Noel Rojo

Migration is not only about people crossing borders. An inseparable part of this phenomenon includes the women and children who remain in their home countries after their husbands, fathers, or sons have left. What about them? What do their everyday lives look like—from Mexico to Senegal, Ethiopia, India, all the way to Romania and Slovakia? And what kind of lives do they lead in the face of the global challenges that forced their men to leave? These are the questions explored in the book Women Who Stay by Slovak reporter Magdaléna Rojo. This is a book about migration. But perhaps it’s more about motherhood? Or about childhood without fathers? About life without husbands? About growing old without children? All those anonymous people on the move have human faces and stories. These are stories that unfold behind the back of the wider world. Slovak reporter Magdaléna Rojo approaches this global issue from the other side—from the countries where the problem begins, and through the lens of the women who stayed. With her, we journey to Mexico, Senegal, Ethiopia, India, as well as Romania and Slovakia. In all of these places live families who send off their loved ones on longer or shorter journeys to secure a dignified living. And in all of these places, women and children remain behind to continue living their lives. Magdaléna Rojo was curious to learn how they live—and so she decided to collect these stories. The result is her intimate collection of reports titled Women Who Stay. Magdaléna Rojo approaches her protagonists with the sensitivity of an anthropologist and the patience of a reporter who aims to show the entire universe in a drop of water. She reveals the daily lives of families, where worries and uncertainty, even tension, visibly surface. The world may be full of color, but the reasons for migration are more or less the same. And so are the images that reflect the impact migration has on families: unfinished houses, increasingly unfamiliar male faces on smartphone screens, and often, the daily baking of bread that is always the same—whether it’s called chapati, tortilla, or injera. The original photographs in Women Who Stay were created by documentary photographer Noel Rojo.