There are, like, so many farms scattered in that region,
filled with children doing that type of work.
I knew the importance of the picture,
and it's all about taking the risk.
[Music playing]
My name is Salwan Georges,
and I’m a photojournalist with the
[Sirens wailing]
My editors asked me
if I’m interested in documenting the opioid epidemic
that was swiping through the United States
and taking so many lives.
I think it’s an overdose.
We got a call that two people OD’d
outside this bar in Taunton, Massachusetts.
[Music playing]
The gentleman was laying down.
Families were crying, hugging each other,
shouting, “Please save him, please save him.”
This was a fentanyl overdose, I believe.
That scene was so heavy
that I had to, at some point, just put my camera down
and just hope that this person makes it.
[Music playing]
Thankfully, at the end of this night,
he was awake and on his way to the hospital to recover.
I was able to [catch] up later with him,
and he’s doing OK now.
His mom writes me from time to time.
[Music playing]
Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than the regular heroin.
Unfortunately, a lot of times, people don’t make it back from it.
[Music playing]
We were undercover
watching this gentleman going from car to car selling drugs.
When the detectives decided to move in,
this person swallowed the bag of fentanyl
because they were scared to get caught.
The detectives were able to kind of pull it out of his mouth.
It was a white bag, full.
So that’s, like, will definitely kill this person.
They just must have chewed through the bag or something
and, within half an hour, OD’d.
It was during sunset,
as you can see the light shining through
between all the paramedics working.
And then, within 10 minutes, this person woke up.
They were like, “Hello, you know, you have OD’d.”
Welcome back, basically.
I’ve never seen anything like that where the drug dealer ODs.
[Music playing]
I spent time on Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia.
It’s a heavily trafficked open-air drug market.
One of the people was Gutierrez,
and Gutierrez was setting up to shoot fentanyl.
[Music playing]
I approached him because he was wearing a Detroit Pistons hat,
and being from Detroit,
it was an easy way for me to introduce myself.
He was telling us all these stories about his friends who OD'd.
I was saying, “Do you mind if I hang around and take some photos?”
And he was totally cool with it.
We just watched him break the pill,
heat it up, fill the needle,
and then he just shot it in his hands.
After that, he got up and walked away.
So it just seems like a very routine thing.
It’s like he’s going to get a flu shot, basically.
Basically, as you drive down Kensington Avenue,
you see a bunch of people just going either through withdrawal
or just very high.
And it’s just a very sad scene to see.
[Music playing]
In 2019,
we went undercover to Ivory Coast
to expose some of the chocolate companies
that still use child slavery and child laborers.
A lot of those leading chocolate companies
like Mars, Nestlé, and Hershey
pledged to trace the source of the chocolate
to make sure no children were harmed harvesting the cocoa.
According to our reporting,
they still couldn’t do it after 20 years.
[Music playing]
We spoke to these children,
who told us that literally they were smuggled in buses
and were forced to kind of live in these areas
and have a master that will barely pay them,
make them work in really, really harsh conditions
to collect cocoa.
And you can see the sadness on these children.
They should be at school.
That’s what they told me.
They shouldn’t be doing this hard work
and giving up their dreams.
It’s not easy to find these children,
and it’s extremely dangerous
because the government doesn’t want you to see this.
[Music playing]
At the border of Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast,
these buses come in the middle of the night, nonstop.
As you can see here, these kids,
they’re probably, like, 15, 14 years old.
Some of them were crying.
Those buses kept coming every night.
There are, like, so many farms scattered in that region,
filled with children doing that type of work.
I knew the importance of the picture.
I knew I really needed to show what’s going on.
And it’s all about taking the risk,
so I jumped to the middle of the street,
I grabbed the photo, and I left.
It’s not a thrill or anything.
It's more about showing the truth.
[Music playing]
One of the people I was able to photograph
and hear their story was Abou.
He was 15.
Abou told me, “Please take my picture.”
“Please show my face.”
“I want my family back in Burkina Faso
to see who I am and what I do now.”
It was a really sad thing to hear from a kid.
To this day, I think about it.
These children harvest a lot of the cocoa that we eat,
and they just ...
they don’t even know what chocolate tastes like.
[Music playing]
don’t even know what chocolate tastes like.
So I was getting ready to go to Afghanistan for work.
I got a call from my editor asking me to reroute to Ukraine.
At that time, we're afraid that Russia will invade any time.
[Explosive bang]
[Music playing]
This was the funeral of a 24-year-old Ukrainian soldier.
This was his mother, sister, and some relatives, grandma here.
The war is kind of personal for me.
I kind of grew up in a similar situation.
As I was photographing, I was thinking of
all the family members I lost in the war in Iraq.
It was really difficult for me to capture this moment
and continue documenting it.
But I knew I had a job to do.
I knew I had to get myself together.
[Music playing]
It was completely darkness.
I saw this man just placing his hand on the window saying goodbye.
This was Georgiy saying goodbye to his wife, Maya,
who, along with the children, are leaving.
This train was heading to Lviv.
From there, they hoped to cross into Poland
and then make their way to Germany.
This whole scene unfolded in front of me.
Georgiy and his wife, Maya, kept kissing,
holding hands through the window,
their children crying in the back.
I felt something really, really heavy.
I was like, “I feel like I’ve witnessed this before.”
“I’ve felt this before.”
And I think it’s because it triggered another memory of mine
as how my dad said goodbye to me and my mom,
put us in a bus heading to Jordan in the late ’90s,
as he had to stay, and he was not allowed to leave.
It was technically difficult to photograph
because it was completely darkness.
But when you start shooting with your heart,
all these things become invisible.
And all I had to do was just witness this thing
that tells the story of a lot of goodbyes,
a lot of final goodbyes.
This is the price of the war,
of any war.
[Music playing]
Photojournalism, to me, is more of a mission.
There’s nothing else I would rather do
than just tell people’s stories
to make any type of impact on their life for the better.
Everybody has a story.
All you have to do is just spend time with them.