#womenslives

Nadja Cristina Gomes Bezerra, 42, and her daughter Alice Vitoria Gomes Bezerra, 4 months old. #HerPlanet

Across Women’s Lives photographer @annestoltebailey spent some time last week at the Fundação Altino Ventura rehabilitation clinic in Recife, Brazil, where she met and took portraits of the families coping with microcephaly as they waited for their babies to be seen by a physical therapist. For the full photo essay please head over to www.pri.org/herplanet.

This is part of a co-production with @frontlinepbs, amplifying Brazil’s #zikastories.

#Brazil #Brasil #womenslives #portrait (at Recife, Brazil)

Good morning! To kick off our #HerPlanet series, today we are hosting an Instagram takeover with a #RiodeJaneiro based environmental activist. Natalia, 21, is an environmental studies student at UniRio, and a volunteer at @greenpeacebrasil specializing in water activism and the #NovaVidaSolar solar panel installation project. Today she will take us along to a homeless shelter just outside of Rio, where she and other volunteers will be teaching youth about sustainability and how to install solar panels at their facility. Follow along and let us know if you have any questions for Natalia! (at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

If it hadn’t been for an unfamiliar variety of sweet potato, 27-year-old Beatrice Otieno would likely be giving birth to her third at home. That home is a mud brick shack. It’s hot inside, and the coolest spot is the dirt floor. It’s not where a child is going to have the best chances of success on his first day in the . But the orange flesh sweet potato will very likely change that baby’s fortunes. It’s already turned around Beatrice’s life.

Not long ago, she heard that if she went to the for pre-natal visits, she would receive coupons for orange flesh sweet potato vines to plant in her yard. She bit.

The coupon would entitle her to the plants at a subsidized cost. They would supplement her and her family’s diet, and anything they had left over she could sell. Learn more about PATH’s sweet potato initiative at pri.org/womenslives. #owningit #womenslives

“Slowly we seem to be picking up this, I would say ‘disease’ from the West about body image that is thrust upon you if you are a woman entertainer or an artist in particular. You are expected to dress up to invoke a sexual desire, to seduce the male. And you are expected to fit the dimensions that somebody else has set in terms of standards of beauty and perfection. I don’t wear the heels, I don’t starve myself, I don’t seem to have the standard dimensions that are expected out of me. I love dressing up. I like looking pretty, I don’t want to go around with armpit hair hanging out. But even until about a decade ago in India, women in entertainment who went on stage did not have so much pressure. We had our own ideas about what is beautiful. It included a lot of curves and a big fat bum, and it was all OK. But now we want to fit into this generic idea of what looks beautiful.”