23°, Far from Paradise

23° of latitude separate the Equator from the Northern tropic. These latitudes are home to beaches, palms, vacation resorts, idyllic paradise — and poverty. This is where the sun bares countless dark and desperate lives. This is where the unfortunate location of birth often condemns people to a life of struggle in an unforgiving land, beset with drought and flood, famine and tempest. (click to read more)

A kite made of sticks and a plastic bag flies over a Cap Haitien, Haiti slum with the innocence and hope of the boy who made it from matierials he found in the garbage.
For thousands, the same river near Jacmel, Haiti that washes away their crops during a storm, provides them with the only place to wash clothes and bathe.
Many earthquake victims fled Port-au-Prince for Haiti's second-largest and already overcrowded city, Cap Haitien. With good land at a premium, many displaced families live along the garbage-strewn shore of a river in Cap Haitien, which also doubles as a bathroom. Yet, a mother's hope for a better future for her children is unflagging. This family later moved into a new concrete block home in a community of 200 houses built by Food For The Poor. Half the families were earthquake victims.
Beleaguered and aimless, earthquake survivors wander through a tent camp in Port-au-Prince a week after the earthquake.
Parched villagers outside San Pedro Sula, Honduras, use an ingenious system to gather water from a narrow well. Access to clean drinking water is a daily struggle for more than 800 million people worldwide.
Looking for a cheap thrill and an escape from a hot afternoon, children jump off a highway bridge that crosses over their flood-prone slum in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
During a rare break from work and worries, a young girl in Georgetown, Guyana swings dreamily in a hammock on the porch of her family's shack, where their most valuable possession is tied.
In a scene that mimics a bygone era in the developed world, a family farms in the Dominican Republic with hard labor and the sweat of their brows to eak out a meager existence from the rocky earth.
Carrying a bag full of hope - donated goods from an international charity - a Guatemalan farmer walks through his corn fields hoping that the weather will provide a good harvest.
A team of men and women march along a ridge on their way to plant some of the 25,000 trees donated by Food For The Poor in Mahotière, Haiti on May 1, 2010. May 1st is Haiti's Labor Day. To celebrate, on Saturday May 1, 2010, Food For The Poor donated more than 25,000 trees to be planted in Mahotière, Haiti, a farm community in the mountains high above Port-au-Prince, where deforestation, soil erosion and hunger are prevalent. About 1,500 local people participated in a highly organized planting of the trees on the steep slopes surrounding a Food For The Poor village. The organization has built new homes there in the past year, with more currently under construction, totaling 40 homes. The participants all received boots, sneakers and a cooked lunch. Cows and donkeys were also distributed to parts of the community.
A trio of girls anxiously waits in line for food at a relief agency distribution near Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
A boy plays near an abandoned factory near Cap Haitien, Haiti. Decades of political instability have driven industry and foreign investment out of Haiti.
After four tropical storms destroyed their crops, the subsistence farmers of Baie D'Orange wander through the mountain mist hoping for aid to arrive. However, that aid is already too late for 40 people who died of malnutrition in late 2008. The lives of the poor in the tropics are governed by geography and weather, drought and flash flood, oppressive heat and oppressive poverty. The landscape that tourists may think of as idyllic paradise in clean, safe resorts can just as easily turn into a deadly tempest in a mud and stick home clinging precariously to a steep hillside. Caught between the forces of nature and economics, the poor summon an inner strength culled from faith and hope to eke out an existence and still dream of living in the paradise that surrounds them.
Hopeful for tomorrow, men repair their nets after a day of fruitless fishing while others play soccer in a coastal village in northern Haiti.
The shadows of poverty - represented here by a clothes line and barren trees - entwine with the sunbaked earth at a family's shack in Honduras.
Children play on the single bed that an entire family must share in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
A Honduran hospital ward is full of children with opportunistic infections, often leading to respiratory problems, which is common among children with poor diets or chronic malnutrition.
A long scar, evidence of the dangers of poverty, is left after a boy accidentally drank acid from a bottle he found in a garbage dump next to his house in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
The bodies of a mother and child are brought by wheelbarrow for burial at a cemetery in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti after the earthquake.
On the year anniversary of the devastating Haiti earthquake, women pray at the ruined Port-au-Prince cathedral for their loved ones who perished in the disaster as well as for those who were spared.
Lying below the irony of a Superman movie poster, a young girl with a heart problem can barely sit up, struggling to survive in her family's shack near Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. The family can’t afford treatment for her heart condition.
A baby cries after his daily bath in a river along the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
A billboard advertising baby products stands in stark contrast to what was once a middle class neighborhood of Port-auPrince.
Looters pick their way through unstable debris as they salvage anything they can find inside the ruins of the Roman Catholic Notre Dame Cathedral in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
With at least 50,000 earthquake victims living on what was once a golf course at a private country club, Delmas 40B is one of the largest tent cities in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Feeding programs, which were always important to the poor, have become even more valued since the earthquake. This one feeds about 200 children daily at a school in Cap Haitian, where many earthquake victims migrated.
Near the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a family doles out by the spoonful the meager pot of corn they must share, never knowing from where their next meal will come.
Workers in a garbage dump in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala wait to hear about a planned vocational training center that would teach them to do something other than earn a living by sifting through refuse for food and recyclables.
Cite Soleil, or "Sun City," is Port-au-Prince, Haiti's largest slum, where hundreds of thousands of people are crammed into a warren of shacks in a flood-prone tidal marsh.
Despite the fetid swamp environment of a Cap Haitien slum, a child still finds moments of simply joy and laughter.
Children play and bathe in a river near Georgetown, Guyana. In a country where 90 percent of the population lives within several miles of the coast, much of life revolves around water. Children, whether rich or poor, find comfort and joy in water.
In the weeks after the quake, Haitians turn - as they always do - to prayer and faith as the catalyst for their healing.
Haitian resilience and the desperate reality of poverty coexist within feet of each other at a food distribution point in Leogane.
A silted river snakes through the Haitian landscape, another victim of the rampant deforestation, which threatens the environment and its people.
Symbolic of Haiti's past and current crises, a coffin maker has been busy in the mountain village of Baie D'Orange, Haiti, where 40 people died of malnutrition in late 2008 after four tropical storms destroyed their crops.
With a fresh start in life, neighbors chat in front of their new homes donated by the charity Food For The Poor in rural Domincan Republic.