bob miller // photographer. visual journalist. 

MULTIMEDIA

STAY AWAKE

Of all the options I weighed for how to spend my last January of college, this wasn’t one of them. “You are not God’s children!” a woman yelled at me from the back of a speeding van. She stretched her body out over the dusty pavement and flung her voice at me with a cupped palm. “We kill the press!” I stood in the middle of Africa’s largest slum with three journalists at my side and a Nikon around my neck. I should have taken a class. Instead, I flew 19 hours and landed in the middle of an international news story, lugging cameras and an audio recorder. It was Kenya’s worst political crisis in years, and two days into my journey I was running. Nairobi’s first rioters were throwing stones at me, chasing me from dirt roads, and I was ducking behind buildings clicking a camera shutter. From an unfinished concrete balcony I had watched the first smoke rising, and now, a day later, I stood under the same smoke clouds wondering how I had gotten myself into all of this. It would be months before the smoke would finally settle over Nairobi, and even longer before I could settle with my memory of it.

Watch this video: http://vimeo.com/1869464