Christophe Smets

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‘The normal should be darkness’: why one Belgian national park is turning off ‘pointless’ streetlights

^{Jacques Monty dismantles a street lamp. He says his job until now has always been about maintaining lighting. Photograph: Christophe Smets/The Guardian}

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How an annual ‘wedding flight’ of 1,000 virgin queens is ensuring the revival of Europe’s dark bee

^{Hubert Guerriat, a biologist and beekeeper, founded the South Hainaut beekeeping school in 1983. Photograph: Christophe Smets/The Guardian}

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Exposition Cordons : rencontre avec des mamans monoparentales qui reprennent le pouvoir sur leur vie

^{Photographe: Christophe Smets}

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‘I cried, I cried. I had no one’: the brutal child kidnappings that shamed Belgian Congo

^{Monique showing old family photographs to the writer Jennifer Rankin.
Photograph: Christophe Smets/The Observer}

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Smoked monkey and whole sharks: the suitcase smugglers feeding Europe’s hunger for bushmeat

^{Customs officers examine a passenger’s luggage at Brussels airport
Photograph: Christophe Smets/The Guardian}

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More flowers, fewer cars: the rewilders turning parking spaces into parks

^{Leen Schelfhout’s Citizen Garden is one of four in Brussels.
Photograph: Christophe Smets/The Guardian}

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Female genital mutilation opponents – in pictures

^{Aissatou Drame is the head of AMSR-Africa (Association pour la Maternité Sans Risque) in Senegal, a vast network of volunteers campaigning for safe pregnancies. These women, often community leaders, do not work from an office, opting instead to visit girls at home and travel wherever they are needed. Many organise local discussion groups on FGM. ‘We need to talk to couples, to mothers, to grandmothers, and explain to them why they mustn’t keep cutting young girls. Men, too, are implicated,” Drame says. ‘We encourage them to talk about how they feel when their wife is cut.’
Photograph: Christophe Smets/La Boite a Images/GAMS-BELGIUM}

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