The best pupil in the class

In Chinese schools can a good study result become a ticket to a schoolarship for poor children. The pupils are highly motivated and everybody want to be the best pupil in the class. The girl in the middle is the best pupil in the third grade at the school in Shang Ya Men. She is very proud over the Student Representative badge that she wears as a reward for being the best pupil.

Text and photo: Mikael Good

Education breaks poverty

Zhang is a shy 10-year old girl who goes to school in the village Chuyi Pu in southern China. Zhang lost both her parents when she was five and she lives with her grandmother in a small ramshackle house, without water or electricity.

Her grandmother's economy is bad and she couldn't afford to pay the school fee. She could start school thanks to financial aid from a Swedish NGO. Zhang is a talented and highly motivated student which you can see on the scarf she proudly wears around her neck. The scarfs are handed out by the headmaster of the school to students who have studied and behaved well. 



Nearly 12 years has gone since I met Zhang and her grandmother. She was highly motivated when she was 10 and if she kept that motivation I belive that Zhang has been able to break out of poverty and create a better future for herself.

Text and Photo: Mikael Good

People in a Chinese village

Most people in the village had not seen a white man before, and many gathered around me to have a look. They now know that white men are big, have long hair, beard and laughs and smile alot.

Text and Photo: Mikael Good

The first child that was born in Tufanu

The man in the picture belong to the Rudari minority in Romania. His mother and father had been given land to live on in a remote area in the country by the communist regime in the late 1940s. He was the first boy who was born in the newly founded village Tufanu. After the Romanian revolution in late 1989 most of the old documents from the communist era wasn't valid anymore and the vast majority of the houses in the area was considered to be illegal settlements.

Text and Photo: Mikael Good

A Hungry Latvian Boy

Arvids just sat on a chair in his old worn sweater and big trousers and looked straight ahead when I met him. He tried to think about something else than his stomach that was aching of hunger. He lived with his unemployed mother and his four siblings in a apartment on the Latvian countryside. His mother got some money from the social service but they didn't cover the expenses. Therefor she couldn't afford more than two simple meals a day to feed her children, and they often had to go to bed on a empty stomach.

I visited the family when I followed two Latvian AID-workers that handed out a Christmas parcel to the family. Arvids and his older sisters opened the parcel and their faces turned from sorrow to happiness when they unpacked the parcel that was bristling with food and healthcare products. Arvids literally shined with his whole body when he held up a bag of macaroni and showed it to his mother and said:
- Mummy please, can we have macaroni for lunch?

Text and Photo: Mikael Good

Greetings from Latvia - Sveicieni no Latvijas!

What would you do if your neighbours could not afford to pay their rent, their food and their clothes. Would you just ignore them and pretend as if they were not there? Or would you help them so they came back on their feets again? Latvia is a neighbour to Sweden and they are short of everything. And yet few Swedes cares about their Latvian neighbours situation...

Latvia is the country in the European Union that suffered hardest by the economic crisis that hit Europe in 2008. The previously so Optimistic Latvian Tiger Economy which was pumped up by the major Swedish banks aggressive lending lost its bite and the country went into a deep recession and workplace after workplace went into bankruptcy. According to official statistics nearly 20 percent of the population became unemployed during the crisis but unofficial sources are talking about an unemployment rate of almost 40 percent. In some rural areas in the east of Latvia the unemployment went up to almost 100 percent according to social workers in the area.

The Latvian family in the slide-show consist of a mother, her three children and their grand mother. The father of the family drowned in a fishing accident a couple of years ago. The family live in a dilapidated barn-like house in a little village on the Latvian countryside east of the capital Riga. They have no running water. The only heat comes from the wood stove which is located in the living room in the small apartment. Their economic situation are strained and they live on the margin. Even if the family didn't borrow any money from the banks they had like so many other poor families to pay the bill for other Latvians life in abundance on borrowed money that they couldn't pay back. The Latvian government had to cut every cost in order to prevent a national bankruptcy. During the economic crisis the situation on the Lativan countryside was directly comparable with the situation in the U.S during the great depression of the 30s.

The Latvian economy are slowly getting better and better. But the price for a better economy was very high. Many highly educated Latvians has moved abroad for better paid jobs. And this brain-drain can prove to be devastating for the country in a nearby future. The population in Latvia is declining rapidly and this is a serious social and economical problem for Latvia. In the 2000s the country has lost one seventh of its population through emigration and a negative birthrate. According to Centrālā statistikas pārvalde (CSP) 1.997 500 million people live in Latvia today. But some unofficial sources says that only 1,8 million people live in the country. In 1989 just two years before Latvia gained it's independence from the Soviet Union, the population in the country was 2,7 million people. There are no jobs, no hope and no future on the Latvian countryside and those who can move to a slightly better future in bigger cities in Latvia or abroad. Those who remain, are the elderly, the disabled and those who for various reasons do not have a chance to move.

If you want to support Latvian families in need you can make a donation. If you are a EU citizen you can make your donation via the NGO Heart to Heart and if you are a US citizen via the NGO Star of Hope




Text and photo: © Mikael Good. All Rights Reserved.