Liz Loh-Taylor: Recently Added Galleries and Collections

Portfolio

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Blog pics

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Jood, 11yo, Tel Al Hawa, Gaza City

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Jood was part of my Dreaming Big with Cameras workshop in Egypt. At just 11 years old, she carried the quiet depth of an old soul—one who had already seen far too much for someone so young.

In this video, Jood shares her story—of life before and during the war. It’s a reflection on displacement, fear, loss… and a glimmer of hope.

Alongside her words, we’re showcasing some of her photography—images that reflect the quiet tension of suppressed emotions. Through her lens, Jood captured not just what was visible, but what was felt: traces of resilience, fleeting moments of comfort, and the unspoken weight carried by those around her.

What we do

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Dreaming Big With Cameras began not as a grand initiative, but as a quiet hope—that a child, armed with a simple camera, could reclaim the right to dream. To laugh out loud. To see their world—and themselves—differently.

Since 2007, I’ve travelled with 10 to 20 compact cameras tucked in my bags, partnering with local NGOs, grassroots charities, and schools. Together, we’ve run informal photography workshops for children who’ve lived through war, poverty, displacement, and silence.You might ask—why photography? Aren’t there more urgent needs? I’ve asked myself that too.

But here’s what I’ve seen again and again: when a child is given a tool to tell their own story, something shifts. Photography becomes more than a creative outlet—it becomes a declaration of self. A child who may struggle to find food, or carry the weight of their family’s survival, is suddenly invited to see the world through a new lens. And to imagine that they belong in it.

This project isn’t about cameras. It’s about confidence, curiosity, and reclaiming joy. It’s about hope. About giving children the chance to be children—if only for a moment—and to carry that spark forward.

Since its first days in Zambia, Dreaming Big With Cameras has travelled to Tanzania, Namibia, Mexico, and India. And with your help, it will reach many more.

I still stay in touch with many of the children and organisations from those early days. Their stories continue—evolving, growing, thriving. And that, more than anything, is why this work continues.Because one small moment of joy… can ripple for years.

Other DNU

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Cameroon Sahel: Edge of Fear: Where Tears Turn to Darkness

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Boko Haram and Colonial Borders - The Strangulation of Cameroon's Far North
Logone-et-Chari, Cameroon–Nigeria frontier

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

Along the dust‑blown frontier of Logone‑et‑Chari, Boko Haram rides cheap motorbikes across a border Britain and France sketched in 1919, a line too porous for security yet lethal to the people it slices apart. Villages endure raids that begin as ochre clouds, end in torch‑black ruin.

A woman survived seven years in an underground “gift” pit; Tongushi, sixty, fled with a grandchild through thorns while flames devoured her home; ten year old Garba hoes onions where eight sisters once slept; Mohammed cried himself blind after finding his family butchered. These stories haunt settlements already living on half‑rations.

The same cartographic vandalism that crippled trade now fuels militant commerce. Guns in, girls out, cattle rustled both ways. Until tarmac, clinics and classrooms replace potholes and plate armour, insurgency will remain a symptom, not the disease. The dust keeps rising; it falls on the same forgotten villages, casualties of a war they never declared and a boundary they never chose.

Ethiopia: Borders that Bleed

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Ethiopia’s Interlocking Wars

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

On an atlas Ethiopia is tidy; on the ground its borders ooze grief. Addis tries to douse Tigray only for Benishangul‑Gumuz to reignite, and vice versa.

A decade after I first came to photograph families hollowed by HIV, I boarded an Addis airport bus. A stranger in a scarlet tracksuit cracked a joke across the aisle, and the coach erupted in that effortless Ethiopian warmth that once kept orphans alive. Yet the route north is now sealed. The ENDF and Tigray Defence Force trade fire while Eritrean troops linger and Western Tigray stays under Amhara control; the Pretoria pact is, at best, a cease‑fire riddled with loopholes.

To the south‑west, Metekel smoulders. Fano militias and Gumuz insurgents clash over gold seams, dam land and ancestral soil. More than 600,000 people have already fled. Agaritu Beleta, four years in a tent stitched from UN tarpaulin, told me, “We used to help others, now we have nothing.” Her cousin is cornered in Tigray by soldiers who never signed any deal.

Aid crawls in; clinics run on expired formula. A doctor feeding a skeletal toddler whispered, “Help her now, don’t wait for the world to feel sorry.” Camera shutters can’t double as IV drips.

Walking the Mirage

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Between Flood and Furnace
Danakil Depression & Afar, Ethiopia

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

In Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression, one of the hottest places on Earth, families endure a brutal convergence of climate disaster and man-made crisis. Between Flood and Furnace captures life on a knife-edge: floods have uprooted tens of thousands, while drought scorches the land, decimating livestock and deepening hunger.

This series follows communities navigating mirages of hope, rebuilding after each loss, walking miles for vanishing water, and surviving amid shifting conflict lines. Through searing heat and floodwaters, their resilience holds. The crisis may feel distant, but it is entirely man-made, and dangerously close.

The Land That Became a Lake

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>South Sudan's Floodplain: When Water Refuses to Recede
Unity & Jonlei States, 2024

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

Relentless floods have transformed Unity and northern Jonglei into a landscape of stranded islands and submerged livelihoods. Three years of back to back La Niña rains, dam surges from Uganda, and a flat, bottlenecked river system have turned homes into lagoons and farmland into water fields.

This series documents life where the floodwater never left. Communities now survive on water-lilies, schools have become boat sheds, and reaching a clinic often means wading chest-deep. Rising fuel costs, a collapsed pipeline, and an influx of 600,000 displaced people from Sudan have pushed local systems past breaking point.

With no clear drainage plan and adaptation funds largely undelivered, South Sudan’s floodplain exists in a state of permanent emergency: drenched, dispossessed, and waiting.

Sudan's Kashmir

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>A Frontier Suspended
Abyei, 2024
This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

Caught between Sudan and South Sudan, Abyei is a land claimed by both yet governed by neither. In this suspended no-man’s-land, only the UN flag flies. Its peacekeepers managing a fragile, uneasy calm under the shadow of oil, mines, and unresolved borders.

A Frontier Suspended documents life in a territory where maps blur and time stalls. Minefields line the villages, oil revenues fund political deadlock, and seasonal floods carry explosives into children's paths. Here, people farm, marry, mourn, and survive on contested soil, waiting for a referendum, recognition, or simply the next dry season.

Abyei’s story is not one of progress or peace, but of endurance in the face of indefinite limbo.

Shatila

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Between Exile and Echo
Shatila Refugee Cap, Lebanon

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

Between Exile and Echo traces the layered lives of Palestinian refugees in Beirut’s Shatila camp - where exile, resistance, and memory are woven into every narrow alley.

Established after the 1948 Nakba, Shatila was meant to be temporary. Seventy-seven years later, it stands as a vertical maze of makeshift homes and inherited statelessness. Residents, including newer waves of Syrian refugees, are locked out of most professions and property rights, living under layers of bureaucracy, surveillance, and historical trauma.

This work, first captured in 2010 and revisited in 2024, chronicles life amid concrete and memory, where power cuts define the day, massacre anniversaries shape the past, and laughter survives through chipped teacups and footballs kicked between balconies. In Shatila, even hospitality is resistance. And humour, an act of endurance.

Eritrea | Ethiopia: "Hinguguay Beliuwa Ilomni"

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>The Hinguguay Devours an Entire Generation
Eritrea-Ethiopia Border, 2009-2010

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

In the highlands along the Eritrea–Ethiopia border, a silent catastrophe unfolded. The Hinguguay Devours an Entire Generation documents the forgotten fallout of HIV/AIDS in a region already fractured by colonial borders and decades of war.

Here, the virus left villages without parents, only children and the elderly remained. Grandparents too frail to stand cradled infants. Ten year olds became heads of households. With no guardians, these children vanished from official records, left without protection, education, or basic rights.

Through haunting images and field reportage, this work reveals how poverty, stigma, and indifference created a perfect storm. The “hinguguay”, a folkloric monster once used to scare children, became real, swallowing a generation while the world looked away.

This series is a testimony to those children still holding together the remnants of broken families, and a call not to let another crisis devour the voiceless in silence.

Democratic Republic of Congo: Tides of Terror

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Survival on Lake Kivu’s Frontlines
Lake Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

On the volatile shores of Lake Kivu, survival is an act of defiance. Tides of Terror documents the lives of Congolese fishermen and villagers caught between hunger and armed conflict, where each night on the water could be their last.

The threat extends beyond the lake. Armed groups like M23, backed by Rwanda and entangled with Western interests, terrorise communities with rape, displacement, and brutality. Women live in fear of gang rape, often begging for contraception to avoid pregnancies born of violence. The trauma doesn’t end with the act; it continues in exile, stigma, and silence.

Among the chaos, mercenaries from Wagner Group appear near humanitarian outposts, exposing the unsettling overlap between aid and militarisation.

This series lays bare a frontline where geopolitical games manifest as human suffering and where ordinary people fight to hold on to life, dignity, and hope

Democratic Republic of Congo: The River of Colonial Divide

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>A Legacy of Defiance and Resilience
Democratic Republic of Congo

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

This series traces the brutal imprint of Belgian colonialism in Congo, a regime marked by severed limbs, racial hierarchies, and spatial segregation. Generations still carry the memory of ancestors mutilated for resisting forced labour, of a people divided by language, privilege, and geography.

Yet even as colonisers ruled from one side of the Congo River, the river itself resisted. Its vast, untameable flow became a symbol of defiance, one that colonial power could never master.

Today, that spirit endures. The barges that traverse the river between Kisangani and Kinshasa are floating testaments to Congolese resilience, brimming with trade, life, and self-sufficiency. Against a legacy of domination, the people of Congo have built a culture that moves forward with pride, power, and purpose.

Democratic Republic of Congo: Beneath the Judgement

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Cobalt, Livelihoods and Survival

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

This is not a story about villains and victims. It is a story about survival. Beneath the Judgment confronts the brutal realities of cobalt mining in the DRC, where families carve out a living from the earth, often with bare hands and no protection. Artisanal mines, condemned by international observers, are in fact a last resort for communities with no other economic lifeline. They are dangerous, unregulated, and essential.

In contrast, commercial mining operations, mostly foreign-owned, sprawl across the land like industrial fortresses. These walled cities import their own labour, extract vast wealth, and leave devastation in their wake. In one village, toxic runoff from a nearby mine poisons water, soil, and bodies. Children are being born with abnormalities. Families are falling ill. And still, there is no alternative.

This project does not offer easy answers. It captures the impossible choices people must make to stay alive. It calls for justice, but not the kind that erases the poor under the guise of ethics. If mining ends tomorrow, so do thousands of lives. Until there is something else to live on, this is the Catch-22 the world continues to ignore.

Cameroon: When Rivers Become Raiders

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Cameroon's Other Invasion:
Far-North Cameroon, 2023

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

In northern Cameroon, floods now outlast headlines and wars. Entire towns remain submerged for months, even years, forcing families to fish where they once farmed. Displacement camps house tens of thousands, living in tents never meant to survive multiple rainy seasons. Yet many seasons later, families are still stuck in these very tents.

Lives have been reset to zero. Homes, livelihoods, and futures washed away by a climate no longer bound to seasons. Amid insurgent violence, people now face a slower, relentless assault: water that never recedes.

While the government denies the scale of collapse, locals trade soaked memories for survival, stitching tarps, selling plastic sacks, and delivering babies behind plastic sheeting. They wait. Not for the rain to stop, but for the world to care.

Borders Drawn in Chalk

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Cameroon's Colonial Fault-Line Erupt into a Twenty First Century Battleground

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

Cameroon’s bloodiest fault line is a colonial artefact. After Germany’s defeat in 1918, the League of Nations split “Kamerun” into a French‑ruled core and a thin British crescent. Independence brought an uneasy 1961 federation, later scrapped, leaving Anglophones in the Northwest and Southwest under a centralised French‑speaking state. By 2016 protests over French‑only courts and curricula ignited an armed push for an independent “Ambazonia”.

Today that chalk border dictates who lives or bleeds. Villages burn, plantation labourers lose limbs, and schools are torched as rebels and soldiers force civilians to prove loyalty through the language they speak. Hospitals are war‑zone checkpoints; paperwork, once a colonial control tool, is destroyed to erase futures. The crisis is not merely “separatist” but the still‑open ledger of British–French partition. Without genuine federal autonomy that honours the 1961 pact, Cameroon’s Anglophone regions will remain a 21st‑century battleground drawn by strangers a century ago.

Barter of the Future

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>When Tradition Meets the Bulldozer

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

Indigenous peoples from Ethiopia’s Omo Valley to Namibia’s Kalahari and the Amazon’s Yaguar once lived in seamless rhythm with their lands. Today their territories are sliced by fences, monocrops, missionary outposts and corporate titles, a fresh chapter of colonialism lubricated by global capitalism and evangelism. Body markings, rites of passage and centuries‑old ecological knowledge face erasure; those who resist are labelled “primitive”, those who comply receive processed food and imported faith, trading autonomy for diabetes and dependency. Reservations become open‑air museums, cultural identity rebranded as sin. My work documents this tension, not to romanticise but to witness and archive what breathes before it is paved. Culture can evolve; it must never be bulldozed.

Afghanistan: A Year After the Fall

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Between Fear and Survival

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

Arriving in Kabul on New Year’s Day, I was trapped in the airport by a bomb blast, an ominous prelude to a country a year into Taliban rule. International headlines fixate on sweeping bans: women barred from NGOs, girls kept from school, decrees that drove aid agencies out. On the ground the picture is messier. Many Afghan women still work, some openly, others from home. Meanwhile nearly everyone agrees corruption has fallen since the previous government’s collapse.

Markets illustrate the contradiction: hijabs and burqas mingle with uncovered hair; conversation is candid yet cautious. Families describe livelihoods wiped out, not only by Taliban edicts but by sanctions and the NGO exodus. A once‑thriving dairy cooperative is gutted, guesthouses stand nearly empty, Kabul freezes under rationed electricity. Women are chased from public parks; children wash car windows to eat; bread stalls can’t sell their naan.

Yet resilience persists. Hazara sisters sew intricate embroidery in unheated rooms, mothers patch garments for sale, and night‑long conversations reveal a populace stitching life together despite fear. Afghanistan is not collapsed. It is bruised, caught between Taliban authoritarianism, Western withdrawal, and an indomitable will to survive.

Afghanistan: A Land Withhering

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Afghanistan’s Rural Collapse—At a Glance

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

Once‑green mountains outside Jalalabad now stand bald and brittle. Plastic pipes dribble what little water remains down to villages where streams have shrunk to thin veins, wiping out the medicinal plants and pasture that sustained local life. Travelling with FAO, I found Taliban escorts as stunned as the elders: climate change has turned once‑lush slopes into dust.

Across three provinces the pattern repeats. Wetlands in Sheendan Walibik are cracked earth; droughts that villagers say began only in the past 10–30 years now starve livestock and hollow out settlements. In Gula Ram the poppy ban, meant to curb crippling addiction, has removed the last cash crop from isolated farmers, leaving them with a stark choice: stay and starve or flee empty‑handed.

The economic unravelling is ruthless. A Jalalabad dairy cooperative that once sold 7,000 litres a day to government and NGOs now manages barely 2,000 after contracts and electricity vanished. Over 1,500 member families, 113 of them women‑headed, are selling off their cows to fund perilous journeys abroad, often returning with no money and no livestock left.

Deforestation in Elyaskhail has stripped hillsides, driving wildlife away and swinging villages between flash floods and relentless drought. Afghanistan’s countryside is being crushed by a three‑way vise: climate disaster, political isolation, and economic free‑fall. Each blow compounding the next, leaving communities fighting an unforgiving, cumulative collapse.

When the Indus Spoke Truth

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Where Floods Spoke Louder than the Fear
Sindh, Pakistan 2011

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

In the wake of suspicion and stereotypes, Where Floods Spoke Louder than the Fear documents the human face of catastrophe during Pakistan’s 2011 monsoon floods. As five million people were affected and homes drowned beneath the swollen Indus, what emerged was not extremism, but extraordinary resilience.

From submerged farmlands to makeshift cricket games and madrasa classrooms doubling as shelters, this series captures the quiet dignity of communities surviving with nothing, yet still offering chai to strangers.

Beneath the floodwaters, propaganda dissolved. What remained was humanity: misunderstood, misrepresented, and deeply resilient.

Lebanon | Israel War: Ghost Cities, Living Graves

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>How War Devours Life in Lebanon
Lebanon, November-December 2024

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

In Lebanon’s mountains, coasts, and border towns, war does not simply kill, it hollows out lives, spirits, and futures. How War Devours Life in Lebanon is a first-hand account of survival amid Israeli airstrikes that have targeted homes, schools, medics, and the dead alike.

This series follows ordinary people - fishermen, mothers, artists, refugees -forced into extraordinary resilience. Children flinch at drones, recite prayers under rubble, and lose the language of play. Displacement is constant; safety, an illusion. In towns like Nabatieh and Tyre, war criminalises existence itself: fishing, farming, even walking by the sea.

And yet, defiance endures. Barbers open shops. Mothers walk the waterfront. Coffee carts roll out each morning. Every act of normalcy is a quiet protest against erasure.

This work bears witness to a people who do not just survive war. They resist it with every breath.

Brazil: Cities of the Unfreed

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Where the Walls Remember
Salvador Bahia, 2010

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

A gutted cocoa factory in Salvador, once the jewel of Portugal’s plantation empire, had become a living citadel of Afro‑Brazilian resistance. Dozens of families carved rooms from concrete husks, children sprinting past rust and rats while women cooked over open flames. Every laugh echoed through machinery that once ground their ancestors’ labour into European profit. When Brazil’s World Cup facelift arrived, bulldozers wiped the settlement away, proof that modern “progress” still speaks the language of colonial extraction. My negatives hold the afterimage: a boy grinning over a scavenged sweet, a stitched‑up man guarding his doorway, eyes that refused to flinch. This was no slum; it was an unrecognised society, a monument to survival inside capitalism’s abandoned shell, erased in bricks, indelible in memory.

Afghanistan: A Land Withering

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Afghanistan’s Rural Collapse Under Climate and Regime Change

In the mountains outside Jalalabad, I found myself climbing dry, broken slopes alongside village elders. Once, they told me, these mountains had been lush with vegetation, alive with traditional medicines and plants. Today, they stood bare and brittle. Water, once abundant, now barely trickled through plastic pipes snaking down to the villages — a desperate lifeline rigged together as the rains abandoned them.

I was travelling with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), visiting rural communities struggling to survive the twin blows of climate change and Afghanistan's political upheaval. A convoy of young Taliban foot soldiers escorted me, scouring the mountains and wetlands. They watched, curious but silent, their weapons hanging loosely as they too seemed to absorb the harsh new reality unfolding across their land.

In the village of Gula Ram, the story was the same. Where mountain streams had once gushed, now only thin veins of water ran through makeshift tubing, barely enough for drinking and washing. Entire ecosystems had collapsed. Without water, traditional medicines had disappeared. The mountains were no longer green. Life was retreating.

Further south in Sheendan Walibik, I walked across what should have been a thriving wetland — but it was a wasteland. Once, the rainy season would have brought thick grass to feed livestock. Now, for most of the year, the land lay cracked and barren, the bones of the earth exposed. Livestock starved. Villages shrank. It wasn’t always this way. Villagers told me the droughts only became severe in the last 10 to 30 years — a blink of an eye in a place that had endured for centuries.

And yet it wasn't only the climate tightening its grip. Regime change had torn open old wounds too.

In one village, former poppy farmers spoke bitterly of their loss. After taking power, the Taliban banned poppy farming outright — a move heavily criticised by Western voices who pointed to poppies’ crucial role in producing medical opiates. But speaking to locals who weren't farmers, a different truth emerged: an epidemic of addiction had hollowed out entire communities. Now, with poppies banned, farmers in remote areas with little access to healthcare or education faced a brutal choice — stay and starve, or flee with nothing.

In another corner of Jalalabad province, I met families once tied to a thriving dairy cooperative. The cooperative had once been the economic heart of the area — supplying milk to the republican government, the military, universities, and NGOs. It had sustained over 1,500 members, including 113 women. Today, it struggles to survive. With the Taliban’s takeover, contracts evaporated. Electricity became unreliable. Production plummeted from 7,000 litres a day to just 2,000. Families, desperate, began selling their cows — often to fund the dangerous journeys of sons sent overseas in search of work. Many never made it, returning home to a life even bleaker than before — no cows, no money, and no future to speak of.

In Elyaskhail, a village once alive with forests and wildlife, the land had been stripped bare. Deer and wolves had long since migrated. Trees were cut down for firewood, either to sell or to survive the brutal winters. Once-fertile fields now looked like abandoned battlegrounds. Some areas were prone to catastrophic floods; others to relentless droughts.

It seemed, in Afghanistan’s broken countryside, that nature had turned against them all. The villages I visited were fighting a losing battle, caught in a chokehold of climate disaster, political isolation, and economic collapse.

It wasn’t simply drought or Taliban rule that was hollowing out these communities. It was everything, all at once — relentless, cumulative, and unforgiving.

SM_South Sudan

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Democratic Republic of Congo (Eastern borders and Mining), Personal Project

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Pakistan Floods, UNWFP

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Ethiopia/Eritrea, AIDS Orphans Rising

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Ethiopia Conflict, UNOCHA

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Afghanistan, UNOCHA, FAO, Personal

(Liz Loh-Taylor) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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