A blind man at the window of a bus in the bustling city of Djibouti.

A health worker administers a polio vaccine in the town of Gof Guddud, in the Baidoa region of Somalia.

A 16-year-old OvaHimba woman cradles her infant in the remote homestead of Otjekwa, Namibia. Driven from their original home near the Namibia-Botswana border by cattle raiders in the mid-19th century, the semi-nomadic OvaHimba migrated to Angola. After World War I, they resettled in a dry, mountainous region near Namibia's Skeleton Coast. The name OvaHimba means "beggars" in an Angolan dialect.

Western and Egyptian traditions blend at a wedding at the Le Méridien Pyramids resort in Giza.

Brassieres for sale at a bazaar in N'Djamena, Chad.

Balancing a tub of fresh-caught fish on her head, a woman in Tanji, Gambia, wades ashore after meeting the village boats at dawn. Women in Tanji haul the loaded tubs - which can weigh up to 100 pounds - back to the beach, where the fish sell for around five U.S. dollars each.

The Gurunsi people in Burkina Faso are known for their elaborately decorated houses. At the annual art and culture festival in Tiebélé, a communal event that shapes social and spiritual life, a family group of Gurunsi women create a geometric mural. During the competition, painters take a break to dance, sing, and bump.

Using weights made from automobile parts, young Angolan men work out in Kuito, a battered town that is rebuilding after decades of civil war.

A priest outside the massive Grand Mosquée complex in Mali's medieval city of Djénné. The largest mud-brick building in the world, the mosque is reinforced with a sturdy network of internal timbers. Built in 1905, it was modeled on a mosque first erected on the site in the 11th century. Every year, after the rainy season, much of the population helps repair and resurface the mud walls.

The Christian cemetery in Banjul, island capital of Gambia on the west coast of Africa. Bound by the Atlantic Ocean and the 700-mile-long Gambia River, Banjul lies just a few feet above sea level. The tide has gradually eroded the shoreline cemetery, washing many grave sites out to sea.

Men gather in a palm grove near the former French Foreign Legion post of Tenirhir in Morocco. They are visiting for a three-day festival and livestock market honoring the Sufi saint Hadj Amar.

Toiling over large, dust-spewing grinders, workers in the Eritrean capital of Asmara make shiro, a food staple manufactured from chickpeas. The legumes are processed into a powdery, protein-rich flour traditionally boiled, spiced and mixed with butter or oil.

A barbershop in Lambaréné, Gabon.

Patients in Maweni recover from eye surgery to correct trachoma-related blindness. Preventing the spread of the disease "is quite a challenge," acknowledges Peter Kilimam, the International Trachoma Initiative's representative in Tanzania. "It is hard," he says, "for people in rural villages to understand the connection between a mild eye disease in children and the blindness of their mothers."

Amid the tobacco fields of Mtunthama, in the heart of the Malawi bush, pupils pursue rigorous studies in science, technology, Latin, and Greek at the elite Kamuzu Academy. The so-called "Eton of Africa," Kamuzu is modeled after the best English private schools. Many students are children of high-ranking government officials.

A young Touaregh boy from near Ghadames, an oasis town in Libya.

In the vast Kejetia Market in Kumasi, Ghana, women pick their way past an assembly line where shoes are crafted from old automobile tires. Sprawling across 25 dusty acres in the ancient Ashanti capital, Kejetia is one of the largest marketplaces in West Africa.

The pyramids and the Sphinx at Giza, swathed in the pink light of dawn.

In the Perinatal HIV Unit at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, health workers test an infant whose mother has been diagnosed HIV positive. Mother-to-child HIV transmission is a huge problem in South Africa. A single dose of the AIDS drug nevirapine given to a mother in labor - and her newborn - can cut the risk of HIV transmission in half, but as of 2002, it was often not available to poor mothers.

A religious ceremony in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea.

Livestock are herded into smoke to keep the mosquitoes away in the Lake Chad region of Chad.

The massive Oshodi Market in Lagos, Nigeria, is a sea of buyers and sellers trading a vast variety of goods and services. Every day, up to 4 million people pass through the area, located at the congested crossroads of several bus and rail lines in the Nigerian capital, one of the most populous cities on Earth.

A solitary baobab tree spreads its branches above a field near the Senegalese towns of Joal and Fadiout. The national symbol of Senegal, baobab trees often mark burial sites.

An elegant islander visits his son's general store on São Tomé, the former Portuguese island colony in the Gulf of Guinea.

A father walks his daughter to school in Kuito, Angola. All students in the town bring their own small benches to class.

Early morning on Côte d'Ivoire's Atlantic shore.

In the high plains town of Soatanana on the island of Madagascar, pious residents dress only in white as a sign of purity. Residents greet visitors by washing their feet in a biblical ritual of welcome.

The glaciered peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania.

A cart full of empty oil drums is transported down a hill in Matadi, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

An army of community volunteers sweeps through a neighborhood in Khayelitsha, a vast South African township of nearly 2 million people that sprawls across the sandy flats near Cape Town. Khayelitsha was created in the 1980s to permit "controlled squatting" by rural blacks who migrated to the Cape Province in record numbers.

Monkey comes first on the streets of Lomé, Togo.

In their new home in suburban Johannesburg, Reuben and Sylvia Mamorare enjoy breakfast with sons, Modise and Matsebe. The Mamorares both work for Eskom, southern Africa's electrical utility.

A settlement of the !Kung San people in Otjozondjupa, Namibia, in southwestern Africa.

Cafés are popular gathering spots for young Eritreans in Asmara, a cosmopolitan city left relatively unscathed by 30 years of bloody war with neighboring Ethiopia. Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia in 1993. Despite some renewed conflict in the late 1990s, Eritreans have since been rebuilding their nation and savoring its colonial Italian charms.

Mahou villagers in Douelala, western Côte d'Ivoire, gather at a Muslim funeral for Diamond Soualid, 39, who died after falling from a palm tree while harvesting palm nuts. During the ceremony, men and women mourn separately. Soualid's body lies in the community's only casket, reused for every village funeral.

In bomb-blasted Hargeysa - a breakaway territory in northern Somalia - the fighting has stopped, but recovery comes slowly after 14 years of civil war.

Seven-year-old Tamba Mussa greets his mother for the first time in two years. Kidnapped and used as a child soldier by rebel forces in Sierra Leone, Tamba was taken back to his village by workers of the International Rescue Committee from Sierra Leone's Kono district. "His mother was so happy, she was dancing," said photographer Lambertson. "She didn't believe it could possibly be true."

In the old city of Marrakech in northern Africa, the 12th-century Koutoubia Mosque towers over throngs of traders and tourists in the Djemaa el-Fna market.

Men on a dock in the east African port city of Djibouti. The vibrant city-state on the continent's eastern edge is a sweltering crossroads and gritty gateway to the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

AIDS patient Rosinah Motshegwa, 29, with her caregiver, in Khutsong, South Africa.

Surrounded by stacks of aish - the Arabic word for both "humanity" and "bread" - a baker breaks for a smoke in Mena, an Egyptian village near the great pyramids. One of the world's most ancient forms of bread, aish has been baked in Egypt for at least 1,500 years.

In the morning calm before hundreds of students arrive, a teacher in the village of Sanguere-Ngal, Cameroon, prepares the day's lessons. Children attend classes in six dilapidated buildings nearby. Every Friday, students carry all the desks outside and sweep the dirt floors.

In Kampala, Uganda, a bicycle taxi saves soles on the muddy streets near Owino Market.

Six-year-old Kazungu Kautingu stretches in the kitchen doorway of her home in Kelongwa, Zambia. Kazungu's father, David, though not a trained physician, runs a clinic that provides medical care for 4,000 local residents.

In South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province, rangers test a cape buffalo for bovine tuberculosis. The deadly infection spreads swiftly to other species, particularly lions, which prey on the buffalo. Rangers inject each animal in the reserve with a powerful narcotic, then hold its head upright to prevent choking while a veterinarian takes a blood sample and injects an antidote. The buffalo is back on its feet in a few minutes.

Hundreds of passengers disembark to stretch their legs when their Congo River barge reaches Maluku, the last stop before Congolese capital, Kinshasa. With few passable roads in the region, many people travel on barges - without shelter for as long as a month, crowded together with their belongings, livestock, furniture and wares for sale.

For the many adopted children of Kenya's famed distance runner Kip Keino, school is a quick walk down the road from his Baraka ("Blessing") farm. Keino and his wife, Phyllis, have adopted more than 100 orphaned and abandoned children in the past 30 years and opened the school for grades one through eight.

An aircraft buzzes high above the roaring cascades of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.

People walk along a ridge in the sensuous sand dunes of the Namib Desert in Namibia.

A cattle herder drives his kuri longhorns to the Chari River in southwestern Chad. The kuri with their distinctive lyre-shape horns are native to the Lake Chad region and prized as dairy cattle.

Thirty-two-year-old Godfrey Malama is gently bathed by his wife, Cecile, in the Mother of Mercy Hospice for end-stage AIDS patients in Chilanga, Zambia.

Mateus Chitangenda, Fernando Chitala and Enoke Chisingi and their families have been displaced by war to the town of Kunhinga, in central Angola.

In the mountains of central Sudan, near the village of Gidel, Nuba children gaze across the granite range where their people have been isolated by decades of civil war.