After the green talk at the Copenhagen summit, Kenya open again the discussion with a big investment policy in renewable energy which will take the country to be a referential not only for the African continent but also for the rest of the world.

African pioneer in the “green power”, since 1956 Kenya discovered in the Rift Valley the potential of the geothermal energy (today estimated to be 7000 MW) with the realization of the first two wells in the Olkaria volcanic site which today are producing 115 MW and designated to become 400 MW in the next years.

It’s 4.5 billion US$ the ten years plan investment put in place by KenGen for the construction of wind plants, solar-thermal plants (which is a new innovative technology) and for the expansion of the geothermal energy, which is going to determine an increase of the energy production from 1000 MW to 3000 MW before 2018 and up to 9000 MW before 2030.

Are of course ambitious goals that want to be reached, especially for a country with an electrification rate of 18% and which is called for important changes in political stability and in a fight against corruption.

I spite of this problems, there are already many countries that are already involved in this energy policy and not only economically. First in the list is Spain (which with an investment of 20 million Euro gained the exclusive for the construction of wind plants in the south of Nairobi), Belgium, France, Germany, China, Japan and informally also Philippines.

Text Mariangela Latella

Zucchero, Bruno Vespa, Leone di Lernia, Giorgio Napolitano and Bacio Perugina are only few of the 500 beach boys of Malindi. Guys between 20 and 30 years old, that to find an alternative to unpaid jobs they sell excursions, souvenirs and plenty of dreams.

For the hotels managers are a problem because they disturb with insistent proposes the clients and because they are a competition with the services offered by the resorts. Instead, for their families, are resources to escape from the poorness.

The most skilled (no more than a dozen) are able to gain till 800 Euro per month (around 80.000 KSh). It is a big amount of money, considering that 10.000 KSh is the average of the salaries of local employees, employed in the resorts.

The rules of the beach are made by the “mayor”, means the highest in a hierarchy invented by them. To become a mayor it’s indispensable to get at least 300 clients per year.

There is an estimation that the 20 local agencies based in Malindi have a turn over of almost 2 million of Euro per year even if the earnings for each beach boy (around 30% of commission) doesn’t reach 2000 Euro per season.

Text Mariangela Latella

-Featured in GEO Italy with the story Forgotten Italians.

-Published on 7.7 Documentary Photography Digital Magazine with “Forgotten Italians”

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-Belarus Free Theatre Exhibition, “VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival 2009″ Modena, October, 9/17 - 2009. Photos by Alessandro Vincenzi/Posse Photographers. Curated by Marta Posani and Beatrice Mancini. Video edited by Beatrice Mancini.

-Published in Witness Journal 25 with “The Transgender World”

-Belarus, “Belarus Free Theater” from 9th to 17th of October at Foro Boario Modena, Italy VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival

During the night between the 14^th and 15^th of January 1968, a violent earthquake of 6,4 Richter scale, hit a huge area of west Sicily including the provinces of Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento.

Even if the biggest part of the municipalities like Gibellina and Salaparuta have been completely destroyed, Poggioreale after 41 years still preserve the whole city system, a vast majority of the houses, churches and public buildings. The center of the city, identified like elimo, was founded in 1642 and apparently populated since the antiquity; on the nearby Monte Castellazzo, traces of indigenous dated IV century a. C have been founded.

Walking among the ruins of Poggioreale, between streets and alleys, courtyards and squares, it’s easy to come across with people that appear and disappear, just like ghosts, that walks around ruins in a village still impregnated of life. Of this people you can only imagine the happiness of a too faraway memory that mixed up with the reality of the present, the sadness and the feeling of abandonment that this people had to endure.

A wound still present in the inhabitants of Poggioreale, an open wound that could be found between the ruins where is still perfectly decipherable the city interlacing among houses and courtyards, alleys and streets, churches and noble palaces and the precious theatre. Rests perfectly readable, reason why they open a gash even more painful in the history of Poggioreale.

The tragedy of the earthquake it continues with the poor living conditions in which the population is oblige to live for 14 years. They lived in shacks, which sanitary conditions were simply too far from the actable, cold and humid during winter, extremely hot during summer, being the shacks made out of tin. Some of the people manage to emigrate in other parts of Italy or abroad, but for most of them there wasn’t any other choice than to wait for the construction of the New Town. This was happening while the State distributed money to over 120 municipalities, even though if there were no more than fifteen municipalities hit by the earthquake.

When the construction of the New Town ended up, the inhabitants of Poggioreale founded themselves in front of a town badly designed and even worse constructed. Over dimensioned if we think that it has been thought for five thousand people, when there were no more than two thousand people left after 14 years. It is a town where the squares (so big as ugly) are empty as well as the streets and the biggest part of the houses. Many project have been made and systematically finished and abandoned; sports centres, the system of the squares and pedestrians bridges, a theatre ended in 1991 end never used.

Different architects thinks that the New Town of Poggioreale have been thought in a different architectonic system that was too far from the autochthon life style “Rebuild a town in the Trapani province thinking about a Danish quarter, it is obviously lacking in the culture and the history of the place. Poggioreale is an example of this choice”.

Today, after 41 years, Poggioreale is a twin town: the oldest one that is dying under the wearing out of the time and the disinterestedness of the administrations, the youngest one that was born in coma and it doesn’t look likes that is waking up.

Although it’s not a Sicilian word, in Palermo exists a job that is passed on from father to son since almost a century. Are the “Cenciaioli”, people with a low income, some with problems with the justice, that are trying to reconstruct their life looking for sustainability in the garbage while offering a free service to the city and the citizen to earn an average of 30 Euro per day.

Are ecological workers that remove from the streets all those materials, in some case also dangerous, that we don’t need anymore, garbage that for us are annoyances, but for them a matter of survival.

It’s a job that have been considered illegal, even under everybody’s eyes; the garbage is property of the municipality, therefore removing stairs, bed nets, broken washing machines, paper and everything that could be sold from the streets, it’s considered as “stealing” from AMIA (Agency responsible for the collection of garbage).

In 2004 they tried to regulate their activities, opening the VAT account, adapting their mean of transport to the security rules and some organizing themselves in the cooperative APAS, that was in title to do differentiate collection door to door besides the routine collection of recyclable materials from the streets of Palermo.

In January 2009 it looks like that the Prefect gave the police the order to block the “Cenciaioli” activities, starting with the firsts impoundments of means of transport and arrests. Because of this decision the “Cenciaioli” started with protests that had the objective of getting back the permission of work.

Today, during a garbage emergency and while Palermo is exploding of rubbish, the municipality insists in forbidding this free service to the citizen and to the city, forbidding moreover to the platforms that collect recyclable materials, to receive collected materials from the “Cenciaioli”.

A paradox that it primes a mechanism that resend to the street without a job the “Cenciaioli”, removing precious material from the platforms (every day an equivalent of 48.000 Euro of recyclable material end it up in the Bellolampo rubbish dump) and permitting that the amount of garbage in the street s of Palermo increase.

-PkPosse Photographers at Open Wound Festival of Photojournalism 21-22-23 of August 2009 in Imperia, Italy