heavy puddles of sea water; the fishermen, who once hauled their boats out to sea from a pristine beach, now stagger and stumble over rocks to their battered craft. The castaway desert island beaches are gone - replaced by broken stones and dark sinister looking water that shadows the islanders every move. The worst case scenario. In the next decade Tuvalu, like many other islands around the Pacific, could be a distant memory on an out-dated world map. The cap Sailor Keviki is wearing on patrol a museum exhibit behind a glass cabinet, his uniform a star attraction in an ebay auction.
AS THE late autumn sun descends on the Afghan border it brings with it a sudden chill and the early promise of another harsh winter; In the yellowing gloom a young boy, dressed in oily rags, goes from vehicle to vehicle at the crossing point selling single cigarettes to bleary-eyed truck drivers slumbered over their steering wheels, their cargo’s of contraband Chinese electronics and rotten vegetables ground to a halt at the muddy crossing; Another child sells tiny broiled quail, cooked whole. The blackened corpses rested in piles of scorched wings, feet and skulls, their little black eyes sunken in their scorched sockets. Death comes cheaply here in the dark shadows of Central Asia. Earlier in the day, as the first light of dawn had crept over Dushanbe, the bleak Post Soviet capital of Tajikistan, our torturous route from the city to the border had been explained in Russian by our driver, Samir, as he grinned through gold teeth and traced a dirty fingernail across a worn map on the bonnet of his Soviet Era Lada jeep. Written in indiscernible Cyrillic the text offered us little clue to how hard the going would be. The elaborate symbols which adorned it made more immediate sense. They, above all else, brutally referred to the job in hand: Not so much a route but a complex web of impassable glaciers, mule tracks, mountain passes and high altitude. Like the landscape it charted there was no colour in the map, only monotone with no contours and the sketchiest of topography. I could make out the distant Pamir’s and beyond what I assumed to be the epic soaring ranges of the Hindu Kush. The same map is in front of me now, folded inside a copy of the Koran, bookmarking the words of the prophet: “Oh God, protect me and those who travel with me.” We have journeyed into the one of the wildest and most desolate places on earth, shadowing the footsteps of Markhor mountain goats and hardier still, the flourishing army of Opium traffickers responsible for the West’s deepening heroin misery.
FALLING softly into the distant horizon the fading African sun pours through splintered wooden shutters, casting thin strips of light on Basemae Madmbi’s deeply anguished face as she lies motionless on a rusting iron hospital bed in war-torn Eastern Congo. As the warm glow penetrates the room she moves slowly, at first her hands twitch and then, straining out her neck, she attempts to bask in the momentary wonder of the light. Within moments the sensation is gone and she places her head back on the pillow, leaving her once again in the shadows. Basamae tells me later that watching the sunset was once her favourite part of the day, a time when she washed and combed her hair, looking on as the children ran around the village throwing water at each other. The best she can hope for now is the feeling of the setting sun as it passes over her face – it is one of the few joys she has left. Raped by a group of rebel soldiers on the outskirts of her remote village at the height of the Eastern Congolese war six months ago Basemae made the “mistake” of calling out the name of one of her rapists, who she recognized during the attack. Her punishment was savagely brutal but also coldly calculated. Recognised by his victim the soldier took out his knife and gouged out both of Basamae’s eyeballs, later kicking dirt in the hollowed stumps of her face and goading her to identify him. Left to die on the outskirts of her village Basamae was saved only by the intervention of a local priest who carried her to the main road.
A DARK intertwine of deep Green fjords stretches beneath us towards the horizon where the confluence of the glacial current merges with the black stillness of the open sea. Far to the south, where the waves lash Cape Horn's cold granite cliffs, three great oceans: The Pacific, The South Atlantic and The Antarctic meet in a cacophony of restless waters, conflicting winds, turbulent waters and deadly squalls; The stormy heart of the most unpredictable micro-weather system on Earth. “My Patagonia,” in the words of the Chilean Poet, Mario Miranda Soussi, “Is a landscape of infinite water, torn apart by a torrent of love, navigating a single river swollen by miracles.” The verdant terrain we are crossing at five hundred feet above the Patagonian rainforest canopy is no less violent – fern covered jurassic mountains crashing into each other, snarling vegetation suffocating the trees, roaring rivers tossing huge boulders and rocks. Fleetingly we pass over a few small corrugated tin houses, their pillar box red roofs glinting in the late evening sun; Remote dwellings only there, it seems, to show how vast the terrain is; even the mighty Andean Condor, with its three metre wingspan, appears in this landscape no bigger than a humble swallow. The shadow of the plane that carries us is lost on the side of an enormous glacier as, without warning, we begin to lose altitude. As the single prop dips and weaves in the soaring thermals we approach the tree line, cutting the uppermost branches off a soaring 200 year old pine tree, as we hurtle towards the dusty runway. Our pilot is Doug Tompkins, the most controversial American in South America, a multi-millionaire conservationist who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying up a Northern Ireland sized slice of Patagonia, a man who through a series of grand purchase has practically split one of the world’s longest countries in two.
THE RISEN CHRIST died for our sins! We deserve our punishment here on this earth...we deserve to feel pain and sadness,'proclaims the preacher breathlessly. Unrelenting he bangs on the pulpit and waves his fist at the congregation of God-Fearing middle-aged women crouched and penitant on the long palm mat before him. 'He died for us......he died. Amen Lord. Praise be to Jesus.......' As the hoarse rhetoric soars a sudden cloudburst takes everyone by surprise enveloping the lush greenry of the church garden in a celestial looking mist. Behind the altar heavy flumes of rainwater pour from racked plastic gutters directly into a plug socket which cracks and fizzles. As if electrified by the static in the air an elderly woman lunges forward in her fervour, speaking in tongues....ghajababgoooddbakakak.... fainting in the humidity of dusk she is helped to her feet by applause and tears, warmly and roundly congratulated by all for allowing the divine presence of god withing her soul. The drama over for the evening Sera Vakabua clutches her bible and walks out into the rain. Bookmarking Psalm 27:1-3 is a faded photograph of her youngest son, Edward, in his British Army uniform. He is standing in front of a makeshift signpost in English and Arabic saying Mortar Platoon. His 4th Batallion Rifles fatigues stained with sweat but he is smiling in front of one of Saddam Hussein's Palaces. She reads the words to me from memory as we walk to her home: 'When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies attack me they will stumble and fall. Though an army besiege against me my heart will not fear.' This was my son's bible,' Sera says, handing me the old testament for inspection. 'It was at his bedside when he died. He had highlighted Psalm 27 with a pen. I know he read it every night. Like the others my son was terrified. He feared the terrorists more than he feared God himself.'
GOU GIAN HOU places the stained scrap of paper on the scarred wooden school desk of an orphanage in Central China and flattens it out with shaking wrinkled hands. In broad, vertical, Chinese script it says “Hsiao Mieh?” or “Disposed of” He is showing me the death notice of a condemned man. There are two ways The Government executes men and women here in mainland China, he says: “They are either taken to a killing ground, a remote open grave, where a guard points a rifle at the back of their head and asks the prisoner to open their mouth so the bullet can pass out through his mouth. Or they are dragged into an ambulance and “finished” with a cocktail of three drugs: Sodium Thiopental to make the condemned unconscious; Pancuronium Bromide to stop the breathing and lethal Potassium chloride to stop the heart. Lethal injection is becoming more and more common, thats how they kill them now.” As he speaks through my translator Hou reaches out and strokes the thick black hair of six year old Zhaing Sai. Behind him the sound of childrens laughter floats towards us as four other orphans swing happily on a rusting climbing frame. “The certificate belongs to this boy. The name on the paper is his mother. It is all he has left of her and he can’t read. Here in the orphanage there are forty others like him, young girls, adolescent boys, all orphans of execution with parents either dead or on death row. Across China there are tens of thousands more, most or fending for themselves. They are the ones who really suffer from execution.”
THE atmosphere inside the bitterly cold office in the rundown urban outskirts of Sarajevo is awkward and brittle. At first nobody utters a word and then the thick black coffee and cheap Russian cigarettes arrive and the women become manic and talkative. 'This is the database,' says Bakira Plesic, pointing to the clumsily assembled rows of shelves behind her; stacks upon stacks of sky-blue books and folders. Inside the files, she says, are tens of thousands of testimonies of women and girls raped during the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. 'Some of the victims in the logs are as young as 7, others as old as 65,' Bakira, 46, adds with a blank expression. In a corner a student volunteer patiently types the latest testimonies into a bulky desktop computer that has seen better days. On the wall behind her grainy newspaper photographs and crude photocopies of former Serbian soldiers stare out defiantly. 'These men are the Nazi's of our time but are roaming free,' says Bakira, drawing heavily on a cigarette and waving her hand towards the pictures: 'It is our job to find them, nobody else cares' Thirteen years after the civil war in Bosnia ended an estimated 80,000 women, raped and brutalized by soldiers during the fighting, still await justice in the courts. Today many of the victims remain in the same communities as the men who attacked them. Now, as the tiny Balkan nation looks towards taking back responsibility for prosecuting war crimes from an International Court in the Hague, a group of Bosnian rape victims are finally making a stand against their attackers, and, amidst growing frustration with the legal system, hunting their attackers down themselves.
In 2009 an estimated 300 million domestic workers from the world's most impoverished countries are scattered across the globe from Kensington, West London to the wealthy Hamra District of Beirut, serving the rich and supporting a population back home that is at least twice as large. The remittances from this silent army of modern-day slaves provides an estimated $300 billion a year, nearly three times the world's foreign-aid budgets combined, bringing Morocco more money than tourism does, Sri Lanka more money than tea and the Phillipines just under a tenth of its GDP. But behind each hard-earned dollar sent back are tales of abject exploitation and sorrow, sexual abuse, violence and murder. Over the past six months British Foreign Correspondent of the Year Dan McDougall and the award winning Observer photographer, Robin Hammond, have followed the migrants painful journeys from the Phillipines to the Middle East and London, a city which has increasingly come to represent the end of the road - the promised land where their dreams of a better life finally flounder.
NAEMA KHARDES carefully removes her daughter’s photograph from a tattered leather bible as the first light of dawn creeps out of the great desert and through the awnings of the fifth century crypt. As she softly mouths her first prayer of the day shafts of sunlight illuminate particles of dust in the air around her. It is silent but for the clinking sound of a tiny altar bell. In the recesses black-veiled women clutch fat round rosary beads and mutter to themselves, seeking solitude and holy water on their way to work through Cairo’s bustling labyrinthine streets. Naema is lost in thought, clutching a photograph of her daughter, Naegle Adli Azme Attiahk, to her heart. As she does so her first tears of the day drop onto the ancient wooden pew below her chin. “Naegle is gone, lost to me at nineteen,” cries Naema later as we leave the church. “She is forced into Islam, forced to wear a black cloak. She is invisible. She could pass me on the street each evening and I wouldn’t know. Only god knows where my daughter is.” Stuck between a rock and a hard place Egypt's estimated 8 million Coptic Christians are the Middle East's largest non-Muslim minority but are also one of the saddest victims of today's war between the West and Islamic extremists. The epicentre of the campaign against the Christians is the volatile Egyptian South, the heartland of fundamentalist activity and home to the majority of Egypt's Copts. Coptic leaders say the fundamentalists are determined to drive the Copts out of the southern villages, whose emerald green fields they have tilled for centuries. But in the past few years a new target for the fundamentalists has emerged: Hundreds of young women like Naema, born into Egypt’s minority Christian Coptic community, have simply disappeared or left home under mysterious circumstances. Across Cairo and the Nile Valley police and media have reported scores of missing Christian women: Surrounding most disappearances are allegations that the women have been kidnapped by Muslim men and forced to undergo conversion to Islam. A conversion carried out with intimidation violence and rape.
THE musky scent of cheap patchouli rises from a cracked clay incense burner in the tiny courtyard of Shaban Abdulal Zarhel's decrepit mud and brick home. In the corner, next to the scraggly livestock, his wife, clad from head to toe in a sombre black burka, squats on the floor, smearing the deepest indigo dye on her youngest son's forehead. Alongside, her four other children sleep off their relentless morning labour in the fields. By 2pm, after a meagre meal of rice and flatbread, they will return to the boiling heat of the meadows. 'Indigo has been used to ward off harm to male children since early Islam,' my translator, Said, tells me without prompting. 'It is a Bedouin tradition adopted by the Arabs.' Here in the Fayoum oasis, 90km south across the Sahara from Cairo, fear of the evil eye, like locusts and drought, is a constant in people's lives . 'They call the evil eye 'ayn',' Said continues. 'Protecting the boys, the next generation of workers, is the most important thing for these families.' Assembled on the ground next to the family stove are amulets, charms and talismans engraved with Koranic script. Shaban Abdulal's wife is pregnant. They are hoping for another boy. Outside, the couple's eldest son, one of four boys, erects a barricade of tightly woven palm branches, known as tabia, to keep the wind-blown sand out of the family home. We have been with the family since the fi rst light crept out of the great desert and into the cotton fields that surround Zawyat Al Kardsha, the farming community in the oasis that they call home. Looping down from the chaos of the capital and linked by road, Egypt's crescent-shaped chain of five oases – Fayoum, Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla and Kharga – have provided refuge and safety for two millennia. Like hundreds of thousands of other people across the Nile Valley, Shaban Abdulal and his family are bonded to their fields.
“As we indigenous peoples understand it, the earth is a mother and you can't, for the sake of accumulating capital in just a few hands, turn Mother Earth into a commodity.” Evo Morales. Bolivian President.” DARKNESS FALLS across the Andes turning the distant snowcaps from blinding white to nothingness in the blink of an eye. From the East the night races across the bleak Altiplano towards us as the temperature plummets to below zero leaving the windswept plains of the planet's largest salt-plain in a vast cold shadow. Above our heads the sky changes to a hazy and then a deep blue hue, revealing the clearest view of the milky way to be found anywhere on earth; a dreamlike band of crystal light arching gracefully across the entire celestial sphere: Gemini, Orion, Vulpecula, Taurus, Sagittarius. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon on 20th July 1969 one of the first sights they encountered from Space was the wilderness where we stand. As the earth turned they were captured by a vast patch of white across the lower South American continent which they instantly took to be glacial but was in fact Southern Bolivia’s Salar De Uyuni, a little-known desert of cactus, dust, rainwater lagoons and home to ten billion tonnes of salt covering nearly 5,000 square miles. Since then the Salar, which straddles an altitude ranging from 20,000ft at its peaks and ridges to about 12,000ft in the plains, has remained a largely forgotten corner of one of the most remote and inaccessible plateaus in the world; a destination for bewildered travelers heading to the Chilean border the long way from La Paz and intrepid astronomers intent on using the clear night skies above the salt plains to study the mysteries of the galaxy. But all that may be about to change. Energy economists in London, New York and the Middle East predict that this unlikely windblown patch of salt in the Andes, a sea of emptiness with barely 60 tumbledown adobe villages encircling it, could, over the next two decades, become the next Saudi Arabia. Like the Persian Gulf before it in the 1920's the Salar de Uyuni, or more specifically the vast quantities of Lithium beneath its Northern Ireland size salt table, could hold the answer to the future of transport but the fight to secure it could be one of the most defining energy issues of the next decade.