Originally shared on Instagram on December 13, 2025. Photography and story by Mark Middleton.
This photograph changed the direction of my life.
I made it just outside Nairobi, in Kibera—one of the largest informal settlements in the world. Being there was overwhelming in ways I still struggle to put into words. The density, the humanity, the resilience… and the hardship. I watched people collect drinking water from places where, only yards away, others had no choice but to use the same source as a toilet. It wasn’t abstract. It was immediate. It was real.
This image shows a young boy standing on top of a pile of garbage inside the vast sprawl of Kibera. I remember the moment clearly. I remember the silence I felt behind the noise. I remember knowing, even then, that this wasn’t just another photograph—it was something that would stay with me.
Years later, after I returned home and after life had moved on, I was looking through my archive one day. When I came across this frame again, it stopped me cold. All of the memories rushed back, but so did a sense of responsibility. This image reminded me of the most basic injustice on Earth: that access to clean water—something so simple, so foundational—is still out of reach for millions of people.
Not long after that, I became involved in Rotary International. And when people ask me why Rotary matters so much to me, this photograph is part of the answer. It represents the moment when travel stopped being just about seeing the world and started being about serving it. About doing something tangible. About helping communities gain access to clean water, dignity, and opportunity.
I still look at this photo today with grief. And gratitude. Grief that so many people live this way through no fault of their own. Gratitude for the life I was born into by sheer accident of geography. And motivation—to keep doing what I can, alongside others, to leave this world better than we found it.
Some photographs are memories.
Some are stories.
This one became a calling.
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