The Most Glaring Disparity On Earth

Concepts like inequality and disparity of resources are so often rendered with statistics that it’s easy to forget what they look like in real life. Photographer Andrea Bruce, a former war photographer, got an assignment from National Geographic that enabled her to compile a stark reminder. She traveled to Haiti, Vietnam, and India, the latter of which has more than half the 950 million people in the world who have no choice but to engage in “open defecation.” India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi currently is in the midst of an ambitious $40 billion program to see the practice ended by a year from this October, which would be Gandhi’s 150th birthday, but that goal is unlikely to be met, according to the photographer. Vietnam is said to have made dramatic progress, while Haiti, in part because it never received sufficient aid to recover from the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, appears to be stuck. This portfolio includes an unforgettable photo of a Haitian man, just returned from the pits, whom the photographer describes as one of her “super-heroes.”