
Child Mortality in La Guajira, Colombia
In La Guajira, Colombia, clean water shortages have fueled a surge of health complications among the region's indigenous Wayuu communities. Well water is testing dangerously high in salinity. Physicians are reporting outbreaks of adverse skin conditions resulting from bathing in stagnant, bacteria-infected ponds. Stream and river water is polluted with waste from nearby coalmine El Cerrejón. Contaminated water sources are causing severe and often fatal intestinal infections i

Coffee farmers battle rust, debt and market challenges
Colombia's smallest-scale coffee farmers are struggling to keep up. Jairo Martinez and his family were forced to flee their land and abandon their crops in 1996, as violence between left-wing guerilla and right-wing paramilitary forces escalated in his mountain village, La Secreta. Paramilitaries executed close family members and burned his house to the ground. He returned as soon as the region settled, only to confront new challenges. La Roya- an aggressive coffee fungus- w

Displaced by armed conflict on the plains, a cowboy makes a new life in the mountains.
Camarita is a 64 year-old cowboy from 'El Llano', the grasslands of southeasetern Colombia. in 2007 guerilla rebels murdered his son, threatened his life, and forced him to flee his cattle ranch. He now runs a little bbq shack called 'Camarita's', high in the lush coastal mountains of northern Colombia. He started selling smoked sausages from under a tarp on the side of the road. The fragrant, slow-smoking techniques he learned as a boy on the plains quickly attracted passin