One of the most exciting parts of our work is traveling to visit our partners, getting to see for ourselves the amazing work that they are doing in the face of tremendous obstacles. We tried to give some impression of what our recent trips to Palestine and Haiti were like here on Grassroots Journal, and now we are happy to be able to share two new photo essays.

The photos in Gardens in the Shadow of the Wall: Pictures from Palestine show how our partners, The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees, are fighting to protect their rights to produce their own food and to keep working their traditional lands in the face of continued illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory and of the Wall, a so-called security fence that snakes through the hills, separating Palestinian villages from their farmlands.

In The Water of Life: Photos from Haiti, we see the efforts of the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP) to protect the fragile watersheds of the Central Plateau and to find clean water sources for local communities. The contrast between the vast stretches of parched, tree-less hills and the re-forested, irrigated fields of the MPP’s cooperatives is striking.