News stories by Travis Lupick

Deep in the forest in Gbarpolu County, northwest Liberia, a group of men working a surface gold mine are asked what will happen to the land when they are finished with it.

With his gold chain, baseball cap, and baggy denim shorts, Junior Toe wears the uniform of Liberia’s urban youth. Spend just a few minutes with the young man and it is evident that he possesses the street smarts to match the look.

'There were three people. One person was holding me down; one person was holding my hand; and the other person was doing the job. They lay me down, and…' Fatu said of the female genital mutilation she underwent as an eight- year-old in Liberia.

On an elegant veranda adorned with a red carpet, Malawi’s Vice President Joyce Banda recalls how her childhood friend Chrissie Mtokoma was always top of their class and how she struggled to beat her. But now decades later Banda is a likely contender for the country’s presidency in 2014, while Mtokoma lives in poverty.

As Daniel Chakunkha and Mussa Abu talk on the side of a dirt path in Makunje village, Malawi, a steady stream of bicycles loaded with charcoal passes by. The men stand at the halfway mark between Mwanza, a small city in the country’s southwest, and Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial hub.

In Mbedza village, a remote rural community in southern Malawi, Fedson Feston beams an infant’s awkward smile and swings his tiny arms up towards the face of his mother. Four months old, Fedson is too young to know how lucky he is to be alive.

Soot and ash filled the air the day after a fire gutted Malawi’s Blantyre Market. Men and women merchants wore solemn expressions as they shovelled piles of debris from the site on Tuesday.