TAJIKISTAN:
Navruz, meaning "new day", is a spring festival rooted in the Zoroastrian tradition, celebrated across Central Asia for at least 2,500 years. Held on 21st March, around the time of the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere when the number of daylight and night time hours are equal, the day symbolises balance and marks the new year, when the powers of light overcome the powers of darkness.
I joined in Navruz celebrations in the village of Pista Mazor, close to the Afghan border of Tajikistan. The 21st was a day filled with feasting, music, dancing, shared by the whole village. This was followed by a 13 day holiday, given over to visiting family, forgiving debts, spring cleaning, dressing in bright colours, sewing seeds, collecting the new seasons herbs and cooking special Navruz dishes with them...

HAITI:
Haiti has the highest HIV/Aids rate outside Africa, but efforts at prevention and treatment are hamstrung by fear and superstition. Many believe it treatable only by voodoo priests and the armed gangs that rule the slums. With journalist Veronique Mistiaen, I followed a group of courageous women in the capital, Port-au-Prince, who dare to reveal their HIV status and to reach out to those who dare not.

JOYCE:
This is portrait of one woman, Joyce Mbwilo, in her village in rural Tanzania. There is no crisis here: no war, no famine, just everyday people doing everyday things, living in poverty with a lot of humour and resilience. This is also the story of how communities in the developing world are affected by the way we live here. Climate change in Joyce's village, Uhambingeto, has meant half the maize crop has failed each year for the past four years; the country's debt means insufficient funds to subsidise secondary education. Yet Uhambingeto also benefits from our actions: with the initial round of debt relief in 2000, the government made primary education free and compulsory: all the children in Joyce's village now go to school. And with support from the NGO Tearfund, Joyce no longer walks ten hours a night to collect water: the water is pumped to the village centre.

HOLOCAUST:
There were several orchestras at Auschwitz during the camp's occupation made up entirely of inmates. They were forced to play for the pleasure of the SS officers and as an accompaniment to executions. Music was, in Primo Levis words, the perceptible expression of the camp's madness. In December 2004 I photographed the making of a music memorial film at Auschwitz: a tribute to the victims of the genocide and a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. Leading international and local musicians played and were recorded in Auschwitz for the first time since the camp was operational. "Music is an abomination in the wrong hands," said director James Kent, "but I think it can now purify itself by returning to Auschwitz and be a sort of requiem to the dead".

DARFUR:
Since February 2003, 1.8 million people are estimated to have fled from their homes in Darfur, a region of West Sudan the size of France. This mass displacement, targeting African tribes throughout the region, has been engineered through joint attacks by the government, bombing from the air, and by the Janjaweed, a local Arab militia who follow on horseback, burning and looting the villages. The stories told by people now living in camps vary little: everyone has lost almost everything. Their resilience in responding to the crisis that they have been hurled into struck me even more than the extent of the loss they have experienced.

ETHIOPIA:
I was caught off-guard by the stillness and quiet when I walked into this day centre for old people in Addis Ababa. In near silence, a dozen women moved around a table, filling hundreds of cups with sweet tea for the old people who sat just emerging from darkness in the large room behind. They were playing cards, sifting stones from lentils or waiting for their meal to be served. There were men wearing the same uniforms they'd worn decades before, as soldiers under Haile Selassies regime, old priests in their robes, a former tailor in his patched-up suit...

GUINNEA BISSAU:
It costs $3 to make a landmine, $1,000 to remove one. In Guinea Bissau, a tiny country on the West African coast, they're everywhere: the legacy of a twelve year struggle for independence followed by civil war in 1999. I visited the country with novelist Jonathan Coe.

TEEN BOYS:
Interviews with teenaged boys for the Guardian Magazine.

MONTSERRAT:
Tucked away in a Benedictine monastery in the Catalonian mountains, a boys choir has sung its respects to the Lady of Montserrat for 800 years...

MAASAI:
The Maasai have been herding cattle across the great plains of Tanzania for generations, their nomadic lifestyle helping to preserve the wildlife of East Africa. Now, they are being forcibly evicted so that tour operators can turn their homelands into vast "nature refuges" for wealthy holiday makers.