Tag Archives | Poverty

Susan Winters Cook is a former member of Mullica Hill (N.J.) Meeting. From 1981 to 1997 she was a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Daily News. She traveled to South Africa several times between 1988 and 1994 on her own, partially funded by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, to document Quaker development and empowerment activities as a response to apartheid and then during the intense time of transition from apartheid to democracy. She began documenting the HIV/AIDS situation in 1995, then returned to South Africa in 1997 permanently. She started a provincial-based AIDS education periodical Ubomi (Xhosa for "Life") in 1997 out of a realization that "the people who needed the information the most were those most at risk—and that was the rural poor." She writes: "The real tragedy of AIDS in South Africa for me was, having seen what the parents endured and sacrificed to ensure a better future for their children, to discover that many of those young people would not live to accept that gift of freedom."