Gardens of Healing

In a world so different from my own, I tried to capture still moments of daily care, revealing how nature and strength can shape the healing process and coexist alongside human struggle.

This project was born from my visit to the hospital in Waliso, a small town of the Oromia region in Ethiopia, where I was granted access to every part of the facility (except of surgeries) and invited to observe the quiet rhythm of daily care for two days. From the moment I stepped inside the hospital, I felt comforting sense of soothing relief, despite the nature of where I was.

Although I had permission, I decided to turn my lens away from patients faces to honor their privacy and focused on stillness between them - soft gestures, the play of light and details that revealed the delicacy of life within the hospital walls.

While the differences from the European standards are evident, the similarities are familiar: people are facing same struggles, caring for their loved ones and seeking recovery. The air in Waliso hospital was filled with unique aroma of spices and traditional buna coffee mingling with papaya and banana trees. Hospital corridors and wards were intertwined with carefully kept gardens and flowers - symbols of vitality and new life. It was nothing comparing to a typical hospital that smells sterile and cold with a faint note of disinfectant and medical supplies. In Waliso, these natural elements live side by side with illness and sorrow while offering a quiet reminder of steady persistence of life. I spoke with doctors in the hospital and they told me that nature itself - the scent of flowers, the closeness of gardens and sunlight - can sometimes help patients recover faster than any prescription. It's fascinating how medicine takes on such different shapes depending on where you are in the world: in some places it depends on drugs and machines, in others it's more on the steady comfort of the natural world. I left Waliso with a deep sense of gratitude, aware of the privilege of seeing how nature, care and small daily rituals come together to shape the delicate yet enduring process of healing.

I would like to dedicate this work to the extraordinary doctors, hospital staff and patients of Waliso, with heartfelt thanks for welcoming me into their world. All photos were shot on medium-format film using an analog camera.