The moondust-like sand had barely settled on my boots before I took my first fearful steps outside the jagged concertina wire. A year of anticipation, a month of training and days of traveling had led me to Zabul Province, a sprawling rural stretch of southern Afghanistan.

I landed at Forward Operating Base Smart a few days before my first mission was scheduled. This small patch of concrete and metal boxes was where I would learn that the fighting on the front lines doesn’t always mean firing a weapon.

The gritty glamour of deploying was something I used to crave, even though I had never really tasted it.

That attitude changed when I realized I was following in my older sister’s footsteps, by spending my first year of marriage separated from my husband by a war zone. I would also miss my other sister’s wedding, and a million other moments with my family.

With boots on the ground, I felt the weight of those future memories fall on my shoulders more heavily than my armored vest.

A Hidden School

I shifted uncomfortably under the shrapnel-protecting garment, my body unfamiliar with the extra plates hanging on my sides.  At training in the States, the vest had just the front and back plates, but in theater there were side and shoulder additions snapped and woven on for extra protection. It made me regret the days I skipped the gym.

The morning was bright as we loaded up with weapons and head scarves, and set course for a girls’ school in Zabul’s capital city, Qalat. My first mission outside the wire wasn’t to enhance security or work with the Afghan government. It was to decorate head scarves. That I’d flown halfway around the world to put jewels on cloth made me laugh.

The mine-resistant vehicle we traveled in roared through the bazaar and into the city, where we parked up on a lonely desert hill. I shouldered a green duffel bag full of at least a hundred new head scarves, and tried not to lean back, for fear of falling over. I hustled to join the five other women from my unit who had already started across the hill.

The outskirts of the city were nothing more than mud walls, where men and boys had gathered to watch us. A couple of our Army security personnel kept their eyes trained and weapons ready for anyone who came too close.

We started into the city down a rocky path barely ten feet wide. The locals trailed behind, and sometimes crept to our sides, eager for a view of the foreigners in digital camouflage. Their whispers rang loud and harsh. I didn’t know a word of the Pashto they spoke, so I caged my eyes forward and kept marching.

But the trash on the street stole my attention. Garbage was strewn about carelessly. Foul odors hung over the streets; there was even littler in the small well we passed. I couldn’t tell if it was desperation or laziness that made the place so dirty.

Turning another mud-walled corner, we arrived at the Babagok Girls’ School. Nothing gave its location away.  There was no marquee heralding the school mascot. There wasn’t even a sign.  We found just a rusty padlock and a creaking metal door that led into a dirt courtyard.

Foreigners would never have come into my elementary school like this…

Most of the school was outdoors. Mats and old rugs stretched over the dirt floor, while fabrics spread wide across wooden poles fought the sun’s rays overhead. Little girls knelt in the shade and stared at us, while we peeled off layers of armor and carefully draped head scarves where our helmets should have been.

I lay my rifle down cautiously in the dirt, anxious about leaving a loaded gun so close to children.  Foreigners would have never come into my elementary school like this, but I quickly realized these children are used to strangers — strangers carrying guns and candy.

I expected women to be teaching here. But the teachers were wiry old men with white beards. Maybe men were the only ones who to have been educated; maybe this generation would be the first in which girls would learning something other than traditional home making.

My only prior exposure to children of the Third World was through the news, or maybe a picture story on poverty. I’d never seen such pleading eyes. My eyes jumped from face to face; I didn’t know what to make of this new heartbreak.

I used to teach gymnastics to girls the same age as the ones sitting before me, and I pictured my former students kneeling among them. The haircuts here were more ragged, and their clothes were tattered, but these girls had the same vivaciousness. Unlike the harsh chatter I heard in the streets, the girls’ whispers were like fireflies buzzing on a summer night: bright, joyful, mysterious.

We opened the Army duffel bags and began handing out the shrink-wrapped scarves. Pumpkin orange and spring green spilled out of our hands and into their tiny palms. Their shyness quickly dissolved; order turned to mild mayhem as their little hands grabbed for the plastic-covered fabric, even if they had already received one scarf.

The teachers barked at the girls to be polite, to stay seated. But soon the chaos resumed. Once each girl was clutching a shiny new headdress, our team broke out the Bedazzlers.

A Bedazzle machine is something you would have forgotten years ago, unless you had a craving for attaching cheap gemstones to all your clothes. The black plastic contraptions looked like modified sewing machines without needles. A general’s wife had donated a dozen or so of the Bedazzlers - actually, they were a knock-off version call Gem Magic - and asked us to bring them to children who had probably never had a new headscarf, much less one with rhinestones on it.

The night before this mission I sat in our less-than-sterile health clinic, sorting out the different-sized gems, one by one. Six hundred glittering pieces later, the supplies were neatly organized into packets, so we could put as many gems as possible on scarves the next morning.

Performance Anxiety

Twelve girls inside sat with their legs folded under them, on drab rugs that had lost any measure of comfort. With a Bedazzler in each hand, I knelt in a similar fashion, trying to ignore the awkward handgun strapped to my right thigh.  I hated that my gun was loaded.

Murmurs floated through the small classroom, as I opened the first Bedazzler, and with wobbling hands fit a tiny gem on the teeth of the machine. I took my own scarf, placed it in the jaws and pressed hard. One click and several heartbeats later, the silver-rimmed jewel sat like a miniscule island on the golden sea of my scarf.

More whispers erupted as I held my scarf up for the girls to see, and motioned for them to let me decorate theirs.

With tentative hands, the first girl held out a frayed shawl. The grapefruit-colored fabric looped around her chocolate-colored hair and spilled onto the rug.  Taking it gently, I placed it in the machine and pressed again. This time a pink jewel landed on her gauzy headscarf, and she pulled it back to study this modern marvel. Our glances collided only for a brief moment, and I was still at a loss for words. I knew nothing of their native tongue, so I silently shifted to the next girl sitting beside her, and repeated the process.

Load gem, place scarf, press hard, repeat.

I did this a dozen times before my hands stopped sweating from performance anxiety. The girls pulled, twisted and examined the glittering jewels on their scarves, apparently satisfied with my decorating skills.

In the next stuffy room I saw more girls in colorful garments: lime green, deep red, twilight blue. Their faces were just a bit younger; they were maybe six or seven years old. I couldn’t ask their ages; the interpreter was outside with another group. Kneeling again, the girls formed a half circle around me. Having watched me in the first room, they were ready, holding out their head coverings for something shiny to adorn them.

I began again, the silent air hanging thick between us as their eyes followed my hands. By now I noticed an orange stain on most of the girls’ fingers. The remnants of henna dye clung to their cuticles.

The girls never took their scarves off; they just shuffled closer and handed me the edge of their fading fabric. One small girl with a sea foam green scarf hung back, unsure of how to approach the strange girl in camouflage before her. Her classmates urged her forward, pulling her scarf in my direction. Obeying, she knelt closer to me and waited for the click of the machine.

A single gold star was enough to turn her shy expression into a grin. I knew I had won a small battle, but it took her a long time to smile.

Virginia-based writer Georganne Hassell served for four years as a public affairs officer in the U.S. Air Force.

The story of Kurt Vonnegut, a youthful hunter, trapper, and amateur scientist, sleeping under the stars in West, involves a ghost — the narrator of Galapagos, Vonnegut’s fourteenth novel, published many years later in 1985.

The ghost is Leon Trotsky Trout, who tells us that over the course of a million years, descendants of cruise ship passengers stranded on Galapagos evolved into furry mammals resembling seals. A bacterial disease had destroyed the human race — except for the marooned vacationers: an Indiana schoolteacher, Mary Hepburn; another passenger, James Wait; a fur-covered mutant: Akiko Hiroguchi, whose mother survived the bombing of Hiroshima; and an old sea captain named von Kleist. A strange tale!

With deep affection, Vonnegut dedicated Galapagos in memory of Hillis L. Howie.

Who was Hillis Howie? Why would Vonnegut honor him by laying at his feet this piece of fiction with overtones of H.G. Wells’ fantasy  The Island of Dr. Moreau?

“He was a darling man,” Vonnegut told me. In the late 1930s, Howie led a group of young men, including Vonnegut, into the wilderness of the West on what became, for Kurt, an unforgettable adventure and inspiration.

* * *
When Vonnegut was in primary school in Indianapolis, he attended the Orchard School, a private school for upper-middle class children. Vonnegut loved it there. He had responsibilities and others depended on him. He joined with classmates in caring for Billy the goat; running the school library; operating the goodies store; even managing a student savings bank. At lunchtime, all the children, the youngest to the eldest, stood at their place and sang, “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing…” Then a few hurried between the kitchen and tables as waiters.

Watching over the school was headmaster Hillis Howie, a benevolent man who fostered individual ability and respect for self and others. He was a Deweyite in the era of progressive education, believing as Aristotle wrote, “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” So the children built whirligigs while they were studying weather; model ships when the subject was exploration; and planted a garden, which they harvested in the fall, putting fresh vegetables out for lunch they had raised themselves.

Howie’s pied piper influence never left Vonnegut: “The value system under which I try to operate relative to animals and plants and the earth and persons with cultures different from mine is one I learned from him.”

Then in 1929, Kurt’s parents lost their money in the Wall Street Crash and removed him from the Orchard School, enrolling him in a public elementary school instead. It broke his heart, and he never forgave them.

* * *

In the summer of 1938, however, when Vonnegut was about to begin his junior year at Shortridge High School, his parents gave him permission to join Howie’s nine-week prairie trek out West.

Howie had been leading his “summer camps on wheels,” as he called them, for ten years. The first prairie trek enlisted a caravan of Model T’s with canvas water bags hanging off the back. Nine boys had accompanied him, traveling and camping across six thousand miles of country. Seeing how much they enjoyed observing and collecting specimens, on future trips Howie encouraged his band of junior explorers to choose a specialty: mammalogy, ethnology, geology, archaeology, ornithology, herpetology, photography — even journalism. By 1930, the treks had a purpose worthy of Lewis and Clark: the boys were gathering specimens to be placed in the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. One year, they brought back a cast of a dinosaur foot.

Howie’s description of the journey sounded like an advertisement for Pony Express riders:

“The plan is to leave civilization behind and spend the months of July and August in remote and generally unknown regions of the Southwest; to establish temporary camps in sagebrush, pinon, and big timber and at ruin sites, deserted mining towns, and alpine lakes; to investigate the fauna, flora, and geology of each territory; to set a standard of camping which will be a satisfaction to ourselves, and a model to others; to live a physically vigorous life, with a taste of the hardships which the early explorers expected. From this it will be understood that the expedition is not a sightseeing trip nor a deluxe dude ranch.”

Kurt got ready to go. He was about to turn sixteen: tall, very thin, and shy, and living painfully in the shadow of his brilliant elder brother, Bernard, a doctoral student in science at MIT. But now he would be joining five adults and 14 boys, including his best friend, Ben Hitz, whom he had known since Orchard School, on an expedition into the wild, desert country of the Southwest, guided by an almost legendary teacher. Vonnegut decided he would list himself as “archeologist-mammalogist.” He purchased a wide-brim hat to keep the sun off, a pair of boots, packed some tools, camping gear, and took off.

Ten days later, after having stopped in the Dust Bowl regions of Kansas and Oklahoma, the prairie trek caravan arrived at base camp: Cotton-Wood Gulch, Thoreau, New Mexico.

Howie deliberately “sought out the remote and generally unknown wilderness regions,” he said in an article for a nature magazine, the Regional Review in 1941. “Sometimes we pretended that we were the first white men to penetrate these wilds. In many spots, the boys had an opportunity to compare the unspoiled land with country that had been ‘developed.’ We led a simple life, did our own cooking, gathered firewood, sagebrush or buffalo chips for fuel and slept under the stars almost every night. We were providing a pioneer experience for the boys in a frontier part of the nation.”

They traveled west to the Grand Canyon, and then wound north to Mesa Verde, up Pike’s Peak, and around the foothills of the Rockies, collecting and categorizing as they went.

Kurt, who enjoyed hunting back home, trapped a rare type of tawny mouse, then skinned and dried it. (Later, in the army, he mentioned his find to another soldier, who pronounced Kurt’s specimen, “Meesus Vonnegeesus.”) Howie’s goal was to teach the boys, “the value of our national parks, national monuments, national forests, Indian reservations and other interesting parts of our public domain.”

Away from the pall of his home life where his parents sometimes quarreled late into the night, and away from his brother’s talk about science that “bored the shit” out of him, Kurt came into his own. He mounted an outcropping of rock and, pounding his skinny ribcage, let out a Tarzan yell that drew shouts of admiring laughter from the other boys. He was just like them — he belonged.

* * *

When Vonnegut was discharged from the army in 1945, considerably changed in body and spirit by his experiences at the Battle of the Bulge, and the destruction of Dresden where he had been a POW, he enrolled at the University of Chicago on the GI Bill. He had no idea which degree to seek. An adviser convinced him he would enjoy anthropology, a “science that was mostly poetry,” as Kurt understood it.

He worked hard, writing long papers, and tried to recapture some of his adolescent excitement about primitive societies, Indians, and nature. But he felt excluded and condescended to. When the department rejected his proposal for a masters dissertation about similarities between Cubist and Native American art, he halfheartedly started another research project, but a few months later, he dropped out and never re-enrolled. His revenge, in a sense, when he published “Galapagos,” his fantasy about an evolutionary marriage of humans and animals, was to dedicate it to Hillis L. Howie, “a good man.”

Did Vonnegut know how his father had found the money during the Great Depression to send his awkward boy on the life-changing prairie trek? Apparently not; he never mentioned it. Too in debt to afford the expense, Kurt Vonnegut Sr., an out of work architect, drew up plans for Howie for a cabin heated by a wood stove, and bartered them for his son’s fee.

The cabin is still there, above a spring fed valley in northern New Mexico where the Zuni, Hopi and later Navajo peoples have lived for hundreds of years. On clear mornings, you can see the sun rise over the purple and brown hills, just as Vonnegut did when he awoke, young and hopeful about the long summer day ahead.

Charles J. Shields is the author of And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, the only complete life story of Kurt Vonnegut, one of the most influential, controversial, and popular novelists of the 20th century. The Christian Science Monitor called Shields’ bestselling Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee “one of the best biographies of 2006.”

The art, and the extravagant grilles and monstrances, continue to bewitch, long after the fantasies of written Edens, Immaculate Conception and resurrection have lost their luster.

Cathedrals litter Spain. Once envisioned as synagogues or raised as mosques, they were conquered by the Catholics and converted into sites of Christian worship.

At the Mezquita-Catedral in Córdoba, the three monotheistic faiths found peace, for a time, and worshiped together. Still intact, it’s a relic of that lost era of concord.

The head of security at the Mezquita could have been handsome, but there was something incongruous about his assembly. It was as if his face had fallen, perfect and complete, through the floor of one designer’s sluice box, and been stitched to a body that had sprouted from a more practical vision of humanity. The Italian chisel had met the German production line. Deo Design and Construction: under new management. Fuck aestheticism, we’re building human Volvos to get you through an age of terrorism.

And terrorism was indeed what this man was fighting. More specifically, he was fighting my mother the jihadist — all five foot two inches of her, clad in brown boots and corduroys, toting a hot pink beret. So moved had she been by the emotional tenor of the place that she had decided to perform a full Islamic prostration, kneeling to the ground and bowing her head to the stone floor in the direction of Mecca.

The head of security’s reaction to this display could have come from a dramatic reading of the “Da Vinci Code.” Crossing himself and rushing to mother’s side, he urgently whispered into his walkie-talkie. The word “Musulmán” was launched into the dusty, silent space, amid a rapid patter of Spanish.

“No hablo español,” my mother interjected.

“This forbidden in Spain. No Musulmán. This forbidden. You cannot do this!”

Mother’s expression changed from fear to indignation.

Ever the star of international diplomacy, I scanned my limited Spanish vocabulary for helpful phrases:

Cuanta cuesta? How much?
Poquito Little
Rápido Fast
Caliente Hot
Muchas gracias Many thanks

Listing them here makes me realize that I am ridiculously well prepared for a sexual encounter in a Spanish-tongued city. But for a run-in with an authority of the conservative Catholic Spanish church? Not so much.

“Musulmán, Musulmán!” the guard repeated, and we were soon surrounded by five other guards, large rifles slung conspicuously over their thickset shoulders. French, English and limited Spanish
melted awkwardly together as mother accepted her God-appointed duty to educate the guards in the singular root of monotheistic faith. She was back at St. Leos Catholic College, before her classroom of teenage boys. She would get through to them. She would singlehandedly herald a renewed world order of religious harmony!

After a long struggle with her increasingly impatient audience, she realize she was failing. In a desperate attempt to avoid being expelled from the cathedral, she pointed to her ring, rosary-beaded and purchased in Rome. It was a symbol, she argued, of her Christian devotion.

Security guard defensive mode evolved into deep confusion. Mother was begrudgingly restored to the status of odd tourist. We walked around for a time, then exited into the sun.

We Crash a Mass
The next morning brought a new resolve to the heart of my implacable parent. She would not depart from the land of the Mezquita without partaking of the Blessed Sacrament at the Bishop’s New Year’s Day mass. She wished to enter the center of worship, which had been cordoned off and secured for the midday
ceremony.

Sashaying up to our best friend, the head of security, she raised her voice an octave:

“Je suis proffessorio! I am proffessorio de religion!” She pointed to her rosary ring.

“I am the same as you. Same Christian.” By this stage he had realized, like most people who try to argue with my mother, that his only real option was to acquiesce. His team would maintain maximum readiness –alert, and most importantly, heavily armed.

“No bow,” he repeated. “Musulmán forbidden. It is wrong here.”

We quietly passed through the barrier, and mother dropped to her knees in solemn prayer. She prayed for the miraculous healing of his intellectual hebetude.

Symonne Torpy lives and writes in Sydney, Australia.

Bertsolaritza is the Basque art of competitive improvised rhyming, sung a capella or set to melody.  Think of a live poetry singing contest, where the performers must create their rhymes on the spot.

Only traceable to the beginning of the 19th century, these spoken verses were mainly sung by literary people, typically in informal settings (at dinners, or while drinking with friends).  Although there are no records of bertsos from long ago, the tradition likely stretches back much further. It’s still a rich custom in the Basque country where I live.

Bertso (pronounced “burr-cho”) competitions began in 1935, but were soon put to a stop, during the Spanish Civil War.  Even speaking Basque was dangerous, then — so those who celebrated the language through spoken verse took a big risk. Basques nonetheless kept singing bertsos at low-key events; they became a way to voice opinions about politics or the news.

The documentary Bertsolari explains bertso’s survival by noting that “Francoism didn’t speak Euskera (Basque).” Since bertso is all about the beauty of the Basque language, it was an uncrackable code. Not until the 1980s was the next national bertsolari championship held. Over 10,000 people turned out to hear their language celebrated in this special form.

At a bertsolari txapelketa, or bertso competition, contestants take the stage in regular street clothes, and perform siting in simple chairs, facing a vast audience of Basque speakers and fans. One by one, the contestants are called to the mike. Each is given a subject by the gai-jartzaile, or subject setter.  The task: to invent a verse according to a specified tempo and tune.

Typical assignments are to ad-lib a greeting; to compose a verse on a particular subject; or to incorporate certain words or rhymes. In “prison verse,” the bertsolari must compose verse related to a given topic; in “conversation verse,” two bertsolaris take turns discussing a given subject. “Farewell verse” is a way of saying goodbye.

A bertso could be about a serious theme, like hunger in Africa (prison verse); or a comic situation, like accidentally getting into your grandma’s bed (conversation verse, with one performer playing the guy, the other his grandma); or centered on a word, such as “fire.”

You could compare a bertso performer to a comedian who performs improv, or a rapper who makes up his beat on the spot, but without props or music - just words and their power.

Nowadays, people study hard to become good bertso singers. One of my husband Joseba’s bandmates is a popular bertso performer, and teaches bertso too.

The highly-regarded bertsolari artist Xabier Amuriza defines bertso this way:

Neurriz eta errimaz
kantatzea itza
orra or zer kirol mota
den bertsolaritza.

Through meter and rhyme
to sing the word
that is the kind of sport
bertsolarism is.

It was uplifting to see people so proud of their language, especially because it is a minority one.  I know that I probably will never speak Basque well enough to be able to compose these poetic verses on the fly, but just learning about people who could master their own language that well was astounding.

Since there are so many English-speakers in the world, I think we take our language for granted.  But with only about 650,000 speakers, Basque is cherished, relished and respected. Basques rarely get the chance to get excited about and celebrate their language;  bertso gives them that opportunity. I hope one day I’ll be able to appreciate it without subtitles.

Amanda Gonser writes and blogs from Spain’s Basque country.

The Basque ciderhouse has been overshadowed by the more famous Spanish tapas bar. That’s all the more reason to visit one.

The sargardotegia melds apple (sagar), wine (ardo) and “a place where something happens,” or tegi. So, sargardotegia roughly translates as “the place where apple wine happens.”

The Basque fondness for apples shows up in documents dating back to the 11th century, when the King of Navarre praised the Basques for their cider-making talents. Basque whalers seem to have preferred cider to water during their long seafaring expeditions.

Traditionally, vast apple orchards were picked by the whole community. Apples would brought to the top floor of a two-story farm house and pressed, and the juice caught on the ground floor. The cider was then poured into large barrels, and left to ferment. The alcohol content, at 5% to 6%, is less than that of traditional hard cider, and more on par with beer.

Nowadays, machines do the pressing. But the process after smashing is the same: the juice goes into huge oak or chestnut barrels of about 250 gallons each. Fermenting turns the natural sugar to alcohol, and rids the apples of any sour taste.

Apple-picking takes place September through November. Cider-drinking season traditionally opens in mid January, when many sargardotegias open their doors, and let the cider fans in. The imbibing lasts through spring, or until the cider is gone.

A typical sargardotegia has a large dining room, where patrons normally eat standing up, and a kupela, or barrel room.

Originally sargardotegias were just for tasting: you’d sample cider from various barrels, and leave with bottles from the barrels you liked most.

Nowadays, a trip to the sargardotegias means dinner, and social event. But one still draws the cider straight from the barrel.

A ciderhouse meal always starts off with little pieces of txorizo - a sausage - and bread. Next comes a juicy cod omelet. Then more cod, but this time served with tasty green peppers. The next course is always a txuleta - a huge steak practically still bleeding, but oh so good. You’ll end with a dessert of strong Idiazabal cheese with membrillo, a quince jelly you cut into pieces and place on top of the cheese slices. This is served with nuts you crack yourself, either with your hand or against the table.

This filling meal is punctuated by many trips to the kupela to refill your cider glass. The trick to staying power: you decant only two or three sips of cider into your cup on each trip, drink up in the kupela room, and then return to the dining room for more eating and talking. This is why eating standing up makes lots of sense: it’s easier to tack across the room for another drink.

Cider production was practically moribund during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, when most people abandoned their orchards. The cider-drinking tradition also lost some popularity after the nearby Navarre region increased its production of wine. But since the invention of Sargardo Egun (Cider Day) in 1981, cider has made a huge comeback. Most cider is produced in Gipuzkoa, the province surrounding San Sebastian. Gipuzkoa turns out some 2.5 million gallons annually. Only 10% of this output is drunk in sargardotegias; the rest is bottled and sold in stores.

The two most important words of any Basque cider night are txotx (pronounced “chocha”), the cidermaker’s altert that he is opening a barrel, and to come and fill up your glass; and topa (pronounced “toe-pa”), the Basque way of saying cheers! My favorite cider word is azkena, or “last one,” which comes into play late in the evening. The cider is so delicious that you just have to have one more.

Visiting Ciderhouses in Basque Country

The town of Astigarraga, about five miles inland from San Sebastian, is Basque ciderhouse stronghold, with as many as two dozen establishments scattered through hill and dale.

Lizeaga. At Lizeaga, one of the oldest ciderhouses in the region, you can enjoy a traditional menu of chorizo cooked in cider; cod omelet; grilled beef steak; and Idiazabal cheese with walnuts and quince preserve. Open year-round. Gartziategi Baserria, 20115, Astigarraga. Tel: 34-943-468-290.

Petritegi Sagardoa. Busy, big Petritegi is open year round. Petritegi Bidea 20115, Astigarraga. Tel: 34-943 457-188.

Sidreria Donostiarra If you can’t get to the countryide, Sidreria Donostiarra, in the heart of San Sebastian’s old town, is a convenient place to enjoy the cider-drinking tradition. Cider is only sold, not produced, here. Calle Embeltran, 5, San Sebastian. Tel. 34-943-42-04-2.

A comprehensive guide to ciderhouses in Basque country.

Amanda Gonser writes and blogs from Spain’s Basque country.

An avalanche and flood produced by a melting glacier destroyed the valley below in 1961, killing 15,000 people. Glacial meltwater often accumulates in lakes, held back only by rough rock dams. These can burst suddenly, with catastrophic results.

 

The Pastoruri glacier used to be a prominent tourist attraction. Now it’s a fraction of its former self. Glaciers supply 80 percent of the water for Peru’s arid coast.

 

Terraces like these are a traditional way of dealing with water shortages. Some date back to Inca times.

“The rain is not like is used to be,” said Valentin Antesana, 83, from the town of Andamarca. He said rains had been erratic and unpredictable in recent years.

A man from Andamarca leaves offerings by the shore of a lake.

 

A dancer in traditional costume during the annual irrigation festival in Andamarca. Customs and institutions hundreds of years old still govern decisions about water use in many rural areas.

 

Climate change is likely to bring both severe floods and prolonged droughts to Peru’s Amazon region — threatening the rainforest and those who live there.

 

Already parched Lima receives just 9 millimeters of precipitation each year. That could shrink.

 

Emily Kirkland traveled to Peru with the help of an AT&T New Media Fellowship, to study the adaptation of communities to climate change. This story was adapted from Latin America News Dispatch.

When Dr. Paul Rhodes, a Washington, D.C. geriatrician, fell in love with “an exquisitely beautiful Jamaican woman I had been dreaming of,” he also fell hook, line and sinker for four acres of cliffside land on her native island.

The rugged parcel was bushy and craggy, but had breathtaking views of mountains, an azure bay and the Caribbean Sea. He was blown away — and so was his beloved.

“She said she wished to live and die on the land,” Rhodes recalled.

But soon his love ran off with a local chef.

Rhodes, an associate professor of medicine at George Washington University and Howard University, had already been smitten by Jamaica and its people. In the 1970s, as a fourth-year medical student, he worked on a University of the West Indies public health project in the rural Jamaican parish of Hanover. He later set up a small charity to help support the island’s old age homes, and co-founded a shelter for street people near his parcel, in the northeast coastal town of Port Antonio.

Jamaica became his second home.

For years he lived a bi-national existence, making housecalls to homebound elders in underserved areas of Washington, while overseeing the homeless shelter in Jamaica.

Then, nearly a decade ago, he decided to create “something fantastic” on his dream land.

“All right, I don’t have the woman,” he reasoned. “I have the land.”

He conjured a tranquil African village.

The result was Great Huts, a cluster of a dozen West African-inspired dwellings. The huts fit beautifully with the landscape, says Rhodes. “we proud to say we are the un-villa”

Rhodes, 62, a Brooklyn, New York-born Jew, wanted the land to fuse elements of Jewish and African culture.
There are lots of carved cedar lions around. The biblical Lion of Judah is both the symbol of the Israelite Tribe of Judah, and of the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, whom Rastafarians revere as a messiah (believing Selassie to be direct descendant of the Tribe of Judah, through the lineage of King David and Solomon).

A lion, made by a Rastafarian artist, stands on its hind legs atop Great Huts’ tallest structure, the three-story 34-foot-high stone, wood and thatch hut “African Sunrise.”

“It gives a feeling of being on the fly bridge of a ship,” Rhodes said.

A path leading from this dwelling to other buildings on the property is intended to evoke Middle Passage, the route across the Atlantic slaves ships traveled, from Africa to the West. Some 15 million enslaved Africans perished on those journeys.

A life-sized wood sculpture of slaves breaking free from their shackles stands in the Great Huts lobby.

There’s another Jewish-African connection in Queen of Sheba, a luxurious three-story dwelling of honeycomb coral and fossilized limestone boulders. The 30-foot-long bedroom features a hot tub, small fish pool with a waterfall, and large window in the shape of the Star of David (a Rastafarian as well as Jewish symbol). The Queen of Sheba traveled from Ethiopia to Jerusalem to test the legendary wisdom of King Solomon; some Rastafarians link Selassie to Menelik, son of Solomon and the queen. A painting portraying their meeting in Jerusalem adorns the wall of another hut.

Deep sand on the floor of one hut is meant to evoke a makeshift synagogue. During the Inquisition, when Jews had to worship in secret, they used sand as a carpet to muffle their footsteps. Rhodes sometimes sleeps here on the sand.

Another hut is called The Tabernacle, after the portable central place of worship of the Israelites after they left Egypt. Their priests would enter the Tabernacle to commune with God.

“Akan Tower,” is meant as a reminder of certain commonalities in African and Jewish beliefs. Some scholars believe Hebrew and the West African Akan cultures have in common aspects of language, religion and culture, and that there must have been an intermingling in the past. In both cultures, there’s an emphasis on Old Testament teachings, eating kosher and unshaven heads and faces.

In Lemba Hut, Rhodes features the Lemba, a South African ethnic group that many suggest has links to Judaism. The Lemba observe Shabbat, practice male circumcision, eschew pork and engrave the Star of David on their tombs. Genetic testing has suggested a relationship.

On Saturday nights, Rhodes conducts a Havdalah service, to close out the Sabbath. The lighting of a braided candle, the use of fragrant spices and a ritual pouring of wine usually precede a torch-lit cultural performance of African dancing and drumming. The dance floor is emblazoned with a mosaic of an elephant and a lion, symbols common to African and Jewish culture typically represented on the floors of Israeli synagogues.

Marking 350 years of continuous Jewish presence on the island, Rhodes also offers a faith tourism tour of Jamaica’s small Jewish community, of about 200 people. The tour includes a visit to the island’s sole synagogue, and its Jewish cemetery, with tombstones dating back to the 1600s.

Art is everywhere: fantasy masks and Afro-centric work by Jamaican carvers, painters, sculptors and ceramicists. Many grace a colorful second-floor, open-sided dining and lounge area with elegant wrap-around cushioned seating, carved chairs and tables. The long neck of a 15-foot papier-mache giraffe pierces the ceiling.

“I’m borderline obsessed with beauty and design,” said Rhodes, “and suffer a compulsion to acquire beautiful things.”

Volunteers who help out at Dr. Rhodes’ homeless shelter are put up for nominal prices. Visitors are picked up at the airport, and transported here via a 2 1/2 hour taxi ride.

The nearest community is Boston Beach, traditional home of Jamaican jerk-style cooking. From there it’s a short drive or walk, along a dirt path, to Great Huts’ guarded gates.

Rhodes’ dream for Great Huts is still evolving, but one aspect of it has come full circle. He’s married to an actress, Nikki, a beautiful Jamaican woman he calls his “correct” soul mate.

Merle English is a New York-based writer.

]]> http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/jamaica/feed/ http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/my-friday-with-kebab-allah/ http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/my-friday-with-kebab-allah/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:57:09 +0000 C. Noah Pelletier http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/?p=6695

SUZHOU, China — Every Friday I’d pay the equivalent of thirty cents and ride the bus to Shi Quan Jie. This was a street in the old district, where the walls were whitewashed, and the roofs had sweeping slopes, upturned eaves, and ceramic tiles. Few of the buildings reached over three stories high. Large birch trees lined the two-lane road, flanked on either side by bubble tea stands, black market DVD shops, and boutiques showcasing China’s puzzling take on high fashion.

On my way to find a wok, I stopped at a Chinese Muslim restaurant where everyone, including the child waiters, wore tight-knitted caps. The menu was in Chinese, with English translations beneath it.

Some dishes sounded peaceful: “The hashed meat meditates.

Some sounded dangerous: “The palace explodes the diced chicken rice.”

And others were downright spooky: “Digs up the beef red.”

The sun was shining. I walked to the takeout shack attached to the restaurant. The griller was just standing around with a blue filter cigarette in his lips when I arrived. In Mandarin, I told him how many curried lamb kebabs I wanted.

“Sanga.” I then held up three fingers.

He screwed up his face at me. Then he held up his hand, outstretched his fingers and said “Wooga.” Five.

Was this his way of telling me that I was too skinny? Perhaps, but something told me this offer was non-negotiable. I waited for my five kebabs at an outside table. The legs might have been rat-gnawed. It stood on an open area of hardened clay between the sidewalk and a canal.

For the first two minutes, the kebab griller tapped the skewered sticks of meat above the coals. Then he stepped away from the embers to catcall a girl clicking down the sidewalk in high heels. It wasn’t subtle, whatever he said, but she turned up her nose and kept walking. Real cool. He leered at her and then turned to me, thumbing in her direction as if to say, women, go figure.

The griller brought over my kebabs and a flatbread in a plastic sleeve that read “crusty pancake.” He went back to the grill station, picked up an old copper kettle and came back to sit across from me. I’d watched his assistant — the boy baking crusty pancakes — use that same kettle to brew a cup of tea just moments earlier. Steam was still rising from the spout.

I tore off a piece of crusty pancake, and when I looked up, the griller was sucking on the spout. He was really gulping it down, and, just when I thought steam might billow out his ears, he set down the kettle and belched.

After lunch, I pulled out my notebook to make a few notes, referring to him not as “the kebab griller” but as “Kebab Allah.”

Kebab Allah burned his sleeve on a coal.

Kebab Allah threatened his assistant with a bamboo skewer again.

“I’m not saying the man walked on water; however, in its own special way, watching him work did have a purifying effect on me. And he made a pretty mean kebab.

Grasshopper seller

Sorting a new crop of rice

Carrying greens to market

 

Watching her children play in the backyard

 

Lunch in the back of his tuk tuk, or rickshaw

 

A father waits outside a hospital with his daughter, hoping a doctor will see her soon.

Photographer Allison Heiliczer is based in Hong Kong.

]]> http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/the-news-from-laos/feed/ http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/ghanas-culinary-essence-and-global-dreams/ http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/ghanas-culinary-essence-and-global-dreams/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:51:23 +0000 Grace West http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/?p=6620

Bubbling hot oil spills over the side of a pan as chopped plantains are dropped in, while a large drum of chicken cooks in spiced sauce, next to a pot of simmering goat light soup. Smoke from the brick-grilled tilapia seeps in from outside, creating an infused aroma of the culinary essence of Ghana.

The busy kitchen of Maquis Tante Marie in the Ghanaian capital of Accra specializes in West African cuisine: Ghanaian staples like fufu — mashed cassava balls — and tomato paste jollof rice.

Restaurant owner Yvone Laryea, originally from the Ivory Coast, opened Tante Marie in 2000, to help make up for the lack of established West African restaurants in Accra. She hopes to attract not only Ghanaians, and francophones from neighboring countries, but also tourists, and expats drawn here by the promising prospects of the new oil industry.

Hospitality is one of Ghana’s fastest-growing industries, on the heels of the 2007 discovery of oil off the coast, and international interest being channeled into the new oil reserve. To date the upscale restaurant market has been dominated by foreign, especially French and Chinese, cuisine. Now, many in the food industry are trying to promote Ghanaian cuisine, sometimes by challenging the traditional ways of food preparation, to try to make it more appealing to foreigners.

“For years people have felt everything foreign, especially European and American, is better,” said George Ansere, principal quality assurance officer of the Ghana Tourist Board. “But the trend is changing; we are realizing that our food isn’t [as] backwards as we might think.”

But restaurant owners complain bitterly that job applicants, even graduates of hospitality programs, are often insufficiently prepared for the work.

“Culinary training in this county needs to be more serious,” said Jean Awad, 45, owner of French restaurant Le Magellan. “Graduates have this printed paper saying they passed, but they come here, and we have to teach them again.”

South Africa and Kenya, with their large international populations, are considered African culinary leaders in Africa. But new influx of foreigners into Ghana has introduced suggestions that this country improve the quality of its restaurant food.

“The understanding of the local cuisine is very high, but exposure to what makes for five-star standard cuisine is still a bit limited,” said Sanjay Narain, 42, the CEO of catering company Allterrain Services Group. “It’s possible to work to high international standards — it just takes training, education, and discipline.”

Cooks and caterers must first be better trained, industry professionals say.

“There’s a gap between what the industries are expecting and what the academic institutions are producing,” said Ansere.

For Charles Agbenuzah, 45, head chef of the five-star African Regent Hotel restaurant, the problem is what training schools teach.

“Things they learn from books and classrooms aren’t applicable to the practical field,” he said. “You see the vast difference when trainees come into the industry; they don’t know what actually pertains to the field.”

Often, they lack information about personal, kitchen and food hygiene.

“That’s insidious to the industry,” said Agbenuzah, “if the trainees don’t know the reason why they have to be hygienic.”

Some professionals are calling for the creation of a new culinary training institution. Believing a proper training institute could put Ghana on the map, Nutepe Kartey-Attipoe, general secretary of the Ghana Chef Association, has been reaching out for aid from NGOs and investors.

Others suggest improving existing institutes, or working to create a more unified sector.

“There a lot of separation in the industry, with no governing body,” said Efua Goode-Arthur, director of the EKGS Culinary Institute. “People are doing things anyway they like. If we come together as a group to share ideas and have a structure, that’ll really help.”

Approximately 250 students graduate from EKGS each year, and Goode-Arthur said that help create jobs. But some believe internships are not producing trainees with the desired skill levels so other techniques must be explored.

Currently, the domestic market is dominated by informal “chop bars,” local eateries that are usually unlicensed and unhygienic. The tourist board has made efforts to bring many of them into the formal economy, by adding a third category to the restaurant grading system, and changing the language use to describe them.

Ghana’s 1,549 licensed “traditional catering establishments” far outnumber the 363 formal restaurants and fast food eateries.

Chop bars hold special importance for Tante Marie’s Laryea, who learned about restaurants by watching her mother run one. She argues that chop bars are a must-have cultural experience for visitors.

“It’s the typical image of Africa. Anybody can walk in and have the local dish, eat with their hands, and chat like they’re at home,” said Laryea. “It’s interesting for foreigners to feel the atmosphere, so we must work on getting them hygienic.”

Still, she envisions a future that includes global African restaurant franchises.

“You have McDonald’s world-wide; an African restaurant should be able to export itself all over the world too,” she said” “But we need to have that high standard training ground to carry out this dream.”

Grace West was a student in the New York University journalism institute’s 2011 Reporting Africa program.

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On a hot Sunday morning Pastor Didier Santana preaches to 200 members of his congregation. Waving his arms in the air, he implores them to join him in worship. Moments later, Santana solemnly bows his head in prayer as the churchgoers of Église Évangélique de Perpignan, or his “sheep” as Santana prefers to call them, bow with him.

“We must remember it’s not God that lit the fire, it’s man,” Santana tells the worshippers.

Perpignan, which is located in the southernmost region of France near the border of Spain, is a Catholic town. But evangelical churches hold a strong presence in the city.

Église Évangélique de Perpignan is one of 11 evangelical churches in the city. According to the Evangelical Federation of France, the number of evangelical churches in the country has risen from 800 in 1970 to more than 2,200 today.

Catholicism began to decline in France in 1905 when the government instituted the separation of church and state. Religious buildings were declared state property and all religious funding was abolished.

Even with the magnitude of evangelical religious growth in the region, some French are still skeptical of the evangelical movement, fearful that churches may provide a platform for dishonest pastors.

When Pastor Santana was first approached for an interview, he himself questioned whether the report would make fun of his church.

“Is she going to call us weird?” Santana questioned the interpreter about the journalist’s intentions.

In a recent Thursday evening sermon, Santana encouraged his congregation not to feel down about their religious beliefs.

“There are people who think we are crazy or part of a sect in the mountains, but we are not. We are followers of Christ,” Santana assured the churchgoers.

While the traditional Catholic Church service is usually a solemn affair steeped in tradition, the evangelical service tends to be lively and includes a more vocal outpouring of emotion. Église Évangélique de Perpignan’s M.O. is strikingly similar to that of evangelical churches in America.
The church is a plain white building, devoid of the elaborate ornamentation that marks most Catholic churches. Église Évangélique is written in bold letters on the side of the building.

Inside the sanctuary, there is little decoration, only the words “Dieu est amour” in gold lettering on the wall behind the stage. During worship, Pastor Santana shares the stage with a band and vocalists. A projection screen hangs from the ceiling, showcasing the words to the worship songs.

On a typical Sunday morning, the church is filled with people — old and young, mothers and children, couples and singles.

Since Santana became pastor of the church four years ago, the congregation has continued to grow. Every Thursday evening, the church holds a special service that caters to those who are contemplating coming to Christ.

Throughout France, the evangelical church is attempting to make itself known with national groups like “Objectif France.”

Objectif France exists to help mobilize evangelical Christianity in France. In an effort to attain a project advocate from the United States, Objectif France has teamed up with the Christian Community Foundation of France, for the distribution of a prayer and awareness guide to 25,000 American churches and missionary agencies.

France has about 430,000 evangelical Christians, about 0.7 percent of the population of 62 million, according to Objectif France.

With these numbers, Objectif France hopes to create movement by connecting the “American Christian community with evangelical French ministries” in order to spur growth in France.

At Église Évangélique, Pastor Santana diddles his thumbs on his desk piled with papers.

“We are definitely growing,” Santana said with assurance. He noted there are 11 other evangelical churches in Perpignan, including three registered evangelical churches and eight “brother gypsy churches” that serve the Roma community.

“Our goals for our churches are to preach the good word of Christ, do social work, help the sick and help the old,” Didier explained.

When asked the most difficult part of being an Evangelical pastor in Perpignan, his answer was one only a man who felt the grace of God could give.

“My job is not easy, I am the shepherd and they are my sheep. But there is always more joy than difficulty.”

Christina Cocca is a journalism student at California State University, Northridge. This story first appeared in The Perpignan Project, the web magazine of an annual summer foreign reporting program sponsored by ieiMedia and the San Francisco State University Journalism Department.

Simon Marill whacks on the red-hot piece of iron with his hammer, sending sparks flying. With a pair of pliers he plunges the metal into the fiery oven. He then removes the iron and thrusts it into a bucket of water, causing steam to rise. With a little polish, his most recent work of art, a small snail, will be ready for sale.

Marill is a blacksmith, a job North Americans associate with horseshoes and swords. Marill is not employed at a castle, but rather out of a workshop in modern-day France. Ironwork is his job, art his passion. Like many people in France’s Languedoc-Roussillon region, he has combined the two.

Despite years of decline, blacksmithing still thrives in modern-day France. For centuries, the population of the Pyrenees Mountains exploited the region’s rich iron deposits. This came to a halt in the 1980s, when the mines closed as a result of foreign competition.

However, iron remains part of the region’s culture in the form of private ironworkers called ferroniers or forgerons. Many blacksmiths such as Marill still use good-old fashioned hammers and anvils to fashion the iron. French citizens see it as a regular job. Schools have well-equipped workshops, where students can learn the skills needed to become ferroniers.

According to Robles Oscar, the treasurer of the preservation association of the Escaro iron mine, iron mining in the Languedoc-Roussillon region dates to ancient times. Back in antiquity people thought iron could ward off demons and heal illness. They admired blacksmiths for being to manipulate it.

By the 17th century there were over 60 sites in Roussillon exploiting the iron in the mountains. The iron was sent from the seaside town of Collioure to European cities such as Genoa, Venice and Barcelona.

On the eve of World War I, production reached record levels. During World War II the mining companies had to hire many immigrants to reinforce the mining teams.

But after the war, the region could no longer compete with foreign mines, such as those in Africa, where costs were lower. The last mine in this region shut down in 1986.

When the mine in Escaro closed in 1953, the city’s population dropped from 600 people to 83. Now, the mine is a museum where tourists can look at unused mining equipment.

“Ever since the mining operation closed there haven’t been any renovations,” said Oscar. “The village is falling apart.”

Catalan blacksmiths used to travel to Escaro for its iron, and the town once housed four forges that produced nails and tools. These sites went away with the mine. But, this did not mean the end of blacksmiths in Languedoc-Roussillon.

A listing of blacksmiths in France contains 4,579 names, with 66 in the Eastern Pyrenees.

Marill, of the mountain town of Arles-Sur-Tech, operates out of his own workshop, called Le Moulin. He makes most of his money from iron door hinges. However, his passion lies in art. Having taken courses in both blacksmith skills and visual arts, Marill can bend iron into art forms. He can make fireflies, snails and even a life-sized mermaid, which he sold for 500 euros. Marill is not the only smith whose trade is also art.

An hour’s drive from the mountains, you can find the warehouse of Sylvie Dabazach. Her warehouse, in Perpignan, is called Art et Tradition. Her creations, which include an iron palm tree, are all her own.

“I like creating things,” she said, “and the metal has allowed me to give shape to my ideas and my drawings. My father was a ferronier, and I have always liked this job.”

Despite the family heritage, her father did not want her to follow in his steps, because she is a woman. So instead she became an illustrator and a civil engineer. But eventually she became a ferronier and learned on the job.

Like Marill, she makes most of her money from traditional blacksmithing, which is to say iron objects like staircases and iron decorations. Also like Marill, she is not satisfied with that. Every ferronier has an artistic side, she says.

But she is happy to take on whatever jobs she can get. Dabazach has felt the same impact as everyone else has, during the global economic crisis of the past two years. “Before we just went to work, no questions asked. Today, we have work for a month, maybe two, but after that we don’t know what will happen.”

French students who wish to follow in the steps of Marill and Dabazach can do so at the Centre de Formation des Apprentis du Batiment des Travaux Publics ((Training Center for Apprentices of the Public Work Force) in Perpignan, a school with a program in metallurgy. Students, or apprentices as they are called in France, take general courses in math, French, technical illustrations, and practical metallurgy. The school is the largest of 103 blacksmith-training centers in France, with an average of 85 students every year.

“It’s a number that is relatively stable,” said director Michel Jean. “It doesn’t increase and it doesn’t diminish too much.”

In terms of employment, school officials are confident that apprentices will find jobs after graduation. Surveys show that almost 100 percent of their graduates manage to integrate in the job market.

“This reflects the general situation in France,” said Claude Blanc, a teacher in Ferronnerie d’Art. “There is a lack of qualified individuals in the ferronnerie sector, but here (in Languedoc-Rousillon) we are rather privileged.”

Not only is there a good job market, but the apprentices are paid 500 euros a month while they are studying. They are taught one week out of three, and the rest of the time they work.

Just like Dabazach, the educators acknowledge the effect of the economy on their industry: “In times of crisis expensive furniture is probably not a priority,” Jean said.

Despite the sexism Dabazach experienced with her father, the program has a high number of female applicants. Blanc and Jean believe it is the artistic side of the profession that attracts them.

In terms of the job sector, Blanc and Jean think there will always be a demand for blacksmiths in this region of France, due to the high number of centuries-old buildings. Modern cities like Paris may not need as many experts in the art of ferronnerie, but ancient towns like the medieval city of Carcassonne will always need restoration.

“America doesn’t have any 12th century churches,” said Jean. “But we have many of them.”‘

Simon Arseneau studies at The Sheridan Institute of Journalism in Ontario, Canada. This story first appeared in The Perpignan Project, the web magazine of an annual summer foreign reporting program sponsored by ieiMedia and the San Francisco State University Journalism Department.

But France has not always willingly embraced its Catalan roots.

Castellers of French Catalonia from Perpignan Videos on Vimeo.

Having lived in Perpignan his whole life, Vincent Dumas enthusiastically describes his hometown as an area that has a unique culture, in comparison to the rest of France. But when this young Catalan describes his family history, there is a sense of disdain in his voice as he acknowledges the treatment of his ancestors.

Not so long ago, Catalan children in France were punished for speaking their native language in schools. Many Catalans felt obligated to identify with French culture, and some were even tempted to relocate to Spain.

And while over the years Spanish Catalans have progressed toward having rights to self-governance and establishing themselves as an official nationality, Catalans living beyond Spain’s borders were constantly being reminded of their minority status.

“There was a certain self-hate that was taught to our grandparents in school,” Dumas explained. “There were severe punishments for speaking Catalan, so it’s very difficult now for the generation of my grandparents to go back to being Catalan.”

But today’s generation of Catalans do not face the same tribulations. In this region, the yellow- and-red-striped Catalan flag flies side-by-side with the flag of France on government building and private residences. Public festivals and national celebrations are often accompanied by activities rooted in Catalan customs. Many young Catalans are actively embracing their culture.

“One hundred percent, I am Catalan from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair,” said Hermine Duran, 48, a member of a local troupe of human castle-builders known as Castellers, Angelets del Vallespir. The Casteller derives from a competitive form of dance performed in teams in both French and Spanish Catalonia.

Catalonia stretches from the Eastern Pyrénées at the southernmost tip of France to the area surrounding Barcelona in Spain. While South Catalonia has become an autonomous community in Spain, the French side of Catalonia, known as North Catalonia, remains a region without any political power of its own.

As a result, less than an hour away from Spain, cities like Perpignan located in North Catalonia have developed a distinct identity — not quite French, not quite Spanish, but Catalan — equipped with their own language, culture and social history.

Perpignan, the last major city before the Spanish border, has especially inherited this identity. According to a 2007 survey, of the 9 million Catalan speakers in Southern Europe, only 125,000 live in France.

“[The Catalan culture] certainly would have disappeared if it weren’t for South Catalonia in Barcelona,” said Dumas. Though his mother hails from the Spanish portion of Catalonia, where Catalan is a co-official language, Dumas has found himself searching for ways to maintain his culture, in a region accustomed to identifying as either French or European.

Since the start of the 17th century, Catalans in the south of France have been somewhat disregarded as a cultural group. Sparking oppression and resentment that would last for centuries, King Louis XIV declared that the use of the Catalan language was “repugnant and contrary to the honor of the French nation.”

Dumas offers the term francisme, which indirectly translates as “Frenchify,” to describe the French government’s efforts to stamp out the Catalan language in favor of French.

And despite their recent popularity within mainstream culture, even the sardane and the Castellers have had a tough time surviving.

“It’s like all histories, there are golden periods and downfalls,” said Joseph Bonet, coach and founder of the Angelets del Vallespir. “But then there came the francisme, and it almost disappeared.” Bonet, who was a Catalan teacher for 15 years before becoming a casteller, says that the 200-year-old tradition of building human towers didn’t resurface until the 1980s.

But, like Dumas and Bonet, many Catalans have taken on the challenge of keeping their culture from disappearing. This generation, Dumas says, has more freedom to be Catalan: it’s much easier for younger people who haven’t experienced the oppression of years past.

Today, Catalan culture is reviving. Dumas has even co-founded an online publication, La Clau, to aid in the recovery .

The magazine aims to defend the Catalan point of view on society, and to simultaneously change European perceptions of the Catalan community. Through La Clau, Dumas says he hopes to strengthen the relationship, divided by modern geography, between North and South Catalonia, to keep the community alive in France.

“You’d have to ask my psyche why this is so important,” he said. “It’s just a part of me. I am an inheritor of a thousand-year-old culture.”

This story was adapted from The Perpignan Project, the web magazine of an annual summer foreign reporting program sponsored by ieiMedia and the San Francisco State University Journalism Department.

One. 167 Concord Street, Brooklyn

White picket fence, white birch tree, red shutters, red car, and red “No Standing” sign. Perfection.

Two. Clothesline poles, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

Few people use these poles — or clotheslines — anymore, but still they climb into the sky, rusty pulleys and scraps of rope still clinging to them.

Three. PUSH

Door handle on an art deco building on Fifth Avenue in the 40s.

Four. Defunct subway-line names

On the platform at the Dekalb Avenue station in Brooklyn there’s an illuminated (and still working) sign listing the names of defunct subway lines. Recite them out loud and they roll off your tongue: “Fourth Avenue Brighton Sea Beach West End.”

Five. “Brown”stones on St. Felix Street, in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, are colored like a box of macaroons.

Six. Arrow-theme wrought iron fencing, complete with fletching.

Seven. Construction workers’ breakfast orders

Scribbled on a two-by-four scrap: “Bagel Jelly Iced Cup French Vanilla Bagel Butter” for these hardworking men.

(c) 2011 Caitlin Van Dusen and City Lore

Caitlin Van Dusen is an editor and writer in Brooklyn, New York. Her articles have covered topics ranging from knitting in Nepal and bow hunting in Maine to a scent designer in Copenhagen and a lemon ice king in Corona, Queens. She is a copy editor at the Believer and McSweeney’s, and the art editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It happened in the desert near the pyramids of Giza, Egypt. I could see the pyramids in silhouette not too far in the distance, and I remember hearing the grains of sand whisper to each other and the sound of hooves beating the ground. It was just my horse, the desert, and me, and it was the first and last time I lived in the moment.

I arrived that summer night with my sister Marwa and my Egyptian cousins in a Honda civic and a Volkswagen Beetle, which we later traded for horses — hesitantly at first because all the horses we had seen looked as if they could barely support themselves.

Our guide Abdu, a short, stocky man dressed in the traditional galebeya, whose mouth was decorated with only two teeth, promised us the ride of our lives with the strongest of horses.

He disappeared behind a shack down a dusty road, and reemerged followed by six of the most beautiful horses I had ever seen. These were unlike the horses pulling carts on the streets of Cairo. They were true Arabian horses, with tight char-black velvet skin, long thick hair and muscles protruding from every part of their bodies. Marwa and I, however, could only drool at the sight of them. We had promised our concerned mother that we would play it safe, so we chose to ride a camel instead.

We realized our mistake right away. The boys shot out into the desert with their horses, screaming and howling, leaving us behind with our sluggish camel and the two young boys who had to guide it through the darkness. They whispered to themselves about why anyone would chose to ride a camel, but it was obviously meant for us to hear. They were right. The journey was only worthwhile riding on the back of a speeding horse, not on a two-humped camel, which we learned, didn’t necessarily mean was made for two people.

Nevertheless, Marwa and I made the best of it. As we trotted along at about five miles an hour, we took the time to admire our surroundings. The sky was a magnificent dark blue and glowed with the white light of the stars that peppered it. Silence surrounded us, except for the distant thud of horse hooves against the sand, and the howls of the people riding them. The air was cool, a refreshing change from the daytime heat that had burned our skin only hours before.

We eventually caught up with the boys who had stopped on top of a small hill to admire the view. It was like having a dream you were afraid would end too quickly. The hill overlooked the city of Giza, and I felt like I was looking out into the ocean, and that the lights of the city were just a reflection of the stars in the sky. The boys were all panting as if they and not the horses had done the running. I wanted in and so did Marwa, so we begged our cousins to switch with us. The horses had tired them out anyway, so they agreed.

I had barely grasped the reins when my horse went flying. Everyone called after me, but my horse and I had a special connection. He understood that I wanted nothing more than to get away from the past, my insecurities, my tedious life; away from everything. He was taking me to that place where I could simply forget and just live for once. But we had to hurry, Abdu’s horse was catching up with us and he would try to hold us back. His horse pulled up beside mine, and for the first time I saw a serious expression plastered on Abdu’s normally cheery face.

“Pull the reins!” he yelled.

I smiled at the sight of him: his short stumpy legs in a horizontal line flapping up and down. I pressed my heels slightly more tightly to the ribs of my horse and we sped away. The cool air smacked me in the face; I felt it go through my eyes, nose and ears. I tasted the sand in my mouth as it kicked up all around me, and felt the goose bumps creeping up my arms and legs. I couldn’t tell whether I was hearing the sound of my heart thumping in my ears or the horse’s hooves beating against the desert sand. I was sure that soon the ground beneath us would crack open because of how hard his hoof touched upon it or that any moment I would be thrown off.

But my horse came to a gradual stop by himself; I didn’t even pull the reins. He began trotting in a circle, giving me a full 360-degree view of the desert. I understood what he was telling me. My entire life I had either dwelt in the past or wearily anticipated the future. My biggest fear was growing old, yet I had never learned to live in the present. But there in the desert that night, with the dark blue sky, the full moon, the stars and the incessant whispering of the sand, it was just my horse and me, with no regard for space or time. My mind was for once a blank. All I could do was listen in the darkness taking slow deep breaths. I was alive and aware of it. I saw the rest of the group coming towards me, and I shut my eyes tight and pierced my horse’s stomach with my heels, waiting to get away once more. But he did not move. The past was too far a distance for even my Arabian horse to reach. The moment had come and passed, and I understood it would seldom return.

* * *

Two years have passed since that experience in the desert, and back in Egypt on one particularly long summer night I sat with my cousins, lounging lazily in our youth, giggling and gossiping. Our parents later joined us to reminisce about their own youth, their talk filled with a nostalgia that made my heart swell and my breath short. My aunt brought out an old photo album congested with black and white photos of our parents in their prime. They bragged about how fashionable and “hip” they once were. My mother’s eyes fixed on one photo in particular. It was a picture taken with her cousin before the start of their first year in college. She is propped up against a fence wearing a fitted skirt reaching just below her knee, and a slimming blouse. Her face is beaming and her smile shows that she is aware of her beauty. Her cousin is leaning against her; she is also beautiful, but terrifyingly shy of it. Against the backdrop of my cousins’ chatter, I watched as my mother examined the photo. She bit her lip and squinted her eyes as she tried to recognize herself, and suddenly the tears began to drop slowly from her eyes, in the way that water drips from a faucet that’s not properly closed.

I tried not to get caught up in the moment. I closed my eyes and thought of that night in the desert. I began to taste the sand in my mouth, but the nostalgia was too much for me, so I ran outside shutting the door behind me, and waited anxiously for my Arabian horse to appear and take me away. He never came and I was left there, bent over, my hands on my knees trying to catch my breath at the life that’s not quite running past me.

Rania Moaz is a writer living in the United Arab Emirates.

Emilie Eaton studies journalism at Arizona State University.

This story first appeared in Istanbul Stories, the publishing project of an annual summer foreign reporting program sponsored by ieiMedia and the San Francisco State University Journalism Department.

Istanbul-based photographer Brian Underdown blogs at Istanbul blogger.

Monica had a list of things to do before she died. I found it strange, since she was in her 20s. I have a list of things to do before I turn 40, which will probably become the list of things to do before I turn 50. Nonetheless, I was willing to help her tackle a few important items.

She was finishing a two-year job in American Samoa (an item on her list). She was working as an assistant public defender there, helping the poor. She loved to help people, though she tried hard to hide it. She’d try to maintain this gruff don’t-care-about-anyone exterior, but it never worked.

One day in April, not long before her 30th birthday, we met in Sydney, Australia. She was impatient to leave the city; it seemed Sydney was not on her list. She was used to the no-frills atmosphere of Samoa, and found the big city far too urbanized.

We rented a small car and began the long trek north. We were taking the scenic route to Cairns, where we planned to spend a day scuba diving (or snorkeling for me) the Great Barrier Reef, and then would try to spot the elusive duck-billed platypus.

Cairns is about 1,600 miles north of Sydney along the east coast — a long journey for anyone but two women on a mission.

Monica drove most of the time, believing that her week-long jaunt to New Zealand the year before had made her an expert at driving on the opposite side of the road, and maneuvering around the circles at just about every intersection.

She forged ahead through the treacherous, winding, roads, shifting gears and smoking cigarettes, complaining, in between puffs, that she had no clue where she was going. Many times, from my view over her left shoulder, I believed we would plummet to our deaths off the steep cliff that appeared to have no bottom, while Monica struggled to take one last drag.

“You should take a picture of this. Me, shifting and driving on the wrong side of the road,” she’d say. “I need proof of this.”

She put the cigarette back in her mouth and posed for my camera. Monica was always worried that people didn’t take her seriously enough.

After the click of the camera, she jerked the steering wheel to the right to keep us on the road. We managed to get to the Gold Coast, a city of high rises on the beach, infinite waterways and countless tourists. We stepped out of our tiny tin can into a hot and sticky tropical climate, leaving behind the jackets we wore in Sydney.

Just up a steep mountain road, we entered the rain forest. Small caves littered the terrain. We parked and ventured inside one. It was pitch black, even in the middle of the day. As our eyes adjusted,
a glow from the ceiling of the cave seeped through the darkness. There were hundreds of glow worms dangling above us.

I ducked, thinking they would fall on my head. It was as if someone had taken a box of glow sticks and thrown them up in the air.

Something zoomed past my head.

“Whoosh.”

A puff of air hit my earlobe as the creature zipped by. I ducked again.

“Bats,” I heard someone say.

I skulked back toward the entrance. I reached the light just outside the cave and felt the rush of freedom come over me as I finally stood up straight.

The next day, we flew three hours to Cairns, scorching sunshine following us. Across the street from The Cairns Youth Hostel, we waded into a swimming lagoon, where a sign warned children against pretending to drown. The actual beach was a cluster of black muck that appeared to have washed in from an oil refinery.  The crystal clear lagoon provided a refuge for tourists who came to the shore for
a dip in the sea. Nearby, a pier full of bars, restaurants and shops stretched out past the soiled sand and into deep blue waters, where we watched boats returning from excursions to various parts of the
Great Barrier Reef. We were just a short ship ride away from marking an item off Monica’s list.

Our first morning in Cairns was Monica’s birthday. A local tour guide named Rick, whom Monica befriended on a smoke break, directed us to Haba Dive Adventures, an adventure company leading
daily excursions to the remarkable reef. A group of young handsome men greeted us at the boat.

“Don’t get too excited,” Monica warned me, “Rick said they’re all Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Saddened but somehow feeling safer, I boarded the boat. A basket at the entrance contained individual packets of Dramamine. The boat boys warned us to take a packet if we thought we would experience any motion sickness. “I won’t need any, I told them. “I never get seasick.”

Packed with bathing suit-clad voyageurs, the boat left the dock and headed for Opal Key. The strong winds left us confined to our seats with white knuckled grips on the railings. As the boat fought through the gusts, we were tossed about and thrown through the waves. My stomach began to churn. Where is that basket? Is it too late to take the medicine?

I lowered my head and prayed for the nausea to pass. It didn’t. I stood up and looked for one of the Witnesses. We found the Dramamine scattered on the floor, and he picked one up and handed it to me.

I staggered over to a long bench and curled up in a ball, waiting for relief. Thirty minutes later, Monica woke me with the news that we had made it to the reef. She was putting on her dive suit.

“Time to go,” she screamed, as though the boat was being invaded by pirates.

The scuba divers were partitioned off into a group for special instruction. They were waiting for Monica. She hopped over to join them, struggling to put on her flippers. I sat up and looked around. No land in sight. I felt my stomach flip flop, but the nausea was gone. And then so was Monica; with a loud splash, she’d leapt into the water flippers first.

Long fingers of red coral danced by a large rock on the bottom of the sea. I had read on Wikipedia that there are over four hundred species of corals found at the great reef. I felt like I was seeing them all
at once. One piece resembled the human brain. Just beyond that was a patch of long strands of blue, purple and yellow corals, swaying with the waves. Nearby, I spotted a coral that looked like several clam shells sewn together. A long thin green fish glided by, barely distinguishable from a piece of sea grass. I drifted along in awe.

Finally I peered up out of the water and realized I was alone, far from the boat and the other snorkelers. I began to swim frantically towards the boat, remembering the movie I had seen about the tourists who were inadvertently left by their boat captain to be eaten by sharks.

I made it back to the rest of the snorkel group near the boat. I had been in the water for an hour and a half. “Fifteen more minutes until we leave, the Jehovah’s Witness in charge told us.

I returned my mask to the water to search the reef for Monica. The divers were beginning to surface and climb aboard. Of course, we had to wait for Monica.

She smiled all the way back to the dock.

Next we headed for the mountains. We were searching for a cabin called “On the Wallaby,” where, according to Rick the tour guide, we could see a duck-billed platypus.

Monica couldn’t wait.

“I have to see a platypus. It may not make sense to anyone else, but it is a must for me. And no, I have no good reason why, so don’t even ask,” she headed me off.

We stopped at every body of water along the way, searching for signs of a platypus. We sneaked to the shore from every direction, hiding behind trees, hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive creature.

Night fell. Back at the cabin, we were greeted by a tall young man with long blond curls. “I’m probably the only one who can still find a platypus,” he bragged. “They are getting harder and harder to find, and sometimes days go by without a sighting.” Monica’s face began to show worry. “There is one almost certain way,” he continued. “You have to go to this lake just before dawn, and sit and wait until one swims by.”

“I’m there,” Monica declared. He gave her directions to the lake and wished her luck. Spotting a duck-billed platypus had become a popular quest in this area, and Blondie led a group of people every
day on a canoe trip with the purpose of locating one. Monica took his directions and we went to our room, with its bunk beds, wood floors and vaulted ceilings.

I awoke at 10 the next morning, with a pounding headache, courtesy of our effort to try beers from every region in Australia at the local pub the night before. We were leaving Cairns that evening. Sadly, I realized Monica would not get to see the platypus.

Just then the door swung open, and in bounced Monica, her jacket zipped up to her chin, her backpack slung over her right shoulder. Her smile was unmistakable. She’d checked off another item on her list.

I didn’t know then how important it was for her to meet this goal, and neither did she. The image of Monica proudly bursting in that morning, in her zipped-up jacket, is seared into my memory. A year afterward, she suddenly passed away.

I hold on tightly to the memories of that trip. And I’ve developed an appreciation for checking items off the list.

The idea was to seduce slow-moving cars to stop by for a cone or cup of ice cream. Little more than hulking cement billboards, mid-century ice cream stands boasted shapes and signage brazenly trumpeting their wares. There were stands in the shape of upside-down ice cream cones. Others were conceived of as igloos and castles. Nearly all were bedecked with gaudy, flashing neon signs. If travelling motorists weren’t already sold on the idea that an ice cream cone would offer a fun-filled break from the tedium of the road, then the stands’ flamboyant architecture loudly broadcasted that message. (In Louisiana, scores of former ice cream stands have been converted in recent years to drive-through daiquiri shops, perhaps the ultimate expression of roadside dining exuberance.)

Soft Ice Cream Creates a Stir

The stands were just the right type of retail outlet for the post-war ice cream-loving times. Partly aided by these roadside outfits, ice cream cone sales went through the roof. By 1953, 6 billion of the treats were sold in the US, according to industry figures.

To meet the escalating demand, a hundred cone companies poured an estimated 50 million lb (22.7 million kg) of flour and 3.5 million lb of sugar into cone-making machines. And it wasn’t just kids who were lapping up cones. Adults loved them, too. In fact, in a bid to attract adult customers, a total of 65 per cent of the cones produced in the early 1950s were of the flat-bottomed variety - said to be more appealing to grown-ups than the more common waffle cone.

With a seemingly insatiable demand emanating from baby boomers and their parents, new ice cream vendors entered the market. In the UK Mr Softee and Mr Whippy peddled soft ice cream from vans in English villages and towns, beginning in the late 1950s. In the US the demand for soft-serve ice cream soon eclipsed that of the regular, hard-packed variety. By 1950, Americans were lapping up five times as much soft ice cream as they had three years earlier, while hard ice cream consumption had slipped 16 per cent from its 1947 levels. By 1957 more than 12,000 drive-in stores were dotting the US roadways. And fans were digging into 150 million gallons (568 million litres) of the swirled soft confection annually.

Dairy Queen

It wasn’t long before regional and national chains in the US - Tastee Freez, Carvel, Kohr’s and Dairy Queen, to name a few - pushed aside many of the original mom and pops. One of the most successful of these new purveyors was Dairy Queen, founded in 1938. From the opening of the first shop in Kankakee, Illinois, the fledgling company - launched by the father and son team of J. F. and H. A. McCulloughs of Green River, Illinois - flourished. In 1946, sales of their soft serve - unlike frozen custard, it was made without eggs - totalled $75,000 according to company figures. By 1950 the company was raking in $35 million from its 1,400 outlets. By the mid-1950s the company was claiming 2,600 shops located throughout the US.

Franchising was the key to Dairy Queen’s growth. Starting in the late 1940s, the company had instituted a system in which store owners were granted a specific geographic territory in exchange for paying an upfront fee and royalties Today, Dairy Queen operates more than 5,900 restaurants in the United States, Canada and twenty foreign countries. (Texas claims boasting rights to the most Dairy Queens, with 600 outlets.) International expansion began in 1953. Dairy Queen now runs stores outside the US, in places like Canada, Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and India. Today, Dairy Queen is owned by multinational Berkshire Hathaway.

Howard Johnson and his 28 Flavours

In ‘The Oranging of America’, a 1976 short story by American writer Max Apple, a fictional Howard Johnson embarks on a road trip across America. Cruising US highways in a limousine fitted out with a back-seat ice cream freezer containing a selection of eighteen ice cream flavours, the restaurant magnate launches a quest to find new locales for his roadside eateries. ‘He raised his right arm and its shadow spread across the continent like a prophecy’, Apple wrote of his road-tripping restaurateur.

As it turned out, the aspirations of the imaginary Johnson didn’t differ substantially from those of the actual man. Howard Johnson introduced Americans to an expanded palette of ice cream flavours. But just as importantly, he cemented a trend that ice cream-stand owners had already begun to exploit - the marriage of ice cream-eating and automobile trips.

In 1925 Howard Dearing Johnson, then a young druggist with a soda fountain in Wollaston, Massachusetts, doubled the fat content in his ice cream; customers flocked to his store for the rich treat. Predicting that Americans were ready to expand beyond the traditional favourites of vanilla and chocolate, Johnson unveiled a line-up of 28 flavours - from maple walnut to banana. Soon he added lunch and snack foods, such as fried clams and hot dogs. An American roadside dining institution was born. Like the mom-and-pop ice cream-stand operators, Johnson figured out that Americans’ infatuation with the automobile, and the lifestyle it spawned, was the key to marketing his product.

So Johnson followed the Second World War veterans and their families to the suburbs that were springing up around the nation’s cities. There, amongst the split levels and ranch houses, the automobile was king. In fact, in the newly minted towns, residents were totally dependent on their cars for connecting with essential neighbourhood services - from grocery stores to dining establishments. So Johnson embarked on an expansion plan in which he situated his orange-roofed eateries in burgeoning suburban subdivisions. From Levittown, New York, to Kankakee, Illinois, Howard Johnson restaurants became familiar dining landmarks. Accommodating suburbanites’ automobiles was key to the business’s success. The Levittown restaurant was typical. It boasted 26,000 square feet (2,415 sq. m) of parking - an area that that dwarfed the size of the eatery itself.

By 1952 Johnson had served more than 200 million diners at his 355 stores. Investors - including Second World War general and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower who became a partner in a Washington, DC HoJos, as the chain was affectionately called - clamoured to buy into the business. By the beginning of the next decade, the number of HoJos in the US had nearly doubled. And when a major highway, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, opened to traffic in 1940, Johnson was given the nod to put the roadway’s eateries in place. By 1952 there were twenty-one HoJos on the Pennsylvania artery alone, eleven positioned on the New Jersey Turnpike, and one on the Maine highway. One hundred million Americans a year were taking to US roads by the early 1960s - and Johnson was feeding a good number of them.

Soon Johnson’s dining empire was equated in the minds of many Americans with the concept of roadside dining. ‘In most states east of the Mississippi River, the term “Howard Johnson” has become synonymous with roadside restaurant’, the New York Times wrote in a September 1952 story chronicling the chain’s success. ‘[A]s long a automobiles continue to pour out of Detroit, Howard Johnson won’t worry too much: every car that rolls off the production line has built-in customers’, wrote the Chicago Defender in 1961, estimating that America’s roadside restaurants were pulling in $6 billion of business annually. Ice cream was HoJo’s biggest seller, accounting in 1955 for a quarter of all sales. And it seemed as if the HoJos formula would be easy to export to Europe. But when the company opened its first store in Amsterdam in the 1970s, customers spurned its products.

And trouble was brewing at home as well. In the 1960s charges of racism dogged the chain. Several outlets operating in southern states refused to serve African-Americans. In fact, HoJos became embroiled in controversy when in 1961 President John F. Kennedy was forced to issue a personal apology to a Sierra Leone diplomat who had been refused service at a Hagerstown, Maryland store. Soon, nagging cleanliness and food quality issues surfaced - and in a blow to the ice cream’s brand, customers complained that some HoJos outlets were carrying fewer than the vaunted 28 flavours. Perhaps the fatal blow was struck when the New Jersey Turnpike authority decided to terminate Howard Johnson’s roadside concession contract in 1973.

Today, almost no original Howard Johnson buildings remain; in 2005 the Times Square restaurant in New York was shuttered forever. A year later, La Mancha Group, LLC  took control of the food and beverage rights, according to www.HoJoland.com, a Howard Johnson fan site. Meanwhile HoJo devotees keep the flame alive through various Internet sites, hoping for a resurrection of the iconic roadside dining spots.

As for the restaurant magnate himself, Johnson always considered himself an ice cream man at heart. He was said to down a dish a day and to have kept a freezer full in his New York penthouse apartment. Yet despite his epic accomplishments - including the rainbow of 28 flavours - Johnson’s attempts to convince Americans to become more adventurous ice cream eaters fell short. At mid-century, fully half of US ice cream fans still preferred vanilla. In fact, Johnson appeared to have died a disappointed man, reported a New York Times obituary in 1972. Try as he might, the restaurant chieftain believed that in one key respect, he had failed mightily. ‘I spent my whole life developing scores of flavors,’ he lamented, ‘and yet most people still say, “I’ll take vanilla.’”

Beyond the Border from Pavement Pieces on Vimeo.

And he’s seen firsthand the environmental degradation the 670-mile fence has inflicted on the surrounding area.

The $3.7 billion fence was intended to serve as a solid barrier between Arizona and Mexico to prevent illegal immigrants and drugs from passing over the border. What it has done instead is fragment an already stretched environment, and prevent animals from accessing large portions of their habitats, which is pushing some toward extinction. It has even caused flooding in border areas.

“it’s just so enraging to have this put up, and it’s only harmful,” Odle said.

Odle’s 50-acre plot is located along the border in Cochise County, Arizona. He moved to the area in 2000; the fence here went up in 2008.

“When this first went up, I’d drive along and deer would be ahead of you; and they’d go a ways and try and go south, and they couldn’t cross,” he said. “I followed them a mile or so, and they eventually just went north.”

While Odle is not a rancher, he is very much an outdoors man –  his eco-friendly straw-bale house and solar energy use can attest to that. A former Marine and Vietnam veteran, he wears a denim shirt, khaki shorts and a stained white hat. He drives a massive white truck with a National Rifle Association sticker affixed to the back window. Odle also cares deeply about the local wildlife.

“We’d see rabbits — rabbits can’t get through. Or roadrunners,” he said. “Well, who cares about rabbits and roadrunners? Well, I do. And it really pisses me off that this thing affects those critters the way it does. It’s really tragic.”

About a mile from Odle’s property, the wall abruptly ends over the San Padro River. There, the only barriers are sparse, steel beams low to the ground. If they can fly under the radar of the Border Patrol, who regularly patrols this area, it seems almost effortless for humans to cross here.

Animals don’t have it so easy.

They don’t have critical thinking and reasoning skills like people do, Odle said. “The animals aren’t like, ‘The word’s out; we can cross here.’ It doesn’t work like that.”

Odle isn’t the only one who sees the wall as a serious environmental hazard.

Environmentalists warn of habitat fragmentation, habitat destruction and hydrological issues.

“We’re talking about a solid barrier that’s chopping ecosystems in two,” said Dan Millis of the Sierra Club’s Rincon Group. “Migration corridors are being blocked, and that can have a huge impact, not only to (animals’ access to food and water, but to their genetic variability and basically the strength of the whole species.”

Randy Serraglio of the Center for Biological Diversity points out that habitat destruction is more extensive than most people realize.

“There’s a lot of other land that’s disturbed along with the border wall than this tiny little strip of land that everyone thinks is so innocuous,” he said. “(The Border Patrol) still has to drive will-nilly all over the desert to apprehend these people….The operation support activities do more damage than the wall itself.”

In 2005, The REAL ID Act allowed for the waiver of 36 environmental laws so the wall could be built, laws that conserved migration patterns, maintained clean air and water, and protected endangered species.

Now, species such as the mountain lion and the endangered ocelots and jaguarundi are feeling the effects of the fence, Millis said. Other environmentalists name the jaguar, the long-nosed bat, the masked bobwhite quail and the Sonoran pronghorn as species that have suffered.

Serraglio warns that some species will go extinct if the problem is not remedied.

“Any further construction of the wall, and we can pretty much say goodbye to jaguars in the United States,” he said.

Flooding is another issue. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, in the Sonoran Desert area, and the cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, experienced flooding that some environmentalists attribute to the wall.

“You had six feet of water on the Mexican side of the wall, and only a foot or two on the U.S. side, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the wall is playing a part in the hydrological disaster,” Millis said.
The flooding in Nogales caused the death of two people in 2008. Today, in Nogales, Mexico, the ironic words, ‘Walls are scars on the earth,’ are scrawled across the metal wall in white spray paint.

It’s easy to see how the wall can cause flooding. Near Odle’s land, debris of grass, vegetation, clothing, shoes and discarded water bottles form somewhat of a dam on the Mexican side of the fence.

“The fact (is) that it affects the wildlife, the environment,” Odle said. “ou can see the flooding that occurs down here — that’s another aspect of it. But it doesn’t stop people.”

The Department of Homeland Security sees it differently.

“I think there’s a misconception that the border fence is supposed to be a solution to any and all border problems,” said Colleen Agle, public information officer for the Tucson Sector of DHS. “It’s not the solution by itself. We see that as part of a solution that consists of our infrastructure, agents and technology.”

Opponents have referred to the fence as a multibillion-dollar “speed bump” that doesn’t really keep illegal immigrants from crossing; they said it only slows them down.

“That’s not my terminology, but that might be fair to say,” Agle said. “It allows our agents time to respond to an area so we can make the proper law enforcement response to whatever type of border incursion it is.”

Agle maintains that the border fence does, in fact, deter potential illegal immigrants.

“When our agents go in to make an apprehension, a lot of people realize they are going to be apprehended, and (they) run back across (the border),” she said. “It they’re going to have a challenge to get into the United States, our agents can respond. Also, if they’re going to have a challenge getting back into Mexico, there’s basically a certainty of arrest. If an individual knows there’s going to be a certainty of arrest, there’s deterrent.”

DHS wouldn’t comment on the environmental effects of the wall.

Despite the Border Patrol’s arguments, local residents and environmentalists are not convinced the wall really does anything to deter illegal immigration and drug traffic.

“The nature of this wall is a knee-jerk political reaction to this anti-immigration hysteria that has swept the country since Sept. 11 and has intensified more recently,” Millis said. “What it is not is a solution to any of the problems it claims to address.”

Odle agrees.

“It doesn’t stop people,” he said. “So why was it put up? Well, it was put up because some lard butt up in Dubuque, Iowa, was sitting on his overstuffed chair, eating his supersaturated fats, watching his wide-screen TV and says, ‘Oh yeah, that’ll stop them.’ It would stop his fat ass, but it doesn’t stop some 20-year-old who wants to come up here, wants to work and is hungry.”

Even Odle’s dog Jake has wandered onto the Mexican side at various times. Once, he was gone for three months, until a woman in Mexico called him and let him know. So Odle had to get his dog’s registration papers, then go get him and bring him back.

Millis points out the hefty price tag of the wall in relation to its overall effectiveness.

“Now (DHS is) saying what it really is is a speed bump,” Millis said. “It slows people down for five minutes or so, and then we have more time to respond. And that’s just ridiculous. How many billions of dollars do we have to spend on a five-minute speed bump?”

The wall, which isn’t finished and spans only 670 miles across the nearly 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico, already has a price tag of $3.7 billion.

As far as a solution to the rash of environmental issues that have arisen, some say baseline data research and funds allocated to mitigate existing damage could be the answer.

An ongoing protocol developed by researchers from the University of Arizona and U.S. Geological Survey will monitor the environmental effects of the wall. The protocol will study its environmental effects, including effects on wildlife and vegetation, hydrology, erosion, species migration and movement, and the isolation of species on both sides of the border.

“The problem is, we don’t have the baseline data on a lot of these species and how they use the border region,” Serraglio said. “So it’s really hard to tell scientifically what exactly the border wall is doing to them.”

Ideally, protocol would remedy this issue, deciding what areas along the border fence should receive funds to counteract the environmental effects of the wall. It is currently under review by DHS, said Laura-Lopez Hoffman, one of the UA researchers working on the project.

Money allotted to mitigate the environmental degradation is another point of contention. Currently the DHS and the Department of the Interior are embroiled in a bitter struggle over $90 million appropriated to repair environmental damage inflicted by the wall.

“It’s a little complex, with Homeland Security refusing to hand the money over to Department of the Interior, because they are worried about an obscure provision of the 1930 Economy Act,” Millis said. “There was supposed to be about $50 million per year dedicated to this effort, but it has been held up for two years now, and the wall continues to be an unmitigated environmental disaster.”

This story was adapted from “Beyond the Border,” a reporting project of the Reporting the Nation concentration at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the University of Arizona School of Journalism. The story first appeared in the graduate web magazine Pavement Pieces.

In early July, a newspaper assigned me a story on the “Playboy Plotter,” the spoiled scion of “good” Beirut family who had contacted al-Qaeda linked groups over the Internet and expressed a desire to carry out bombings in New York City. When I called the plotter’s mother, she answered right away, as if she’d been waiting for my call. I asked her why she thought her son had become an Islamic militant.

“Shu yaani?” she cried out, bewildered.

I repeated the question in Arabic, although she supposedly spoke English, but she remained mystified.

Finally I figured out it wasn’t the Playboy Plotter’s mother at all, but an old auntie from Bint Jbeil who was already on the line, calling for Umm Hassane, when I dialed. Even our phones barely belonged to us anymore.

But food was the real battleground, and here the rhetorical question was Umm Hassane’s most powerful weapon. In response to our simplest questions, she would fire a rhetorical salvo that rendered us, her assailants, impotent.

“Umm Hassane, are you hungry?”

“How can I have any appetite?”

“Umm Hassane, what do you want to eat?”

“How can I eat with all this pain?”

“Umm Hassane” — realizing that we would have to resort to specific questions if we had any hopes of an answer — “Do you want salad and potatoes?”

“If you’re making some, maybe,” — then, flinging up her hands in deprecation. But not if you’re making it for me!”

If we asked her “Biddik shi?”’ — Do you want anything? she would answer back, despairingly, “”Shu biddi? Shu biddi akel?” What do I want? What can I eat?” Mohamad called this her “not-so-subtle attempts to tell us we don’t have anything to eat.”

Most of the time, she would just say “Shu baarifni?” Literally, it means, “what do I know?” But like a teenager’s whatever, or a wiseguy’s fuggeddaboudit, the phrase shu baarifni contained a multitude of shifting meanings. In her mouth, it meant: Leave me alone; Don’t leave me alone; I don’t know what I want; I want you to know what I want without me having to ask, or even knowing what I want myself.

Her other favorite expression was ma btifru maai, “it makes no difference to me.” This meant that deep, violent opinions were being suppressed through superhuman exertion on her part. All these expressions contained a depth of passive-aggressive mastery that impressed me greatly, no matter how frustrating, and I started to think Umm Hassane could make millions teaching corporate communication seminars.

In the end, most of her rhetorical tricks just meant yes. But not simply yes. They meant, Why aren’t you eating? Why aren’t you eating what I eat? Why aren’t we all eating together, the same thing, at the same time?

The food wars came to a head one Friday, when I asked her if she wanted a cucumber-and-labneh sandwich. Apparently it was one thing to serve an arous as a snack, and quite another to offer it for lunch.

“I’ve been eating nothing but labneh,” she wailed. “I ate it yesterday, I ate it this morning. Azit nafsi”– my soul, my appetite recoils.

“She was insulted that you offered her that,” Mohamad whispered to me in the kitchen. “It’s for babies.”

“So what the hell does she want?”

Mohamad went into the living room to investigate. After the usual “What, me eat?” formalities, she presented him with a list of grievances: we had no salad, no meat, no bread. Worst of all, we lacked the most essential oil of Lebanese kitchens: Mazola. She lamented the madness of cooking with nothing but olive oil — it was not for cooking, as everyone knew, and how could we live like this?

Mohamad trotted back and forth, a reluctant ambassador, while I waited in the kitchen to find out what she wanted. Finally, after some wheedling, she consented to a shish taouk sandwich.

I asked him to find out if she wanted garlic, hummus, and pickles, the traditional accoutrements of such a sandwich. He got an Umm Hassane answer: “What do I need with hummus?”

“She’s being insolent,” he muttered, back in the kitchen, where we were both hiding from her wrath. “They’re all pseudo-martyrs, my whole family.”

We loved having her. We would have bought her anything she asked for, but she refused to ask. Somehow this woman, the scourge of greengrocers and agriculture students, could not say what she wanted in the privacy of our home. She was trying so hard to stay out of our way, not to be a burden, that she ended up driving us half-insane.

I was confounded. I loved to feed people, but I couldn’t cook for Mohamad because most of the dishes I knew how to make relied on ingredients he wouldn’t eat. And I couldn’t cook for Umm Hassane because she refused to tell us what she wanted. I finally had the kitchen I’d been longing for, with a real stove and a real refrigerator and a real kitchen sink. But I had no idea what to cook.

“I have an idea,” I said to Mohamad one day, as we stood in the kitchen.

What she really wanted was to be fussed over, to be coaxed and taken care of. But Umm Hassane was from my grandmother’s generation: brought up to put others first, never to acknowledge their own desires, except in the context of being denied. They showed their love by cooking and complaining. For these women, the kitchen was one of the few places where they could be the undisputed queens.

I outlined a plan: I would ask Umm Hassane to teach me how to cook traditional Lebanese food, under the pretext that I needed to learn how to prepare food for Mohamad, like a dutiful wife. Instead of the fancy fusion stuff I made only for myself, she would teach me how to make Lebanese peasant food — mlukhieh, sayyadiyeh, burghul wa banadura, kebbeh nayeh. I would learn something new; she would have a mission, something to make her feel appreciated. And if it made me look like an obedient wife, that was a price I was willing to pay.

* * *

The day we planned to make mlukhieh, I stumbled into the kitchen late. Umm Hassane had been awake since seven a.m. rehearsing each bit of prep work. Next to the sink, a raw chicken lay spread-eagled on the counter, waiting for me with naked accusation.

“Wash her!” she commanded, hobbling into the kitchen and pointing to the chicken.

“Make coffee,” I muttered, heading for the kettle. I could barely communicate in English, let alone Arabic, until I’d had my coffee.

Clearly I hadn’t understood. Drawing herself to full height, Umm Hassane pointed toward the sink and repeated her orders: “The chicken! Wash her!?

We hadn’t even started cooking, and already we were hurtling toward one of those clash-of-civilization conversations where people kept shouting Arabic nouns over and over –”WATER! WATER!” — thinking I was deaf as well as simple-minded, but never explaining exactly what they wanted me to do with the goddamn water. Meanwhile, I would stand there, choking on basic verbs, and thinking, This is just a taste of how it must feel to be a taxi driver, a busboy, a chambermaid, any of the starter jobs immigrants get in America while they’re learning English. These encounters usually deteriorated into something like this:

“Make coffee!”
“Wash chicken!”
“Coffee!”
“Chicken!”
“COFFEE!”
“CHICKEN!”

Then I remembered an old habit of my grandmother’s. Whenever she was craving something — a hamburger, a cigarette, a beer –she would say: “You want a beer, don’t you? Don’t you want a hamburger? You want me to roll you a cigarette?”

At the time it drove me crazy.”No, Grandma, you want a hamburger,” I would say. Why couldn’t she just admit that she wanted a beer? She ran the kitchen; why couldn’t she just take what she wanted? That my grandmother’s life revolved around other people’s hungers –that she needed to justify her desires, even to herself –was something I didn’t figure out until after she was gone.

“Umm Hassane,” I said. “Don’t you want a cup of coffee? You like coffee, don’t you?”

Thus was born our morning ritual of cake and coffee. That morning, before making mlukhieh, Umm Hassane and I sat out on the balcony eating chocolate cake and drinking coffee. From then on we did it every morning. We would hold blunted conversations and watch the city perform its morning rituals: pigeons wheeling in the sky, traffic jamming on the Corniche, maids beating carpets on balconies. She would stretch her legs and luxuriate in the sun. Normally, she might disapprove of such idleness; a person should be off cleaning houses. But since it was part of my cooking classes, that made it okay. Really, she was doing it for my sake.

One morning, as we sat looking at our sliver of Mediterranean water, she swung her legs down and scooted her chair closer to mine. She leaned forward, fixed me with an intense expression, and commanded:

“Bring me a baby!”

“But we have a cat,” I said. “Who needs a baby?”

“A cat! What’s a cat?” she said, angrily brushing aside this evasion.”Bring me a baby!”

How could I explain to her that our lives were still too unsettled, too unstable? That war correspondents don’t just go gallivanting around the Middle East having babies; or that even now, as we began to tentatively settle down, we still didn’t know where we wanted to be? I definitely didn’t have the Arabic — or even the English, this hour of the morning –to express the array of emotions this demand evoked.

“I want a baby,” I told her, all innocent shrugs, “but Mohamad doesn’t.

This was another trick I had learned in Umm Hassane’s school of culinary and rhetorical arts: whenever she wanted something her way, she would claim, piously, that Mohamad Ali likes it this way or Mohamad Ali wants this. But I should have known better than to try to wield the master’s sword against her.

“Mohamad doesn’t want one?” she growled, flicking aside his opinion with a toss of her chin. “Who cares what he says? Bring me a baby!”

Annia Ciezadlo was a special correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Baghdad and The New Republic in Beirut. She has written about culture, politics, and the Middle East for The Nation, Saveur, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and Lebanon’s Daily Star. Her article about cooking with Iraqi refugees in Beirut was included in Best Food Writing 2009.

Salesman outside Burma's only synagogue, in the former capital Yangon

Traveling in style in Beijing

Cooling off

To participate in a Tamil festival, this girl prepares to climb 272 steps

Dancing at mosque after religious study, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Young monks praying at the Schwedagon Pagoda in Yangon

Making a pretend "mochi," a holiday rice cake, for Japanese New Year

New Year's in pajamas, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Working Sunday in Phnom Penh

Going to school in a floating Cambodian village

A sister and her brother, who live on the street in Phnom Penh

Visiting Beijing's "Forbidden City"

Riding with daddy in Phnom Penh

]]> http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/work-struggle-joy/feed/ http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/woodstock-russian-style/ http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/woodstock-russian-style/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:32:46 +0000 Lina Zeldovich http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/?p=5918

“Remember how we had to hide from the militia?,” Alex asks, as we weave through a constellation of multicolored tents, clustered around fire pits underneath pines so tall I have to throw my head back to see the pale blue sky. I hear someone playing a guitar. Another chimes in from a distance. Someone’s humming, someone’s whistling, and the air smells of burning twigs and kasha.

This is Russia’s answer to Woodstock. The natives called it The Festival of Bards. We’re in the middle of the Russian woods, at a camp-like sprawl about 400 miles northeast of Moscow, where the concepts of civilization, friendship and trust take on a different meaning.

“I remember,” I say. This was my juvenile alma mater, where everything happened for the first time: first time in the forest, first night by the fire and first love in a tent. I was 18, only a couple of years older than this event.

Now I am almost twice that age, an American tourist who speaks her native language with a slight accent, whose foreign-structured sentences sound funny and who doesn’t get the latest political jokes, because she’s unfamiliar with Kremlin gossip.

The Trek

We get here by coming to Kazan, a city halfway between Moscow and Siberia, at the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers. Kazan was founded by Tatars — the descendants of Genghis Khan — and later conquered by Ivan the Terrible.

Then we take a bus to Aisha village, famous, in its own way, for giving the world Alexander Poniatoff, the founder of America electronics company Ampex.

In the old days, a long path without signs would lead us from the bus stop to the hidden forest valley, intended to be found only by the word of mouth. It was part of the secrecy that only those who had the right directions could make it here.

Everything is different now, except that the festival is still nicknamed Aishinsky.

“These days everyone drives,” Alex says. “And we buy Cola and Fanta at kiosks, which were unheard of even 10 years ago.”

A Clandestine Affair

With an effort, I can recall the lyrics to the songs. I hope I still understand their subtleties. I breathe in the sweet scent of sap floating in the air, and follow Alex on our quest for the director’s tent, feeling almost as young and Russian as I once was.

Twenty years ago, this as small and clandestine affair, an outlet for the Soviet iconoclasts who retreated into the woods to speak their minds, scream out their frustration and sing their carols without being eavesdropped on, ratted out and arrested.

Back then, the big cities weren’t safe. One couldn’t have a politically incorrect conversation in cafe, because a nerdy guy at the next table could’ve been a KGB thug in plain clothes. One couldn’t criticize authorities in one’s own apartment, since the place could’ve been bugged.

People trusted only those they’d known for a long time — that’s why the Russian concept of friendship always had a deeper, stronger meaning. A friend was not a buddy you bowled with on Wednesdays or drank beers with on Sundays, but a confidante you trusted with your deepest thoughts. It was someone safe to take along to the woods to share a bottle of vodka, a pot of tea, a guitar and your latest rebellious rhymes.

“Remember how we used to truck everything in on our backs — tents, pots, canned food, drinking water? Alex keeps talking. “How we schlepped from the bus, getting lost and not asking for directions, unless it was another bunch of kindred spirits with guitars strapped onto their backpacks?

A construction crew would arrive the day before, to fell some trees and build the outhouses, or fix any that still stood from the previous year. It was typically an all-male team, but still The Damsel’s Hut was always the first to rise.

A Life I Miss

I almost stumble over a man in his early 30s sprawled across the path, next to a guitar and a nearly-empty vodka bottle. He’s snoring, and someone’s unattended and unwashed children jump over him like a log.

The sleeping guy looks familiar. I make a mental note to come by later; he may be someone I used to know. For now, we have to hurry if I want to be included in the program. The sun is sinking below the pine crowns. We’re cutting it close.

We finally find Stas’ tent. Short for Stanislav, Stas is the festival’s historical figure without whom things tend to fall apart. He’s got a mixed reputation as a good singer, a horrible womanizer, and somewhat of a dark horse who used to get away with cracking political jokes, even during the Soviet era. Some people love him, while others wince at his name. He’s another make of Russian - one you trust up to a point.

He recognizes me, though my once-raven black mop of hair is now blond.

“Look who’s here,” he says with a hug that makes my bones crack. I forgot how close Russians get with people they know.

He wants to know what possessed me to take two planes and an overnight train from Moscow to this middle of nowhere.

“I miss this,” I say, trying to explain life on the other side of the globe. I miss the tunes, the smoky midnight tea brewed over a fire, even the white frost that decorates the tents in the early morning.

I give Stas my new Russian poetry book. He asks me to sign it, and tells me to come by the stage shortly after midnight.

He asks if I am writing my next book, and I nod, even though I haven’t written a word in Russian for ages. The Slavic rhymes and English grammar don’t get along, at least not in my head. Luckily, a gang of slightly drunk youths bursts into his tent yelling about a broken mike, saving me from having to tell more lies. They also confide that tonight’s guest star got pulled over by the militiamen for sipping Stoli while driving.

“I’ll see you at the stage,” Stas tells me as he flips open his cell phone to do damage control. If he’s lucky enough to know the militiamen on duty, the celeb may still make it. We leave the tent as Stas orders his crew to find him a sober driver.

Alex and I walk back in the dusk through the suddenly bright spotlights of fires and twinkling “cyclops” flashlights worn on the forehead. Performers are getting ready, tuning up their guitars and drinking warm-up vodka shots.

Performance

By the time we reach our tent, the wooden stage is lit, and the nearby hill, which serves as theater seating, is seeded with spectators.

We pass a young woman who is prepping her man for tonight’s performance by force-feeding him.

“You’re on your second liter and you haven’t eaten a thing!” she yells, holding a bowl of soup to his mouth. “You won’t make out the strings!”

She resorts to the method Russians use for their young picky eaters. “One spoon for mommy, one spoon for daddy, three more spoons and you can have another shot.”

We find our clan — the same one I used to belong to, before we all got married, divorced, rich or disillusioned. Some are drinking vodka, others sipping tea — the two refreshments as inseparable from the Russian psyche as snow from winter.

Traditionally, every concert opens with a song written by Oleg Nechayev, “We All Got Together Tonight.” Everyone on the hill sings along. I’m happy to see that the gala has upheld its insubordination agenda.

The singers mock Putin’s insatiable desire to rule and the masses’ inherent inability to follow his laws. Men sing about the journeys ahead and women they have left behind. Women sing about choices: whether to follow their men into exile or marry their politically-successful best friends.

Russians worship nostalgia. In summer they miss snow, in winter they long for the sun. They believe feeling nostalgic is important — that you have to understand what’s missing in order to appreciate what is.

Yet, one shouldn’t be sad on such a great night, and that’s why everyone has glasses and flasks. I keep refusing the alcohol handed toward me from all directions, explaining that I needed to be able to walk up to the mike.

Finally, at quarter to midnight, I head down to the stage.

I have a sudden panic attack. I’m from another world, a foreign continent, a different universe altogether. Why would these people care about my poetry, even if it’s written in the language they understand? Why did I agree to make myself a laughingstock at Woodstock?

I search for Stas or his bearded emcee to tell them I’ve changed my mind. But they’ve already announced their guest from New York. So now the crowd is bellowing with excitement.

The stage is bright, and woods are darker than a black hole. The hill in front of me is painted with flashlight polka dots, like a quivering living blanket.

I open my book and abruptly change my mind about what I’m going to read. I start with the piece I wrote on the plane that, years ago, took me from Russia to the United States.

Back then I thought I would never be able to return. I peered out the window wondering if I was flying over Aisha, and over the pine that witnessed my first kiss.

As I read, I realize the entire hill is so silent I can hear the night birds chirping. And when I throw a quick furtive glance at the emcee, whose face looks strangely yellow under the stage light, I can tell he understands, even though he never moved away from his homeland. When I’m done with my three selections, he motions to me to read more.

I flip to the first page and read “Little Harlot,” which is based on Balzac’s “The Harlot High and Low,” and is my favorite. I read about love that happens and love that doesn’t, and about where we go after we die, which for Soviet atheists is a question of eternal debate.

Half an hour later my throat is sore, and I bid farewell to the crowd that suddenly roars and applauds. Now I can drink all I want.

The Aishinsky Festival takes place on the last weekend of May. Lufthansa Airlines flies to Kazan, with a stop in Frankfurt; you can also take an overnight train to Kazan from Moscow. From Kazan, hire a taxi ($15-$20) to Aisha Village. Then follow your intuition, and any backpackers on foot. There still are no signs, official parking lots or websites.

Lina Zeldovich writes in English and Russian, and is the recipient of three Writer’s Digest Fiction Awards. She blogs about her adventures at http://noveladventurers.blogspot.com/

Balloons

Bullets

Church

Shoes

Packing

Revival

Burning

“Bamboo bikes have been around since the 1800s, but never on any large scale,” says Huanea, fetching a frame from the ceiling with a lengthy bamboo pole. “This one’s mine.”

Bamboo Bike Studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, has offered customers the chance to make their own bicycles for the past two years. By fusing standard bike components with an all-bamboo frame, consumers create their own lean, green, cycling machines.

But the bikes aren’t designed just for New Yorkers. The studio’s volunteers are taking the project from Brooklyn to Africa.

A Factory in Ghana

As frames are mounted on to racks, ready to be worked on by the weekend’s clientele, the materials to build an entire bamboo-bike factory are sailing towards Ghana. They were packed into the shipping freight by the studio’s volunteers.

Backed by an unnamed Ghanaian investor, and by Columbia University’s Earth Institute, the studio’s staff consists of about eight volunteers. Building the bikes is more of a passion than a business. Serving Ghana is its main priority.

“It’s a way to get super-cheap transportation into the hands of people who need it,” says Huanea. While an American customer pays $632 to construct a bamboo bike in the Brooklyn studio, Ghanaians will be able to purchase one for $50 to $60.

Chinese-made steel bikes are available in Ghana for about $100. The average yearly income in a Ghanaian household is $2,200, according to a 2005 study by The Globalist.

Sean Murray, a former botany teacher, co-owns the Brooklyn studio. As the prospect of a bike factory in Ghana progresses to reality, he can hardly contain his excitement.

“I can’t wait, I cannot wait!” says Murray, talking about the prospect of workers in Ghana mass-producing the bikes. “I have made about 350 bikes in my life. They’re going to make three bikes a day. These guys are going to be fantastic!”

Recently the studio announced that it had opened “the world’s first bamboo bike factory,” in Kumasi, Ghana.

In preparation for the project, the studio in Brooklyn has used a strain of bamboo imported from Mexico, nicknamed “iron bamboo” in botanical circles, to build its bikes. This is more representative of the stiffer species of the plant found in Ghana.

How Bikes Stoke Development

According to Murray, some Ghanaians spend about five hours of their day walking from place to place. A bike could cut this down to a single hour.

“It’ll free enough time for school,” he says.

Though the weekend workshops at the Brooklyn site are starting to generate some revenue, it’s not enough to pay salaries.

Murray, a high school botany teacher, is not the only member of the workforce who has a second job. Huanea works in a restaurant. Other members, such as Greg Schroy, who only joined the project a few months ago, work unpaid. All volunteers are under the age of 30.

The project still needs money. Information published on the Earth Institute’s website appeals for a donation of $80,000 to help the factory meet its goal of producing 20,000 bikes a year. The group declined to discuss the specifics of how the project was being financed.

They see no problem with the product, though. Bamboo is vastly available in Ghana, and it grows quickly. Murray is adamant that the wood is more than suitable for the mass production of bicycles.

“The bicycle is probably the most useful thing next to the computer,” he says. “And this is the best way of making the best thing.”

This story was adapted from Narrative NYC, the newsroom publication of Dale Maharidge and Jessica Bruder’s reporting class at New York’s Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Schweidenback knew his landlord was not a particularly skilled carpenter, and never understood why he was more prosperous than the others.

“Then it really dawned on me why this guy was so successful,” Schweidenback said. “He had mankind’s greatest invention: the wheel.”

Whereas other tradesmen were limited by how far they could walk, Schweidenback’s landlord could bike 10 miles outside of the village for jobs.

Schweidenback came to view the lack of transportation as a leading cause of the villagers’ poverty.

“Absolutely everyone walked everywhere, and it was peaceful and tranquil, but they didn’t get a lot done,” Schweidenback said.

Mobility and Prosperity

Over the next dozen years, Schweidenback thought about this whenever he saw bicycles in the trash, or broken ones at yard sales, in his hometown of High Bridge, N.J.

One day in 1991, he “foolishly” decided to collect a dozen bikes and ship them to Sucua.

Things didn’t work out exactly as he planned.

Instead, after he had collected 140 bikes, he began to envision what this could do for other impoverished families in developing countries.

This was the start of Pedals for Progress, Schweidenback’s nonprofit organization that now boasts a nine-person staff and volunteers in High Bridge, and has sent 125,000 bikes to 32 countries.

“I started getting involved in this, and became so enthralled by the whole concept that we could change society for the better,” he said.

The idea, he said, was simple: to act as a bridge between people who have bikes they no longer want and the people who need a means of transportation in Latin America, Africa and Central Europe.

It costs $35 to get one bike to a user in a poor region. Pedals for Progress asks $10 from the bicycle donor, and receives an average of $10 from the sale of the bike abroad (bikes are sold at 10% of their estimated worth).

“My greatest challenge is coming up with that other $15,” Schweidenback said. “I can only ship as many bikes as I can raise $15 for.”

Schweidenback said that the other part of his job is very “blue collar,” working with a minimum of 6 to 8 people to pick up as many 30-pound bikes as possible at each collection. The bikes are then loaded on to an 18-wheeler and dropped off at a warehouse. From there, they are put on ocean freights.

Pedals is working mainly in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Moldova, Ghana, Uganda and Sierra Leone.

Two of its biggest partnerships are in El Salvador (more than 20,000 bikes shipped) where bikes are sent to a San Salvador training organization that teaches people to be bike mechanics; and to Rivas, Nicaragua, where donations of nearly 17,000 bikes have put more than 35 percent of the population of about 30,000 on wheels, the organization said.

Collections are primarily sponsored by groups — church groups, bike shops, bar and bat mitzvah projects — in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut.

Ryan Hermansky, 18, of Delran, N.J., took up a Pedals for Progress collection for his Boy Scouts of America project. The 66 bikes he collected were sent to Accra, Ghana.

“If I had built a swing set for someone, that’d be nice, but it isn’t the same impact as giving people bikes to use as transportation,” Hermansky said. “The people who get these bikes will be able to ride to school and work and it will really make their lives better.”

Schweidenback said he finds it amazing how many bikes Americans buy: 23 million new bicycles each year, 18 million of them adult bicycles, leaving their old ones unused in basements, garages, or landfills.

“We’re throwing the old ones in the landfills because they are the wrong color,” Schweidenback said.
Sending bikes to developing countries is not merely a short-term fix for poverty, Schweidenback pointed out. “The bicycle represents the cleanest form of transportation and it dramatically increases the movement of goods and services, which allows societies to grow in steps.”

Schweidenback had worked a middle school teacher, carpenter and contractor. But after collecting those first bikes, he knew this is what he wanted to do.

“I was afraid I would cut my fingers off because I’d be cutting wood but thinking about bikes,” Schweidenback said. So, he talked it over with his wife, a professor at Pace University, and “she gave me a year to try it out.”

Pedals for Progress receives hundreds of different brands of bicycles, including 28-speed mountain bikes, name brands such as Gary Fisher, and custom made Terry bikes.

“We get everything from bikes that were made in the 1920s to bikes that you could ride in the Tour de France,” Schweidenback said.

Real estate developer Jeremy Doppelt, of Boonton, N.J., began volunteering a year ago after seeing a pamphlet in his local bike store. An avid cyclist, Doppelt said was amazed to learn about how a bike can change a life. He recalled learning about children who slept outside of their schools at night because the walk home was too far.

“It’s crazy because, like the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and this really applies to Pedals for Progress,” he said.

Schweidenback, who was named a CNN Hero in 2008, and has received numerous other prestigious awards for his work, said that Pedals for Progress is only a “small drop in a big bucket,” considering that there are 3 billion poor people on the planet.

“Yet it gets me up in the morning and I know everyday there are families that have a brighter future because of the bikes we send them.”

I was on a Colombian “learning journey,” and would travel West from Bogota to the coffee-growing region of Armenia; to Medellin; and finally to the Pacific Coast, accompanied by three other people and our guide and host, 32-year-old Alan Wagenberg. And one of the greatest things I learned along the way was the Colombian way with food.

In Bogota, fruit was everywhere. At the market we tried orange-hued gooseberries, granadillas and pitaya, a species of cactus species that can cause gastro-intestinal difficulties. Ours was sweet. We’d countered all this sweetness with sour apple, lulu, and tart passion fruit, maracuya.

Now we were taking a cooking lesson at a vegetarian restaurant.

While the soup simmered, we made arepas, the basic side to every Colombian meal, and the only truly tasty ones I had. Many South Americans take the shortcut, and use premixed corn flour. We made ours the traditional, labor-intensive way, soaking the corn kernels, then simmering them until they resembled cooked pasta.

We kneaded the dough, then shaped it into smooth balls, and rolled them into saucer-like disks. We browned them lightly on both sides, in a heavy skillet.

For the empanadas, we made a filling of cooked quinoa, carrot, onion and parsley. We folded the disks in half, pinched and crimped them ornately to seal them and then deep-fried them until they were golden brown.

For dessert — blackberry dulce– the women picked wild blackberries. We cooked these with unprocessed cane sugar. A dollop of creme fraiche elevated the dish to gourmet status.

We ended our last day in Bogota in revelry at Andres Carne de Res. I know no restaurant like it. It seats about 2,000 people, but the layout is such that it feels intimate.

At Andres Carne de Res

The menu arrived in a gray metal box with a handle that was cranked to scroll through the hundreds of choices.

This restaurant was all about meat. In one preparation, a clean white cotton cloth was layered with a quarter inch of salt and sprinkled with fresh oregano.  Beef tenderloin was placed on top. The meat was then rolled into a tight cylindrical loaf, and placed directly on red-hot charcoal. It was cooked eight minutes on each side, until it resembled a fire-charred log. Then the char was cracked, to reveal the tender meat inside. I had fire-grilled beef: cooked to order, tender and range-fed scrumptious.

The ambiance was festive, the atmosphere electric, the music appealingly energizing. There were live marching bands. Transvestite orchestral quartets tossed sashes over the diners. Our downfall was the aguardiente, Colombia’s anise-flavored sugar cane liquor. We drank shot after shot.

Real Colombian Coffee

The next day we flew west to Armenia, the capital of one of three departments in the Colombian coffee-growing axis. We were met by Jayson, the manager of the coffee plantation El Algrado.

For the next few hours we were his students. We learned about plant cultivation, harvesting, processing, selection, roasting, blending, shipping and marketing. We saw lush coffee bushes laden with both ripe (red) and immature (green) coffee cherries.

The red cherry is sweet, with just a subtle hint of coffee flavor. We visited the selection, roasting and testing rooms, and tried assessing the quality of the final product based on scent and taste.

Red means ripe; green, not yet

Leaving the plantation, we drove along roads lined with groves of plantain, banana and papaya.

Later, a man on horseback arrived at our accommodation, La Residencia en la Tierra, a lodging and creative space, leading five horses. I hadn’t ridden a horse for about 40 years, so I was somewhat intimidated. I was given El Paloma, a white, gentle, pokey creature. She didn’t like being last, though, and gave me an adrenalin rush each time she picked up her pace to stay near the front.

About 40 minutes into the ride over the hilly, hummocked terrain of the 1000-hectare farm, it began to rain hard.

Our plan to ride to a pineapple field for a fresh sweet treat was shelved. Instead, we took shelter at the shack of one of the farm’s cooks. While we waited on the rickety, corrugated iron-roofed porch for the rain to abate, she made us warming hot chocolate with panela, Colombia’s brown cane sugar.

We took a cable car ride back down the mountain, to the Botanical Garden of Medellin, and lunch at its restaruant, In Situ. This open and airy restaurant overlooks a pond, and flower, herb and vegetable gardens. Since I raise orchids, I was particularly interested in those grown in the orquideorama. They did not disappoint.

We left for the Pacific Coast, where for the next three nights we’d stay in log cabins at Utria National Park, a accessible only by boat. At the cabins, we were met by Maria and Ides, who made me feel as though I’d arrived at the home of beloved aunties.

Meals at Utria were based mostly on the locals’ catch of the day. We arrived at camp famished, and so greatly appreciated our dinner of vegetable soup, fried fish, French fries, cabbage salad, arepas and freshly-squeezed orange juice.

Over the next few days, there wasn’t much dietary variety, but everything Maria and Ides prepared was fresh and delicious. For one dinner, Ides grated coconuts to make a flavorful rice dish. Another time, Maria conducted a cooking lesson. After forming and frying arepas, we slit each one and slipped a raw egg inside, then deep fried them.

The day we hiked to Cocalito Beach, Maria and Ides prepared fish empanadas for breakfast, which fueled us well for the challenging trek.  For two hours we inched our way over three miles of roots, rocks and boot-sucking slime and through swirling mountain streams to reach this pristine place.

Maria

Ides

For our breakfast empanadas

Wearing rubber boots, we took a boat across the inlet, then followed our guide Antonio up and down a slippery, root-filled, boulder-strewn, red clay mountain. Once we reached the crest, the remainder of the hike was mostly in the middle of shallow, fast-flowing mountain streams. Though it was hot and humid in the forest, the cool water flowing over our boots prevented any suffering.

Another day we traveled by boat to the village of El Valle, some of us completing the last six miles by hiking. The initial stretch paralleled that of the hike to Cocalito Beach: uphill and down over red clay, roots and rocks. Our guide, Sparrow, gathered some oranges, peeled and quartered them with his machete, and distributed the chunks among us.

Sparrow

After two hours, we arrived at the September Station, a refuge for sea turtle eggs. The manager showed us the compound where the eggs are secured from predators. He offered us fresh coconut milk for 5,000 pesos ($2.50). He cleaned up each coconut, then lopped off the top, and handed it over. Sparrow, in the meantime, had split a coconut open so we could eat the meat.

Coconut milk break

We completed the hike along the beach under a hot sun. Most of us took off our rubber boots, enjoying the freedom of walking on smooth, compact black sand. Along the way, I found six sand dollars, though only one survived intact all the way to El Valle.

On and on we trudged.

There wasn’t much to do in the tiny village of El Valle. However, that evening we were entertained by a group of high school students, under the direction of their teacher. They performed traditional Colombian dances, poured us shots of sugar cane liquor and got us up to dance.

High school students performing in the village of El Valle.

The next morning after breakfast, we set out on a paved road that ended abruptly, and gave way to a ribbon of cavernous ruts, flowing water, slop, muck and boulders.

No wonder Sparrow crossed himself before we headed out.

The author, with a new friend.

Sergey had been sitting across from me on the red velour train seats for over seven hours. I woke up to him looking out the window. He immediately reminded me of a mall Santa. I unsure if it was comforting to have his company, or disconcerting.

His graying beard supported his round cheeks, and the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes seemed like he spent a lot of his life crying or laughing. He was wearing ironed black trousers, and newly-polished black shoes, but his coat looked like he’d been working in mines, and duct tape was holding part of the collar in place.

I don’t remember why we started talking, although surely he made the first gesture of conversation when we were about an hour outside of Moscow. When he spoke I turned my head slightly to avoid the wave of his breath, which smelled like moldy library books and grape juice.

We skipped over the common questions you ask people you meet during your travels — the “where are you going,” “where do you live?” didn’t seem relevant for out inevitability short-term relationship.
Although he had a serious gaze and hadn’t smiled, his mannerism seemed grandfatherly and subdued. He was keen on asking questions, but seemed to be answering mine with more questions, in a philosophical way that you can only do when talking to strangers.

I told him I would just be in Moscow for half a day or so until my next train boarded. He insisted that I must have a cup of authentic Russian coffee before I leave.

I agreed, and decided to cautiously follow him on the metro towards Pushkin Square, a popular and tourist filled spot not far from Red Square and the Kremlin.

I was expecting to be led into a lavish cafe, my mind picturing all cafes in Russia to be like New York’s Russian Tea Room.

“Here we are!”

Sergey finally cracked a smile, and winked as he threw up his hands and pointed to the large Golden Arches of McDonald’s.

The wrinkles on the side of his eyes came even more sharply to life. It was unclear if his gestures were a mark of humor, at the idea of bringing an American tourist to the iconic sign of Americanism, or if he was genuinely excited to be getting me a cup of excellent Russian coffee.

Fried Food and Cigarette Butts

The smell of fried food against the cold air was startling, and there were as many cigarettes littered between the slabs of concrete as McDonald’s straw wrappers. Pigeons poked at dirty French fries.

“This is the first modern historical landmark in Moscow!” he declared.

Still, thinking I’d perhaps been unable to pick up on his wicked humor, I asked, “Huh?”

I actually was in front of a historical monument that represented a huge shift in the Soviet Union. It was only 18 months after this McDonald’s opened in 1990 that the Soviet Union ceased to exist, as Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as leader of the country, and various Soviet republics proclaimed their independence.
In January of 1990 there was line around the corner to step inside what must have only then existed as the idea of The United States (although McDonalds Canada actually handled the Moscow opening).

The manifestation of neatly-packaged food was a sure sign that capitalism was on its way, but more to the point, the enthusiastic reception of McDonald’s from the Russian people signaled a strong desire to leave economic hardship, and move on from political controversy.

Perhaps more than wanting to see the new McDonalds, joining the long lines was a political statement for change. Or maybe the long lines were still a commonplace Communist activity.

I gestured that I would wait outside as Sergey went in to get coffee. A few feet away a McDonald’s employee was having a cigarette break, with long exhales and deep coughs. Her short dirty blonde hair was tied behind a visor that made the circles under her eyes more menacing than her small frame suggested. Her arm was hugging her waist, until the pop song that was her ringtone played, and she yelled, “Hello!” into her phone.

I peered in the tinted glass to see about 20 more cashiers similar to the ageless smoker, attending to the crowds. Tourists? Young Russians? I couldn’t tell the difference, nor could I spot Sergey among the people fighting for seats.

After Sergey bought my coffee we stood outside, both looking onto the square now punctuated with new glass buildings and other imported Western chains.  In the silence I sensed neither of us felt a part of this place. I wanted to ask him if he was in this very place 20 years ago, but as he pulled a flask from his jacket and tapped the contents into his paper cup, I knew he would only answer my question with another question.

Guessing how he would have answered me, I silently asked myself whether I would have been here that day.

The last thing I said to Sergey as he clasped my hand with both of his to say goodbye, was, “Thanks again for the Russian coffee.”

Maggie Owsley writes and photographs from New York City. See more of her work at www.andthenphotos.com.

Photographer Allison Heiliczer is based in Hong Kong.

Just over three months before I met her in the dusty Kenyan town of Narok, Salula’s mother had told her it was her time to become a woman. Her short childhood was to come to an end. Salula knew vaguely what that meant. There was to be a ceremony, something was to be done to her. She was afraid.

“I didn’t want to become a woman,” she tells my translator in her native language, Maasai. She didn’t know she had a choice.

As we speak, she repeatedly scratches the capital letter “A” onto the dark, dry skin of her right leg. She is just now learning the alphabet. Never having been allowed to go to school she had learned neither of her country’s national languages, Swahili and English.

Nor had she learned of the dangers and complications of what is euphemistically called female circumcision, a rite commonly practiced for different reasons in different ways in 28 African and Arab countries.

A Nine-Year-Old’s Clitoridectomy

For Salula it began before dawn on the chosen day in her small village on the edge of the world-famous Maasai Mara Game Reserve, where thousands of tourists flock every year to marvel at lions, leopards, elephants and other wildlife in the beauty of the wide-open East African landscape.

She half sat, half lay on a cow skin shivering in the morning cold. A village woman supported Salula’s back and wrapped her arms tightly around the young girl’s frail chest. Two others held her legs open. Suddenly there was a searing pain “down there,” and there was a lot of blood. It took two months for her wound to heal and even now, she murmurs, it sometimes is still painful.

Once she was healed, it was time for her to be married. Her father would give her as a second wife to a man his own age in exchange for wine, beer, new blankets and a few cows. Salula was decked out in new clothes and shoes, her head smeared in a foul smelling red ochre paste made with cow dung. She did not want to be married, she tells me. She saw her husband to be for the first time on their wedding day. But again, she didn’t know she had a choice. This was the way it had always been done in her village.

A village official had secretly sent word to a local NGO about this child bride. Just as the bride and groom prepared to leave for his village, two policemen who had posed as impromptu wedding guests arrested the father and groom.

Salula was taken to a safe house, and from that day her life changed completely.

The Safehouse

Three concrete block buildings and a shed are an unlikely frontline in the revolution that is occurring in Kenyan Maasai culture. This is home to more than 30 girls ranging in age from 9 to 18 who have escaped circumcision and early childhood marriage. This is the Tasaru Girls Rescue Center, a bastion of the campaign to stop traditional genital cutting in this southern region of Kenya.

Dozens of girls sat quietly at desks doing schoolwork, even though they were on holiday from their boarding schools. They come here now when school is out instead of going home to their villages where they would face pressure to conform to tradition.

As I was shown around the center I saw one girl sitting alone in a large room that served alternately as a dining hall and schoolroom. Her overgrown, filthily matted hair adorned with a metal headband identified her as a new initiate, meaning she has recently been circumcised. She was wrapped in a once-colorful but now faded and threadbare shuka cloth traditionally worn by Maasai women. She, too, had come here escaping marriage.

I accompanied her to a barber shop in town where her head was unceremoniously shaved while others in the shop laughed about her sorry state. She did not understand what is being said since she spoke no Swahili, she had never been to school. She just sat silently in the chair watching in the mirror as tufts of her hair fall onto the blue and white checkered cloth, the electric razor buzzing under blaring music. She had the look of someone accustomed to having things done to her.

The Crusader

Agnes Pareyio, a stocky buddle of dynamic energy, is the heart and soul of this safe house, which has become the headquarters of her crusade to save as many girls as she can from the knife that she herself was subjected to at age 12.

Standing up to her mother, she had refused to be circumcised. But her determination was worn down by taunts and gossip in her village.

“It went all around the village that I was coward,” Agnes told me as we sipped sodas in a gaudy garden restaurant on the main road in Narok.

Sappy Dolly Parton songs blared over the loudspeakers. “So to prove I’m not a coward I agreed to be cut,”  she said still with bitterness in her voice. “I hated the whole thing.”

After being married off in the tradition of the Maasai, she began to get involved in grassroots women’s organizations promoting girls’ education. In a small study about girls’ dropout rates they discovered that after circumcision the girls were married off and never returned to school. So they decided to tackle the big taboo issue of female cutting head on.

I had been told of Agnes’ favorite teaching tool, so I thought I would be prepared to see it. But when it was brought out for me to see I had to hold back my nervous laughter. There sitting on Agnes’ desk at Tasaru was a beautifully carved wooden model of a woman’s pelvis, the truncated legs spread wide. In the middle is a modular space where she places wooden blocks depicting vaginas in various states of cutting.

One block shows a healthy, complete vagina, the clitoris and labia in tact. A second one depicts a vagina that has been subjected to excision, a type of circumcision in which the clitoris is removed completely and the inner labia are sliced off, as this is the type of cutting most common among the Maasai. A third block shows the most severe form of mutilation in which in addition to the excision, the outer lips of the vagina are sewn together, leaving only a small opening for the passing of urine and menstrual flow.

Eunice Kenana, a teacher at Tasaru, popped in the block that represents a normal, healthy vagina complete with clitoris and pink labia. She taps it with a pen. “Beautiful,” she declares with a broad white-toothed grin.

This shockingly graphic and highly effective teaching tool is what Agnes and other Tasaru volunteers take with them on their rounds of the villages for “sensitization” meetings where they gather the men and the women in separate groups and outline for them the problems and complications of genital cutting.

When Agnes first began her crusade in the mid 1990s, people thought she was crazy and she was accused of lying to the women about their bodies and trying to destroy Maasai culture. Often she would show up at a village only to find it temporarily abandoned, its residents gone into hiding from her, and her teachings. She grew a thick skin to deflect the criticisms and continued her struggle. With time and persistence Agnes gained the respect of many in her region and was even elected to a slot on the local county council.

In 2002, with funding from The V-Day Foundation, founded by Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, she established Tasaru. Girls seeking to flee mutilation and marriage see it as a refuge. But many in the community think of it as “the place where they steal our children.”

Or Else Your Clitoris Will Grow Long and Green!

Many Maasai men have never seen an uncut woman, said Chris Oloishuroh Murray, the only man on Tasarua’s board of directors.

“When we talk to them about female cutting they seem surprised to learn that some of the problems they have seen their wives have are related to circumcision. They are especially surprised that their wives lack of interest in sex is directly related to this cutting.”

At meetings with Maasai men, Oloishuroh Murray said, he is often asked whether girls will become more promiscuous if they are not circumcised, and if they will become prostitutes. The men worry about not being able to satisfy their women.

The women villagers are more worried about carrying on their traditions and ask what will be left of their culture if female genital mutilation is stopped.

But the biggest question from both men and women is “Who will marry uncircumcised girls?”

Traditionally in Maasai culture a girl cannot be married unless she is circumcised because that act is what makes her a woman.

Ellen and Phyllis, both 15 years old, arrived at Tasaru when it first opened, escaping their respective circumcisions. Ellen says she had been told in her village that if a girl was not circumcised, her clitoris would grow long and turn green and fall off in pieces. At school, she had learned about the female anatomy and the dangers associated with female genital cutting.

But while they saved their clitorises, they have lost an important connection to their traditional culture.

Both Phyllis and Ellen know that being uncircumcised means they will never marry within the traditional community.

“Boys say they will not marry girls who are not circumcised, but we say we will find boys who will,” said Phyllis.

In any case, they both now have bigger plans: Ellen planned to become a journalist and Phyllis said she dreamed of becoming a doctor. There was little chance they will ever return to their villages to continue the traditional way of life.

They have both gone through an alternative rite of passage sponsored by Tasaru, to initiate into their culture without the brutality of the cutting. But few of the villages they have left recognize the alternative as a legitimate passage into adulthood.

Phyllis said that since she escaped her cutting, her father decided that her five-year-old sisters, who are twins, would not be sent to school.

“He says it’s just a waste of time educating girls.” But she had hope for her small sisters. “Hopefully the world will be changed by the time they reach circumcision age.”

But because of pressure from NGOs, Christian churches and the government, girls are being circumcised now younger than before, and circumcision ceremonies, which were once grand affairs and announced far and wide, are becoming secretive and more dangerous for the girls.

Circumcision at Dawn

The call of the muezzin from the oddly imposing mosque in town awoke me at 5 a.m., beckoning the small local Muslim community to prayer. I laid awake in the chill of the predawn hour thinking of a different ritual, one where girls are sentenced to a life with little sexual pleasure, complicated childbirth and the knowledge that their bodies are incomplete.

It is at that hour that most circumcision ceremonies are practiced, though each clan has its own customs. I imagined that somewhere out in the bush, in a remote village a girl, maybe 12 maybe 10 years old, was having her genitals sliced by a drunken old woman wielding a razor blade. Somewhere, at that early hour, a girl was being mutilated so that she could be come a woman. I could not go back to sleep.

A pair of scissors with blue plastic handles arrived with my morning coffee. They are meant to cut open the small packet of Nescafe that served as my caffeine fix for the day. But they seem aggressive, threatening, sitting there on the plate while I’m thinking about genital cutting.

I looked over the balcony of the restaurant at women in the town and tried to imagine their vaginas. Are they circumcised? Were they somehow, miraculously, spared the knife? When I saw the women in full Maasai regalia, I looked past the colorful shuka cloths draped across their bodies, their necks weighed down by tangles of beaded necklaces, their elongated earlobes heavy with even more beads. I looked past all that and try to imagine their clitoris-less, labia-less vaginas.

And I looked at small girls playing with plastic bottles strewn in the road. Things are changing here but would they change quickly enough to spare these girls?

Monday is market day in Narok, and many Maasai women come to town from the surrounding villages to sell charcoal. They huddle under the shade of scrawny trees on a putrid, garbage strewn plot of land that serves as a park. I squatted down next to them amid the trash and flies and asked them about emurata, circumcision.

Nekusa is in her late 20s and her closely shaved hair highlights the classic Maasai elongated earlobes decorated with a tube of beads.

“We are not ready to give up circumcision,” she told me in Maasai through another of the women who spoke English. “Even if we wanted to leave it, it is our husbands who rule,” she said. I ask her to imagine a world where men do not govern women’s lives. If it were up to her, I asked, would she do away with the practice? “But our husbands do rule,” he answered shrugging.

As we spoke, an elderly man with the typical red and blue checkered blanket of the Maasai warriors wrapped around his shoulders approached and interrupted the conversation.

“Look at these women, all these women were circumcised and there is no problem. We will change nothing of our culture,” he said, reaffirming Nekusa’s fatalism. Before I could ask him any questions he briskly walked away.

At one point, as I talked to the women, one of them wondered why I was asking so much about circumcision. Did I want to be circumcised? she asked. No way, I said, clamping my legs shut. I was just curious.

The Circumciser

Mama Sayianka doesn’t know her age, only that she was born during the Mau Mau rebellion, a defining period in Kenyan history in the 1950s when Kenyans rose up against the colonial power, Britain.

For nearly 20 years she wielded the circumcision blade, proud to uphold the traditions of her clan, having learned the “craft” from other circumcisers who preceded her. She performed her first cutting on her own daughter and had to lay down the tools of her trade when her hands became too shaky to perform an accurate operation.

I met Mama Sayianka in Pulunga village at her family’s circular enclosure called a boma that holds two tiny huts of sticks held together with cow dung. The roofs are just over 1.5 meters high and are clearly meant only for sleeping, since no one taller than a child could stand up in one.

She led me out of the enclosure, out of the earshot of the men where we could talk freely about her work.

In her clan, the circumcision ceremonies begin with the brewing of a special traditional beer, which the circumciser and her aides drink freely as in one of the huts they prepare a bed of the soft, furry leaves of the African wild sage tree, like the one that shaded us that day from the searing equatorial sun as we talked.

At about 4 a.m. on circumcision day, milk is poured on the initiate’s head to symbolize purity, and her head is shaved. She dons a specially made dress of cow hide decorated with beads and is made to stand outside in the pre-dawn chill “to freeze the body.” This is the only anesthetic she will have. Once the sun is high enough in the sky, Mama Sayianka would cut a hole in the dung roof of the hut to allow the sunlight to enter and help her perform her task.

She described precisely how she would set about it the actual cutting but finds it easier to demonstrate. Beside her was a village girl, about 18, with her two-year-old daughter on her lap. Mama Sayianka suddenly turned to the child, spread her legs wide and started showing me on this tender young vagina how she would spread the labia, find the clitoris, hold on to the small nub and with a new razor blade, lop it off in one swift cut. This needs no translation. I stared wide-eyed at the intrusive demonstration. The toddler squirmed at being poked and prodded until the mother protested.

Mama Sayianka leaned back and laughed at my visible shock. Just to make sure I understood she grabbed the plastic tip of the lace of one of her small white rubber sneakers, holding it as if it were a clitoris and swiped at it with a stick. I got it, I told her.

I asked her how she felt about the movement to stop female circumcisions and her face became grim.

“They are doing bad because they are spoiling our culture and we want to maintain our culture,” she said through a translator. The move to abolish the practice, she believes, is an outside imposition.

Mama Sayianka told me that schools are contaminating the girls.

“Girls like circumcision,” she assured me, “but then they go to school and suddenly they don’t like it.”

She looked me straight in the eye. “If Maasais came to your home and told you that not circumcising girls was bad, and ordered you now to circumcise your girls, how would you feel?”

I would feel angry, violated, I would fight it. But I did not answer her and just nodded my head to signal that I got her point.

She doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. Anti-female genital mutilation campaigners say it brings complications with childbirth but Mama Sayianka, who is now a midwife, says she’s never seen any such problems because the type of circumcision practiced in her clan is clitoridectomy which doesn’t affect “where the baby comes out.”

And they say that a circumcised woman doesn’t enjoy sex, which Mama Sayianka assured me is not true. My interpreter translated her words faithfully, but then added to me in English: “That is what she is saying, but I am saying that it is true, we feel almost nothing.”

Chris Murray, from Tasaru, has had sex with both circumcised and uncircumcised women. “With circumcised women it takes quite a long time for her to reach orgasm, if at all, and she’s not really interested in what you are doing.” With an uncircumcised woman, he says “you move all the way together.”

Widespread in Africa

No one knows when or why the practice of female genital cutting began. The different types of circumcision, at different ages and for different expressed reasons make it difficult to trace its roots. But the practice is surprisingly widespread. In 28 African and Arab countries, it is a time-honored tradition.

Some cultures, like the Maasai, use it as a rite of initiation into adulthood, as with male circumcision. But in Ethiopia most circumcisions are practiced on girls under five years of age. In Nigeria, most are cut before their first birthdays.

Many different reasons are cited for the practice, including hygiene, aesthetics, and disturbingly, as a way to control women’s sexuality.

Most of Kenya’s more than 40 ethnic tribes practice some form of circumcision but, according to a UNICEF survey, the prevalence is decreasing. While in 1998 38% of women 15 to 49 said they were circumcised, in 2003 the percentage had dropped to 32. But among the Maasai, an estimated 93% of women and girls have been victims of female genital cutting, which has been illegal for girls under 18 since 2001. Despite the law, few parents or circumcisers are fully prosecuted.

Emurata, as circumcision is known in the Maasai language, is practiced on boys as well as girls, in the same crude and often unhygienic manner. Sitting in a cafe in Nairobi, I read in the newspaper about two boys who had sustained severe injuries to their penises during a circumcision in the northern Samburu province.

Here there is no movement to stop that practice, though in the United States there is a small but growing campaign to have male circumcision, practiced on an estimated 60% of American men, declared a human rights violation.

It is of course not the same. Male circumcision cuts away skin. Female circumcision cuts organs. It is like having an eye or your tongue removed.

“Whoever thought of cutting organs was a crazy bugger,” Agnes pronounced.

Second Thoughts and Regrets

Jacqueline was a boldly beautiful girl of 16, her high rounded cheekbones sweep up to narrow eyes inherited from her nomadic ancestors of the Maasai. Thin braids peaked out of a yellow bandana that covered her head. We sat together in the yellowing grass of the yard at the Tasaru Rescue Center.

She escaped being married off when she was 13, and is clearly proud of having run away. But she did not escape circumcision, and she seems ashamed. When I asked her to talk about it, her confident voice turned shy. Her head bowed, she told her story to the grass.

It was during the December school holidays when Jacqueline was told she was to be circumcised, along with another girl from her village. For three days there were celebrations. Cows were slaughtered, traditional beer was brewed, friends and family came from nearby villages. Jacqueline was not able to participate because she was still, then, considered a child and not privileged to join the festivities to mark her mutilation. Only after her cutting would she be initiated in the world of adulthood.

Before dawn on the fourth day, she and her fellow “initiates” were taken by a small group of women into the corral where the cattle were usually kept, and told to lie on a freshly-stripped hide. Jacqueline was first. One woman held her shoulders down and the circumciser parted her legs. No one held her feet. It was sheer will that kept her legs open as the circumciser sliced off her clitoris in one clean cut. It was all she could do to keep from screaming.

“It’s a taboo to scream,” she told me, still looking at the grass. “People will look down on you and won’t eat the food your family prepares. “Even this,” she twitched her foot “is considered a scream.”

After the ceremony she was given milk and herbs to wash her wound. She bled for a full day. After a week of bed rest and being treated like queen because of her bravery, she began to heal, and felt proud of her newly-acquired womanhood.

Jacqueline went to her cutting willingly, and this is what shames her most.

“It is our custom, I did not know it was bad until I came here,” she says with her head bowed again. No one at the school she attended ever talked about the dangers of female circumcision. No one had ever hinted that there might be a problem. With longing in her voice, she finally lifted her head and looks me straight in the eyes and cried out, “Oh I wish I could go back and undo it.”

There is a saying in Maasai that translates roughly as “A sewing thread follows the awl,” which is said to mean that one has to follow the trodden path and not veer into unknown territory.

This reinforces the Maasai feeling that tradition must be followed, that female circumcision must continue. Without these traditions Maasai elders say, their already fragile culture will fall apart. They will be swallowed by the globalizing influences imported from the west.

But there is another Maasai saying, that “a ringing bell cannot be silenced.” The anti-female genital mutilation campaigners are that bell, and if it is rung loudly enough and long enough, perhaps what will be silenced are the choked early morning screams on the African savannah, of girls being cut.

Sibylla Brodzinsky is a Colombia-based journalist who writes for the Economist, the UK Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor. She’s at work on a book about displaced Colombians.

The Canadian-owned Peñasquito mine produced its first bar of gold in 2008, but was not officially inaugurated until March 2010, by Mexican President Felipe Calderon. It is one of the three largest mining operations in the world, and Latin America’s largest gold producer.

Unfortunately, the new neighbor has failed to deliver, and the locals’ hope for a brighter future has dimmed.

In fact Peñasquito, owned by the conglomerate Goldcorp, has turned out to be a very troublesome addition to the community, as its main contributions involve environmental contamination and guzzling of scarce water.

Contamination and Water Guzzling

Mazapil, one of the largest municipalities in Mexico, covers an area of 12,063 square kilometers and is located on a high plateau, roughly 2,000 meters above sea level. Its climate is classified as semi-desert.

Founded in 1568, Mazapil is is one of the poorest and most marginalized municipalities in Mexico.

Even though it has been a mining town by tradition, Mazapil has never been prosperous. Its population has managed to survive from agriculture and the raising of livestock.

The ejido system still prevails in this part of the country. It consists of community members, known as the ejidatarios, sharing a common landholding, both for agricultural and living purposes.

Though there’s little rain, the community draws water from massive aquifers that provide vital groundwater, used primarily for the irrigation of crops.

The main underground water reserves are located directly underneath the ejido of El Vergel.

“Our life support system depends on water, because we live off what we harvest!” said Irma Hernández Herrera, a resident of El Vergel. “Here we grow chili peppers, alfalfa, corn, beans, squash, and our lives depend on this, because this is what we eat.”

Nevertheless, since 2007, groundwater levels have been deemed as critical statewide, as the water tables have suffered an annual deficit of 220 million cubic meters. There is barely enough water for farming.

Project of Mass Destruction

Peñasquito, an open pit mine, will require thousands of liters of water per hour in order to operate during its estimated 22-year lifespan.

Before operations began, a contract between community members from the ejido of El Vergel and Goldcorp stipulated the perforation of only 10 water wells for industrial use. Nevertheless, by the end of 2009, Goldcorp was already operating 30 wells, residents say.

Joel Mancilla, Commissioner of El Vergel, accuses the mining company of using in one hour the amount of water a local family would use in 25 years.

What locals call Goldcorp’s disregard for agreements, and the mine’s inordinate use of an already-scarce groundwater supply, have caused widespread uneasiness locally.

“The mine’s wells reach 300 meters below the surface, while ours at El Vergel only reach 100 or 130 meters,” said Armando González Alvarado, a resident of El Vergel and a member of the committee that negotiated with the mining company.

Local residents also justifiably fear for the contamination of the aquifers, due to cyanide leaching processes used in Peñasquito. A cyanide solution is irrigated over mounds of soil in order to separate gold particles from the rock product.

The cyanide filters through the raw mineral, gathering gold and other metals and pushing them to the bottom of the mounds. From here, the concentrated particles flow towards a pool known as the tailings pond, where gold is recovered via the absorption of carbon.

Cyanide leaching is a risk, although the toxic pools are lined with layers of high density polyethylene.
Short-term exposure to high levels of cyanide, be it inhaled, consumed in food products, drunk, or absorbed through the skin, is extremely toxic, even lethal. Long-term exposure to low levels of cyanide can result in serious respiratory problems, affect the nervous system and damage the digestive tract.

Another Goldcorp mine, in Honduras’ Siria Valley, relied on the same cyanide leaching method. Ten years after it established operations, adjacent communities, particularly Palo Ralo and Pedernal, have reported hundreds of health issues involving intestinal and/or renal cancer and nervous system disorders, and research from a 2006 study found that 96 percent of the population suffers from rashes and other skin problems most likely caused by exposure to toxic materials from the mine.

Strange Odors and Dying Livestock

Residents of Cedros and El Vergel are already complaining about strange odors, water shortages, respiratory problems, and deaths of cattle and wildlife near the mine. They also report seeing new crop diseases.

The mine is expected to produce about 500,000 ounces of gold, 28 million ounces of silver, 450 million pounds of zinc and 200 million pounds of lead, for each of the 22 years of its projected useful life.

With gold valued at about $1,200 per ounce, Goldcorp can expect to earn some $600 million per year from this mine, from the gold alone.

The residents see little of this. For several days in May 2009, community members blocked the entrance to Peñasquito, demanding an increase in rent for the 6,000 hectares they’d leased out to Goldcorp. The company agreed to pay 30 million pesos, or about $2.5 million, over 30 years.

Lauro Herrera, community leader from Cedros, claims Goldcorp “took advantage of our ignorance and poverty.”

Local ejido leaders now state that they are owed at least 100 million pesos [about $8.3 million] per year, under the terms of Mexican mining law, retroactive to 2006. And they’ve called on the National Water Commission to reprimand Goldcorp for the likely contamination of the underground aquifers.

Protests and Disillusionment

In May 2010, another sit-in by the locals halted operations for about a week. This time, disgruntled community members demanded higher wages, as hundreds of workers “earn 800 pesos ($65) a week for 12-hour workdays,” and hadn’t had a wage increase in three years, a spokesman said.

“Yes, we are very disillusioned with how things have worked out,” said one protester. “We expected differently. Our husbands who do work there earn very little.”

Mazapil Mayor Vicente Pérez Esquivel has stated that Goldcorp made all the previous arrangements with the federal government, and since 2007, when the first stage of operations began, the municipal government had not received any tax payments from the mining company, not even the construction license fees.

Just from property taxes, the municipal government should be receiving one million pesos annually from Peñasquito, under the law. Such revenues would come in very handy in a municipality where only 30% of the population has running water, 65% have electricity, 18% sewer service and 3% garbage pickup service, and just 7% of the roads are paved.

“We are not against employment,” Herrera Medez, of Cedros, said. “On the contrary! But the truth is that the company has not hired many locals.

“We want the governments to take action and be more proactive about the contamination, the environmental impact. But one thing I do tell you: we are not going to stop until we find a favorable solution for everyone here. We have seen elsewhere the destruction and well, death, that is left behind wherever an industrial mine like this one passes through.”

“In the future, I see a deserted image of what once was this town,” said El Vergel resident Hernández Herrera. “It makes me very sad, especially for the children who will live such a situation. We have had a very hard life and struggled enormously to upkeep this ejido. We have already suffered so much, and now, this monster comes to devastate our land.

“What will we do once the water runs out? And it is clear that it will run out! Because in every place where a mine establishes itself, the water eventually runs out.”

James Rodriguez, an award-winning photojournalist who has worked extensively in Mexico and Central America, is now based in Nairobi, Kenya.

And, at times one person here reminds me of one person there, as if they were parts of the same whole, particles waiting to be reunited.

One of these unlikely pairs came to my mind today as Ms. Maria pulled her cart full of vegetables to my gate. Possibly the last of her breed — the Portuguese peasant woman — Ms. Maria has been pulling this
cart through the streets of the small fishing village where I’ve lived (when I am in Portugal) for more than 30 years.

Ms. Maria makes the rounds twice a week, her thin, tiny body lunging forward in a perennial black skirt and shirt, and a black head scarf tied with two thick knots at the back of her neck. At 70 years old, or older (she is not quite sure), she still farms a small piece of land that yields the most delicious greens I have ever tasted — ever — anywhere.

“I’ve worn black since he’s gone,” she told me, years before I moved to the States, as she tied a bunch of turnips I had chosen from her cart. She has been widowed almost as long as she has been
doing these rounds.

“So, you’ve never worn any other color in 30 years?” I asked.

“Not once, but …” She looked me straight in the eyes, making sure I was paying attention “…the clothes I set aside for my funeral are lovely and colorful: white skirt and blue blouse, white shoes, and a blue and red scarf. I want to see him smile the moment he looks at me.”

I nodded and muttered something like, “I see.” I was interested but didn’t want to seem unduly curious. Then I gave in.

“He is waiting for you, then?”

I was glad I asked. She threw me a cunning smile.

“Oh yes, he misses me — and how! I miss him too. I won’t come to him dressed in black — no way! He loves me in colorful clothes. We’re going to be happy in the beyond, you know, as happy as we
were down here. I can’t wait.”

She pointed at the sea a few feet away from us and asked,”Don’t you miss this when you’re away?”

She had found my weak spot. “Yes, I do. I miss it very much.”

“So you understand, then; it’s like a hole inside; no peace; no peace till we’re together.”

This conversation marked the beginning of our summer talks. One day last July I asked her how it came to be that her turnips, carrots, kale, cauliflower, spinach, and whatever else she was selling on any
given day tasted so delicious.

“It’s the shit,” was her unhesitating answer. “Good shit from my sister’s cows.”

“Oh,” I uttered. “Great.”

And it was. No chemicals. All pure stuff.

“Why do you ask?” she said, straightening her back as if to look taller. “Is it the cucumbers? You should have tried them before. They were really good then. All the vegetables changed, but cucumbers
changed the most.”

“When?” I ventured.

“Before they went up there, of course.”

I was lost.

“Ms. Maria, who went where, when?”

“Ma’am!” She had never called me “Ma’am” before. “You’re an educated lady. You, of all people, should have heard of this. I’m an ignorant woman, but even I know what they did when they went up there. And you live in their country, too.” Her voice had climbed an octave or two.

“Do you mean, the Americans?”

“Like I should be telling you!” she protested. “They went up into space, right up to the stars, can you believe it, and turned the atmosphere upside down. That which was up, they brought down; what was down, they pushed up. Her hands went up and down as she spoke.

“That’s what they did. And my vegetables have never been the same since.”

The sea roared outside my window. Had she really said ‘atmosphere’?

“Who’d have thought that you didn’t know,” she sighed, sounding almost disappointed.

“I don’t know everything, Ms. Maria,” I said, apologetically. “I know nothing about cucumbers, for example.”

We both fell silent; then our thoughts seemed to fly in the same direction.

“Shall I come by next week?” she asked.

“I’m leaving this weekend. But I’ll be back by Christmas, ready for your vegetables.”

“We’ll see,” she replied, “I may be with my man by then.” She added softly, “Now that would be wonderful.”

But she isn’t, and I’m so glad.

Meeting Ms. Maria’s Twin

I am not sure why Ms. Maria came to my mind so clearly when I met her “twin” in South Carolina.

I guess it was her kindness and her age: her deeply wrinkled face, eyes hidden under folds of skin; the same look of someone who had led a hardworking life.

Our meeting was not carefree. I was wary and — why not say it? — afraid. I had left Rock Hill with a friend, headed to a place in the countryside I cannot find on the map, even now. Somewhere in The South, as people put it to me then. This sounded a little strange to my ears.

Weren’t we in the South already? Apparently not. As I would come to understand, the college town of Rock Hill is generally seen (mostly by its population, I imagine) as too campus-centered, too fond of “Earthfare” grocery stores to be The (real) South. It is also too close to Charlotte, a city so far from The South as to actually be situated in North Carolina.

I mean, Rock Hill is only 20 minutes away from something with the word “north” in it.

I was venturing into The South to take my dog to a summer camp where she would (I hoped) have a great time while I went home for a while, to a different South, this one in Europe (with, come to think of it, same north-south dynamics). My friend was coming with me to check out this place for her own dogs, ahead of her trip to California.

I was filled with a sense of excitement but also of apprehension, which increased rapidly as we drove farther and farther through a landscape bare of human presence. We saw no houses, barns, dogs, or cows — no cars, even — for miles and miles. I found myself wondering, Do I have my AAA card? Are our cell phones working?

On the radio, familiar sounds became less and less clear, and voices with hard-to-understand inflections took over. Then, everything began to slow down, as if life had gone into slow motion — only it wasn’t life, really, it was my car, slowing and rolling gently to a halt, so gently I was able to guide it almost off the road.

The Lonely Road

This was a very good thing, seeing as there were only two narrow lanes with neat white lines down the middle. And not a soul in sight. This could be very bad, of course; though, on the other hand, the sighting of a soul under these circumstances could be even worse.

My friend and I looked at my dog sleeping in the back seat. In American films, what happened to women stranded on a long, empty road? Not a single good thing came to mind.

We called roadside assistance and were relieved to talk to a human being, whose job it was to fix predicaments such as ours. She was matter-of-fact, in control, reassuring. We would be rescued without delay — or would we? “They’ll be there in three hours.”

Three hours? Did she just say “three hours?”

We looked around and again we saw fields and more fields. With less than two hours of daylight, dark versions of our imminent denouement filled our imagination, and it was then we spotted someone moving towards us, indistinct at first and then more clear, though for the longest time we could not tell whether man or woman, young or old.

Going back into the car was an option. But then, why do it? The car was not going anywhere; the windows were not bulletproof.

We continued to stare as if our lives depended on our ability to discern as much as possible about who was coming. Now we could see it was a woman, and that she was carrying something with both hands. What could it be?

A tray, we thought, and we were right. On the tray something sparkled in the evening light. A pitcher, it seemed. A little later the cups on the tray became visible, and then her voice traveled the remaining distance:

“Hi there! I fancied you could do with some homemade sweet iced tea.”

Minutes later she placed the tray on the car trunk and stirred the golden liquid with a large wooden spoon. We wanted to ask where she had come from, but were wary of the answer.

“Where do you come from, then?” she asked, wasting no time.

I began to explain but didn’t get far.

“You’re not from around here, right?” she said. “It wasn’t a question. “I bet you’re from fancy Rock Hill, hey?”

Fancy is not a word we associated with Rock Hill, but there was no time to think of a good answer, as she went straight to the next question, which was — guess what? “What do you do for a
living?”

Now, as easy as it should have been to say what we do for a living, it suddenly felt awkward to speak of research “and stuff like that,” as we put it, trying to sound unintellectual as possible. Part of me wondered why I was acting this way. It wasn’t long, though, before I felt the punch.

“I guess I made iced tea for two liberals, hey? A nest of liberals the place you work at is, I bet.”

There was no stopping her now.

“Colleges! I bet that’s where you work, right? I bet that’s why your car’s ready for the trash. Liberal and poor go together good, hey? Can’t afford the right kind of car.”

And with that she let out the biggest laugh, and we couldn’t help but laugh along with her. We laughed so hard I needed to visit nature’s rest room right there behind some bushes. When we could finally look at each other again, she said, wiping her eyes:

“That’s alright. You’re God’s creatures too. I bet you can do with some of this.”

She let the iced tea and cubes fall loudly into three large clear cups. She knew we’d be there a long time, and meant to keep us company.

We raised the cups to our lips and drank. This was The South, then: cool and sweet, strong, refreshing, with a sprinkle of humor. Just like Ms. Maria.

Maria Clara Paulino teaches contemporary art history and criticism at Winthrop University, and in 2010-2011 is a visiting professor at the University of Porto, Portugal. She speaks five languages, and has translated and interpreted for Salman Rushdie and Vito Acconci, as well as for the European Parliament and the U.S. Department of State.

A villager shoulders an old rifle as he walks along a remote road in the highlands of the Amhara region of northwestern Ethiopia. Many men in this area carry old weaponry. It’s unclear if the guns are status symbols and for show, or if they are used for protection from wildlife or bandits.

A villager paddles a handcrafted, papyrus reed canoe across northern Lake T’ana, the source of the Blue Nile River, in the Amhara Region.

A mountain village in an Amhara valley

A village family in the Sidamo region fills a bowl with grain from an old storage sack that had been saved in the village granary from a previous harvest. This area is home to more than 40 different Sidama sub-tribes, who rely mostly on cattle raising and subsistence farming in this harsh and barren land.

Villagers in the Sidamo region drive cattle to water and to grazing.

A girl in Sidamo tends to cattle along a creek.

Women in Sidamo carry battered cans filled with water back to their villages, after making the trek to the river - the only water source in the area.

A girl in Sidamo carries her little brother

A native craftswomen in Sidamo displays her hand-spun and hand-dyed yarns in her stall at a Saturday market.

Village boys in Sidamo show off sunglasses they picked up at the market.

Sunset in southwestern Ethiopia.

Mike Rynearson, an award-winning former staff photographer and deputy director of photography for the Arizona Republic, is a partner in the photojournalism company Quest Imagery.

]]> http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/surviving-famine/feed/ http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/sharper-image/ http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/sharper-image/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:00:27 +0000 Renae Blum http://www.bigworldmagazine.com/?p=5213 Claudia Crocetti stands in a darkened room, beneath empty-looking white boxes in display cases on the walls. “We can’t do anything without light,” she mutters.

Then the lights in the ceiling snap on, and the ghostly boxes fill with warm yellow light, revealing hidden images in paper: the Virgin Mary, Mussolini, Botticelli’s Venus.

These are watermarks, some old and others new, the work of Italian filigranisti who create invisible designs on banknotes and official documents.

Fabriano, in Italy’s central Marche region, is the home of the watermark, an elaborate hidden design created by pressing a special screen to paper. Artisans here developed the technique in the 1200s, to protect their paper from imitators.

Fabriano artists also created the first waterproof paper, by developing and applying an animal gelatin. And they built the first hydraulic hammer mills to pulp paper, a relief to artists who before that were forced into the strenuous work of pulping with mortar and pestle.

Seven Years of Study

Downstairs, visitors watch master papermaker Micella Luigi and several students create this same watermarked paper using the methods of 13th century lavorente, or laborers. It’s a day like any other at the Museum of Paper and Watermarks (the Museo della Carta e della Filigrana) in Fabriano, a city known worldwide for its innovations in papermaking.

The traditional steps Luigi and his students follow look simple, but take apprentices six to seven years to master.

First, rags are placed in a series of hammer mills, noisy contraptions that pound the cloth into finer and finer pisto. The ground fiber goes into a vat of water. A lavorente stands above the vat, lifting a wire frame out of the dun-colored water. If one is creating watermarked paper, the frame will have a design sewn into it; the paper will form inside.

As the fiber settles, the papermaker swishes the frame back and forth, controlling the size and shape of the new paper. When he is finished, an assistant lays the wet sheet out on wool. The paper is about 80 percent to 99 percent water at this point, so a screw press is used to squeeze out excess water.

One begins to think of papermaking as gourmet cooking, or a bizarre science experiment. There are many ways to go wrong, many points in which timing, instinct and good judgment are crucial. You need the right temperature in the water. You need correct amounts of water, fiber and glue (and dye, if the paper is colored). You might smooth the paper incorrectly, or keep the hammer press going too long.

A true master, Luigi says, can create a set of paper in which every sheet is identical.

Followed by Heavy Work and Low Pay

The watermarks Crocetti is showing here are among the world’s best. The images in these rooms reflect not ridges of steel in a mesh frame, but human skin and hair, draped cloth, the sun gleaming on a metal helmet.

Some sheets are elaborate calendars, all 12 months on a single page, with perfectly symmetrical vines, flowers and heraldic symbols wrapping around each month.

Reaching this level of expertise exacts a price that not everyone is willing to pay. Sometimes it’s physical. The filigranisti who create these intricate designs often “have big glasses,” Crocetti, a tour guide for the museum, explained.

Staring at the wire mesh and tiny holes, they must sew steel thread through their damaged vision.

Some paper makers also have blackened fingertips from dipping paper into hot water all day.

“They shed skin like a snake,” Crocetti said.

The most common barriers to becoming a maestro of papermaking like Luigi are lack of time and lack of money. During the years of learning, students work as apprentices for little to no pay. A full-time papermaker can earn perhaps $1,500 a month.

“Young people don’t want to learn, because work requires a sacrifice,” Luigi said.

He picked up the trade himself “very gradually,” from an elderly maestro years ago.

He hopes his own son, currently attending a technical institute for papermaking, will continue his work. But papermaking is traditionally a very secretive art.

“He likes to teach to his son, but doesn’t like to teach to all,” Crocetti said, laughing. “They (the papermakers) are very jealous. It’s difficult for them to show tourists all the secrets.”

Indeed: if you lived within 50 miles of Fabriano in the 1430s, you faced a fine of 50 ducats - roughly the price of a very desirable slave - if you made paper without permission, or taught that skill to an unauthorized person. You could also be fined for not teaching the right person. Local mastro Piero di Stefano, for example, faced a 100 ducat fine if he failed to pass on his craft to a son or apprentice, or taught it to anyone else.

Then, Machines Take Your Job

Today, most paper is produced mechanically. Watermarks embedded in paper money are created by computers, not filigranisti meticulously hand-sewing the pattern on a wire mesh.

Luigi doesn’t mind the technological advances. It’s quicker, but can’t touch the quality of handmade paper, he says.

“Here, there is a niche for people who want personalized paper,” he says. He regularly fills orders for wedding invitations, personal stationary, even watermarked paper with designs the customer created. And he’ll knock down the price, for good friends.

The rewards of such work — physically taxing and unglamorous as it is — are small, but special.

“I like my work very much because after I pull the material out of the water, it feels like woven cloth,” Luigi said. “It feels like touching cotton.”

Where to Buy Fabriano Paper
Fabriano’s famous watermarked paper is widely available, at prices ranging from a few dollars to over $100. The Museum of Paper and Watermarks offers specialty products both in its gift shop and online, often at quite reasonable prices. Recently five sheets of handmade paper with envelopes, decorated with flower petals, were on sale for about $5; large sheets of 11″ x 18″ watermarked paper sold for $2.25 each. In the United States, the Illinois-based Blick Art Materials sells many Fabriano papers, as does the Milan-based Fabriano Boutique, which maintains shops in Europe, Japan and the United States.

This article was adapted from the 2010-2011 edition of Urbino Now, an annual magazine by ieiMedia journalism students that circulates in Italy’s Le Marche region.

.

With its red rooftops, medieval castle and rocky beaches, the seaside village of Collioure, near Perpignan, has inspired artists for generations. But for the artist Marc-Andre Figueres, who calls himself MA2F, the primary source of creative motivation is the phallic tower rising over the bay.

It was this 15th century tower, along with the shape of the Collioure Bay, that inspired his work, “The Erotic Trilogy of the Bell Tower of Collioure” (La Trilogie Erotique du Clocher de Collioure).

The trilogy includes a book, and two complementary exhibitions.

Twelve empty gold frames, each attached to a viewing station made up of a pole and steps, are strategically placed around Collioure for “Point 2 Vue Erotique Autor.” Each frame captures a different angle of the bell tower and explores MA2F’s theory of eroticism and spirituality.

Frame 12 is positioned near the crumbling 19th century Fort Dugommier, which offers a breathtaking view of Collioure Bay and the Mediterranean Sea. It was this view, showing the rigid masculinity of the bell tower juxtaposed against the feminine shape of the Collioure Bay, that inspired MA2F’s theory of the erotic bell tower.

“I’m inspired by the light and the changing of the colors,” said MA2F, as he stood at the top of Fort Dugommier and pointed to the view of the Collioure Bay and vineyards behind him “Also, you can see a lot of bright colors here from the view, with the blues and greens from the Mediterranean Sea.”

“He loves to find connections and meanings between things,” said Florence Delseny-Sobra, who has known and worked with MA2F for five years. “He likes to see that everything has a meaning, that everything around him was meant to be.”

Born in Perpignan in 1959, MA2F has continually embraced his connection to the Catalan towns close to him, even as he’s developed a national reputation. His paintings and sculptures have been displayed in galleries in Paris and abroad, and he is known for the “sun paint” he invented in 1990. Sun paint uses a special pigment that reacts to solar energy and changes color with the varying types of ultraviolet rays.

“He really lives like an artist,” said Delseny-Sobra. “When you start talking about his exhibitions and what he is doing in Collioure with “Point 2 Vue Erotique Autor” and all the frames that he did, he is really into it. You can really feel his creativity.”

MA2F’s passion for Collioure’s scenic beauty was a core inspiration for his purchase of Fort Dugommier more than 15 years ago. The artist is working to restore the dilapidated stone fort, built in the 1840s, and to turn it into an art center, and a research center for renewable energy.

“Here will be a prototype for all sustainable energies systems,” said MA2F. “We believe we are creating new systems to use energy now, and actually when we go through all the renovation works we can see that the water from the rain is collected, and we will use the geothermal energy to keep the fort at an average temperature.”

The construction work is done by groups of about a dozen 16-to 22-year old volunteers at a time, half of them male and half female, who work in two-week stints each summer under the direction of three professionals.

“The work here makes sense for this age range because, indeed, this kind of work is simple enough for all ages,” said MA2F. “Seventy percent are from France, and the rest are from all over the world.”

The volunteers, who start at 7 a.m. and finish by 1 p.m. every day, are rebuilding the fort without the help of machinery. They use wheelbarrows, picks and shovels, as well as their own brute strength, to excavate buried structures and reconstruct stone walls.

The restored fort will include gallery space, and a research center where artists can work and display their art. And for MA2F, there will be an apartment and studio that will feature a ideal view of the erotic bell tower, and the bay that first inspired him.

This article was adapted from InPerpignan, a multimedia project of ieiMedia and the San Francisco State University journalism department.

Growing up in Virginia with a Scottish mother and Egyptian father, I lived in a blend of accents, skin colors and tastes. My mother whipped up everything from cornbread and chili to Shepherd’s Pie to Peruvian stew. I knew the difference between coriander and cilantro by the time I was six, and I could name all the vegetables at the farmer’s market. But Egyptian food was mostly a mystery.

Culinary Disconnect

In the Arab world, culinary traditions are usually passed down from mother to daughter, and, far away from his mothers and sisters in Egypt, my father had no way to recreate the dishes he ate growing up.

In college, I took classes in Arabic language, politics and history. But I was missing something essential.

“I bet my mom’s gulash is better than yours,” one friend boasted.

“What’s gulash?” I whispered to another friend, Sara Elghobashy.

Her large Egyptian eyes widened.

I might have been well-versed in the rise of the Ottoman Empire, but I was stranger to daily Arab life.

So Sara, raised in New Jersey but born in Egypt, agreed to teach me how to cook like an Egyptian.

Food is a pivotal part of Arab culture.

“I would much rather offer someone a plate of hummus than lecture to them on the geopolitical history of Amman,” said the Jordanian-American author Diana Abu-Jaber, who writes about food in her novels. “I think in the end you probably learn more about Middle Eastern culture–its earthy, delicious, hearty nature– from eating the hummus.”

As Sara and I shopped for ingredients for stuffed grape leaves and Egyptian rice pudding, greater ambitions took hold.

“Why stop with grape leaves?” I thought. “Why not eggplants and peppers and zucchini? Why not kebabs and falafel?”

But wise Sara knew to start slowly.

We began chopping onion, parsley, tomato, mint and dill. Add rice and ground meat, and you have the standard filling for all stuffed vegetables called mahshy. Sara’s roommates and I gathered around the table, and she showed us how to stuff each leaf and roll it into a perfect parcel. Her fingers worked quickly, tucking the green ends in as she rolled, locking all the delicious filling inside.

I gingerly picked up a delicate leaf and plopped a dollop of filling in the center, just as Sara had. But the filling squished out through the edges, leaving me with a messy blob.

“That Looks Great,” She Lied

“That looks great!” Sara lied, as I placed the blob into a pot lined with onions and peppers to infuse the leaves with even more flavor, a trick Sara got from her mother.

“Growing up, my mother was always in the kitchen, so if you wanted to talk to her, you had to go to the kitchen,” Sara said. “When I got to college, I realized that I could recreate most of the meals just from memory.”

After about five minutes, the pot began to sputter and spit broth. One of my leaves had exploded, spewing rice down the side of Sara’s stove.

For the rice pudding, Sara tossed rice and coconut into a baking dish filled with water and milk. She watched me with a perplexed look as I carefully measured two cups of sugar into a measuring cup.

“I never thought of using one of those” she said. “All my measurements are from my mother, and two cups for an Egyptian are totally negotiable.”

After about two hours, the grape leaves were tender and the rice inside fluffy. We piled them atop a platter, burying the exploded one at the bottom.

Traditionally, a full meal would begin with soup, followed by the mahshy, then either chicken or spiced meatballs called kofta.

The pleasant bitterness of the leaves contrasted nicely with the faintly sweet filling. After dinner, we pulled the pudding from the oven, where it had solidified more than Sara wanted.

“I swear my mother is keeping something from me,” she said, while I cut the rice into squares. “No matter how much milk I put in, it’s never as creamy as hers.

But the pudding was thick and delicious.

I Arrive

Back home, I found an e-mail from my father in my inbox. I hadn’t yet told him about my plan to cook my way into Egyptian culture. But maybe he could smell the rice pudding all the way from Virginia.

“Today I tried to cook rice pudding like my mother used to make,” he wrote. It didn’t turn out right, though. I called your aunt to ask for help but she didn’t pick up. It’s sitting in the fridge now uneaten.”

“You don’t need to call Aunt Nagwa,” I wrote back. I’ll teach you when I come home for Thanksgiving.”

And with one click of the send button, I finally felt like an Egyptian.

Aisha Gawad is a writer in New York.

Last week, I went hungry at a five-star hotel. It was at one of those fancy corporate parties. I’d been hired the day before as one of the foreign hostesses such parties require.

“Okay Grace, so you can please come there at Lower Parel at 11:30?” asked Sameer, the coordinator. “Aur late nahi karne ka hai na?” And don’t come late, he added in Bombaiyya Hindi.

“Mai yahan ki nahi hoon na?” I joked. “To mai late nahi ati hoon.” “I’m not from here, so I don’t come late.”

The next day, I tried my best to get there late. The coordinators and other girls are late as a rule, so there’s no point in arriving at the scheduled time. I struggled to sit at home a little longer, to walk more slowly in the train station. But even though I took the cab on the wrong side of the road outside Lower Parel station, I reached the ITC Grand Hotel at 11:50.

What can I say? I’m from Canada, and we always come early.

I was buzzed in by silk-clad Sikh doormen, and arrived in the grand lobby. There, other foreigners drank expensive coffee and chatted. They probably thought I was also a guest at the hotel.

So I sank into a sofa, surrounded by marble and heavy chandeliers and oriental lilies, until Sameer and the two other girls wandered in casually at 1 p.m.

Sameer saw me sitting there.

“See girls, how Grace is here? You all should also come like this, na.”

“Aray, baba, we came with you, how could we come earlier?” one of the Ukrainian girls pointed out, her Hindi thick with the accent of her mother tongue.

We changed and then waited around, as the event actually started at 4 p.m.

“Look at you girls, living like princesses in this hotel!” joked Sameer, waving a hand around.

We began to ask for something to eat. The other girls whined, limbs crossed, as they sat on chairs. The chairs wore tight white covers, like our tight black skirts. I reminded Sameer that I’d been there for hours already.

“Aap mujhe kyu itna jaldi bulate hain? Aap jante hain ki mai time per ati hoon,” I complained, knowing it was a lost cause. Why do you always call me so early? You know I come on time!

“Haan baba, don’t worry, I promise, you will eat. Just wait for some time.”

He disappeared for a while. And then returned with nothing.

“After, after only, then you will eat,” he promised. The other girls shrugged. It’s always like this, they said.

Hungry, I became grumpy.

We did the event. We stood and welcomed guests. We smiled.

Okay, you are finished, confirmed Sameer after an hour and a bit. It was after 5 p.m.

We sat down, and I asked again to eat. Later, Sameer said once again.

So we went to get changed, but then the client called us back to stand and welcome some more. Mid-change, we stopped short and came back out in our heels. At around 6 p.m., we were finished again.

So for a second time we changed in the sparkling, beautiful bathroom, the Ukrainian girls chatting and spritzing their collarbones with perfume. Outside, I found Sameer.

“Baba! Hello! We need to eat now! It’s been all day!” When I get tired, I’m not patient enough for Hindi.
“You will eat nice hotel food baba, just wait, I will arrange it.”

But it became obvious, finally, that there would be nothing for us to eat. So by 6:30 p.m., we were handed our few thousand rupees each and sent on our way.

Four thousand Indian rupees is about $90. I don’t live particularly extravagantly here, and can eat and travel on that for a couple of weeks. Being paid to do virtually nothing, while enjoying the air conditioning of a luxury hotel? I should have felt good.

But that day wasn’t nearly as good as one before, when I’d spent the whole afternoon volunteering at a kindergarten in Dharavi slum.

In Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia, I interview teachers at Muskan School, evaluating the progress of the program for a local NGO. The young women teachers at Muskan receive daily training and what i in their neighborhood s considered a good salary: 3,000 rupees per month.

I’m not paid. The building is not so fabulous, either - only unfinished cement and tin. There is definitely no air conditioning.

But in Dharavi, I have never, ever gone hungry. I’ve never had to ask for something to eat before it’s been given to me, in love. Whenever I go to Muskan school, I sit with the school teachers, and my empty plate is filled (more than once) with home-cooked food they share from their own tiffins.

Sameer joked about us being princesses in a beautiful hotel, but he was wrong. It’s in Dharavi where I’ve felt like a princess, because that’s where I’ve found the most generosity, respect and openness of heart.

Bronwyn McBride is a writer in Mumbai. She blogs at Bronwyn Grace.

Going to Ho Chi Minh City reminded me not only of the travesties of the war, but also the power of resiliency. The old and new Vietnam seem forever linked — as if one colors, but does not overshadow, the other.

In the main market in Ho Chi Minh City, I conversed with a Vietnamese woman who now lives in California.

She asked me where I came from.

“Me too! I’m also from the U.S.A.!” she told me.

How can she be, I wondered, with that thick, clearly Vietnamese accent?

“I am from Vietnam, and I am from the U.S.A.”

What could that mean?

“Vietnam birthed me; the U.S.A. nurtured me.”

Vietnam is not about past perceptions — it’s not the nightly news showing soldiers disappearing — and yet it finds truths in these images; it finds the truth of resiliency and moves with it.

In Hanoi, we also saw the remnants and memories of war, and evidence that French is still a strong cultural force.

And yet I still could not easily grasp this place, or its people.

A walk around the lake in Hanoi’s heart– which felt like a stroll in a faraway land–whispered some answers. Vietnam both exists and is being created. The difference now seems to be in who is creating, and the mystery surrounding the creation.

Whole hog is exactly what it sounds like. It involves slowly cooking an entire hog at the low temperature of about 175-220 degrees Fahrenheit. Whether cooked in an old-fashioned barbecue pit or in a modern smoker, the process takes about 24 hours.

In the nondescript town of Nolensville, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville, Patrick Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint greets drivers on the main drag. Pitmaster Martin and his crew do more than serve up incredibly delicious barbecued pork, though. Martin sees his work as part career, part mission to preserve the art of whole hog.

Martin picked up the craft of Tennessee-style whole hog barbecue when he was at college in the northwestern part of the state, in tiny town of Jack’s Creek. There, he learned to slow-cook an entire hog, in a pit of cinder blocks over coals.

The restaurant where he learned his craft, Siler’s Old Time BBQ, is still run by Chris Siler and his wife.

At Siler’s, just as at Martin’s establishment, the food takes so long to cook that they abide by the policy of cooking and then selling until the food runs out. Any customers who show up too late are simply out of luck. That’s a throwback, in a world where customers are used to getting what they want, when they want it. With whole hog barbecue, there are no shortcuts or substitutions. It reminded me of a time when the world was a slower place.

Martin and Siler are among a disappearing handful of expert whole hog pitmasters. Even in Jack’s Creek, rising operation costs have made it hard to get an entire hog from farmers.

I located Siler’s by following Martin’s handwritten directions. It was a nearly six-hour round trip drive through rolling Tennessee bluegrass and beautiful hills.

I reached the restaurant just as the last parts of the hog were being sold to discerning customers. Siler explained to me that folks in that part of Tennessee are so particular about barbecue that they order according to the part of the hog they want.

Siler and Martin’s restaurants are as Americana as it comes, and not because it’s trendy. They are simply people who keep to tradition.

For Martin, who has succeeded in expanding into various commercial ventures based on his success as a pitmaster, it goes beyond that. He wants to preserve what he calls the “dying art of whole hog barbecue.”

That’s what most tourists do. However, that is not really seeing the city, but playing into an artificial point of view created by locals stereotyping themselves to the notions expected by Westerners, hiding from them the real underbelly of what goes on in the port of Morocco.

So we were dropped off at the port under a brutally hot North African sun. The boat had left for Europe, and we had to kill at least four hours on this unknown continent until the next ferry.

In Tangier, the mafia has more power than the government. There is virtually no health care, and it has one of the highest HIV rates in northern Africa. The economy revolves around tourism, drug smuggling, illegal immigration, exports, the body trade and prostitution.

This kind of mayhem is what intrigued my family.

As soon as we got off the boat, our bags were sniffed by drug dogs. It was a ridiculous routine; an attempt to make it look like there was law and order. In a city of drug and weapons exports, honestly, what type contraband could we have had?

We got through the gate, and were firmly on African soil.

“Hey, hola, bonjour.”

Suddenly a stampede of fake tour guides in white robes hovered around us. They were greeting us in every language, to see which one we responded to. We continued to ignore them.

One decided to claim us. He followed us wherever we went, as is if we had set up his tour in advance.

¿Hola, de donde sois?
Speak English?
Francais?
We looked past him. Quickly, he stopped in front of us to cut off our path.

“Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, I can tell you are scared,  but don’t. I will show you around, I will take you to see the best, all the best, for you.”

He stared my father in the eyes to try to look sincere, but was really staring at his euros.

He smiled to expose his peg teeth. It was the smile of a gypsy, obvious and very uncomfortable.

My father was just as determined not to have a guided tour as this middle-aged Moroccan was to give us one. He was asking for four euros, but there was no price cheap enough for a guide who was probably just going to show us where the best restaurants were.

We wanted to see Tangier for ourselves. So we kept walking. So did the guide, following us at a dangerously close distance.

We walked faster and faster, and then found ourselves in the Medina, the old bazaar, with its monolithic Arabesque architecture.

We stopped. Still, the man tailed us.

We wanted to enjoy ourselves without the pestering guide.

“What can I do to have you get away from us?” my father asked him.

“You are in Africa, and in Africa there are a lot of mosquitoes,” the guide answered.

It could have been a mistranslated phrase from Arabic. Or was he implying that he would always annoy us, pester us and buzz around us, until we could find a away to repel him?

Eventually we agreed that he would only leave if he got paid. Then, he explained that this was how he made his money: not by giving tours, but by annoying people; following them, making them uncomfortable, and eventually sucking their blood … their euros.

My father took out a euro, and waited for the man to open his hand. Suddenly, the assertive guide became what he really was: a desperate beggar. The coin dropped into his palm. Receiving it almost made his knees buckle, like a drug addict shooting up heroin. When the euro dropped into his hand, he saw it in slow motion. It was the highlight of his day.

It’s sad, that we tourists have that much power.

We walked on. Our guide vanished into the crowd like a spirit, looking for the next group.

A Table Drama

Finally, we had fresh air. But the souk was a hot cauldron of sweat. People were shoulder to shoulder, buying vegetables, dripping their sweat into columns of olives. It was hard to differentiate your sweat from the sweat of others, because the sweat was communally distributed around the market by everyone brushing against everyone else.

Outside the market we found ourselves in an old square, with a cafe and a pension above it (pension, in this context, meaning whorehouse). Suddenly a loud Arabic wall of sound erupted from one of the tables. A man was yelling at the waiter.

Kids started coming into the square to watch what would happen. People looked out of their balcony windows, hoping to see a good fight.

Eventually we figured out that they were only arguing about the bill. At the climax of the bickering, however, the angry client took the pen that the waiter had left on the table, grabbed the waiter by the neck, and attempted to stab him. The people sitting next to him stopped him, but everyone else wanted to see it happen.

The kids found this funny. Probably because he the man was using a pen and not something more threatening.

The Man without Eyes

In the side streets around midday, there was nothing going on. People were inside, with the doors open. Cats were crawling around the winding alleys, looking for dropped food.

We gave in to our hunger and settled for a food stand on a corner. When we walked up to ask for a pita, my mother felt a tap on her shoulder. Already scared by that, she turned around to look a man straight in the face.

He had one of the most grotesque faces I’d ever seen. His eyes had been recently gouged out, and there were two holes where they’d been. Inside the holes were puss and red rings of scar tissue still healing. I saw into his head.

My mother walked away from the stand without ordering, panicking and frightened. We decide to give up, to find our way back to the port.

We walked through the labyrinth of streets, some deserted, and some moving like a streams. On a crowded street in a relatively slummy market where broken electronics were being sold, a Mercedes Benz drove rapidly, not caring to stop and wait for people to get out the way.

People ran from it and tried to find some space between the car and the wall, but there was very little room, because the car was obnoxiously wide for the narrow streets. Clearly the driver was showing who was boss. The car represented power; I was sure this was the mafia I had heard about.

At last we saw the port. We were pestered by child beggars asking for money and trying to sell us unbranded cigarettes. Other children were sitting in a shady corner, passing around a hand-rolled hashish joint.

Then a mother walked up the street holding her son’shand. The other kids looked at them, too stoned to be jealous.

The boy was elaborately dressed. His mother smiled at us. She seemed quite proud of her child, and the child looked happy. They were clearly wealthier than most of the other people we’d met today. But the son did not seem spoiled; he seemed grateful for his mother’s attention.

My father asked if he could take a picture of the boy. As he snapped it, the boy smiled.

We waited for the next boat. Tired, scared, shocked and still hungry, we stood without talking, looking at the Berbers in their traditional bells and wide feathery straw hats, who had come with all their belongings piled into a wooden wagon, all the way from the desert to where Africa falls in to the Atlantic.

They came to sell homemade banged copper bracelets to tourists waiting for the boat. But there was nothing special about the bracelets, those clunky objects. When a Berber came over to me to sell me one I refused it, because the bracelet was quite ugly, and I didn’t have the energy to dig deep into my pocket. By not buying it, I got his respect.

We looked at each other, and smiled a little. Finally, he and the others gave up asking, and like the rest of the people waiting, just stared across the strait, to look at and imagine Europe.

“My father was a choirmaster, so sometimes I’d go to rehearsals when I was very young. I think that started my interest in music.”

Fianko, a cellist in Ghana’s National Symphony Orchestra, is one of few classical musicians in West Africa. This orchestra is the only one of its kind in all of West Africa, a region where names like “Beethoven” and “Mozart” often draw a blank. But arts institutions like this orchestra, and the National Theatre are looking to change that.

Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president after independence from Britain, founded the orchestra in 1959; President Jerry Rawlings commissioned the 1,500-seat theater, which was 1992. Both institutions want to further arts education in a country already vibrant in musical tradition.

“Right from birth to death you have music,” said Othniel Osa, 58, the National Theatre’s deputy director of drama. “Music is very functional in our day to day life.”

Ghanaians mostly hear traditional music, and have their first brush with Western classical music through worship.

“In my childhood I played a lot in the church,” said musician Anthony Zonyrah, 35, as he packed away his cello, rosin and bow for the night. “That made me develop my interest in music.”

Western classical figures like Bach dominate religious music, exposing Ghanaians, nearly 70 percent of them Christian, to classical music.

The orchestra also performs works by Ghanaian composers that mix classical Western theory with traditional African instrumentation.

“In our part of the world music is participatory,” said Isaac Annoh, 45, the director and conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. “I will go to a show and end up participating in it.  We don’t have that gap between performers and audience as it used to be in Europe.”

Ghanaian plays at The National Theatre sometimes mix multiple arts in a single performance.
“At first it was experimental, but it has now gained ground, and a lot of people are using that form,” said Osa. “They don’t write just straight drama, but incorporate music and dance.”

Unfamiliar Traditions
Ghana is rich in culture, but still young in its mastery of Western classical music.

“We are lacking a lot of technique,” said Zonyrah, who studied music at the University of Ghana, like many of the other performers, but didn’t start playing the cello until he joined the orchestra at age 25. It was the first time he had touched the instrument.

Fianko’s experience is similar: he learned cello in the youth orchestra just eight years ago.
Government funding is key. The orchestra originally rehearsed in the spacious and modern National Theatre, but due to budget cuts now practices in a run down building with just enough space for the musicians to crowd in.

“There are signs of neglect all around us,” said Annoh, who fears that without government help, classical music will never spread throughout the country.

Musicians in Search of An Audience
Then there’s the matter of audiences. Both the theatre and symphony face the difficult challenge of attracting them.

“It’s unfortunate in that our colonial masters, Britain, the way they trained us, we take theater as some special delicacy,” said Osa. “You must have attained a certain level to attend theater, unlike the Francophone countries around us.”

Though the symphony has managed to support itself, it relies heavily upon outside help, including donations of accessories, like chinrests and rosin.

The government covers two-thirds of the theater’s expenses, but internally-generated revenue must cover the rest. The theater’s own company sometimes performs, but most productions are produced by outside companies, like church groups and traveling acts.

“It is too expensive to do our own productions,” said theater spokesman Francis Aklie.
Annoh hopes that the symphony will be able to not only tour the country, but also to influence other nations, and to attract foreign musicians to teach and perform.

Both the theater and orchestra are eager to promote early music education. Annoh teaches music in private schools primary and secondary schools. The National Theatre runs programs like Kidafest, where children can spend a week producing plays. The cost is less than $1 per child.
But even these efforts are not enough to ensure future success, according to members of these organizations.

“I’d say the future of the orchestra is really bright, but the government needs to support the orchestra, meaning the young ones need to be recruited,” Zonyrah said.

Her phone rings frequently, conversation can turn awkward fast.

“A lot of people don’t know I’m female. Sometimes they call, and they say, ‘Can I please talk to Mr. Sitsofe Akoto?”‘ said Akoto, 30. “It’s like people think females cannot do it.”

Akoto is one of a handful of female filmmakers in Ghana’s fast-developing film and television industry determined to prove them wrong.  Although very few, film industry women are quite visible, and perhaps especially successful. Their struggles and achievements mirror the struggles and achievements of the Ghanaian film industry — an industry practically nonexistent 20 years ago.
Film production in Ghana has a long but inconsistent history.

Although President Kwame Nkrumah made state-sponsored film production a priority after Ghana gained independence from Great Britain in 1957, the political and economic instability of the 1970s thwarted the industry’s growth. Filmmakers like Kwah Ansah and King Ampaw produced a handful of acclaimed pictures in the 1980s, but the celluloid film stock required proved too expensive to allow the industry to thrive.  It was only with the rise of digital video in the early 1990s that film production began to develop more widely.

Still, the relative youth of Ghana’s modern film industry makes production difficult. There are no large studios to fund potential filmmakers. Ghanaian films are almost exclusively self-produced and financed, sometimes with the help of commercial sponsors.

Nanabanyin Dadson, the editor of Ghana’s largest entertainment newspaper Graphic Showbiz, stressed that economic pressures overshadow gender in this arena.

“A producer, whether a man or a woman, can go to a bank,” said Dadson, 56. “If the bank says “yes” or “no,” I don’t think it will relate to whether one is a woman or one is a man.”

“It’s hard for anyone,” agreed Akoto. “People really don’t understand why they should invest in the movie industry.  Whether you are a man or a woman, it is hard.”

Still, female directors face extra cultural pressures.

“The African woman is judged, and is not expected to have a voice,” said Eagle Productions founder and CEO Juliet Asante. “And what does film do? It gives you a voice. So it’s not something that I would say is welcomed, especially to be a market leader or to be a director.”

Asante, 34, has an imposing but gentle presence. An award-winning former actress, she shifted her focus to directing, and launched Eagle Productions in 1999. In person, she comes across as proud, eloquent and a little vain.

In her immaculately furnished office, a framed, mock issue of Fortune magazine, dated October 2018 reads: “Eagle Productions’ Juliet Asante, media mogul and philanthropist, talks about the potential of Africa and women at the forefront of the leadership chain.”

“I see my work as trying to be the best that I can be as a human being. I don’t define myself in terms of woman [or] man,” she said. “[But] I recognize that there are those limitations, and I get it thrown in my face a lot.”

Eagle Productions is raising financing for its first feature film, a decades-old goal of both Asante and Akoto.

“It’s not a matter of just doing movies. We can do movies,” Akoto said. “But we want to do a quality movie, and apart from the quality we want to hit the international market. We take our time to get it right.”

Akoto credits her commitment to quality to her years spent at the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI), the only official film school in Ghana.

Anita Afonu, a documentary student in her final year at NAFTI, also spoke highly of her education.
“I’ve always been interested in filmmaking. I’m an artist,” said Afonu, 23. “NAFTI being the only film school in Ghana, I saw it as an opportunity.”

But Asante’s enthusiasm has been tempered by experience. She chooses her words deliberately and stoically, though with a kind of weary humor.

“I’ve taken no financier, and I have extended myself beyond the barriers. It took a while, it took a lot of effort, but I kind of raised myself above the fray. So people have no choice but to listen to me,” she said, with a satisfied laugh.

Three of my five companions, already suffering from mild altitude sickness, clung tightly to their oxygen bottles, hats pulled over their eyes. Our driver, a gangly Han Chinese man of about 35, maneuvered our beat up vehicle along the winding road, dodging the occasional stray donkey without expression.

Our guide, Cheng Dak, munched a rice cracker and carefully examined our itinerary. He let us sleep through the beautiful and abandoned terrain, letting us conserve our energy until we arrived at the next destination, the Tradruk Temple, a 7th century monastery in the Yarlung Valley.

Dak, an excitable man in his 40s, had been sitting quietly since our pre-dawn steamed dumpling breakfast. During his six seasons as a tour guide, he had developed an intimate knowledge of the landscape, and a knack for making Westerners laugh. Seven years earlier, he had failed his final exam to become a Buddhist monk. Exhaling smoke as he’d talked at the foot of the Dalai Lama’s palace a day earlier, he promised us he would one day return to fulfill his calling. Until then, he seemed content to drink Red Bull on the road.

Tess, Kristen, Nora, Jimmy, Courtney and I were on vacation from the school we were attending in Nanjing, China. We six had decided to spend our vacation here, as an exotic counterbalance to China’s crowded, westernized coast.

A few hours from the capital, the last physical signs of modernity had faded. Unlike in the United States, where in even the most rural places you find the occasional farmhouse, here we saw only gray-brown wilderness, and the road cutting through it. As we shook off our sleepiness, Nora snapped a few pictures of the nearby cloud-wreathed peaks that reached up like teeth into the sky.

Dak, spotting a small building up ahead, asked us if we needed to use the bathroom. It was the first building we had seen in over 50 miles. But as we pulled onto the shoulder, three small children scrambled up to our van, as if expecting our arrival.

Even before we’d stopped, a small boy with rosy cheeks opened the door. He climbed over Courtney in the front seat, squeezed his way past our bags and looked at me.

“Hello!” he bellowed into my face.

I offered him a high-five.

A girl, in black sweater and bright red track pants, stood on the rail, head ducked, trying her English with us. Her older companion stood beside her, smiling. The driver tried unsuccessfully to shoo them away, but ended up laughing.

Then, at a word from the girl in red, the kids exchanged glances, and belted out:

“Weeee will, weeee will, ROCK YOU!”

Cheering after the refrain.

Later the girls performed a duet that lasted long enough for Nora to snap more pictures.
An older woman, evidently their mother, stood silently off to the side, as if she had grown from the rocky soil. She didn’t approach us, and only smiled starkly when I said hello.

I walked to the edge of the road, where the ground dropped steeply into the riverbed. My friends followed, and we took pictures together in the mid-morning light, posing separately and together.
As we pulled away, the kids waved to us, but the mother looked in the direction from which we had come. A year later, Tess told me that Dak had given them a little money.

These children performers were only the first of many we saw while driving through the countryside, and this was far from the most remote place.

* * *

As we neared Mount Everest, we encountered many groups of people on prominent hilltops overlooking lakes and scenic villages. We always stopped, and I always participated in the festivities.

I sat on a cloth-covered yak, and held a giant dog, and got my picture taken with more than one stranger. On the mountain where we found the yak and the dog, a few teenage girls were peddling small plastic bracelets made to imitate wood. Jewelry held out, they insisted we examine it. But once we had the trinket in our hands they would back away and demand money.

The roadside people are only a sideshow to the strange cultural carnival that happens in Tibet. Natives try to play up to images they have of themselves, or that they perceive others to have. And so a metaculture is born — the fusion of both the tourist and toured, the real way of life deliberately half-hidden behind song and dance, easily-recognized platitudes borrowed from both cultures. Trying to get a roadside person in Tibet to be honest with you is like trying to get a mime to speak to you. It won’t, happen because that would violate the rules of showmanship.

The Chinese government has a long history of destroying the past, from smashing temples to burning ancient documents. But when the Dalai Lama fled China, in 1959, the Chinese decided not raze his famous Putala Palace, converting it into a museum instead. It was a genius move: the site’s holiness was destroyed by its very preservation, by making it into a show.

A few snow flurries had begun to fall when Dak told us it was time to leave the overlook where we were posing with the yak.

Tess was trying to give the bracelets back to the girl, and finally laid them on the side of the road. The girl picked them up again and followed her to the car, hands stretched out, but we were already closing the door. She waved at us in dismissal as we pulled away.

* * *

We’d dropped below the tree line. Barren valleys gradually grew greener. Rocks were replaced by bushes and grass, until trees abruptly began. These hospitable “low-lands” are the truly beautiful parts of Tibet. We traveled along the raging Yarlung River. Our altitude headaches began disappearing, and large travel buses of Han Chinese began clogging the narrow valley roadways.

Our final stop was at a monastery on a tiny island in a holy lake. The lowest point of elevation on our trip, the island was ringed with bushy pine trees, but granite spires still peeked over the surrounding hills. Han Chinese tourists swarmed about. They crowded every corner of the shore; they choked the inside of the monastery. More than five full-size tour buses lined the small road leading up to it.

Courtney and I bummed cigarettes from Dak, who had just cracked open a Red Bull, and looked for a more secluded spot. Near the back of the island, we found a chair-like rock. Tired of monasteries, we kicked back for a smoke.

We’d signed up for a Chinese-style travel tour without knowing what we were getting into. In this style of travel, the bus will typically go for five to seven hours through the countryside, stop at a location or landmark for less than 45 minutes, and then depart again for the next location, five to seven hours in a different direction.

That’s how Dak had been conducting our tour, and we were all getting tired of it. So now, when he came to fetch us, after the requisite half hour, we demanded to stay longer. He reluctantly acquiesced.
I suggested a dip. We rolled up our pant legs and started to wade out into the lake. The water was cold and crisp. A troop of Han Chinese sat on the shore, watching us and pointing. But just as the water reached our knees, Dak came running down the hillside faster than I thought he could manage.
He yelled for us to get out. Swimming in the holy lake was unthinkable.

Crestfallen, Courtney and I waded out and sat down again on the rocks amid the array of garbage thrown there by the Chinese: bags of chips, cans of Red Bull, and what appeared to be an ancient shoe rotted under the log I had my feet on. As I sat there, an older man put a cigarette butt out in the water, and a group of pontoon boats took off for the monastery on the other side, belching smoke into the air.
Dak took us to a small courtyard, where statues of a male and female figure faced each other. Both were nude from the waist down. I squatted next to the female statue, and struck a satisfied smile for Tess’ camera. Then, following my lead, Dak ushered all the girls around the penis statue and, laughing, took a picture of the group.

As he’d promised, on our last night in Tibet, Dak took us to a Lhasa nightclub. We took a table near the middle of the crowded second-floor bar. A group of young men in leather jackets sat to our right, and several older, slightly overweight women to our left. The wall behind the stage was a massive, somewhat blurry printout of the Putala Palace. Two waitresses approached us with Budweisers.

After a few minutes, the house lights dimmed and the stage lit up. Five male dancers entered wearing colorful shirts, furry hats and big furry boots. Tibetan-sounding techno music began, and in unison the dancers skipped forward, executed a turn, then joined hands in pairs and skipped in circles. A young woman similarly dressed joined them. She sang over the music as the men danced around her, waving their hands over the length of her body. The beat stopped, and the dancers froze, then bowed and skipped offstage.

The emcee praised the dancers, then beckoned the audience to approach the stage. I gave in to my drunk friends’ request that I take Dak up for a slow dance.

He went with it. Hand in hand, and hand on hip, we danced. Old women and young men twirled around us. My friends laughed and strained over the crowd to snap pictures of us. Looking into Dak’s face, with his slightly smoke-yellowed teeth and bed-head hair, I realized that he would probably never return to the monkhood.

The music changed to a local folk song. Most of the remaining bar-goers rushed the stage. The crowd divided into lines, and a complex dance began. We tipped forward on one foot, then back on the other, switched and danced in a circle in a Tibetan Cotton-Eyed Joe. I couldn’t keep up. At one point I failed to turn with the crowd, and a woman of about 40 laughed in a friendly way, and grabbed my shoulders, showing me what to do next.

We began staggering back home through a light rain. The street had entirely emptied of cars, and foot traffic and lights were intermittent. Every two or three blocks, we came upon Chinese military police stationed at corners. Their faces were hard to see in the shadows and rain, but their riot shields and machine guns gleamed uncomfortably in the dim night. They were like phantoms.

Unable to sleep, I made my way next door to a 24-hour Internet cafe. Almost all of the patrons were young Chinese playing Internet video games. I checked my mail and the weather back home, and then sat there, not knowing what to do, but not wanting to go to bed. Nobody came and talked to me, or tried to sing me songs or sell me bracelets. People merely sat at their computers doing what people in front of computers everywhere do: they surfed the Internet. Behind me someone listened to “Beat it” through headphones. I paid the few cents I owed and headed to sleep.

Dak saw us off at the train station the next morning. In 10 days, he was the only Tibetan I’d really met. We were now looking at a 48-hour train ride back to Nanjing. In the station, I bought as much beer as I could carry.

In my room in the sleeper car were two quiet, shy girls, and a clean-cut Han Chinese man returning from a business trip. He asked me if I thought Tibet should be its own nation. At first I said no, because they desperately need the money that flows in from the Chinese government (Beijing funds 90 percent of Tibet’s public spending).

He replied that Tibet had always been and will always be part of China.

Then I reconsidered. I realized I had no idea what any Tibetans thought about that. Not even Dak.

Later in the dining car, as we laughed together about some of the things we had seen and done, we saw a group of six raucous Tibetan twenty-somethings a few tables ahead of us. By 9 p.m., their table was already covered with more than 40 empty beer bottles. I waved hello, and they beckoned us over.

They handed us Budweisers, and toasted us. Then they toasted Tess’s beauty, which made her blush. They were also traveling to Nanjing, where they would attend a police academy. I asked them how they felt about home, and the Chinese government. After looking at each other for a few seconds, one jokingly said he was studying to become a policeman because he didn’t know how to dance. But really, he clarified, it paid well.

Then one of the men silenced us, and the group exchanged smiling glances. The tallest, who sat in the middle our booth with his arms around his friends, closed his eyes and began to sing:

“Ain’t nothing but a heartache…”

His friends joined in, and then so did we.

“Ain’t nothing but a mistake, I never wanna hear you say, I want it that way!”

But as soon as the championship trophy was awarded, Modi received word that he’d been suspended.

Cricket arrived in India along with railroads, the ossification of the caste system, and the impoverishment of the countryside — all consequences of the British imperial project. And while the latter two phenomena are far from historical curiosities (given an upsurge of Maoist violence in India’s hinterlands), they’re less and less visible from India’s surging cities.

But in all parts of India, cricket is unavoidable. It’s long been the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NHL all rolled into one.

There are key differences, though: fans historically channel their fervor towards the national squad rather than a local team; the important matches last for either eight hours or five days; and they don’t serve beer.

Since India’s economy began liberalizing in 1991, India’s private sector has boomed. Growth rates have topped 7% for the last decade, foreign investment has flooded in, and the urban middle class has ballooned.

The list of India Premier League franchises could double as a guide to the nodes of India’s boom: they’ve arisen in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore, and even Kolkata, in Communist-governed West Bengal.

These are the locales most transformed by the rising consumer class, eager to shell out up to 5,000 rupees (over $100) for a ticket to a cricket match.

And Modi — part prophet, part charlatan, part convicted kidnapper (as a cocaine-dealing undergrad at Duke University in the 1980s) — was the first to figure out how to manipulate the powerful but inert bureaucracy behind Indian cricket, to seize opportunities.

On a humid March evening, shortly before Modi’s fall, I joined a crowd of fans wearing blue Mumbai Indians jerseys outside Mumbai’s Brabourne Stadium. The home team was competing against the Royal Challengers of Bangalore, named after a whiskey brand owned by Vijay Mallaya, one of India’s most prominent plutocrats. The Indians didn’t lack for powerful financial backing, either. When rights to franchises for the league were awarded in 2008, Mukesh Ambani — deemed by Forbes in 2010 to be the fourth wealthiest man in the world — shelled out a league-high $111.9 million dollars for the Mumbai side, narrowly topping the price paid by Mallaya.

A capacity crowd of over 20,000 fans inside the stadium was evidence of the league’s strength. It didn’t hurt that the Mumbai Indians were led by Sachin Tendulkar, possibly the greatest batsman of cricket’s modern era. Worshiped by hundreds of millions, hess one of the world’s most popular athletes. At only five feet and five inches tall, Tendulkar is proof that in cricket-batting, finesse trumps brawn. When the Mumbai native started warming up in front of the East Stands where I was seated, the fans around me began roaring: “Sa-chin, Sa-chin.”

But the reception for cheerleaders was equally enthusiastic. A mix of blondes and brunettes, in short skirts and calf-high boots, and with exposed midriffs, they came out together and jogged along the perimeter of the field. During the warm-ups and game breaks, they waved their white pompoms and danced with coordinated zeal. When they spun around, one could see the backs of their tops emblazoned with the logo for White Mischief, a vodka brand belonging to the Bangalore team’s owner.

Glamour now needed to match, even trump, the action on the field. Two Bollywood stars own teams, and serve as “celebrity brand ambassadors.” Post-match parties are fodder for local society pages.

The debt to the NFL is obvious. In the IPL’s inaugural season in 2008, the Royal Challengers imported over a dozen cheerleaders from the Washington Redskins,  to sport red and gold hot pants and halter tops, and wave pom-poms. The controversy-seeking media loved it, as did sexually repressed young men from around the country. Cricket purists and tradition-defending elders, not so much.

For the third season, the league’s 40 regular cheerleaders, all recruited from South Africa, were trained by professional choreographers to dance to Bollywood hits. Ten “backups” hailed from Ukraine. (No concession is paid to South Africa’s fraught racial history or to its substantial Indian population: all 50 women were non-Indian and white.)

Modi also opened his checkbook to lure top cricketers — turning the 45-day event into a global all-star tournament.

Shortly after the cheerleaders arrived, but not before the PA system played the global pregame anthem of the moment — “I Got a Feeling,” from the Black Eyed Peas — the match began. I stood up with the rest of the fans in section 14, focused on the action, and hoped that tonight would indeed be a good, good night.

But the Indians were soon struggling. The Royal Challengers were rapidly picking up wickets (the equivalent of outs), eliminating the Indians’ best batsmen. After a middling performance that was still greeted with shouts of adoration every time he struck the ball, Tendulkar too went down, sending a hush over the crowd, and not just those wearing his replica jerseys or waving signs that equated him to a god.

At the break in action, Mumbai’s low target was discouraging.

“I’m not saying we will win,” said my neighbor, who’d come to the match, his first, at the urging of his 12-year-old son. “But we can win.”

Even this guarded optimism was soon revealed as misplaced. The Challengers were scoring runs at a rate that would easily eclipse the target. A graceful catch (barehanded, of course — no leather mitts allowed) of a looping shot brought the crowd back to life and momentarily halted the assault. But the Royal Challengers soon regrouped, and worked steadily towards a comfortable victory.

My familiarity with the basic rules ensured that I could keep abreast of the general action on the pitch. But presumably, the subtleties that keep real cricket enthusiasts enraptured were lost on me.

And as I sat, struggling to retain my enthusiasm, I was beginning to see through Lalit Modi’s hubris. The game may have been revolutionized in India, but talk of introducing professional cricket to the United States, and turning the IPL into an international force as lucrative as soccer’s English Premier League, now seemed a little far-fetched.

It seemed easy to believe at first, as interviewers fawned and members of Indian cricket’s governing body sat on their hands, content to watch the money pour in. But none of us dreamed that Modi would bring himself down.

Modern man that he is, he was done in by a Tweet. Dissatisfied with the outcome of an auction for the rights to two expansion franchises, he broke the league’s confidentiality clause by revealing the names of the stakeholders behind a winning bid.

The first casualty was junior Minister of External Affairs Shashi Tharoor, who resigned after being accused of influencing the bid. But soon Modi was also on unsteady ground.

Shaken from complacency, both the Indian media and the supervising board members began to dig for further improprieties. They didn’t have to go very deep.

Tales of tax evasion, sweetheart deals, and usurped authority competed for column inches with coverage of the semi-finals and finals. Embarrassed into action, Modi’s overseers moved quickly. After he refused to resign, they suspended him.

And that abruptly halted the madcap dalliance between cricket and capital. Stodgy administrators are now shaking their heads over the hit of razzamatazz. The future of cheerleaders, parties and celebrity representatives is suddenly up in the air. The moment for illusory visions of global domination has passed.

The IPL won’t just crumble. But don’t expect to see many blue “Tendulkar” Mumbai Indians jerseys, emblazoned with MasterCard logos, on the streets of New York any time soon.

Dan Packel is a writer based in Mumbai, India, and the former “Think Local” columnist for the Philadelphia Weekly.

Only as the final screws moved into place did we hear the harmonic melodies his music box could play.

“Bravo!” my grandfather would exclaim, as the sound escaped the accordion we’d built.

For many years, I studied my grandfather, Umberto Carocci, as he delicately built each accordion and organetto for clients around the Midwest. He was a one-man company, painstakingly constructing these complex instruments with grace and ease.

Sometimes I would help him fit and test the parts. It was during our “work hours” that I learned about the culture, history and artisan tradition behind Italy’s accordion industry, and came to better understand my Italian heritage.

After my grandfather passed away, on October 24, 2008, I began to think more about this. In the summer of 2010, I decided to delve deeper into his craft, and to revisit Castelfidardo, the central Italian town where he was born, and helped shaped the craft of accordion-making.

A Trip to Castelfidardo

The story of the making of the first accordion follows an oral tradition that seems to change with each generation.

The original tale tells of an Austrian pilgrim who lodged at the Soprani home in Castelfidardo, and introduced a bellowed box-like instrument as he and his hosts relaxed by the fire one night.

Interested in the mechanisms that allowed this music box to work, young Paolo Soprani built his own version. That led to the establishment of the accordion, concertina, and organetti industry in Castelfidardo, in 1864.

My grandfather founded the accordion house Armoni in 1946, after World War II. Then in 1969, he brought his craft to America, by purchasing Star Concertina, in Chicago.
As he distributed his concertinas throughout the Midwest, my grandfather’s work soon became well known. Star also absorbed the Imperial brand of electronic accordions and organs/pianos.

In 1986, he sold his company and retired. No other family member took up the trade, and the company eventually folded.
My grandfather’s story is similar that of many Italian accordion manufacturers. As the industry began to boom in the late 1950s, many manufacturers appeared, only to shut down within an average of five years, due to increasing competition and shrinking demand.

“The boom years were pre-Beatles,” said Fausto Fabi, the operations manager at Soprani/Scandalli in Castelfidardo, when I visited in the summer of 2010. “The accordion was not typical to rock and roll, and stayed outside of that musical circle for the most part.”

But although the accordion wasn’t a feature of the rock and roll band, John Lennon used it while composing most of his songs. Only later, during recording, would he replace the melody with the guitar, drums and bass.

Fewer Accordions Built By Hand
Today, a branch of my family continues both the Soprani and Scandalli accordion lines in Castelfidardo.

In their factory on the outskirts of Castelfidardo, a group of about 20 artisans builds an average of 1,200 accordions each year. An average of 14 people work on each accordion, which has more than 15,000 parts.

Only two major Italian accordion companies, Pigini and Soprani/Scandalli, are left here. Much of the mass production has been shifted to China, making it harder for the local producers to compete. A professional-grade accordion sells for more than $20,000 today.

The intensive artisan construction and the multitude of vendors contributing to its creation have driven up costs.

“More than a 100 different businesses go into the production of a single accordion,” Fabi explained. “All [of these businesses] are locally based, and require specialists, thus making it more expensive.”

In the past, the trade was passed down through the family, typically from grandfather to son to grandson. But in recent years, the trade has lost its strong family connection, as younger generations choose to go into different fields, and machinery replaces human handwork.

Yet the craft is still a staple of the the hill town region around Castelfidardo. And it will forever play a role in my family heritage.

In 2010, Castelfidardo’s International Accordion Festival takes place from Oct. 5-Oct. 10

Stephanie Todaro is a writer in Los Angeles. She wrote this story for the forthcoming “Urbino Now,” a magazine produced by students in IEI Media’s journalism study program in Urbino, Italy.

“How is your baby?” the girl at the liquor store asked intently, as I tried to buy a beer to wash down the day.

“She is a little sick,” I answered.

“Is it because of the red bites that are on her arms?” she asked.

‘No, it is because of the amoebas inside her stomach.”

But the girl was correct. Petra did have a mild allergic reaction to some insect bites, though I do not know how the liquor store girl could have known this.

Wait, yes I do: the people here talk to each other.

In the U.S., it is almost work to talk to your neighbors. I know that the people who live a couple of houses down from my parents could internally combust all over the place one day and we would never know. We like things this way out in the U.S. countryside. We value privacy; we don’t want people talking about us; we like our secrets.

My father even put up a fence of trees around our property when we first moved in, to prevent the neighbors from looking in at us.

It worked: these trees have now grown to full height, and we live in a community of us alone.

But here in El Salvador everybody knows what you do. As we walked out of the hospital with Petra, there was a man waiting by the gate:

“What did the doctor say?” he asked bluntly.

We did not know this man. We’d never even noticed him before. But we gave him the news that would become the talk of the town: the white baby has amoebas.

There are no secrets in Central America. If you bed down with the cute boy down the street, you will soon have every other boy knocking on your door, wondering if it’ll be his turn next. It is also somewhat challenging to lasso a lady here — as she is well aware of the stir it will cause if she’s seen out alone with you.

There are eyes and ears everywhere, and they are all connected to a united network of mouths.

The people here seem to understand that they are being watched, that people talk, that what they do will be deposited verbatim into the verbal record of their town.

In Central America, you do not need to go far for your news — the front door of your home will do.

It is my impression that this is a sign of a community that is organized, equipped and prepared. The term “close-knit community” may be just a euphemism for nosy neighbors, but this is perhaps the foundation of any strong society.

A community in Central America can be mobilized at a moment’s notice. Verbal news can travel faster than radio. Perhaps gossip is a cultural tool that has been instilled into us from our primitive origins? It feels good to spread news, to “gossip” — and an informed, united community is one ready to defend itself.

Communities in many sectors of the U.S. tend to be weak in comparison with those in Central America. I do not know the name of the people who live next door to my parents. I do not care enough to know their names. Just so they stay off my land, they are all right by me.

“The best neighbor is the one you never have to talk to,” my father would say.

The neighbors could be buggering each other for all I care — and I don’t care. My family does not care. And we can only hope that our neighbors don’t care about what we do.

And this is what it all comes down to: in Central America people do care. They will talk to you, pass on the word about you, find out what you are doing, and make you a part of their community — whether you like it or not.

A lady who lives in an apartment downstairs from us tries to look up into our apartment all day long. I don’t yet know what she is looking for, but I do know that she mostly just finds me typing quietly on my computer, in nothing but a pair of skimpy underwear.

But I know that I live in a safe place. It is safe because I live in an apartment complex with about 10 other people, vigilant guards watching my room. Nothing short of an outright invasion of pistoleros could break through this defense. I am safe, because I am a part of a community that cares.

Wade Shepard has been perpetually traveling the world for the past 11 years, through more than 50 countries on five continents. He writes about the people he meets, the places he visits and his impressions of how the world comes together on Vagabond Journey Geographic and Vagabond Journey Travelogue.

A quinces, as Cubans call the momentous fifteenth birthday, is the most extravagant and important party of a girl’s life. When it came time to celebrate my rite of passage, my mom and I agreed that a simple ballroom would not be enough - so we opted for a boat. Quince cruises are extremely popular in Miami. The lavish party through the Caribbean usually lasts a week, and includes a full schedule of dinners, rehearsals, photo shoots, dances, and programmed parties.

While it is true that you only turn 15 once, a quinces is never a one-day event — it takes almost a year to unfold.

Months before the actual cruise, my mom started to buy me what she called “vacation clothes.” With each new shopping bag of jewel-toned halter-tops and bedazzled shorts, I begged her to let me go with her to pick some things out. But she replied with a cold, No te vas a poner Abecrumy — “You’re not going to wear Abercrombie” — and that was the final word. To me, that sounded more like abandon all hope to look cool — you’re destined to dress like you just got off the boat from Cuba, fabulously self-important and glittery. At least I get to pick out my own ball gown, I thought naively.

Reality Bites

Somewhere in Little Havana, I sat in the tiny, receptionless living room of a Cuban seamstress who a cousin of a co-worker of my mom’s referred us to. The smell of sandalwood - a preferred scent of all Cuban women over age 40 - and pork lingered in the air. My grandpa, Pipo, walked around, staring into each photograph on the wall, turning every so often to look at me and roll his eyes. This helped me pass the time as my grandma and the seamstress consulted endlessly about the appropriate length of tulle that should be cut underneath the dress.

As I stared at the garment the two women were manhandling, I realized it wasn’t exactly what I had wanted. But it had been late the night we picked it out, and I’d had homework to do. It fit, my mom liked the pearl and lace design, and most importantly it was on sale. So I’d surrendered. I just hoped my pictures would turn out pretty, and that I would manage to look somewhat older than the rest of my friends.

The reality of my quinceanera didn’t hit me until my entire family - Mom, Abuela, Pipo, Tia Sara, Tia Ani, Tio Henry, Tio Migue, my cousin Stephanie, and my other cousin Mike - were standing in front of the ship, talking loudly about their plans to relax onboard. I tried to hide behind the gigantic white dress I was carrying, but my uncle noticed me fidgeting and took it from me, in an unwelcome act of thoughtfulness, exposing me and my “vacation clothes” to the judging eyes of what seemed like a million girls waiting in line holding white dresses. As we started boarding, they sent the quinceaneras to a separate party room to receive itineraries and meet one other.

I turned to my mom and translated where we had to go, but the man handing out maps overheard me and said, No, eres tu sola. “No, just you.”

I stared him down, angry that he had foiled my plan to be antisocial under the pretense of an overly-protective mom, and reluctantly left my family behind.

The Gulf between 14 and 15

Let me clear up a few unspoken rules of quince cruises. Because of their summery nature, girls born in the fall, like me, must choose between going the summer before they turn 15 — meaning you are still an insecure 14-year-old who just finished middle school — or the next summer, only a couple of months before turning 16. Because I didn’t want my actual birthday to pass without any proof of womanhood, I decided to go on my cruise the summer before. I chose wrong.

Thirty girls were celebrating their quinces on that cruise. Most of them were in high school, and had already turned 15. They had already had their photo shoots at the swanky Biltmore Hotel or the rustic Villa Vizcaya. They had already gone through the polishing associated with becoming a Hispanic teenage girl : eyebrow waxes, teeth whitening, spray tans, acrylic nails, and makeup.

Those things were still a mystery to me. I had only potential. But the ship had, literally, already left the dock. So I decided to act as confident and cocky as possible, pretending to be proud of my braces, bushy eyebrows, and pasty white-girl skin.

The battle of the best-dressed began at the Captain’s welcome dinner, exclusively for the quinceaneras and their families. Everyone congregated on the promenade of the ship, and the girls were lined up in height order on an indoor bridge, to be filmed walking down the stairs. As my lanky self walked to my place near the end of the line, I smirked at the stouter girls in the front who enviously eyed my BCBG dress, and I thought for the first time onboard, Thank you, Mom. Hours of forced practice walking in my heels before the cruise helped me glide down those stairs flawlessly, but a couple of girls tripped in front of the camera.

When it came time to take pictures with the captain, the photographer rearranged our group and put me in the middle. I still remember that as my most triumphant moment.

Some awkward limbo dancing and pinata-breaking happened the next day as we docked in Mexico, and my lack of coordination brought me back down the totem pole. On our “day-at-sea,” we had a painfully long photo shoot on the ship.

The tourists who were not involved with the quinces looked perplexed, as 30 teenaged girls in shiny jewelry and hair-sprayed curls lined up against railings and on chaise lounges to pose for pictures. By that time we were somewhere near round five of the best-dressed battle, and my stubborn pleading with my family to stop buying bikinis had backfired. Every girl wore two different bathing suits each day, while I was stuck with two conservative outfits for the entire vacation.

Dancing with Pipo

Then came our dress rehearsal for the big night, Each girl would be formally presented at the hand of her mother and father, and then dance a waltz with her dad. I had decided to dance with my grandpa, a lovable but hard-headed man. While other dads listened attentively to the choreographer’s instructions, Pipo commented on his accent, wondering what province of Cuba he was from. I had hoped that his age would prove in our favor, and that sometime in his life he had danced the waltz.

A couple of minutes later, my feet were throbbing, and everyone’s eyes were on the man holding me, who insisted on turning clockwise while the entire group turned counter-clockwise. We were asked to come in for private lessons.

I had finally started to get used to the dynamics of the quinceaneras. I knew when to hang out in the Jacuzzi, what to order at dinner, and how much time to sunbathe so that I would get darker, but not peel. Then I got sick.

The day of the big dance, a small tropical storm on the Gulf of Mexico turned into a small hurricane. Our ship was tugged back and forth.  Curtains swayed violently, and people stumbled in the narrow corridors like drunks.

My worries about the dance turned into full-blown anxiety as I practiced one more time with Pipo, and he was still turning the wrong way, the corset underneath my dress was not loving the extra ice cream cones I had treated myself to all week and was taking its anger out on my ribcage, and my nerves about looking grown-up gave way to sea sickness. My enormous and heavy dress would not let me go into the tiny bathroom to throw up, so I forced myself to calm down.

My aunts hovered around me, ready to hold my hair and save my dress if I decided to vomit. But I kept busy, by judging the way-too-tight, overly-jeweled dresses around me, wrapped around peeling shoulders and sunburnt skin.

I could not stop feeling little and ugly next to some of the older girls, but after I walked across the stage and heard my name, I didn’t even care that my grandpa was still turning the wrong way. I danced exceptionally through the salsa and the conga line, and when I walked into the dining room filled with thunderous clapping and flashing cameras, I confidently placed myself next to the cake meant for all the quinceaneras

Even though this newfound confidence sprang from a tired-of-worrying-what-other-people-are-thinking emotion, I realize now that it was probably the first sign of becoming a grown-up.

When I was a girl, I loved the thought of cruises — but that was five years ago.

Sara Claro is a writer and multimedia journalist in New York.

Portuguese immigrants to the Hawaiian islands brought with them the old-world style of baking in a wood-fired stone oven, a forno. In an effort to preserve this tradition, the Kona Historical Society of Hawaii created a replica of a traditional forno in Kealakekua. Volunteers light a fire inside in the wee hours of every Thursday morning. By 10 a.m., the action is in full swing, with volunteers preparing the dough for pao doce, a traditional Portuguese sweet bread.

Then the baker weighs out the dough.

Now everyone is invited to participate. The measured dough must be further divided into seven equal portions, and rolled into smooth balls.

The loaves are set in pie tins, to benefit from one last rise.

The air fills with the aroma of fresh bread baking.

After the loaves cool, they're packaged for sale.

As you can imagine, this bread sells out fast! It costs $5 a loaf. The funds go to support the Kona Historical Society. If you want to be sure to get some, show up early!

The Kona Historical Society, dedicated to preserving the stories of Hawaiian islanders, organizes the baking, on the west coast of the Island of Hawaii, below the H.N. Greenwell Store Museum. Bread is baked every Thursday, starting at 6 a.m., and is ready for sale by about 10 a.m.

Author and freelance writer Kris Bordessa is based in Hawaii. She covers life, culture, and fun in Hawaii for less at Big Island On The Cheap and Honolulu On The Cheap.

I worked at OppenheimerFunds in the South Tower, on the 32nd floor. I was on the phone with my Deutsche Bank salesperson Ricardo, discussing the latest on Argentina’s economic debacle, when I suddenly heard explosions.

I looked out the window and saw something different. My regular view was a gorgeous glimpse of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty, who greeted me every morning with her gaze of hope and encouragement. At that very moment, I swear I saw a tear in her eye.

My vision was quickly obscured by falling debris. I thought that a bomb had exploded upstairs. This was not a regular fire, which starts slowly and gradually. This was premeditated.

I hung up the phone: “Ricardo, I gotta go” and heard my boss yelling, “Let’s get out.”

Art was a smart, quick thinker. He had survived the 1993 WTC bombing, in the same office. He knew, just as I did, that something serious had happened. I sensed the urgency in his deep blue eyes. I had a split second to decide what belongings to take and what to do. I grabbed my purse and left.

Our stairway descent was engulfed in an eerie silence. There was no panic and no smoke, as our tower was the second to get hit. Few words were spoken. The tension was palpable, and we were proceeding down as quickly as we could. I worried about whether the exit doors downstairs were open, and if we were ever really going to reach the ground floor.

But open they were, and I left the building through its center courtyard. I lost sight of my colleagues.

I looked up to the burning North Tower, and immediately realized that they’d never extinguish that fire. That building was going to keep burning, and I knew I should walk as far away from it as I could. I ran out of the courtyard and hoped that I wasn’t going to be killed by falling debris.

The whole descent must have taken less than 15 minutes, as I never saw my tower be hit by the second plane, 18 minutes later.

I walked toward South Street Seaport and stopped at the first free pay phone I saw. I worried that my grandma in Brazil would have a heart attack if she saw this on TV and was not aware I’d escaped. I managed to speak to her for a few minutes and calmly told her not to worry — that “there was a small fire” in my building, but that I was already out, on my way home, and that I loved her very much. She was leaving for the dentist and was very calm, as I was surprisingly calm myself.

My mother, who was planning to travel from Brazil to New York that very evening, was was out, making last minute preparations for the trip. When she told someone in the travel agency that she would be flying that night, he politely corrected her.

Madam, You’re Not Traveling Today

“Madam, you’re not traveling today, all flights are canceled, look at the TV and see what’s happening.”

She panicked, and in a catatonic state, returned home and tried to dial me. But by then all the phone lines were jammed. My grandmother hadn’t left any note, as she didn’t think the incident was serious. So for a few hours, so my mom had no idea whether or not I was alive.

I ran into a few colleagues near the Seaport, who had also managed to call their families before the lines jammed. It was great to see them alive.

Suddenly, a wave of white dust approached us. We started fleeing north, away from it. I didn’t know at the time, but that was the dust from our own tower collapsing.

I walked with our trader Eamon for a while. At one point, he looked back and remarked that there was only one tower in the horizon. Depending on the viewing angle, on a normal day, one tower could block the sight of the other. So I wasn’t sure if he was seeing things.

“Eamon,” I said, “we need to get home to talk to our loved ones, let’s just keep walking and look ahead, not back.”

I was living in the New York’s Upper East Side at the time; it was going to be a six-mile, two-hour walk. By then, fighter jets were flying overhead. We had no idea what else might be coming.

It never occurred to me to check whether the subways or buses were running. At that point, I only trusted one thing, and that was my two little feet still attached to me.

I got blisters, as I forgot to switch into my Birkenstock sandals, and was walking in high heels instead. I bought a pair of cheap rubber shoes in mismatched colors and different sizes, as that was all that was left in the store. The walk became a little less painful.

Miraculously, two cell phone calls came through as I walked, one from my friend José, the other from my cousin from Chico in Brazil. I asked Chico to call my family in Porto Alegre again, and to tell them I was OK.

I walked a few blocks past the UN, and hoped that it didn’t get blown up too. Because I’d stopped only once, to buy the shoes and water, I ironically knew little of what was going on. It was my cousin who told me about the Pentagon and Pennsylvania flights. The shopkeepers told me about the planes, and the towers that were gone by then.

People around me were walking stunned, like zombies. I had never seen New York so quiet. We tried to help each other. New Yorkers have always rallied in times of distress, and this was no exception. I saw a blind man covered in white ashes being guided by another person.

I arrived home around noon and tried calling Brazil and my friends in New York, but the phone lines were still jammed.

I watched the images of destruction on TV for an hour and then turned it off. I wanted to forget it all and start healing.

I put some music on and proceeded to clean the apartment. I was symbolically trying to wash away what happened, as I had to stay home waiting for phone calls that I hoped would eventually start. My apartment was a one-room studio and my Internet connection was old-fashioned DSL line, so I had to choose between trying to send emails and keeping the phone line unobstructed.

Several hours later I finally reached Brazil, and spoke to my mother and grandmother. By then, all the neighbors had converged into in my grandmother’s apartment, as if for a funeral. It almost felt like a funeral, except, by a miracle, it was not mine.

The Outpouring

This is where the love comes in. I spent the next 14 hours on phone calls and emails. Relatives, friends, ex-boyfriends and co-workers were all calling. I heard from people I hadn’t spoken with in years, people with whom I ended up reconnecting, and am still in touch with now. Some people called the universities I graduated from in Pennsylvania and Japan, inquiring how to reach me; others called Oppenheimer’s emergency line in Denver, or mutual friends.

Calls poured in from the around the U.S., South America, Europe and Japan. I didn’t get to sleep until almost 2 am. The acrid smell of burnt material had invaded my apartment, but from the outpouring of love that I had received, the scent was sweet.

I learned later that all of my Oppenheimer colleagues, and my friend Teresa, who worked in the North Tower, were safe.

That was not the case for a few former colleagues at Fuji Bank (in the South Tower, on the 79th floor, exactly where the second plane hit). I learned about the head of HR, who must have been trying to account for the safety of all employees. And a colleague who, after making it to the ground floor, decided to return upstairs, because she had forgotten her building ID, and thought she’d have a difficult time returning to the office without it. Or a few Japanese employees who faithfully followed orders to return to their offices, after being told that the fire was in the other tower, and that they were safe. May their families and friends have found peace by now.

I consider myself very fortunate, and will be forever thankful that I am here writing this. If there’s something to be learned is that one should enjoy the present, as the future is uncertain and may never come.

Nine Years Later

At this time of year I inevitably recall these events, and mark our collective progress since.

We gathered at Art’s apartment three days later, exchanging hugs and survival stories. We ended up working in an emergency barrack in New Jersey, and also from home, for the next three months. Our International Bond Fund maintained its number one performance rank through yearend, and our story made The New York Times.

But Wall Street is ruthless, and several colleagues whose funds had experienced severe losses were fired at the end of the year.

When my group returned to the World Financial Center two years later, my new office faced Ground Zero.

I was actually happy to be back, as I loved downtown Manhattan, and this was part of my own rebuilding and moving on.

Our team stayed together until 2004, when a few colleagues left for JP Morgan proprietary trading. Art was promoted to co-CIO of OppenheimerFunds.

My closest Fuji Bank colleagues had a reunion a few days after 9/11. All of them later either moved on to other jobs, or back to Japan.

Eamon is now our sales rep at the investment company Libertas, and we remain in touch. He received a phone call months after 9/11 telling him that his briefcase had been found. Under the scratches and dust, all of its contents were intact.

Ricardo moved to Goldman Sachs and is rising up the ranks.

Teresa still works for Port Authority. She survived the 1993 bombing too.

Jose bought a house in 2003, and is still renovating it. His garden looks spectacular.

My former roommate Linda and I, who reconnected on 9/11 after not having spoken for 15 years, are still in touch.

My cousin Chico is the father of two beautiful daughters, and working in IT in Rio.

My mother managed to take the first flight to New York, after the airports reopened. But a year later she was denied entry to the U.S., and had her tourist visa revoked, on the back of stricter post-9/11 immigration controls. She became a U.S. citizen in 2008.

My grandmother passed away in 2010, six weeks before her 92nd birthday. I honored her life and recited Kaddish at Kehilat Gesher in Paris.

In 2004 I left OppenheimerFunds for Invesco, a step up in my career. I built up a team from scratch, and have been entrusted by our clients with over $1 billion to look after.

I became a U.S. citizen one year after 9/11, and am very proud of it, as it represents everything we were attacked for. Challenges and setbacks in have not been lacking in my life - this being one of them - but I’ve so far managed to learn from them and move ahead. To this day, I continue exploring this wonderful path of ours, called life.

“Auto!”

I shouted, as I stepped into the road and raised my arm, at the three-wheeler auto rickshaw careening down the dark avenue. I was in central New Delhi and it was 9:30 at night; late enough and dark enough for Delhi to turn into the nocturnal monster I had read so much about in the newspapers. Robbery and rape were rife, I understood.

And yet here I was, a lone girl in this Delhi night, flagging down an auto rickshaw.

It swerved and came to a momentary halt in front of me, its engine still put-putting like a lawn mower.

I looked at the autowallah to see if I could discern any signs of evil. I saw neatly-combed hair parted along the side, beardless, moustache-less face; tired, almost shy, eyes and a khaki-colored shirt that was probably half of a uniform. He looked like a schoolboy, only older.

Harmless, I thought. (Then again, isn’t it the harmless-looking ones that turn out to be the most dangerous?)

I looked down at his thin frame and mentally calculated that I could easily land a few blows and tackle him.

“South Ex?” I asked, to see if my destination was agreeable to him.

Delhi autowallahs are notorious for being extremely picky about where they go. Some even choose to stand around and earn nothing all day, rather than go in the wrong directions. Their logic, if there is one, escapes me. I prayed this autowallah would agree. Four before him had already rejected my destination and me. In exasperation, I had even sarcastically asked the last one to take me wherever he fancied, since my original destination was clearly not convenient for him. He had laughed in my face and driven away.

“150 rupees,” this fifth autowallah proposed.

Great! Now that I finally had an autowallah who was okay with my destination, he was turning out to be an extortionist. Despite having functioning meters, most auto rickshaws in Delhi don’t use them, relying instead on some vague idea of agreeable rates between locations. So it’s important to have an idea of the correct fares and bargain before a trip.

I had developed some expertise in the matter. I put on my sternest face and retorted: “80 rupees and no more. I travel this route every day.” I was ready to fight.

He shrugged and motioned with a nod towards the back seat. “Sit.”

I was surprised. He had given in very easily. Me: 1, autowallah: 0. I slid triumphantly into the back of the auto and the low putt-putt turned into a constant whirr, as the tiny vehicle moved on towards Pandara Road.

An auto rickshaw is a glorified metal cabin on three wheels with a two-stroke engine, a handlebar like a motorbike’s and no doors, no seat belts and no airbags. And a ride in it is a bit like riding a roller coaster, except you stay firmly on the ground with no definite track. Though only for the bravest-hearted or the most immune, it’s one of the most convenient ways to get around Delhi.

And did I say cheap? Eighty rupees translated into about $2, for a 30-minute ride. In an auto, almost anywhere in Delhi is only Rs.100 away.

But that is once you’ve bargained.

Once behind the handlebars, the autowallahs zigzag and weave through traffic, unafraid of bigger vehicles or pedestrians, quite like a bumper car at a carnival. And if the gap between two cars or buses in front is seemingly impossible to fit into, fear not! (Or better still, do). For autowallahs will surprise you by daringly maneuvering their rickshaws into the tightest imaginable spaces in traffic. You can literally touch the vehicle beside you by sticking out a finger.

But that also means that an auto is one of the most  “real” ways to see Delhi. You get unfeigned views of the local people, roadside foods and the occasional cow or dog. And since it is open on either side, you get it all: sight, sound and smell. From roadside beggars and fake-book sellers to incessant honking and clouds of smoke.

On this particular night, the platter seemed especially full. With a scorching dry summer added to the mix, I prayed for zero traffic and no stops. If the auto kept moving, then the wind would keep blowing, making this hot-summer night just a little bit more bearable.

My hair lashed my face in the hot wind. Despite the hustle-bustle on the roads, the tree-shaded sidewalks looked sleepy and lethargic. The streetlights were feebly trying to light up dark corners, but were succeeding only in attracting a cloud of insects. What really lit up the roads instead was the constant succession of blinding headlights from on-coming cars. We passed a stray dog on the side, stretching, in what looked like a yoga pose.

Maybe if I closed my eyes and blocked out the sounds, I could pretend that I was getting a massage.

I reached into my bag for a cigarette. Why passive smoke what the cars around me spewed, when I could active smoke and enjoy it? I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in through the just-lit stick, and let the first clouds of tobacco smoke fill up my lungs. Satisfaction.

I opened my eyes and looked out at the night once more, wiping off a thin salty layer of sweat that had formed on my upper lip. It had been the most brutal kind of summer, one that should be survived only in the comfort of air conditioning. And yet there are many have-nots in Delhi and I was getting a good taste of what the summer had been like for them.

“You shouldn’t smoke, you know. It’s not good for you.”

It took me a moment to figure out that the autowallah was speaking to me. “They kill you  faster. ” l looked at the round rear view mirrors on the side, to get a view of his face. He was looking back at me in the mirror, with a slightly challenging look. Great! So now he was a champion for the no-smoking campaign.

I surprised myself by letting out a chuckle and a smile. “Achcha?” Is that so? I hadn’t been reminded of the cigarette-death connection in a long time.

I felt vaguely amused by the autowallah’s intrusion. It had been a long day and I must have been in a conversational mood, for I continued, “What’s your name?”

He looked back at me, through the rear-view mirror, trying to gauge my question, and me.

“Husain Mohammed,” he said quietly.

I understood his hesitation. His name was Muslim. And in supposedly secular and religiously-conscious India, it wasn’t always the best thing to have your religion known.

“And where do you live, Husain bhai?” I continued, suffixing the Hindi word for brother to his name. Like any other girl travelling alone in Delhi, I had learnt early on that it was safest to make a brother or uncle of every unknown man.

“Old Delhi,” he answered, “very close to Jama Masjid and Chandni Chowk.”

I had been to that part of the city. That’s the heart of Delhi, the key to its history. Crowded, dirty, quaint and mostly dilapidated, it had looked every bit like it belonged in the pages of Arabian Nights. I told him so. And he laughed, a hearty unbridled laugh. “Well, for me that is home, no matter how it is,” he appended. I caught the fondness and the helplessness in his tone, and chose to only smile back in return.

“And what about you?” he asked. And in a rare and potentially quixotic abandon of caution, I found myself telling him my story: How I was in Delhi only for a few months for an internship, and how in that short time I had managed to fall in love with the place, despite the heat, the lack of security and the absence of convenience. I told him about how I was worried I had put on weight gorging on chaat and jalebis, and how I had found friends for life in this city.

This last comment struck a chord.

“I have a best friend too. Shankar. We grew up together. He’s my neighbor. My mother doesn’t like him. He’s a Hindu, you know. Brahmin.”

I understood the intended message in that last word. India had supposedly left its caste system behind. But it hadn’t been erased from most minds. And so it was very common to find Brahmins, the top rung, proudly staking their claim to mistaken superiority. But Husainbhai had told me that detail only to convey that his friend was a devout Hindu, and to impress upon me the unlikelihood of their friendship.

“Some years back, people threatened me. Told me to find friends in my own qaum.” He used the Urdu word, to refer to his own community.  Shankar also faced problems with his people.

“But I don’t care. Friendship is friendship and religion is personal. It is nobody’s business. No?”

I nodded my head vigorously, surprised and pleased.

“I agree. Nobody else’s business.”

I wondered why more people in the world didn’t think like Husainbhai. He could be the poster child for Indian secularity. Perhaps the daily grind had made him aware of what was truly consequential, and what was not.

“Are you married?”

The question caught me off guard, as it seemed a very personal thing to ask. But then, in Delhi, in India, there are no questions that can’t be asked, even of strangers.

“No,” I responded, “not yet,” bracing for a lecture on marriage and the right young age for it. I had gotten used to that here. Every older married person in Delhi thought it their divine duty to advise the unmarried female folk to tie the knot quickly.

I looked outside to check how far I was from my destination. Khan Market, almost there.

“Good! Take your time. There is no hurry,” he responded with surety. Had I heard correctly?

“I don’t understand,” he continued, “why everyone thinks it’s so important for a girl to get married by the time she is 25. You should enjoy your 20s. Live your life and do everything you want before you get married, ok?”

I smiled, a genuine big smile.

I liked this guy. Maybe this was the changing face of the city. If so, there was still hope. “Yes, ok!” I told him with a laugh, ” I won’t marry in haste and repent at leisure.”

Almost at my destination, I sheepishly took out another cigarette.

“Another cigarette?”

I decided to take my chances and, while I was at it, to be a little cheeky. “Yeah, you want one?” He glanced at me in the rear view mirror, his face grim and incomprehensible.

And then I caught a trace of a naughty grin. “Yes!” he replied, lowering his eyes and breaking into a smile.

I passed him a cigarette with a chuckle, and we continued on into the night. Just two people, smoking and bantering about the city and its difficult life.

Nidhi Chaudhry is a writer based in Singapore.

Fires are burning all over the city. I cannot glimpse an intersection that is not ablaze.

Bombaderos, firefighters dressed in black, stand by with tanker trucks and portable pumps. I inhale the acrid smoke with gusto, awakening the latent pyromaniac within.

My heart races as I head down Calle De Trafalgar. An elaborate archway of carnival lights, designed like the onion tops of a Russian Orthodox church, frames the narrow entrance to Falla Parotet.  The ninot at the end is smaller than most, but has not yet been lit. I push my way assertively through the crowd.

I want a front row seat. I want to feel the burn.

I am at La Nit del Foc, the night of fire, in Valencia. Called Las Fallas, it’s the culmination of a five-day festival in honor of St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters, and celebrated here each March 15th. Huge wood, plastic and papier mache effigies called ninots are “sacrificed” at the end of the week, in a blaze called crema.

The tradition may have started as early as the Middle Ages, when carpenters habitually burned the poles they used to support their lamps each spring. At some point the poles were jokingly decked out as funny figurines. Now neighborhoods compete to see who can build the biggest, gaudiest, weirdest ninot.

Burnt in Effigy

An unseen hand tosses a burning carton at a 20-foot high purple-clad mermaid. The pack cheers and jostles forward. In minutes, the statue is in flames.

My face feels sunburnt, as I stare into the fluorescent orange serpent. It engulfs the mermaid’s blonde hair, and soon we see her timber skeleton. She bends forward, then crashes to the ground. The nearest spectators flinch from the sparking embers. The collapse sends a foehn wind rushing past me down the alleyways.

The crowd stays late, watching as the fire withers into embers. The dark of the night sneaks in and covers what was a roaring inferno.

I’d arrived in Valencia the day before, hoping to get to the Plaza del Ayuntamiento by 2 p.m., when the daily mascletas, the big firecrackers, are lit. At the Plaza de Toros de Valencia, the bullring, I join the mob. It carries me along, shoulder-to-shoulder, like a molecule in the ocean. I hear the pops, then the echo and rumble of the mascletas. I am still six blocks away.

Hundreds detonate at once. Then, silence.

I am too late.

As I dive further off the plaza, I discover the casals faller, the neighborhoods. Each quarter creates its own paper mache effigy. Some figures are traditional, some irreverent, and others politically satirical.

In one, a mutt mounts a coiffed poodle from behind, in a strict interpretation of screw-the-pooch. His eyes are crossed and his tongue hangs out, in an obvious grimace of pleasure.

Nearby, a slight bearded fellow with parsnip pointed nose and goatee is marrying a chubby older fellow with rouged cheeks.

Grids of twine crisscross the streets, and I realize that each neighborhood is hosting its own mascleta celebration. The secret to penetrating Las Fallas is leaving the main plaza, and probing these enclaves.

I return here early the next day. The Caballeros FX (the pyrotechnicians) deftly handle little explosive sausages, scissors in their hands and brown paper fuses in their mouth. They secure the colorfully-wrapped mascletas to the grid. These clotheslines drape across the streets, with barely enough room for cars and pedestrians to glide comfortably beneath.

Boys no older than eight kneel purposefully next to a car’s bumper, arranging fireworks of their own. They nervously use a piece of smoldering rope to spark the fuse. Then they take a few steps back; cover their ears.

On another corner, a lit cone erupts in a shower of sparks, while a teenaged girl stands nearby, nonchalantly sending a text message. A toddler in pink plays not six feet away.

The steeple bell strikes 2, and in seconds the ritual begins.

Loud as cannons, these are no ordinary firecrackers. Hundreds explode at once. I feel the percussion in my chest. The throng backs away - but I move closer. The pungent smoke fills the constricted streets and alleyways. The pyrotechnicians are just silhouettes against their ignition flares, as they walk from fuse to fuse.  I can no longer see the next intersection.

I’m inside an erupting volcano.

The skyline lights up in crimson bursts for over an hour, as the day yields to dust. The smoke eventually muddles everything to a pastel glow.

The city parties long after the echo of the last titanium report fades.

The next day I amble to the beach. The smoke has cleared, but in the air there lingers the sulphurous scent of gunpowder.

Visiting Valencia During the Night of Fire

Visiting Valencia Anytime

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They started an escargot farm in Estoher, in France’s Languedoc- Roussillon region, as a means of living and working together.

At the foot of lush, green mountains and surrounded by peach orchards, La Ferme aux Escargots provides a tranquil backdrop for what Stéphane, 45, and Nathalie, 39, describe as a busy but beautiful life.

“We appreciate the way of life we have,” Nathalie said. “It’s a pleasure. It’s a quiet life. There is no noise [but] it’s a job that’s very hard, because we do 17 hours of work in a day.”

The couple struggled to spend time together after meeting in the north of France more than a decade ago. At the time, Stéphane worked for the French military, and Nathalie was a secretary.

“[For a] long time I never see Nathalie. She works with her boss and I work for [mine], so we never lived together, [but we] want to live and work together,” Stéphane explained. A lean, energetic man, he talks steadily.

After they married in 1999, Nathalie brought Stéphane to this region so he could meet her parents. Stéphane fell in love with the land, and so they decided to use farming as a way to work together.

The couple didn’t see themselves as traditional farmers.

“Agriculture,” Stéphane said, “It’s possible, but I am not sure I’ve got a green thumb. So no trees, no vegetables.”

He also had reservations about traditional farm animals. “I’m afraid of cows. I think they’re very dangerous.”

“Horses are dangerous in the back, dangerous in the front and very uncomfortable (to sit) on.”

Goats, he added, are destructive. “You keep something if you have got a goat.”

Eventually, he found the right animal: safe, quiet, clean and unable to escape easily.

Building by Hand

The French word escargot refers to any edible snail. Stéphane and Nathalie farm two types of snails popular in this region: helix aspersa minima and helix aspersa maxima, which they affectionately call “petit gris” (little gray) and “gros gris” (big gray).

In 2003, while Nathalie attended agricultural school in Savoie, Stéphane began building their farm. He hauled in dirt to create a foundation and stones to build a wall around the farm. For the snails, he built “parks” — long rectangular sections of land enclosed by a mesh electric fence, to keep the snails from crawling away.

Stéphane’s ingenuity is evident all around the farm; in the small house and office he built, in the gypsy caravan he designed and hand-carved; even in the furniture, which he made himself. Although untrained in construction, he managed to wire the farm for electricity, and diverted a local natural water source to create irrigation and a small pond.

Nathalie handles publicity and administration, while Stephane does most of the physical labor and artistic work. He drew the farm’s logo, after envisioning the shape of a boy and a snail in some spilt sugar.

The Catastrophe

Their first year of raising snails almost became their last, when nearly half of the snails escaped after their electric fence failed during a rainstorm. Returning home from the nearby city of Perpignan, they found many of their first crop of 300,000 snails squished on the road outside the farm.

“The first years for Nathalie and me [were] a catastrophe,” Stéphane said. They lost money.

To be considered a professional snail farmer in France, one must be raising at least 300,000 snails; fewer than that, and the agricultural administration classifies you as a hobbyist.

After seven years in business, La Ferme aux Escargot is raising 500,000 snails on two square acres of land. Soon the couple hopes to begin harvesting snail eggs for caviar.

By producing high-quality snails and continually expanding their product line, they hope to ride out the national economic crisis and challenge the stereotypes many people hold about snails.

“Everybody thinks snails are very expensive, but they’re not more expensive than beef,” Stéphane said. “It’s in the brain of everybody that snail is a product of luxury. It’s a real problem.”

Although their snails are organic, the Ferrats are reluctant to call them that.

“We don’t want to have this label, because it is used by everybody and by lobbyists,” Nathalie said, explaining that many businesses adopt the “organic” label as a reason to raise their prices, even if their products are not fully organic.

Unable to afford employees, and reluctant to use machines and chemicals, the Ferrats use animals to help them in their work.

“We don’t use chemicals against the pests, the grass or the predators,” Nathalie said. “It’s is not dangerous for the snails if they eat the chemicals — but if we eat snails after they have eaten chemicals, it is dangerous for us.”

Two goats, a handful of rabbits and a sheep keep the grass around the snail parks trimmed. Two ferrets and three cats hunt the rats that eat the snails, while bats, two turtles and frogs keep down the mosquitoes that damage snail eggs.

“Our philosophy is, we want to use the ecosystem to have good results,” Nathalie said.

While many people in this region pick up snails from the street after it rains, the Ferrats say snails from the wild contain pollution that can affect the taste and nutrients of snail flesh.

Sitting down for lunch in the shade outside their home, they watch their five-year-old son Marckam play in the grass. Stephane checks the snails sizzling on the grill in traditional Catalan cargolade style, while Nathalie spreads on a piece of bread terrine d’escargots, a snail pate of her own recipe.

Across the way, a neighbor’s peach orchard stretches out along the foot of the Canigou Mountain like a vivid green carpet. A bird whistles in the distance, its song rising above the soothing sound of the sprinklers watering the snail parks.

“Snail or no snail, I don’t care,” Stéphane said. “It’s tranquil. I stay here not for snails, but because the area is for me.”

This article was adapted from InPerpignan,  a multimedia project of the Institute for Education in International Media and the San Francisco State University journalism department.

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After enduring two world wars and more than 100 years of neglect, the bells of Perpignan have emerged as France’s only fully intact carillon.

Morning, noon and night, they toll the Angelus over the city.

You can also hear them during cultural events, such as the Festival International Carillon de Perpignan, which in 2010 runs through August 19th.

The carillon sits high in the dusty bell tower of the Cathedral St. Jean-Baptiste. From the outside, the tower looks ancient and unused.

But Laurent Pie of Perpignan and Elizabeth Vitu, an American originally from Virginia, journey up the 122 stairs every Saturday morning to play.

“We come to play just like this, for free,” said Pie, the Cathedral’s carillonneur. “We love music, and so we do it.”

Pie and Vitu have worked together to publicize the bells since they were restored in 1996.

Now the carillon is part of life in Perpignan, thanks largely to their efforts.

“If the bells aren’t played, people will lodge, not formal complaints, but they come to the church to see why the bells aren’t being played,” said Vitu, the assistant carillonneur.

Though Pie and Vitu play for free, their international colleagues who perform during the festivals do not. Pie and Vitu are in charge of applying for grant money to pay for the festivals, as well as for the upkeep of the carillon. Pie accepts this as part of his job, joking that for each bit of money coming in, he fills out 75 government forms.

“The part [of the job] everybody sees is the playing part, but also under it there is a whole part of the job which is quite [a bit] larger, which is getting the money for the concerts and festivals,” he said.

A spirit of camaraderie flows between the two.

Pie worked as an organist and high school music teacher in the Perpignan area before being tapped as carillonneur during the instrument’s restoration in 1996. Vitu graduated from Hollins College in Virginia with a degree in carillon music. She worked with many famous American carillonneurs before moving to France to further her studies.

Pie works on the public relations side of the team, asking for money and introducing the festivals to the public, while Vitu uses her connections and musical knowledge to bring new players to the area, and to create new arrangements of popular songs.

“We are really very complementary to each other,” Pie said. “You can ask her to make the adaptation, and she loves it, and you can ask me to do the administrative part of the job and I love it.”

Saving the Carillon

The bells, commissioned in 1872 Jean-Francois Metge and exhibited at the 1878 World’s Fair in Paris, were installed in the cathedral in 1880.

Though the carillon enjoyed a few short years of popularity, no one in the area knew how to play the massive instrument, so it faded from view.

During the first and second world wars, when soldiers melted down carillon bells to create bullets and cannons, they spared the carillon of Perpignan. The Germans didn’t realize the bells existed, according to Vitu.

“That’s the only carillon in France that’s completely intact. There’s nothing that’s been taken down or missing,” she said.

The government attempted to restore the carillon in 1956, but failed. The instrument deteriorated further.

“This place was totally destroyed,” Pie said of the bell tower. “It was filled with pigeons and pigeon shit and it was in the open air, so it was not until ‘96 that it was put in use again.”

Now, Pie and Vitu want to pass down their knowledge to future generations by establishing carillon classes at the Perpignan Mediterranee Conservatory, in hopes that the bells will never fall silent again.

If that doesn’t work out, “I’ll teach with the practice carillon in my home or in the tower,” Vitu said. “We just want to make sure there is someone here.”

This article was adapted from InPerpignan,  a multimedia project of the Institute for Education in International Media and the San Francisco State University journalism department.

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The world was a different place when my father was born. Literally, it was a different place. It is sobering to think that over half of the sovereign countries on the planet today are under 50 years old. When my father was born, they didn’t exist. A hundred countries have come into being since then.

The cartographers of the second half of the 20th century must have been busy creatures — the politicians, the soldiers and the revolutionaries, too. The birth of a country seldom comes without bloodshed.

The political world has just gone through a period of separatism — it is still separating. Ethnic groups in Spain fight for a little piece of the countryside where the people speak their own dialect; a decade ago, Quebec remained a part of Canada by a single vote; the Uighurs don’t want to be a part of China; the Tibetans want their country back; the Soviet Union fractured into pieces; and those pieces fractured into more pieces.

There are now two Koreas, two Samoas, three Guianas, a Papua New Guinea, a Congo, a Democratic Republic of Congo, and a Central African Republic. There is no way that Okinawa is culturally or geographically a part of Japan. Arunachal Pradesh is claimed by both China and India. Arunachal Pradesh claims itself. Even little Belgium is about to split up into even littler countries.

Lost in Time

What year is my map from? is a question the world traveler must ask. Where the hell did Equatorial Guinea come from? Is Western Sahara a real country? Does a country need a certain amount of surface area to be called as such? Are there any rules to becoming a country?

My 1980s Student’s World Atlas that I studied as a boy led me astray. I look at it today, and see lines and a kaleidoscope of colors partitioning the once good-looking and large mono-color regions. The sums of a country’s parts are no longer satisfied with the value of the whole. They want to be their own whole. And the parts within these parts want to be their own whole as well. And on and on.

The political world map now looks like an old Roman fresco. With each year new cracks are formed in the stucco and divides the painting further. The political map is being divided to death.

Today’s Splinterings

Conquest works in waves. The world was once divided into thousands of little kingdoms, fiefdoms, tribes, communities. Separated, these groups were always easy to conquer. One group would grow strong and decimate its neighbors; some spread their conquests over entire continents. A period of empire would then ensue. But soon enough, groups would again divide into smaller units; tribes would realize their differences from other tribes; and demand a fight for independence. The empire would then crumble like a Roman fresco of antiquity.

The political dispersion of the world would then break up again into little kingdoms, fiefdoms, tribes, communities. Separated, these little groups would be easy to conquer. One group would prove itself the strongest . . .

THE BRITISH EMPIRE

THE MONGOLIAN EMPIRE

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

On and on.

At what point in this cycle are we in today? New countries are still creating themselves, even after the fall of rampant colonialism, separatist movements are afire all over the globe.

The closer various tribes get to each other, the more different they often think they are.

But in the middle of this tribal minimalist movement, huge blankets of political regionalism are evolving. Geographically-mandated trade and political agreements are combining the small tribes of the planet into conglomerated chunks.

The European Union is roping in all of Europe, and dropping its internal borders, using a common currency, and standing behind a similar international mask. The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas has swept Spanish America into one big free trade zone. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi talked of a single African country, where he would rule as a “king of kings;” ASEAN has brought Southeast Asia to a singular geopolitical point; while the Shanghai Cooperation Organization ties together Russia and China.

There is now an African Union, the Andean Community of Nations, the Arab League, the Association of Caribbean States, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Commonwealth of Nations, the Francophonie, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, the Pacific Islands Forum, the CARICOM, OECS, OSCE, SAARC, and even an Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization.

As the political world fractures, it bonds anew, just to fracture and bond again.

I think of the ceramic shards that I sometimes find while doing archaeology fieldwork. Their material was once clay in the ground, uniform strats of soil that clearly lay on top of other strats formed from years of soil molecules conglomerating together and dividing apart.

Then someone scooped up a little of this clay and fashioned it into an independent unit, a clay pot. This clay pot was transported away from its primordial base, and used under new and changing circumstances. Later, inevitably, it was dropped and shattered into pieces.

Years go by, and the pieces fracture even more. Then an archaeologist finds them, collects them and takes them back to the lab. There, the ceramic shards are laid out upon a large table, and slowly pieced back together.

Soon enough the pot takes form again. You can still see the cracks in it, as the individual pieces are assembled back together with an adhesive, but the parts come together again as one whole clay pot. It is then placed on display with other similarly pieced together pots.

But I know sometime, someday, this pot will be dropped and broken into pieces once again. And I also know that someday, way in the future, the clay from this pot will disintegrate back into the nameless, unclaimed stratigraphy of the earth.

As with countries.

In Joseph Conrad’s 19th century novella “Heart of Darkness,” Africa-bound protagonist Charlie Marlow famously comments on this, in a way I think about too:

“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps,” he recalls. “I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.…” I have been in some of them, and, well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet the biggest, the most blank, so to speak, that I had a hankering after.”

Today those blank spaces a full of lines. For now.

Wade Shepard has been perpetually traveling the world for the past 11 years, through more than 50 countries on five continents. He writes about the people he meets, the places he visits and his impressions of how the world comes together on Vagabond Journey Geographic and Vagabond Journey Travelogue.

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On a corner stands a tourist hotel, not yet open. The main street [in the coastal town of Niquero] is bustling with horses, bicycles and foot traffic. In the center is an expansive square of cracked bitumen that looks like it has been waiting an eternity for a fountain or a basketball hoop or a parking lot to materialize. At the far side are three 15-centavo pizza carts and a couple of juice-in-a-bag vendors vying for the passing peso.

I toss a mental coin and go for the cart with the necklace-laden senora, and I get lucky. The far eclipses that last “best Cuban pizza” I ate in Santiago. The crust is crisp and light like a good focaccia, with a density that suggests flour of some substance. The sauce tastes of real tomatoes, patiently reduced on a stove with homegrown herbs. The cheese is just right, not too thick or greasy.

I eat another. Then another. I decide to try the competition, but I am disappointed. Now completely queasy with pizza, I wash it down with a bag of juice, not really considering where the water might have come from, and then seek refuge from the heat in an air-conditioned dollar store.

I am standing at the back of the store, contemplating the two choices of vanilla cookie on display, namely square or round, when a plump, well-dressed woman to my right turns and smiles at me.

“Eres Italiana?” she asks. Are you Italian?

She chats with the ease of someone who is comfortable with foreigners. Her name is Julia, and she speaks of her wealthy Swiss-Italian esposo who jets across the Atlantic to make merengue with his Cuban wife and their eight-year-old daughter every two or three months. She invites me back to her house, where she and her mother, brother and daughter live in comparative affluence thanks to her esposo: Goldstar television set in the living room, brand-new frost-free fridge in the kitchen, Escada jacket in her wardrobe and duty-free perfumes, shampoos, soaps and creams that she displays on her dressing table.

We talk about their lives, the same theme of waiting, waiting…waiting for her husband to come, waiting for things to change. This, from a household blessed with more good fortune than the neighbors on either side of the fence. It is clear that a Goldstar television set is no substitute for unfettered capitalistic opportunity, freedom to cast a vote, and a choice of shampoo.

The family shows me a yellowing issues of a magazine commemorating Fidel’s historic first landing in their town, when he is supposed to have stepped onto the beach and uttered the words “I have come to liberate Cuba.”

A gusty wind has reared up and is rattling the frail windows. Julian and her brother entreat me to stay the night, insisting that the wind will make it difficult and dangerous for me to ride to Cabo Cruz. Something inside me decides to believe this pair of noncyclists, so I let them take me on a walk to look for ingredients for dinner.

First, we visit a government farm selling lettuce out of the ground for 1 peso per head. Then we make our way through decrepit back streets to a secret fish supplier in a very poor neighborhood. Everyone in town seems to know that Julia is married to rich foreigner, so everyone purchase begins with a haggle. We emerge from that neighborhood with an enormous pargo (snapper) for the equivalent of $3.50, “a bit high,” sighs Julia. She refuses to let me pay for the fish.

I sit on the porch in a chair and watch a friend of Julia’s sort stones out of a dish of rice, just like panning for gold nuggets, but throwing the gold away and keeping the silt. Inside, the aroma of friend fish with onion fills the little house. Julia piles my plate high.

That night Julia brings out a pile of photos of herself and Euro-hubby Christian living life in the fast lane in Italy, Paris and the Swiss Alps. There she is, outside hotels, in the pool and draped over a shiny red car. She looks happy and content. Julia is in bed by 10 p.m. I climb into my side of the bed and lie in the place where his esposo will rest his worldly head not long from now. I drift off, resting my eyes on the dark shock of her hair and breathing in the odd fragrance of French perfume on my pillow.

Of Hope and Marriage

The next morning the family surrounds me as I start loading up the bike. They seem even more intensely interested in me than the night before. One by one they do their best to convince me that Julia’s marriage to her extranjero (foreigner) is wonderful, that Julia’s brother would make a fine husband, and do I not think he is guapo?

I glance at this timid, studious boy who does not reek of picaflor [womanizing]. He is indeed handsome. They look at me hopefully. He looks at me hopefully. I continue to pack.

Julia gives me a photo of herself in Italy, leaning on top of a sports car, beaming and sun-swept, every bit the calendar girl. She gives me the photo and asks if I will find her a boyfriend in Australia. I stop packing.

I ask rather naively about her Swiss-Italian sugar hubby. Oh, no, she shakes her head emphatically. “I am free, completely free.” She assures me that he has a wife in Switzerland, but shhhhhh, the Swiss wife does not know about his Cuban chica and chicleta. They are esconidas, or hidden, which is the same way Cubans describe a large, illicit lobster.

I feel sad. Sad for the wife in Switzerland who bakes her man sugar cookies and rack of lamb,unaware of her sister in the other hemisphere cooking him rice and beans and fried pargo.

I give Julia $5 and leave them all waving at the front doorstep, waiting for Mr. Eurodaddy to walk up those steps in two weeks’ time.

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Dusk has enveloped Cathedral Road in Armagh, and the warm ginger skyline lures the eye towards the twin silhouettes of St. Patrick’s cathedrals at twilight. The seat of ecclesiastic authority for both the Catholic and Protestant churches of Ireland, this city prominently displays symbols that draw the eye and remind visitors that the land of Eire has a troubled past.

Before we arrived, in the summer of 2009, I often dismissed the Troubles conflict as a provincial, a vicious campaign of fear and discrimination waged by one small group against another.

I was sorely mistaken on all counts, except perhaps for the brutality of the violence: between 1969 and 2001, nearly 3,000 Irish citizens and 600 British soldiers perished in the Troubles, mostly in the small cities and towns of the north, according to information compiled by Sutton’s Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland. An additional 2,000 citizens were interred without evidence or trial, according to Gillespie’s Chronology of the Troubles.

“Anybody between 16 and 50 that had any sort of republican background at all, they would have been arrested and thrown in jail,” warned Cathy Rafferty, a former IRA prisoner and current councilwoman of Armagh. “People spent seven or eight years in cages without being charged or accused of anything.”

It is important for Americans to see the Troubles from the perspective of those who lived it. The most valuable thing I learned during my time studying in Armagh was how passionate the people of Ireland are about a conflict I will never truly understand.

Despite ongoing investigations into the events of 1969 conducted by organizations like the Conflict Archive and the Belfast Police, many in Armagh disagree about how the Troubles began. The city is home to political and religious leaders who have experienced both sides of the conflict.

“The Troubles started here because of discrimination against the Catholic community,” said Armagh councilwoman Mary Doyle, a member of the Sinn Fein party. “People think it was about politics or religion, but really it was about basic human rights.”

As an American journalism student, I had been taught to neatly compartmentalize Ireland’s long history of conflict into a political struggle between citizens who wished Ireland to remain independent and those who wanted to join with Britain and the United Kingdom.

Before I arrived in the city of St. Patrick, the role of religion was an afterthought. But after speaking to local administrators, I saw how powerfully the divide between some Catholics and Protestants still affected the city.

“Religion was critical; if it had been a purely political issue, I doubt you’s have had the same degree of violence,” recalled Gareth Wilson, the deputy mayor of Armagh and a councilman with the Protestant Church-linked Democratic Unionist Party. “Once you split a political dispute on religious lines, real hate is fostered in these communities.”

But local religious leaders still ministering to the needs of residents who lost friends and family in the violence often suggest that newcomers consider Ireland’s history of religious segregation before coming to a conclusion.

“[The Troubles] started because the Catholic community felt they were being discriminated against, and they wanted basic civil rights,” contended Dean Rooke, chief administrator of the Church of Ireland in Armagh. “What started as peaceful demonstrations became violent demonstrations, which ultimately led to out-and-out terrorism.”

To this day, the verdant hills of Northern Ireland are awash in stripes of white and gold or blue and crimson, the cheerful flapping of a Union Jack or Irish tricolor marking the boundaries between republicans and unionists, Catholics and Protestants, friends and neighbors.

Understanding the truth behind the Troubles in Northern Ireland will never be simple, but after a month in Armagh, I came to feel it was important for students of the world to discover the history of a place from the people who lived it. - Alex Wawro

This article was adapted from InArmagh,  a multimedia project of the Institute for Education in International Media, the University of Kansas School of Journalism and the journalism department of San Francisco State University.

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The air-conditioning has never worked properly, but I often turn it on in a vain hope that it will cool me down a little.

Unable to take the heat any longer, I step into the shower — a broken ceramic tray with a metal bucket next to it — holding the brown, but cool, water that I collected the night before. After a brief drenching I feel a little refreshed, only for the heat to hit me again within seconds.

I share the house with Colin, who also teaches at El Neilin University. I can hear snoring in the room next to mine, so as I leave I prop the door open, to let in some of the breeze.

The house has its own enclosed terrace, which allows us to relax without offending the cultural sensitivities. In the evening we can sit outside in shorts, with our tops off, and the western teachers we know from other universities can also visit without causing gossip among our Sudanese colleagues. However, the bustling street that runs next to the house constantly reminds us that we should not dwell on how we used to live.

I walk out of the courtyard, locking the gate as I do so to keep out the goats that wander the streets, eating the local trash.

Breakfast Fish

The smell of freshly-cooked fish fills the air as I walk past the small restaurant just behind the house. Fish, straight from the Nile that morning, quickly turns a crisp golden brown as they are placed in pans of boiling oil. There are only a few tables, under a decaying tin roof which is supported by a few wooden poles, so most diners simply squat on the floor wherever these is space.

A samak breakfast is one of my favorite meals, and the hot fish, served with fresh bread, would often entice me out of bed early. I still do not understand if I have a choice of what I can order but on recognizing me the young boy, who always serves me, gives me a cheery “good morning” as he places a few fish in front of me. I pick off bits of fish from the newspaper it has been served in and put then into the bread in a kind of makeshift sandwich.

After I’ve picked the last flesh from the bones I give the boy a 100-dinar note (about 40 cents) and move on.

Walking up the dusty street, I see many familiar faces: the lady who begs with her daughter outside the bank; the boy with a pair of ancient weighing scales (who can surely make no more than a few cents a day, taking money from people whose last concern is whether they’ve lost or gained a few pounds); the man in a dirty jellabeah, who covers a blanket with ancient, second hand electronics in the hope of making a few dinars. There is an old man, his legs so bent and deformed by rickets that he walks with flip flops strapped to his knees. There’s also Isa, the shopkeeper, who I always buy my bread and cheese from. I wave to him from across the street, but he appears busy stacking up the loaves of the thin bread eaten with almost every meal.

Making Street Friends

The center of Khartoum is a busy place. One of the many markets in the city borders a large bus station, yet with no discernible boundary, people weave in and out of the traffic carrying wares and food as buses and passengers noisily make their way through the crowds. Several restaurants surround the square, mixed in with the shops, food stores, butchers and other stalls that work in the same streets. The waste from all these places runs though the open drains at the side of the road. The stench is particularly pungent this morning, and I wonder how the people sitting down to breakfast can have any kind of appetite.

People often approach me while I walk through the city, inviting me to join them for a bite to eat or something to drink. At first I was weary of being greeted so warmly, but after just a few days I saw this was not a ploy, simply a way to welcome, and get to know, one of the few foreigners in the city. The Sudanese are famed for their hospitality and rightly so.

This morning, however, no one approaches me, and I see no one to talk to. I am simply another face in the crowd, trying to make my way thorough one of the busiest parts of the city.

A Nubian woman, with deep, ritual scars on her coal-black face, sits by the wall that leads down to the Nile. An old car spits smoke into the street as she feeds small pieces of tinder into the fire in front of her.

“Qahwah min fadlak?” I ask, as a place a few dinars into her hand.

She smiles with the few brown teeth she has remaining and starts to prepare the sweet Turkish-style coffee that I enjoy so much: A spoon full of fresh grounds is placed in a small copper pot.

“Bisoon sukre,” without sugar, I specify, as she begins to spoon heaps of it into the pot, then fills it to the brim with water. As soon as the pot boils, its contents is poured into a small glass and handed to me. I sit down on the curb next to her.

My Sudanese friends have often told me that drinking coffee would help cool me down during the day, but I have long since abandoned that theory as I sweat profusely, enjoying the strong concoction.

A young woman walking past with a group of girls approaches me, a tissue in her hand; she gestures to her forehead as I look up.

“Shokran” — thank you– I say as I smile and wipe the sweat from my forehead.

I often forget how closely many people watch me. There is rarely an occasion when, should I have difficulty with the language, or anything else, that someone, or even a few people, do not offer assistance. “We are just interested in what you are doing, don’t be hurt,” replied one man, after I had asked him once why a group of people were surrounding me as I ate my lunch by the side of the road.

“Qahwah? Coffee?” I ask the girl, gesturing for her friends to join us. “La shokran,” she says, giggling, and returns to her group.

It’s time to get to work, so I finish the last of the coffee, leaving just the muddy dregs at the bottom of the cup. I head back into the crowds.

At the entrance to the university are five pictures of former students. All are dressed in Army uniform, and in the corner of each picture, in small Arabic numerals, are written their dates of birth, and death. Another picture will soon join this display: I was told just last week that another student, who’d gone to fight in the South, has been killed.

Our Students

I walk into the building, through the courtyard garden and cafe where Colin is already enjoying his breakfast of fuul and bread, and up the stairs to the English department and into the small lecture room. I’m at least 10 minutes early, but already the room is full; the women take the first six rows and the men sit behind them. A few dozen students sit on the windowsills or learn through the open shutters from the corridor, chatting to those are lucky enough to have found a seat. The room seats about 100 people, but I have almost 180 students. As a student wipes down the board another comes in and places a coffee on my desk, I thank him and pass him some money but he refuses, as always. A final few students come into the room and sit on the steps as I turn to face the class:

“Good morning,” I say, and as the students fall silent I begin work.

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Il Buco claims to be one of the few restaurants in the city to thriftily use each part of the animal.

“We’re the only place that I know of that’s using an entire side of a pig,” said one chef. “We use the ribs, we use the bones, we use the fat, we make sausages out of the heads - so there’s just no waste.”

See how it’s done:

Michael Yessi, the co-owner of Flying Pigs Farm in upstate New York, delivers a pig to Il Buco every Friday morning. A pig costs $800 to $1,000, depending on how much it weighs.

Led by head chef Ignacio Mattos, the staff serves up such dishes such as copa, an Italian cold cut made from the head and feet; and lardo carpaccio, made from the back fat. The results are all over the menu, in the pork sausage, salsiccia; the pasta and pork strozzapretti; and the porchetta with white bean puree.

Finding ways to make all parts of the pig appetizing to diners is both a challenge and a way to keep meal prices in check.

“We try to relocate all these parts, that for some people might not be so appealing, into the table,” said Mattos.

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This is my first visit to my parents’ homeland in over a decade. It is also the first day of school. I look at the students in white shirts and black pants, lingering in corridors. I think about how they are here for an education, and will be tested later. It’s vital that they don’t forget.

Malgosia and I pass the churches and plaques commemorating the war dead. Under Communism, talking about war heroes was verboten; now there is a tendency to fetishize them, with an explosion of books and movies celebrating their heroism and defiance.

Religious and historical veneration have a way of mixing when old glories are recounted, with the church acting as Poland’s keeper of memory and tradition. During one of his first visits back to his native country after ascending to the Papacy, John Paul II advised the Poles, “Don’t forget your roots.” Now many churches bear plaques celebrating the valor of young soldiers sent by priests into battle.

I struggle to keep pace with Malgosia as she unfolds the past, like a quilt long stored in an attic. I’m out of the habit of speaking Polish. Struggling to force my tongue to make dulcet sounds, I pronounce words awkwardly; my grammar is even worse.

Under Communism, Malgosia tells me, priests were thrown into jail, and served as teachers and inspirational figures for ordinary people people. She gets angry talking about Communism, history turning into a harangue. I try to separate opinion from fact, emotion from memory.

During this trip, I have been trying to make sense of my own history. I have been shedding relatives in the decade since my last visit, and losing the language I once spoke fluently.

My parents don’t like talking about their past, so I’ve been visiting relatives and piecing together their story, tale by tale, the way residents of Old Town sifted through the rubble after their war, to rebuild their city. Using blueprints and memory, they rebuilt a city that had existed since the 1300s, finishing in 1984. It’s a reasonable facsimile.

From various relatives, I learn about shocking pregnancies, holy uncles, escapes from Nazis, hidden Communist gold. My hand cramps from taking notes, as I try to capture the outpouring of words, facts and opinions.

My grandmother, I am told, watched her sister die. Her sister worked in the Polish underground, hiding Jews and helping them escape to the West. A fellow villager leaked that news to the Nazis, who then came to her house and killed every living thing. Nothing survived, not even the dogs.

My grandmother rode on horseback to her sister’s house, arriving half an hour after everyone had been killed. She stepped through the blood and found the bodies of her sister, her sister’s husband, their children.

Or she arrived at the same time the Nazis did, hiding in the underbrush as the first shots rang out, and watched her family fall.

Or she arrived the next day, flies massing on the humans and livestock, dust and blood clinging to her boots.

The stories vary with the teller. Memory fades, and sentiment creeps in. Fact takes second place to feeling.

As we walk, Malgosia and I are followed by the strains of “Billie Jean.” Michael Jackson died more than a month ago, and evidently Poland has taken his passing hard. Every hour another song by the King of Pop comes over the airwaves. Be careful what you do, ’cause the lie becomes the truth. We’re chased by more nonsensical death, already changed by nostalgia and misinterpretation.
Catherine Nicotera is a writer in California.

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“Don’t talk to me when we’re on the square,” the woman instructed, as we got off the subway at Tiananmen East.

I didn’t know who she was; I just knew she was different. Unlike most elderly Chinese in Beijing, who move around like old tugboats and avoid the subway in favor of the bus, she was sharp.

Pointing at the red glowing subway map, she repeated Tiananmen changuang, until a man who looked to be in his early 30s quietly told her which stop would leave her closest Square.

Everyone else on the train gaped, as if she had asked for directions to Golgotha.

They pressed against the walls of the car to try to disassociate themselves from her. Yet they couldn’t take their eyes off of her.

“I want to take pictures,” she said to me in perfect English — yet another characteristic that distinguished her from the average Beijing septuagenarian. “And see. I haven’t been here since a month after it happened.”

She was talking about the massive pro-democracy protests of 1989, of course, and that June day when the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army rolled into the square and the military fired on the crowds, killing hundreds of people.

The subway station near Tiananmen was deserted. But, aware of the surrounding fleet of undercover police, we decided to walk apart. Soon we approached the first security check. I went ahead.

“Police security check,” said the officer, blocking my path. “Are you a reporter?”I said no, but he asked to see my passport. He checked the visa and my residence permit, then looked through my bag and removed a large notebook.

“Just my notebook,” I said, shrugging casually, but certain I was done for. Without opening it, he put it back in my bag.

At the second checkpoint my visa and residence permit were examined again.

“What’s your job?” the policeman asked.

“I’m an editor,” I responded, and he let me pass.

By the time I’d made it past all three checkpoints, I’d lost sight of my new friend. I meandered through the square, confused by its vast nothingness and amused by the odd gait of the Chinese military marching across it. Trained in a special way of marching, with their butts tucked under their hips, the soldiers are immediately recognizable, whether or not they’re in uniform.

I imagined the myriad plainclothes officers around here would be easy to pick out. Indeed, some were dressed in their Saturday night discotheque best, while others wore sleeveless basketball tees, evidently in an effort to casually blend in (paired with black lace-up military heels, the basketball tees were especially unconvincing).

I scanned the square, trying to seem inconspicuous, even though I was wearing a firetruck-red cotton dress. The woman’s hair, a bright and creamy white with hints of yellow, almost like sugar cane, made her easy to find. She wore large brown glasses and a loose white button-down shirt full of pockets — those big pockets you see on nurse’s uniforms. I could see her nimbly snapping photos and making great use of her pockets to hide her camera. She moved briskly around the square; at one point I even saw her rush toward a clan of marching soldiers to get their picture.

She coughed just a bit — a forced dry cough — when she wanted to take my picture. I would turn toward her, but never look directly at her, trying to mask our connection.

We walked back from the square to the subway together, still in secret tandem.

“We’re safe now,” she said, once we were both on the escalator headed underground. She looked at me with the relief of a little girl who had just made it back into her tree house without getting tagged.

“The police asked me if I knew you,” she said. “I just told them no.”

Havi