Kevin Carter Died on JuLy 27[my birthday]

Visiting Sudan, a little-known photographer took a picture that made the world weep. What happened afterward is a tragedy of another sort. ...



This photo was taken by Kevin Carter on March 1,1993 who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994.
The picture depicts a famine stricken child crawling towards the United Nations food camp, which is located a kilometer away! The Vulture(which we all know, is a scavenger) is just waiting for the Sudanese girl to die and be eaten by it. No one knew what happened to the child, including Kevin Carter who just LEFT! after taking the picture. This shot shocked the whole world and three months later, Kevin died due to depression.

As I was scanning the pictures I had, I remembered one of the photo which Pastor Chris showed us during the Christ Emphasis Week in High School. The picture above is absolutely one of the little things that give me sorrow and questions. Its so sad to think, that the situation in the picture does not only happen once, but many times and here I am, just writing about what I feel when in fact many children (right now) are suffering. How I wish I was Kevin, I could have extended help to the little girl or maybe gave her food.I read about Kevin Carter's death and he died on the day I was celebrating my 3rd birthday.=(

Sept. 13, 1960-July 27, 1994

Two months after receiving his Pulitzer, Carter would be dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning in Johannesburg, a suicide at 33. His red pickup truck was parked near a small river where he used to play as a child; a green garden hose attached to the vehicle's exhaust funneled the fumes inside. "I'm really, really sorry," he explained in a note left on the passenger seat beneath a knapsack. "The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist."

How could a man who had moved so many people with his work end up a suicide so soon after his great triumph?

DEPRESSION.On the morning of Wednesday, July 27, the last day of his life, Carter appeared cheerful.At around 9 p.m., Kevin Carter backed his red Nissan pickup truck against a blue gum tree at the Field and Study Center. He had played there often as a little boy. The Sandton Bird Club was having its monthly meeting there, but nobody saw Carter as he used silver gaffer tape to attach a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and run it to the passenger-side window. Wearing unwashed Lee jeans and an Esquire T shirt, he got in and switched on the engine. Then he put music on his Walkman and lay over on his side, using the knapsack as a pillow.The suicide note he left behind is a litany of nightmares and dark visions, a clutching attempt at autobiography, self-analysis, explanation, excuse. After coming home from New York, he wrote, he was "depressed . . . without phone . . . money for rent . . . money for child support . . . money for debts . . . money!!! . . . I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners . . . " And then this: "I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."

credit:http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/kevin_carter/sudan_child.htm