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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I have worked as a guide in these mountains; I was born and raised here, in the Mokunda village of Buea. But on this day I was being guided; I was a member of a trip going to the top.

The climb usually starts from Buea, some 1,000 meters up. It’s compulsory to have a guide here; along with the very necessary porters, guides can be obtained from the Mount Cameroon Ecotourism Organization Office. There is no water on the mountain above the forest, so large amounts of it must be carried.

We took the oldest and steepest trail, known as the Guinness Trail, as the brewer was the original sponsor of an annual race up and down this route. The Trail ascends along the drier eastern slopes. It starts by Upper Farms, a place also known as Prison Farms. Originally built by the Germans, the area is now used as an open prison, where the prisoners cultivate the land, and keep goats and cattle.

Cultivated land slowly gives way to forest. We hear birdsong, but only see a few small fluttering birds disappearing into the branches. A couple of runners, practicing for a race the next month, stop to chat. They tell us they can complete this arduous course in less than four hours. That might be a slight exaggeration, but even the record time, of about four and a half hours, seems incredible. The last water is at the first stop, hut #1. It’s an uninviting half-stagnant trickle in January, the heart of the dry season and the hottest time of the year. An English family on the way down passes us.

The woman took one look at us and warned us that we would not make it to the summit.

But we continued with renewed determination! Soon we climbed free of the forest and emerged on to the savannah, which covered the bulk of the mountain on this side. Much of the grass had been burnt, merging slowly into the black lava slopes higher up. Slowly was the right word, as the slopes steepened and we started to feel the thinner air. We panted our way to a resting point beside an isolated tree. The forest lay far below, wreathed in cloud. We were now 2,000 meters up, and had emerged into brilliant sunshine.

The slopes continued, unrelentingly steep despite our guide’s assurances that the hardest bit was over. Eventually, however we walked over what had been the skyline above us. Now when we looked down, we saw only clouds. Ahead we could see equally daunting slopes, and another skyline far above. But on the flatter area between lay hut #2, where we were to spend the night. The hut lies between ribs of lava, and we spent a restful afternoon scrambling around on them.

All this changed as soon as the sun disappeared behind the mountain. The temperature plummeted to below freezing, and after our meal we retired to our sleeping bags. There was only a wooden bench to sleep on, but our good porters had carried up air beds and warm sleeping bags, so we had a comfortable night. We didn’t sleep much, as is usual after such an abrupt change of altitude. We should have spent the previous night in Buea, instead of down at sea level.

The remarkable clarity of the stars was compensation for the long cold night, above the coastal haze and away from the ubiquitous lights that ruin most European stargazing. The night was too long, though, and at the first glimmer of light we were up, shivering in all our warm clothes and longing for the sun to appear. Finally it slid up, blood red from the humid haze of the forest. In the other direction above the ridge was a most remarkable cloud. which looked as if it might be presaging some great storm. But it soon dispersed.

Hot coffee was very welcome but I ate sparingly, fearing altitude sickness, which had plagued me on other high mountains. Then we set out with our guide Peter and our porter Fritz, who that day was carrying mainly water, as there was none at all up there. We walked up one of the lava ribs towards another distant skyline. The hut became a tiny speck below; it seemed perched on the edge of the clouds.

At last the gradient eased, we rounded a corner of rocky lava and there was a high bare mountain pouring out smoke. Though I knew how recently it had erupted, I was taken aback by all this activity. I was a little disappointed that we got no closer, as we worked our way round the back of this new crater to the higher dormant summit behind. Our closest view of the thermal activity was through the zoom lens of the camera.

After a short rest at hut #3, we set out on the easy last leg of our ascent. Working round the back of the active area, we passed a few warm spots with desultory puffs of smoke, and were soon approaching the summit where, of course, we posed for the inevitable summit photo. Guinness has thoughtfully provided a display here. It states, however, that we’re standing just at 4,070 meters, whereas the accepted height is now 4,095 meters.

The summit area is vast, with at least three separate fairly rounded tops rising from an uneven plateau. There is no impression of being on the rim of a single crater. It is possible that the top, nearer to both the hut and the active part of the mountain, is in fact higher, perhaps having increased in altitude as the result of recent eruptions. I think it is probably very rare to get a view right down to the coast, but I gather this is most likely soon after the heaviest rains, perhaps in November.

We were in fact very lucky, as the guide had warned us that we would be unlikely to be able to linger long on the summit, where there are usually gale-force winds. But today it was fairly calm, and very pleasant. After a brief stay we descended to hut #3, where our cook Manfred had brought up a very welcome lunch. Then we returned by the same route to hut #2. It was a pity that we did not have a little longer on the mountain, as we could have come down by Mann Springs, which is one of the few water sources and where apparently there is good camping.

Now we were a lot more relaxed, so I took more pictures, southwards along the steep slopes of the mountain, down the steep lava, northward as we approached the forest, down through the savannah and into the rainforest, with the mist drifting through the trees.

Oddly enough, it seemed longer going down through the trees than coming up, with the prospect of the summit spurring us on. Almost as soon as we got down we were looking out from the Ecotourism Office at torrential rain. The next day from the Limbe port area, we looked up to where we knew the mountain to be. Of course we couldn’t see it. But we guessed that on the top of the mountain, there was still brilliant clear sunshine.

Visiting Mt. Cameroon

The October to March dry season is the best season for climbing; that’s also when most cultural events take place. Still, temperatures can vary greatly, rising to 86 degrees F by day and perhaps 20 below zero by night. Foreigners are usually welcome: local people care less about who you are or where you are from, and much more about what you are after.

The tourist office can provide porters to guide climbers, and every climber must be registered with the Ecotourism Office in Buea Town.

Buea is a tourist site, and from some places, one has a 360 degree panoramic view of the mountain. There are also hotels and motels along the sea beaches of Limbe.

Transportation, feeding and lodging are inexpensive. Local dishes cost a dollar or two; comfortable lodgings can be had for about $10.

Every climber or tourist is free to take snap shots of the people, historical monuments, cultural art works, the mountain and any thing that captures his or her interest.

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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.”

Having taken every measure to disguise our acquaintance, I was stunned that they had discovered us.

“They are very practiced at this type of observation,” she said. “They see everything.”

“People are scared to come today, because they know there will be much security,” she said. “But I had to come. Today is special.”

She said she’d been a journalist once. “The first time I came here was one month after it happened. I came alone, and there was hardly anyone on the square. But I could see that there were so many new bricks. I counted, over 100. They must not have been able to get rid of the blood.”

As we both boarded the subway, she asked for my mailing address so she could send me the pictures she’d taken of me. As I wrote it down, the entire car stared at us. A laowai, a foreigner, was speaking to a Chinese woman who looked like she could be the mother or grandmother of a Tiananmen victim. They knew that we were exchanging ideas and contact information. I was nervous until, in a subtle act of solidarity, a woman sitting in front of us offered her pen, after mine had stopped working.

The Chinese watch, but they don’t tattle.

“Are you going home now?” I asked as the woman, as we approached her stop. “Because I would like to talk more with you, maybe have tea?”

“I don’t think my daughter will like it,” she said. “I am staying with her, and she lives in a military compound.”

I didn’t insist.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, looking away from me as she exited the train. It was her undercover promise that we’d meet again.

Beijing-based Roseann Lake has reported from four continents in three languages.

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Nonetheless, the Little Mermaid patiently remained in her designated spot in Copenhagen harbor for 97 years. The contemplative, somewhat sad-looking mermaid is considered a national heirloom in Denmark, so naturally when the Bjarke Ingels Group, a young Danish architecture firm, proposed letting her take a six-month trip to China, a heated debate ensued.

The architects wanted to make the Little Mermaid the centerpiece of the Danish pavilion in the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, which runs from May to October. They intended to make use of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale to tell a story about a nation wanting to reach out to the rest of the world.

In the story, a mermaid falls in love with a human prince, and makes a Faustian bargain: she agrees to exchange her tongue for legs, becoming a mute so she can walk on earth and meet him.

“The purpose of moving The Little Mermaid is to show that open-mindedness doesn’t necessarily cause you to lose origin or culture,” BIG founder Bjarke Ingels said in a statement at the time. “Typically, national symbols are static – a fortress or a tower, which is unshakable. The perception of a nation with a national symbol so dynamic that it can be moved to China for six months is a great way of showing that Denmark is open-minded and liberal towards the rest of the world.”

Yet this new Danish fairytale ended up telling more than one story about Denmark. While the ideas behind the pavilion show Denmark as progressive, the reaction exposed the nationalist and conservative tendencies that are also a significant part of contemporary Danish culture.

“It’s a grotesque idea to send our national pride and joy to Asia…. No one would come up with the idea of lending out New York’s Lady Liberty,” said Karin Noedgaard, spokeswoman for the right-wing populist (and popular) Danish People’s Party.

Her comments mirror an attitude shared by many Danes, who consider it inappropriate to ship a cultural treasure halfway across the globe as a PR tool.

So in 2008 the conservative Danish People’s Party proposed a new law to prohibit the removal of the Little Mermaid.

In the months leading up to this legislative showdown, the question of whether to allow the (mer)maiden voyage was discussed in various public forums, but most vehemently on the Internet.

“No, no, no, it has to stay in Denmark! What kind of sick idea is it to give it out on a loan?!” wrote one commenter on the website of the public TV station TV2….”If the Chinese want to see it, they can come here!!!”

“To remove her from the city is like amputating an arm from a healthy human being,” wrote another.

The idea also had its defenders: “Of course it is OK to send the original mermaid, even though she belongs to Denmark,” wrote one. “After all, it is only a loan. I mean, if that isn’t OK, then let us empty the Danish museums of objects originating in Egypt and Greece. I think many Danes enjoy these objects, so why shouldn’t it be all right to share a bit of Danish culture? After all, she is a symbol of our world-known H.C. Andersen.”

And another writer expressed the opinion that would ultimately prevail: “Finally a progressive idea showing that Denmark is not buttoned up, but a nation willing to interact with the surrounding world. Finally the Mermaid’s physical smallness becomes an advantage; how many other countries have a removable national symbol?”

Official political debate focused on whether to send the original statue, or a copy.

“The Little Mermaid must remain in Copenhagen, because it is her place, and thousands of tourists will be terribly disappointed not to find her during her six-month long absence,” said Pia Allerslev, Copenhagen’s deputy mayor, summing up one opposition argument.

Others evaluated the effect on tourism differently, emphasizing the unparalleled marketing value of sending the original abroad: “I do believe it is the first time ever that a country has dared to send its most famous tourist attraction away to invite guests to come visit,” Dorte Kiilerich, managing director of VisitDenmark, said in a statement.

Proponents also argued that sending “the real thing” was a gesture of cultural generosity, and an invitation to initiate cultural dialogue between Denmark and China.

“Regarding the copy, it makes me think of Snoopy,” politician Pernille Fram said during a parliamentary discussion. “It is like giving a starving dog a rubber bone. No, we won’t [send a copy], because it is not the same thing.”

Sending the original was part of BIG’s bid to counter the inauthenticity that, according to Ingels, has come to characterize World Expos.

“When we visited the World Expo in Zaragoza [Spain], we were stunned by the artificial content. State propaganda in papier mâché,” Ingels said in a statement. “The Danish Expo pavilion 2010 is the real deal, and not just endless talking.”

After debating for more than a year, Copenhagen’s city council in March 2009 took a final vote. Oddly, the Red-Green Alliance, a radical left-wing party, supported the Danish People’s Party in favoring a ban on the statue’s departure. But the Red-Greens cited a different reason: to spare the Chinese from what they considered a conservative, dated, national icon. Instead, they recommended sending a more modern product of Danish culture: a windmill.

The Red-Greens agreed with the Social Democrats (who favored sending the Mermaid to Shanghai) that the Danish People’s Party had taken the Little Mermaid “hostage” to promote a narrow nationalism. Yet the Red-Greens complimented the Danish People’s Party for this move; with a laconic reference to their controversial immigration policies, the Red-Green Alliance’s spokesman Frank Aaen explained that “in reality the Danish People’s Party has taken hostage something as innocent as a statue instead of doing what they normally do… taking human beings as hostages.”

Despite this unexpected “support” from the left, the Little Mermaid’s visit to Shanghai was approved.

While the Little Mermaid is away—she began her journey in March 2010 and has a return ticket in October 2010 —a video installation by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is on display in her usual spot. His piece includes a live broadcast from the pavilion in Shanghai.

With a distilled Copenhagen experience of water, Danish city bikes and the Little Mermaid, the Danish pavilion in Shanghai lets its visitors immerse themselves in a little fairy tale of sustainable living.

Yet the pavilion has also exposed something rarely found at World Expos: a window into the political reality of a nation.

Elisabeth Ginsberg is a Danish Fulbright student in The Draper Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University.
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When Borfecciha was a child, the father-son trek for crescia was a special treat. “Now crescia reminds me of summer, because that is when I usually eat it,” says Borfecchia.

Today found in most Urbino restaurants, crescia originally was considered the poor man’s bread, because farmers were able to take it out to the fields with them. The food is rich and easy to preserve, making it the perfect meal for laborers.

The bread consists of flour, water, lard, eggs and pepper. The lard gives the bread its flaky and crunchy exterior, while keeping it soft and chewy on the inside. Traditionally it’s eaten unaccompanied, but now it is often served with prosciutto and cheese, or other ingredients to create more bountiful meal.

For Antonio Fabi, crescia brings back memories of high school. After a festival it would be sold at half price. Fabi and his high school friends would run over after school and enjoy the afternoon snack. “I just love the ingredients!” Fabi said.

One of the first restaurants in Urbino to sell crescia was Il Ragno d’Oro, established just after the end of WWII. Here, crescia is made fresh before your eyes. Tender care makes it special: each disc of dough is rolled by experienced hands, cognizant of a 100-year tradition. Oil added to the dough deepens the flavor.

Fresh crescia filled with cheese and prosciutto sells for 4 euro.

“My grandmother would make it when I was a child,” recalled Barbara Serafini, who works behind the counter at Il Ragno d’Oro. “She would give me small amounts of dough so I could make mini crescia.”

No one mass-produced crescia until the 21st century. Paolo Gerardi and his then-fiance met a man working in the supermarket business. They teamed up, and in 2001 established Il Panaro, the first factory to mass-produce crescia. Today Il Panaro produces 4,000 to 6,000 pieces of crescia daily.

Although the factory distributes crescia all over Italy, especially in the north, crescia is still considered a hallmark of Urbino cuisine.

“We have 15 employees here at the factory,” Gerardi said. “Only the women make crescia, because they are more skilled with their hands and have less hair on their arms. However, we do have a boy that delivers the crescia.”

This article was adapted from Urbino View, the English-language magazine of Italy’s Le Marche region, produced annually by journalism interns of IEI Media.

A Crescia Recipe
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We were a little nervous about the trip — the country is run by an isolationist military junta, and is best known in the West for its longtime detention of pro-democracy activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi — but I’m glad we overcame our fears.

We spent two days in Yangon, visiting markets, Buddhist temples and the Musmeah Yeshua. I reveled in intoxicating smells and smiles. One of the most memorable places was the Shwedagon Pagoda. We went at sunset, and in the tranquility of being there, amid a sea of devout Burmese, I connected.

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This festival, each May 15th, marks the eve of the feast of St. Ubaldo. Though St. Ubaldo’s day is observed with a solemn mass and meditation, the day of the ceri is is filled with medieval pageantry and religious fervor.

My informant brought me to a taverna filled to capacity and throbbing with exuberant dancing and singing. Food and local wine was on the house. Even the wine cellar was cleared for the dancers, children among them.

After hours of merriment, my newfound friends escorted me to a hillside ranch whose owners supplemented their income by operating it as a private trattoria. Pachito, the young owner, prided himself on his “cowboy” lifestyle, and questioned me enthusiastically about the American Indians.

Pachito offered me the only remaining space in his house: a hayloft. With straw for a bed and his young wife’s fantastic open-fire cooking, I was delightfully accommodated for the rest of my stay. I took pictures of their son, Ubaldo, floating like an angelic figurine, and his younger brother, as he watched his mom cook foccacia over the fire.

My hosts offered only vague information about the origin of the festival, and of the ceri. They referred to a pagan goddess named Ceres, and of symbolic gestures toward their protector St. Ubaldo. It was suggested that the figures of the ceri were derived from the war chariot of a fabled Milanese leader. Cero translates into English as candle, but that was hardly a hint of what to expect. I retired with anticipation to my straw bed, as the rain beat down on the barn roof.
At dawn I was awakened by a loud drum reveille. I hurried down the path into town. As I turned through the town gates, I ran right into the first procession of the morning. I instinctively began taking pictures. Brief intermittent spells of rainfall left spectacular glints of moisture on the plastic rain caps of the marching musicians. A group of men were carrying three figurines. These represented St. Ubaldo, protector of the masons; St. Giorgio, patron of the merchants; and St. Antonio, protector of agriculture.

I joined the procession and we marched through every street in town, encouraging the people we met to join us. We passed a convent with its doors open, where the nuns stood throwing blessed flowers to the happy crowd. People surged forward to try to catch a flower, and receive a holy blessing.

By midday we were gathered in Piazza Grande, bounded on the north by the 14th century Palazzo dei Consuli, and in the south by the municipal building (where one can find the original Eugubine Tables describing this curious custom, written in an ancient Umbrian language and discovered here in 1444.)

An ecclesiastical procession was forming, headed by the “attendants of the dead,” who walked in pairs and were dressed in white robes with black capes. Next came members of the Society of Santa Croce in blue capes, then more men in black, followed by scholars of the seminary and several men in brown capes carrying the image of St. Ubaldo. Finally came the canons of the cathedral, with the bishop and his attendants. The procession paused and the bishop blessed the palazzo and its people.

Suddenly the great doors of the Palazzo dei Consoli swung open and the three prone Ceri were rushed into the center of the piazza. Mystery solved! I could clearly see the Ceri: three colossal wooden pedestals about 12 to 15 feet long, in the form of eight sided prisms, pointed at both ends.

Video from the Corsa dei Ceri 2007

They suggested the shape of two stacked lanterns. The bearers, the ceraioli, were 10 men clad in white trousers, blue shirts and bright sashes.

The foreman was called the capo dieci, or the leader of the ten. The three saintly figurines from the morning procession were fastened to the top of each cero. As water was spilled from jugs, which were then tossed into the air, the ceraioli raised the ceri, and then quickly and vigorously carried them south along the Via dei Consoli.

As a trumpeter on horseback separated the crowd up front, the tiny 2 1/2-foot figure of St. Ubaldo was mounted atop the strange obelisk, his garments fluttering, and raced through the streets.

At the public gardens, another figure on horseback, the first captain of the people, took command, leading the procession on several obstacle-defying, breathtakingly-paced circuits of the streets. They stopped just once, for rest and wine.

Once more the pedestals were hoisted high for the final phase of the journey through the town gates, then up to the destination, the Franciscan monastery at the top of Monte Ingino. The ceraioli were forced to slow to a walk as the slope became steeper. The townspeople helped, holding guide ropes attached to the swaying pedestals.

The procession reached the monastery in late afternoon, and the gates were closed. The ceri were carried one by one in three circular runs around the courtyard. For this year, their journey had ended.

The figurines were removed from their thrones and placed on benches inside the basilica, where the ceraioli and the townsfolk came to humbly pay their respects, bowing before the figures and kissing them. The figurines would later be returned to their churches, until the next festival, while the ceri were left at the monastery.

As night fell the crowds slowly descended to town. The narrow path glowed with flickering candles, as church bells chimed.

This celebration has earned Gubbio the reputation of being “a town of madmen.” I disagree. It is more obviously a celebration of sincere love and enthusiasm toward their religion, God, and the anniversary of the death of their beloved St. Ubaldo.

You can participate in the Corsa dei Ceri in Gubbio, Umbria, each May 15th.

Bologna, Italy-born Marino Colmano is a producer, cinematographer and writer, and owner of the production company Lucid Media.

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When we drove through this sleepy little settlement on the Omaruru River in the 1990s, it was mainly a pleasant place to stop for gas on the way to somewhere else. Used as a base by big game hunters in the mid 1800s, by the end of the 19th century German colonists had settled beside the Herero and Damara peoples in what was then called Sud West Afrika. A Rhenish Mission was built, then a brewery, and by beginning of the 20th century Roman Catholic and Anglican churches joined the Lutherans. A few artists found their way here, among them a man called “Lone Oak,” who lived under a camelthorn tree with his dog and goat, and painted religious murals on the walls of St. Boniface church.

By 2009, Omaruru was a different story. Almost 20 years after Namibian independence, this town of about 6,000 has become a kind of Ojai, California, drawing artists looking for a creative environment and a laid back lifestyle. Many of the original German buildings have been preserved, and turned into arts co-ops, restaurants, boutiques and studios. (Omaruru was also called Okozondje, the place of scorpions; fortunately, the only scorpions we saw were handcrafted from wrought iron.)

The artists here are both native and adoptive Namibians: Bushmen, Germans, South Africans, OvaHerero, Americans, French, NamaDamara, and Ovambo. They know a bit about mysticism beyond the traditions of their own tribes — the cover of the local arts guide, The Om Eye, features in its masthead the ancient Egyptian Eye of Horus, symbol of power and protection, while the free newspaper, The Om, celebrates the Hindu symbol for the absolute.

We had already decided that meditating on the shaded banks of the Omaruru river might be an inspiring thing to do, but were sidetracked by a visit to the Kristall Kellerei winery, where we concentrated on the Nappa — Namibian grappa — instead. Though we didn’t reach nirvana, we were pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the wines.

Then we followed the art. We started at Wronsky House, built in 1907 as a shop, and still a souvenir and bookstore today. In fact, the coffee shop still serves a sachertorte passed down by a family member who married into the notable Viennese family that invented it in the 19th century.  We picked up the latest edition of The Om Eye, as well as the Omaruru Arts and Crafts Guide, which lists almost four dozen local artists who specialize in photography, embroidery, quilting, paintings and weavings; items made from recycled car parts; sculpture carved from ancient tree roots; intricate traditional woven baskets; and jewelry created from handmade ostrich shell beads. Plus bread baking, wine making and handmade chocolates.

We dropped in and out of shops and studios at Lalabaai, where we met owner and artist Lizanne Kruger, and bought her handmade angel, Mina Afrika. After lunch at the colorful and funky Sand Dragon, where they have a real espresso machine, we moved on to the Kashana Center. Hanne Marott Alpers’ Nawa Nawa Art Gallery specializes in work made of both recycled and natural materials - unusual sculptures made from discarded Land Rover parts, and paintings, Bushman baskets, photography, handmade jewelry. The Desert Rose in the Kashana center sells homemade cheeses, oryx ham, and the luscious Dorgeloh Chocolates, all of which went into our 4×4’s fridge for a picnic down the road. Everywhere we turned there were huge wooden sculptures fashioned from tree roots, and metal wall sculptures made by Michael van de Merwe.

With such a well-developed arts community, it follows that Omaruru has a popular annual Artists’ Trail event. Every year, over the third weekend of May, open studios and outdoor exhibits draw visitors from around southern Africa and beyond.

Editors’ note: In 2010, the Artists Trail is scheduled for May 14 and 15. Read more about life in Omaruru in the local newsletter, The Om Times.

Umbria, Italy-based writer Sharri Whiting lived for four years in Namibia. She now blogs about life in central italy, at Umbria Bella, and runs a summer communications course for Boston graduate students.

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This isn’t a fight club: it’s Royal Palace baths, a Russian bath house,  or banya, on the edge of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where Russians and intrepid foreigners pay $40 to roast inside wooden rooms heated to as much as 200 degrees F. They also thump themselves with veniki, oak branches. It’s all to improve circulation and health.

The spa is one part paradise to two parts kitsch nightmare, decorated in the faux lux style so beloved by Mafia kingpins and chain Italian restaurants: the main room, replete with large aqua pool and plastic patio furniture, is done in fake marble, its vaulted ceilings held up by fat Roman columns.

“Welcome to Royal Palace!” two beautiful women - skinny jeans fitted snugly into boots, gloss-slicked lips, eyelashes like the sharp points of a star - greet visitors in Russian at the entrance. The Betty and Veronica of Brighton Beach, with mismatched personalities: the blonde is cool, taken with some secret text exchange on her phone; the brunette chatty, making jokes with customers and reminding them to tip.

The name, Royal Palace, is fitting: “We like everything royal,” my Russian friend Masha says. No matter that the Russians killed their own royal family. “Yes,” Masha demurs, “but we like what they like.”

The banya itself is a kind of torture, but there’s pleasure in it, too. Here is the Russian national psyche: suffering is edifying, and the banya’s cleansing fire makes you pure again. Through pain, pleasure — the two are never far apart.

You Have Back Pain?

On a Saturday afternoon, aging men built like kegs, their great stomachs protruding beneath towels slung around their necks, lounge around the pool in the main room. They drink beers and snack on vobla, salt-dried fish. Their younger counterparts scour the room for girls, who smirk on the sidelines, crossing and uncrossing their legs. The room smells, not unpleasantly, of chlorine, fish, and freshly laundered towels.

Three men circle the room, masseuses competing for clients. They are insistent: “slushai, slushai,” they say. Listen, listen. They promise a discount if you pay them directly, cash, no need for the front desk to know. You have back pain? They’ll work the spongy discs between your vertebrae to get the blood flowing again. Headaches? They’ll find your pressure points and release the tension. There’s no problem they can’t fix.

Children run in occasionally, complaining of hunger, thirst. A tow-headed boy, skinny as a wild dog, pleads with his father: “papa, papa, papa,” but the man is too busy walloping his wife to hear; the leaves of the venik falling to the ground in clumps. “Khorosho?” he asks her, good? Da, da, she says.

It’s my first time, and so I go where everyone goes: the Russian steam room. There are also Finnish, Turkish, and Roman saunas, each heated to a different temperatures with dry (Finnish) or wet (Turkish) heat, but no one seems to go in them much.

After a few minutes in the sauna, I’m so hot I can barely speak. Masha implores me to wrap a towel around my head; the Russians are all already wearing shapky - felt hats - to protect their heads from the heat. I can barely understand what she’s saying; the blood is thudding in my skull.

A group of men in their 30s catch sight of me, this WASPy American girl suffering their Slavic inferno, and laugh, “It’s nothing yet!” one of them says. He decides I’m an amusing specimen. “We’ll get undressed,” he smiles, “then it’ll really be like Russia!”

I put my head down and listen to feet squish across the floor in sandals and flip-flops as people come and go, wishing each other legkim parom - a good steam. After a spell in the heat, Russians go out into the snow to roll around or, as here, dunk themselves in frigid baths. The ritual lasts hours, whole days: steam room, snow-roll or ice cold bath, maybe to the pool for a swim and a snack, then back into the steam room again. In between, the women rub honey and salt over their faces, and some slick on a mint green paste. When they leave, their skin is as smooth as the flesh of a peach.

Failed Escape

I sneak out of the steam room, hoping to find some relief in a tepid shower. But one of the men from the group catches me, and shakes his head. “You have to go in,” he says, gesturing toward the glowering green square of ice water in the corner. I demur, but it’s no good: things must be done the proper way. I jump; the pain is as if I’d hurled myself against a glass table. I claw my way out and collapse on a stone bench.

Back in the steam room, a young man enters: the executioner. With a ladle and a few deft flicks of the wrist, he flings water, scooped from a bucket, on the hot stones inside the small oven. The stones hiss and growl as they release steam into the air, producing heat. Then the man – from Tajikistan, he tells me later - waves a towel around in great lazy circles, jostling the angry atoms of air.

Surely this is some circle of hell. But the men assure me: “The heat is half what it would be in Russia!” They soften at the look on my face. “You’re doing well! The American we brought only came in here once. When we told him to go in the cold water, he said, ‘you guys are f__ing nuts.’”

Plenty of visitors to Russia have thought as much. In the first written account of the banya, recorded in the Russian Primary Chronicle of 1113, the Apostle Andrew visits the area that was later to become Russia. Observing the bathhouse ritual, he remarks: “They [the Russians] lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. They think nothing of doing this every day, and actually inflict such voluntary torture on themselves.”

After five hours of torture, I’m exhausted, banya-drunk. It’s only 8 p.m., but I fall asleep upright at the table while waiting for my “salad in a glass,” a Moscow-priced ($10) juice made from red peppers, lettuce, tomatoes and carrots. “Ah,” Masha says, looking at me, “and that’s how you know you’re done with banya.”

Tania Barnes is a master’s candidate at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
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But the effort to get here is worth it. We’ve come to watch Dani women make salt from sections of a banana plant soaked in a briny pool some 4,000 feet above sea level, and to see Dani men and women create fire, then catch, kill and roast a pig in an underground oven.

These are customs of a once-isolated people first encountered by Westerners in the 1930s, who still maintain Stone Age-era traditions. Dani men go naked, except for a long, narrow gourd, called a koteka, covering their penis. Women are bare-breasted and wear grass or woven string skirts, with string bags tied to their foreheads.

To visit the Dani in the Baliem Valley, and the sub-tribes known as Yani and Yali, visitors must have police permits.  They’ll walk about five miles from the main town, Wamena, or travel in four-wheel drive vehicles to the base of the Mili mountain in the village of Jiwiki.

Then comes about two hours of rigorous trudging through sticky mud, and clambering over slippery stones on a narrow path up the mountain, through a rainforest marked by waterfalls and rugged scenery. Dani men give us sturdy sticks to help us keep our footing.

As we make our way to the upper reaches of the mountain, we suddenly come upon an area of boulders framing a small spring.

Standing in the salty water, Dani women are soaking strips ripped from the heart of a banana plant. The salty strips – which are quite tasty – are taken home, dried, burnt and beaten into ashes. The ashes are used as salt. It’s an occupation solely for women, but a few men stand around at the salt pool, perhaps to guard them.

Anemoigi, another Dani village nearby, hosts the pig feast, a ceremony put on for special occasions such as weddings. At the entrance to a family compound where the feast is held, we receive an unexpected and exciting welcome.

Ferocious-looking men in feathered headdress, their legs and thighs daubed with paint, and carrying bows, arrows and long, pointed staves, suddenly swarm onto an open field where an armed male sentry stands guard atop a high, bamboo lookout tower. Older men with grease-blackened foreheads and with a semi-circular boar’s tusks in their nostrils look especially fearsome.

Circling the clearing, and hooting and hollering, the assemblage point their weapons at the visitors and let off a few arrows in their direction, but far enough away to fall short of their mark.

It’s all in fun, a mock battle re-enacting traditional war games. The performance goes on for about 10  minutes, and then we’re ushered into the compound, with the “warriors” shaking our hands, and shouting ‘Wah! Wah! meaning “Welcome.” Women waiting inside – some with white polka-dot body paint – keep up a chant.

Round huts with overhanging thick thatched roofs partially encircle the compound, set under banana trees and pandanus palms. Some of the huts – containing an upper level for sleeping and a lower level for cooking — are for the women. Others house the men and boys. There are also long huts for storing sweet potatoes, and for keeping pigs, a Dani symbol of wealth.

Colorful string bags, seed necklaces and other handicrafts made by the women are displayed on the ground for sale. Some of the older women have stumps where one or more joints are missing from their fingers, signifying the number of their dead relatives.

The “warriors” gather in the center of the compound, then run back and forth, singing in a call-and-response fashion. We can easily pick out the chief. His face is blackened, and his headdress has the tallest feather. He greets us with warm handshakes.

As the main feature of the day’s festivities gets underway, men gather at one end of the compound. One rapidly pulls a grass strip across a piece of bamboo anchored by his foot. The swift motion produces smoke and flames. Placed on kindling and wood, the fire grows to heat stones red hot for the earth oven. This is a round pit about four feet wide and four feet deep, lined with wet straw and banana leaves.

Men pick up the hot stones with long, homemade wooden tongs and drop them into the pit. Women place leaves of the potato plant around the edge, and alternate layers of sweet potatoes and vegetables are put inside, and covered with the heated stones.

Now a suckling pig is let out of a pen, and run down by several men. It is cornered by a dog as it dashes into a hut, squealing. Men whoop and holler as the pig is captured; the women and children dance and chant. One man shoots an arrow into the pig’s heart. It squeals for the last time and dies.

Men singe its hairs, then scrape and gut it with bamboo knives, in preparation for cooking. Teenaged boys carry it to the pit, spread-eagled on banana leaves. It is lowered  on top of the potatoes and covered with banana and potato leaves, then with hot stones, more potatoes and vegetables.

The wet straw around the pit is now pushed over it as a cover, and tied with rattan vines. The earth oven is closed with a final heaping of hot stones.

Children roast strips of entrails over glowing embers and eat them, apparently a treat they’re allowed.

While the food is cooking, a figure we’re told is a 250-year-old, charcoal-blackened mummified man is carefully removed from a hut for us to see and photograph.

After about three hours, the barbecue is ready. The women leave off selling their handicrafts, move over to the pit and start removing and passing out the potatoes, vegetables and steamed greens (edible potato leaves and stems).

Young boys carry the cooked pork to the older men, who cut it up and share some among themselves, feeding the elders first. Then the boys serve the women, before returning to join the men.

The meat divided among the Dani is just enough for them. For whatever reason, none is offered to us. But we visitors get to sample the potatoes — bright yellow inside and delicious.

Merle English was a staff writer for Newsday for more than 20 years. She was born on the island of Jamaica and is a graduate of Hunter College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She travels widely, often with a group that meets and interacts with people of African descent in remote corners of the globe. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Midway between Australia and Antarctica, this is one of the most remote places on the planet. Only a few tourists are allowed to visit each year.

Our expedition begins as we leave the comfort of our 5-star expedition cruise ship, Orion, and climb into a 12-person rubber zodiac raft. Orion felt stable — but now our raft rises and falls unsettlingly on the waves.

There are two main landing sites on “Macca,” as it is affectionately known by the 60 or so scientists and rangers working at Australia’s research station here. Our landing is  “wet,” meaning that the zodiac pulls up close to the shore, and we hop off into the water. The landing crew are waiting to help us ashore.

We visit the research base at the island’s isthmus. Curious King penguins and lazing Elephant seals watch us from arm’s length.

King, Royal, Rockhopper and Gentoo penguins all live here, along with the seals and several species of sea bird. These native inhabitants have the right of way, even at the research station.

Our ranger and guide recalls that it took him a few weeks to get used to sleeping on the island, as the Elephant seals would scape their moulting bodies next to his quarters. The rasping sound of their scraping, coupled with their blubbery snorts, kept him awake many nights.

Our second landing point is at Sandy Bay. Again the rangers accompany us. The rangers escort all visitors, to ensure compliance with the island’s protection treaties.

In Sandy Bay there’s zero evidence of mankind — only the incredible sight of tens of thousands of penguins hopping up the steep 100 to 160-foot hillside to their breeding ground. Pods of Elephant seals lay tightly together, the better to keep warm and shed their skin more quickly.

The air stays wet and damp all day, but in the afternoon, it begins to drizzle.

Underfoot we see the little white bones of penguins, beside the larger bones of long-gone Elephant seals. The Brown Skuas act as the island’s cleaners, and we see them at work on the carcass of a huge seal.

On the beach are thousands of King and Royal penguins. We’re assaulted by the din of the constant calling between chicks, and the adults who have returned from hunting in the sea. The smell of the beach is like any beach with rotting seaweed on it, and we take the ranger’s word for it that the smell at the rookery higher up the hill is “quite strong and takes some getting used to.”

We aren’t allowed to approach or touch the animals. But the penguins are inquisitive, and as long as they come to you, you can get extremely close. You can encourage them by squatting down and waddling your backside from left to right!

Birds and animals were not always treated so respectfully here. This island has a brutal past, as a magnet for sealers who, after slaughtering all the seals, turned on the penguins. But today the seals and penguins have regenerated. In 1979, the Tasmanian government declared Macquarie a restricted area, and in 1997 it was named a World Heritage Area.

One generally visits Macquarie during the summer months of December and January. The daytime temperature is about 46 degrees F; no one is allowed to stay overnight. Expedition cruises are the best way to get here — but, since there are so few visitor’s permits, only a very few operators come. Of course, it’s worth seeking out those that do.
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Then he musters his energy into a vertical impulse. Upward he drags his skateboard, which seems glued to the soles of his feet. He is suspended in the air for an instant. Then his body, board and feet come tumbling down.

The grinding resumes as the wheels again find their place on the pavement.

It swings. It stops. It swings again. Enclosed in a metal cage, the wheels of the metronome spin ever faster, creating enough momentum for its red rod to lurch forward. A mechanical drone echoes in the park as the metronome turns right, then stops. Turns left, then stops, in a patient back and forth.

The metronome was built for an exhibition in Prague’s Letna Park in 1991, atop the shattered remains of a gigantic monument of Joseph Stalin. The statue, built two years after the Russian leade’s death in 1953, had depicted Stalin, followed by a farmer, a laborer and a soldier. At 50 feet high, it was, until it was destroyed in 1962, the largest group statue in Europe.

It was also a constant reminder of the Czechs’ lack of freedom, an assertion of the limitations on their ability to assemble, publish and express themselves. The monument symbolized the “Stalinization” of what was then Czechoslovakia, and the victory of Soviet rule.

The statue overlooked the Old Town from a commanding position: the heights of Letna Park.

Now only its stone graffiti-covered base remains. A bright red 75-foot metronome designed by Vratislav Noovak has replaced it. Chipped stone steps and metal stair railings litter the stone plaza below - a consequence of the emerging skateboarding culture.

From the heights of the metronome one can see the tops of Prague’s baroque and medieval-inspired architecture. Sitting on a ledge that overlooks the city and the Vltava river is 19-year-old Adam Marcan, who visits the metronome often.

It’s a little piece of quiet, he says, “where not a lot of screaming or cars can be heard.” He listens to the whirring of the metronome in tandem with the scraping wheels. “It sounds good,” he sighs. The sound of the metronome adds a peaceful hum to Letna Park. Marcan squints in the bright sunlight as he takes in the view. “It’s something more free, very natural,” he remarked, “to go to relax and forget problems.”

Problems seem to be the least concern for those skateboarding here. A place that once symbolized fear and oppression has become a haven for a new generation.

Sixteen-year-old Jorge Vondra and his friends call this place “The Stalin.” Young teens come out after school and on weekends to socialize, and to practice new skateboarding tricks.

It’s not only a center for young people to gather, but a place to reminisce while basking in the beauty of the city. The metronome, a symbol of new times and liberation is, in Adam Marcan’s opinion, “the last of the best places in Prague.”

It also marks time, freedom and a new sub-culture. “Excuse me,” Vondra said, “but I have to skateboard now.”
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He’s tried many times to escape — and because of that, a police presence is a constant in his life. Michael possesses a letter the police gave his parents when he was in the 5th grade, explaining his first arrest, for a fight. Recently, he was prosecuted for another fight, with a man in an area canteen. It took two years for that case to be tried, but after it was, he was sentenced to 10 months in jail.

Michael shares a bedroom with several others, including his girlfriend, his brother and his brother’s girlfriend. The police often prevent Michael from accompanying his girlfriend beyond their neighborhood.

Making the best of a claustrophobic existence, Michael and his friends often dance and drink while listening to music videos (illegal copies), played on an illegal TV and DVD player.

Unemployed, and with the police almost always watching, Michael and his family leave the house only to buy food, and occasionally on weekends, to visit friends and relatives. Their relationships, with help from some Cuban rum, keep them sane.

The family also trades in Cuba’s very prominent black market, trying to save up money to buy a seat on another Miami-bound vessel — willing to risk everything again for a chance at a better life in the United States.

Benjamin Norman is a New York City-based photographer and filmmaker. See more of his work here.

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We were walking down the main drag in Kata Beach in Phuket when a triumph of fish and lobsters and clams lured us in. Well, perhaps lure is too strong a word, but Takayo and I were hungry and this restaurant was close to our hotel.  The dining room was this open-air deal with white pillars, tea candles, and tablecloths starched stiffer than a wedding drink.  It almost seemed forbidding. All that week we’d eaten at the mom n’ pop joints. There’s just something about lawn furniture and the smell of sizzling meat that reminds me of the carnival.

But now, standing before that dripping sea-life display, Takayo had the look of a woman entranced. A little maitre d’ showed us to our table.

As a rule, we typically don’t eat out at touristy restaurants, especially not on the main drag. The food is rarely, if ever, on par with those back-alley joints. Plus, it’s hard to lose yourself in a place that regards ABBA as dining music. That said, as much as I wanted to hate this restaurant, I just couldn’t.  It was vaguely foreign and familiar at the same time, like an old sitcom dubbed into Thai. The waitress brought my entre: fried rice in a hollowed-out pineapple with a side of mummified baby prawns. Takayo pulled out the camera and took a picture.  Blinded by the flash, now we could eat.

Kata Beach is one of those hippie-era hideouts that matured into a popular, yet not-quite-overcommercialized tourist destination. The white palm tree-lined beach is an island hotspot for surfing.  A lot of middle-aged farang women feel compelled to go topless there as well.  Thank goodness there’s no correlation between the two.

I went back to the pineapple restaurant one day for lunch when Takayo was at scuba class.  They had a sign on the sidewalk that advertised a lunch special: burger, fries, and a Coke for 100 baht.  Main drag or not, the price — about three bucks — was right.  The waitress seated me. I flipped through the menu, read the sign on the sidewalk again, and closed the menu.

“Let me get the burger deal and a Singha,” I said, and thanked her. “Kap khun krap.”

The burger was decent. I didn’t even tell her that she forgot my Coke.  A breeze was kicking around the dining area and I was content just to watch the tourists and the mopeds buzzing past.

My troubles began when the waitress dropped off the check.  She had overcharged me.  For a pale white guy with a couple of beers in him, this is not uncommon.  It’s something I’ve come to terms with — Show it to the server, state my case, and move on.  I considered my wording, wondering if I had been unclear. A burger deal.  Maybe she punched it in wrong. When she came back, I mentioned the oversight.

“Sorry, I ordered the burger meal, the lunch special you have advertised.”  I pointed to the neon-lettered sign on the sidewalk.

“No,” she said flatly. “You order burger from menu. “You pay.”

“I don’t know if you remember, but I asked for the burger meal. The menu was closed when you took my order”

“You order menu burger, I bring you menu burger.”

“What’s the difference? The sign’s right there on the sidewalk.”

The conscientious traveler in me said to pay it.   Had it been a mom n’ pop joint, I would have done just that. But another voice said: this is about the principle, not the money.  In spite of feeling like a complete jackass, I politely asked to speak with a manager.

A young man came to the table with my waitress and another one in tow.  It was the little maitre d’. He had short, gelled hair and serious dark eyes. Though he weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, his face showed no sign of apprehension.

“Yes, she tells me you have problem?”  God, he had a high voice, like Mickey Mouse. I explained.  He brought over a menu, opened it to the burger and pointed. ” This. This is what you order.”  He set the menu down before me.

I could have just paid him. Most of the time I do. But once in awhile, like some crackpot vigilante, I get a sick thrill from avenging apathy.  All I want to hear is: ‘I see what you’re saying, but I’ve got a job to do.”‘ Then I’ll gracefully step aside.

“No,” said. “I ordered the lunch burger. It’s lunch. Why would you advertise it if you aren’t going to sell it?”

“That’s the small burger. He pointed to the sign. You order the big burger. You ate the big one.”

“How could I possibly know the difference?”

If the common dictum in the restaurant business is that the customer is always right, in this establishment, customers were not only wrong, but were taught a lesson. When I tried to close the menu, the maitre d’ slapped his hand down on top of it. I don’t know why, but at that point, I really wanted that menu closed. His arm quivered from pressing down. My fingertips turned white.

“I’m not weak!” the maitre d’ finally shouted.  “He reached back and slapped me across the shoulder.”  The two waitresses were dumbfounded.

“Hey, what the hell, man?”

“Yout pay!”

“All right, I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna pay for one lunch special and a beer. Then I’m gonna leave.”

The money was in my sweaty hand. I placed it on the table as if we were playing poker. I wasn’t exactly sure what he would do: Hit again, raise, or fold.

“Get out!”  It was shrill, and loud.  He snatched the money off the table and stormed off. The two girls followed. Of course, everyone in the dining room was staring. I had to hand it to him; the kid really had a pair.

Maybe it was the beer or the heat, but I headed toward the back to find a manager. She was sitting at a desk in a back office. Before I could walk in, the maitre d’ stepped out with a plate in his hand.

“Get out!”  It stopped me in my tracks. I was just outside the office, and then the manager’s phone rang. We locked eyes for an instant, and then she reached over and answered the phone. I had no idea what I was going to say to her.  Was it still about the principle, or was it damage control for my guilty conscience? And what was the principle now, anyway?

I slunk out, replaying the fiasco in my head.  Was I wrong?

An answer came to me in the sound of footfalls.  Every so often I looked over my shoulder, just to make sure no one was following me.
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Hardesty looks into the reasons for Native Alaskans’ high rates of suicide, alcoholism and physical abuse, partly through the meditations of Napoleon, a community leader who killed his four-year-old son in a drunken rage.

While serving nine years in prison for that crime, Napoleon began an essay exploring phenomena like cultural depression and low self-esteem, which he considers closely linked to social problems in Alaska’s indigenous communities.

See Lighting Up the Dark

19:43 minutes

Napoleon’s essay later developed into a book: “Yuuyarag: The Way of the Human Being.” The full book has been made available here.
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The Danielli is one of the most beautiful hotels in the world, with its pink marble walls, stained glass windows, gold leaf columns and Murano glass chandeliers. Staying there was way beyond our budget.

If our hostess didn’t show up, we would be paying for this Venetian vacation for a long time.

We had been invited to Venice as guests of Jacqueline*, a French lawyer we had befriended when she rented an apartment from us in New York for her younger sister, Martine.

A Life-Changing Friendship

Meeting Jacqueline had changed our lives. Jacqueline, 35, and her two sisters, Scherazade, 25, and Martine, 24, were three of the most beautiful and urbane women I had ever met. They were tall and slender, and could walk for miles in Manolo Blahnik stilettos. Jacqueline, shapely in her couturier dresses (she favored plunging necklines) looked strikingly like Catherine Zeta Jones.

When Jacqueline periodically visited Martine and Martine’s boyfriend Christian in New York, she would take us to the city’s most expensive restaurants. She introduced us to caviar at Alain Ducasse, and to escargot at La Cirque. At Jacqueline’s dinners, the best French wines flowed. Evenings were always capped at the club of the moment, where we sat in the VIP room drinking bottles of Kristal.

Rick was smitten. To be surrounded by these sophisticated French women was a testosterone dream. Yet Jacqueline’s largesse made me uncomfortable. We had no way to reciprocate. She showered us with gifts, and always refused to let us pay.

Rick and I guessed that Jacqueline’s lavish lifestyle flowed from her family’s shipping business.

During our New York evenings, Jacqueline told us many stories about Carnivale in Venice. She loved the pageantry and spectacle. But I suspected that something else drew her. Carnivale, its roots in 13th century Europe, involves two weeks of processions, music and festivities, but is centered around the masquerade. The winding streets are the right setting for a festival centered around intrigue and concealed identity.

Musicians, acrobats, theatre troupes and revelers from all over the world participate in the dozens of masked balls and gala dinners. Dressing as royals from the Middle Ages is popular. Many of these events are very expensive, since they take place in museums and palaces, but Jacqueline had managed to secure admission for her 11 guests, all friends and family.

In Jacqueline’s Venice

Of course she showed up; why had I worried she wouldn’t? She also attended to every detail of our six-day visit. Within hours of her arrival, she was shepherding us along Venice’s twisting lanes to a costume shop.  There, among racks of 16th and 17th century costumes, she selected the personalities we were to assume for the week. For Rick, who loves naval history, she picked out an admiral’s uniform, with gold epaulets on the shoulders, six large gold buttons, and ballooning pantalets. With his tri-cornered hat and cloak, he looked like Lord Nelson.

I stepped into the shop as a middle-aged Manhattan mother, and stepped out navigating a hoop skirt nearly three feet wide. It was harder to maneuver than a truck, especially with a powdered wig on my head. A corset bound my chest so tightly that it was difficult to exhale, but it cinched my waist and lifted my breasts to heights they had not seen since I was 16. Around my waist, Jacqueline had tied a stiff, gauzy skeleton that sculpted a bell shape below my wide skirts. Above that were my layers of petticoats. My gown was the color of marigolds, and had a plunging neckline. With the addition of masks and cloaks, Rick and I became members of Jacqueline’s royal court.

On the way back to the hotel, Jacqueline and Christian pointed out the sights of Venice: the Piazza del Marco, already filled with hundreds of costumed revelers; the Grand Canal, where gondoliers in their black and white striped sweaters and ribboned hats waited for tourists.

At the Bridge of Sighs, Jacqueline stopped.

“This is my favorite spot in Venice,” she said dramatically, pointing to the stone bridge spanning the canal. “See those windows at the top? It’s where prisoners saw their last sight of freedom.  The bridge connects the palace to the prison.  Lord Byron said you could hear the sighs of the condemned as they walked stooped toward their fates.”

The rest of the week was a blur of masked balls, dinners and brunches, which we attended in period costume. I spent the week in a photographic frenzy, clicking at the 18th-century masquerade dresses crafted from shimmering fabrics of every hue. Costumers borrowed from the high fashion of the 1700s, and from the theatrical “Commedia dell’Arte style. Of course, no one was more elegant and beautiful than Jacqueline, who now reminded me of Olivia de Havilland, who played the sweet southern belle with backbone in “Gone With the Wind.”

Several months later, Martine and Christian moved back to Paris, promising they would return to spend Christmas as our guests in New York. On December 20th, the phone rang. I heard Christian’s voice, gasping through sobs.

“Jacqueline, that bitch,” he said. “She has destroyed my family.”

Slowly, he explained that Jacqueline had been accused by a major European bank of working with one of its officers to steal over $30 million euro over 10 years. The courts of Monte Carlo had ordered the incarceration of the whole family — except, he said, for Jacqueline, who had managed to escape.

*Some of the names in this story have been changed, to protect the privacy of the family.

When not traveling, Harriet Brand and her husband Rick run Brand Bed and Breakfast in New York City.
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That was more than 50 years ago. Quezada spent 16 more years learning, by trial and error, to produce his first good pot.

He might have remained an unknown and impoverished potter, and Mata Ortiz just another dusty northern Mexico village, had it not been for Spencer MacCallum.

MacCallum, who has a degree in art history from Princeton, was living in San Pedro, California in the early 1970s when he bought, at a yard sale, a 14th century Paquimé pot.

“I put it on my piano at home,” he recalled, “and I would pass it every day.”

A few years later, in Bob’s Swap Shop in Deming, NM, he found three lovely, small pots that looked familiar.

“I immediately recognized them as being made by someone who knew about Paquimé pots,” he said. He wanted to know who had made them, but the owner had no idea. Armed with photos, MacCallum set out for Mexico to find the person who had made the Paquimé pots, 500 years after that civilization had been destroyed.

Amazingly, it only took MacCallum two days to find Quezada.

It was a double surprise.

“I was surprised it was Juan, a man,” said MacCallum, “since most potters in traditional Native American cultures are women, and Juan couldn’t believe anyone would ever come looking for him.”

Reviving a Lost Art

By the time MacCallum arrived in this remote village about 100 miles south of the U.S. border, Quezada had already been selling his pots for a few dollars in U.S. stores, and was teaching family members how to make them. MacCallum bought what he considered Quezada’s best pots. Soon he was promoting them in the United States. Quezada’s pots began to improve dramatically, and as they began to command higher prices in the United States, more villagers grew interested in making them. Knowledge about how to make them spread through the village, but not in a way most North Americans would expect.

“One day, I was trying to explain to people how the pots are made,” said MacCallum, “and Juan took me aside and said, ‘Those that are going to get it, will get it by observing, and then they will have made a discovery and it’ll be their own. Don’t tell them so much.’ I’d have to say that there’s really no teaching, but there is a lot of learning.”

Today, pots made by Mata Ortiz’s master potters fetch as much as $15,000, and are featured in galleries and museums around the world, including the Smithsonian. But local pots run from a few dollars to about $50.

See a clip from a documentary about the development of Mata Ortiz pottery, by the Holden Brothers:


From Unemployment to Tourism

Before Quezada revived the ancient pottery techniques, and MacCallum marketed them, Mata Ortiz’s economic prospects were bleak. A lumber mill that had once provided employment for the village was abandoned in the early 1900s, after being partially destroyed in the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Until the early 1960s, there was a railroad yard, but that was relocated to Nuevo Casas Grandes, a modern city about 25 miles away. The last of the formal jobs in Mata Ortiz disappeared along with it. Many people worked in orchards owned by Mormons who had arrived in the area beginning in 1854, but there were few other jobs.

Now, in a village of about 3,000, there are between 500 and 600 potters, and at least a half dozen galleries, including one in the former railroad station. Quezada’s way of transmitting information about pottery making has clearly worked. Even today, though, the village has no paved roads, and houses are mostly simple, unpainted adobe brick.

Although all the pottery made here is referred to as Mata Ortiz pottery, and certain characteristics identify it as such, there is no single way to make it. A number of variations have evolved. All, like Pilo Mora, considered one of the best potters in the village, begin by flattening out a piece of clay into a “tortilla,” which is then pressed into a bowl. Mora uses the single-coil method, rolling out a piece of clay he then connects to the top of the tortilla. Concentrating intently, he carefully pinches the coil while turning the bowl, drawing up the clay to make the walls of the pot. Many potters still use this single-coil method, which is was one of Quezada’s innovations, while others—especially in the Mata Ortiz neighborhood known as Porvenir (“Future”) —have begun using multiple coils. After the walls of the pot are made, the outside is smoothed with a hacksaw blade. Like all Mata Ortiz potters, Mora uses no potter’s wheel — yet he is able to make very large, surprisingly light pots.

This pottery may be black, white or red, the color determined by the clay and the firing method. Designs range from intricate, Escher-like patterns to butterflies and other animals. The elegance of Mata Ortiz pots and the detail found in the paintings that adorn them might suggest the artist had been sequestered for hours in a quiet, private studio. Mora does have a studio attached to his house, but his work is frequently interrupted by people stopping by for a visit – and most potters lack even separate workspaces.

Ana Trillo and her husband Monico Corona make red-clay and black pots in a variety of styles. A visitor to their house, an unassuming adobe that stretches on erratically, will often find Ana at her kitchen table, painting a pot, while Monico sands another pot by the window. There’s no special lighting or separate space, and when Ana announces it’s time to eat, she clears a spot on the table, tosses another piece of wood in the stove and begins warming the tortillas. She is often joined by her friend Elva Mendoza who, besides working as a potter, owns one of the only restaurants in the village — known for its extremely good food and exasperatingly erratic hours.

Ana, atypically for a Mata Ortiz potter, Trillo isn’t a local. She grew up in Juarez, on the U.S. border, and met Monico during a visit to Mata Ortiz, when she was 15.

“Monico wasn’t interested in making pots,” she recalled. “He was a rancher. I learned first and then I taught him. A friend taught me how to make the pots. It took me two or three years to make pots that were good enough to sell.”

After the pots are formed, they’re set aside for about three days to dry. “After that, I sand them,” said Monico, “and then we polish them with a small stone.”

Painting is done freehand, with brushes often made from human hair — sometimes Ana’s own, sometimes a nephew’s. “He has finer hair,” said Ana, adding, “Some people prefer cat hair.” There’s a wide range of designs. “Many designs are from Paquimé,” she said. “Others, we invented; some are ones we copied and sometimes they just come as inspiration.”

Work is broken up by conversation, jokes and meals. If a woman has young children, they gather around her as she paints, watching intently. Quezada’s way of teaching still obtains.

After the paint dries, the pots are usually placed in an ordinary kitchen oven— one still used for cooking — and pre-heated, then fired over an open fire. Luis Lopez Corona, Monico’s nephew, prefers using bark from the Alamo tree as a covering, rather than the traditional cow chips. “The bark burns very hot,” he said. He places the pots on a small grill, covers them with a metal tub and piles on the bark. Then he liberally applies lighter fluid while his young son, David, encourages him to put on even more. Luis is right: the heat is intense, and the bark gives off a sweet smell and plenty of smoke. He uses a mirror to shine some light through a small hole in it to check on the firing.

The pots are removed, allowed to cool and, if there’s a tourist group at Hotel Posada, Luis will sell his pots soon after they’re fired. One evening, he sold all the pots he and his wife, Lupita, had made that day. “It is a good night,” he said, smiling.

Not all is perfect. Drug violence has reached this region, MacCallum, who now lives nearby in Casas Grandes, acknowledged. “But it’s between Mexicans, and you wouldn’t know about it unless you saw it in the paper or someone told you,” he wrote in a recent note. “The media reports, while containing some truth, have been overplayed to the point of irresponsibility. Few or none here believe there is any danger to visitors.” In the fall of 2009, a store was held up. There was also the murder of a gallery owner, a very rare occurrence in Mata Ortiz. Neither crime has been solved.

Newcomers are likelier to be besieged by pottery sellers, as cars pull up alongside them as they’re walking. Once people know who you are, though, they’ll leave you alone. You’ll notice that every street has several houses with hand-painted signs announcing that a potter lives there. Visitors are always welcome. After you admire the pottery for a few minutes, some coffee or dessert will probably be offered. For all their fame, people in Mata Ortiz have kept the simple pleasures of Mexican hospitality alive.
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My grandparents live in Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city, a five-hour drive from Buenos Aires. On our sporadic visits, we’d go to the stadium of Rosario Central. At our first game, Rosario Central played Banfield. It was an ordinary night — no championship trophy, no major rivalry — yet the stadium filled with loyal fans, their voices ricocheting off the thick concrete walls. I can’t believe we’re here, shouted my little brother, who was nine. At these games, the Argentine culture that surged through us was realized, and my father’s stories became palpable. We came closer to understanding the fanaticism, as the energy thudded within us.

Thousands of arms pumped the air in unison. Scraps of paper littered the sky and fell like confetti. Blue and yellow streamers fluttered as they sailed through the porous air. Smoke of the same colors billowed, dense within the thick walls of the stadium, which seats 45,000 but fills with 55,000. Rosario’s rivals, Newell’s Old Boys, wear red and black; their fans are known as lepers. Even before I understood the passionate relationship my father has with soccer, I learned to hate the pairing of red and black. This rivalry is not as well known as that of Boca Juniors and River Plate of Buenos Aires, but that doesn’t lessen the violence that occurs — the children beaten for wearing the wrong colors, the men insulted for being born on the wrong block.

Cheap Seat Passion
Just behind the goals are the popular sections, for holders of the cheapest tickets: one side for the home team fans, the other for the visitors, the separation meant to keep fighting to a minimum. There are no blue plastic seats to stand on, no armrests to break. Standing room gives the young men who preside there freedom to move. Tall fences separate the hungry crowd from the field. Though there is also a mucky thirty-foot moat, to prevent fans from charging the players, the occasional fan still tests his abilities, and falls within its murkiness.

My younger brothers and I were never allowed to venture to these spots. Muy peligroso, my father would mutter. Too dangerous. He feared that we were not savvy enough, had not been born with the ravenous hunger for victory necessary to last. So we watched from the seats for families and children, choking down our sausage sandwiches.

Yet the energy emanating from the popular sustained us. That’s where the chants started, and filled the stadium. These were the songs we learned as children, before we knew their meaning. We jumped too, and sang words that finally made sense to us.

The players passed the ball back and forth with Argentine finesse. With each pass, the crowd shouted ole! When Central’s DaSilva scored a goal in the second half, the crowd went crazy. The drums got louder, pierced by the sounds of whistles. Then the flags were released, draping lengthwise over two entire sections of the stadium. The blue and yellow striped fabric was passed from one row to the next, until we were all beneath it, jumping and punching the taut cloth, which from the popular must have looked like thousands of beating hearts.

In those moments I realized why people fought, and on rare occasion died, for this sport.

Poor Man’s Sport
The most brutal soccer riot took place in Lima, Peru, on May 24, 1964, in an Olympic qualifying game between Peru and Argentina. In the final two minutes of the game, the referee disallowed a Peruvian goal, a call that resulted in 318 deaths, 1,000 injuries, and the declaration of martial law in the capital. Such incidents are of course not peculiar to South America: soccer riots have killed 20 in Libya, 73 in Nepal, 95 in England.
Argentina may have an unstable economy, and the occasional government corruption scandal that strips the people of work. Yet soccer, a poor man’s sport accessible to everyone, endures.

“Unlike in America, soccer ties into Argentina’s political past,” Deana Becker wrote in the international studies magazine Abroad View.  During Argentina’s military dictatorship, from 1977 to 1983, Argentina hosted and won the 1978 World Cup, she noted. “As the government was kidnapping and torturing its own people, Argentines rallied around their soccer team. Victory made the state seem united, even while the generals pursued a war against the people.” I agree that it’s a way of life that unites more than it destroys.

A few years ago, Argentina’s economy faltered again, and the people suffered. But my father reminded us: “At least we have soccer.”
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This little town of 4,800 supports two bike stores that shuttle riders to the beginning of the Lehigh Gorge trail, as well as quaint stores, B&Bs, and several restaurants. The weekends buzz with activity.

Jim Thorpe has come a long way from its days as a depressed mining town to the biking center it is today.

The first time we came through Jim Thorpe, it was to raft. But we’ve been back three times since to mountain bike: staying in hotels, eating at restaurants, and shopping on Main Street.

We spent plenty of money there, so I was surprised to hear about the anti-bike sentiment. Bike tourism seems to have lifted this town from its depression. Why would a town bite the hand that feeds it?

We Love Your Money, But You, Not So Much

“It’s animosity between the locals and the visitors,” said Tom Loughery, corresponding secretary of the Jim Thorpe Area Council. “Existing residents had no idea that the town had something special to offer. They complain that it now takes 10 minutes to get across town, and the restaurants are crowded.”

They don’t seem to link the visitors to the newly-renovated homes and buildings, and full tax coffers.

No irony was lost when this town changed its name from Mauch Chunk to Jim Thorpe. Thorpe was a versatile athlete of American Indian descent who won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics, but these were rescinded when it was learned he’d earned a minimal amount of money during college playing basketball. Although he played professional football and baseball, his later life was marked by poverty and alcoholism.

Mauch Chunk had once been a thriving coal and railroad town. In an attempt to replace those dying industries with tourism, town leaders agreed to let the widow of the disgraced athlete bury his body there, in 1953, and changed the name of the town. The tourists never came, until the 1990s. But it wasn’t to see Jim: it was to go biking.

Copious studies support the idea that biking can boost an economy. Mountain biking has become the fourth most popular adventure activity among U.S. adventure travelers, according to a 1997 study by the Travel Industry Association of America. Sixty million adult Americans bicycle each year. Bicyclists spend money on this recreation, which creates jobs and brings revenue to communities. The Outdoor Industry Foundation reports that bicycling contributes $133 billion to the U.S. economy each year.

Declining towns can capitalize on their natural gifts. Not every mountain biking center needs spectacular rolling rock trails like Moab, Utah, or the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains that Durango, Colorado, offers. Woodlands and flatlands can be developed into biking arenas. Plus, the trails can be cleared with volunteer efforts, and a few inexpensive tools. In Jim Thorpe, timber roads and coal mining roads had already been cut through the woods.

Looking for new sources of income, West Virginia aggressively pursued bike dollars in the early 1980s. It sponsored races, and reaped the benefits by establishing itself as a biking mecca. The Hatfield-McCoy trails that were opened in 2000 have proven very successful. After a decade of work to build community support, and agreements with 20 different landowners, the shared-use trails have added $51 million to the economy, drawn 303,000 visitors, and created 1,572 new jobs.

Yet some still oppose biking there.

“The nature Nazis think they are saving the world from mountain bikes,” complained Matt Marcus, owner of Blackwater Bikes and the president of the West Virginia Mountain Bike Association, describing his experience with officials from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
“Anti-bike groups claim that bikes cause erosion and trail widening,” said Drew Vankat, policy adviser for the International Mountain Biking Association, “when in fact research has shown bikes cause no more impact than horses.”

Vankat has been at the forefront of a battle with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. The Forest Service director in Denver proposed eliminating bikes on the Monarch Crest Trail, based on research done before mountain bikes were even invented.

“They don’t want to lose pristine nature, and feel if you allow bikes, it will open up the floodgates,” Vankat said.

Jim Thorpe felt the backlash too.

“The state of Pennsylvania outlawed biking on state game lands, and while only four trails were affected, the perception was that there was no more biking in Pennsylvania. That was in 2004, and it really hurt the economy,” Loughery said. “We’re working hard to gain them back.”

Of Course, Not All Bikers Are Angels

To be fair, not every cyclist is courteous. Some refuse to ride single-file or ride around a puddle while off road, widening the trail. But the benefits far outweigh a few examples of bad behavior.

The Forest Service argues that allowing bikes into the woods would open the door to allowing in four-wheeler all terrain vehicles. So it takes the position of no wheels at all. That’s easier: the Forest Service is under siege from powerful companies like Kawasaki Motors. Bike manufacturers lack the deep pockets to fight for inclusion. Without doubt, ATVs are noisy, and pollute with their fossil-fueled engines. But equating human-powered bikes with a trail-eating ATV makes no sense.

Depressed regions have an opportunity to recreate their image and character. While not as powerful as coal or steel barons, if they can overcome the naysayers, bike riders can help towns overcome flagging economic fortunes.
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“The relationship between bees and man hasn’t changed,” he said. “It’s man and nature. It will never change.”

Apicoltura, or beekeeping, has been the Gabannini family business for four generations, making Apicoltura Gabannini the the oldest beekeeping operation in the Marche region of central Italy. Over the years, the family has upheld a tradition of producing quality products, while still respecting the natural environment of their work.

Their business has survived turbulent times, from Nazi occupation to the current hive die-off.

Although not as common today, bee farms were customary in every rural household in this region in the early 20th century. It was not until 1913 that Marino Gabannini decided to barter his product. That’s when Apicoltura Gabannini was born.

Now, the family harvests honey on 25 bee farms in and around Urbino, a town of 15,000, and tends 600 families of bees. Family members produce 10 different varieties of honey, and sell their goods at local markets, fairs, shows, and their own shop.

The shop is sandwiched between the beehives and the family house in the Urbino hills, just outside of town. The dark wood shelves and tables display a wide array of products: jars of orange-flavored honey, beeswax candles, soap. All these items are produced on the Gabanninis’ farm, and in their laboratory behind the house.

On one wall of the shop hangs a framed black and white photograph of four men and three young boys among the beehives. One of those boys is Gualtiero Gabannini at age four. The picture was taken in 1931.

As a child, Gualtiero Gabannini spent his summers in the Urbino hills. When it was hot, he slept near the hives.

“Grandparents would tell their grandchildren to be careful around bees, so the children were always afraid,” he said. “But I never was.”

He was in his early teens during World War II, when German soldiers were stationed near Urbino. During this time, honey was a precious commodity, and many Germans killed bee colonies to steal the goods. However, things played out differently for his family, Gabannini said.

“The Germans were so close to us and we began to know each other,” he said. “It became a forced good relationship.” Gabannini remembered hiding the honey not from the Germans, but from their Italian neighbors.

Despite the tough history, Gabannini still loves everything about being a beekeeper. Even at 82, with a head of crisp white hair and a thin physique, he’ll walk among the sheets of honeycomb, puffing white smoke at the hives with a bee smoker (a device that looks like a watering can).

Honeybees have a long history in Italy. Three honeybees adorn the crest of one of the oldest and noblest families in Italy, the Barberinis. The honeybee symbol rose even further in status when Maffeo Cardinal Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, in 1623, and added the papal symbol to the honeybee crest.

The honeybee soon became a reminder of authority and influence that few could avoid. Scientist Francesco Stelluti, best known for his work with microscopes, published two works on the anatomy of the honeybee, to please Urban VIII. With his microscope, he was able to gaze upon the bees’ most unobserved features, including the tongue and the stinger.

Instead of worrying about the bee stingers, the Gabanninis focus on bees’ natural and healing powers. Gualtiero Gabannini’s wife, Iti Gina, makes honey hand cream and propolis, an old healing remedy.

The ancient Greeks used propolis to treat abscesses; Egyptians used it in mummification, and Assyrians used it to treat tumors and sores. Iti Gina began making propolis when she married Gualtiero in the mid-1950s. She dries the propolis in the sun, and then mixes the brittle leaves with alcohol. The result: a natural cure for sore throats and cuts.

There are a few problems, like rainy days, an age-old problem for beekeepers. These slow their work and can damage their stored products.

However, worldwide beehive die-off is a new issue.

“Beekeeping is a loved tradition in Italy,” said Floriana Ferri, a secretary and technical supervisor for Provincial Consortium Apistica, a regional association of beekeepers. “But it is getting harder for beekeepers. Now it is like a real job, not a hobby.”

The consortium helps train and inform beekeepers in the Marche region. The cause of hive death is still mysterious: theories range from parasites and disease to pesticides.

In 2008, Apicoltura Gabannini lost 40 percent of its production to die-off, Fabrizio Gabannini said.

Despite the drawbacks, Gabannini loves his profession, and hopes that his children will carry it on.

“I love being in close contact with nature,” he said. “I love the bees. They are beautiful and complicated, just like humans.”

This article was adapted from InUrbino.net, an annual multimedia project of IEI Media and San Francisco State University.
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Their film won a Grand Prize at the International Children’s Film Festival in Athens, grabbed the attention of the Australian press, and was even featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

“I Am,” about growing up from the childrens’ point of view, starred only other children.

It was an unlikely turn in the filmmakers’ difficult lives.

Sahiful had been put into indentured slave labor at age 4, after his father died of tuberculosis. With their mother suffering from a mental illness, this tiny boy and his siblings had to figure out how to survive.

Sahiful’s first job was in agricultural work, crushing hard earth with a brick; this backbreaking task earned him the equivalent of 20 cents a day. The job was seasonal, so in the off-season he was put to work tending goats. For this he earned two portions of rice a day. Once, when he lost a goat under his watch, his employer beat him, and refused to feed him for two days.

At age 6 he was rescued, and brought to the orphanage Muktaneer (the word means “Open Sky” in Hindi). He began receiving four good meals a day, was given his own bed, and was allowed to play for the first time in his life. He began attending school. His family was also provided with assistance.

“Before I lived here, I didn’t study, I didn’t go to school, Sahiful told me when I visited Muktaneer in March 2007.

“Since I came here, I can go to school. I learned about photo and film. “[Muktaneer director] Swapan gave me a camera, and I took one photo, and from there I learned all about filmmaking. It was my dream to make a movie.”

The fame of the film brought new attention to the plight of children in bonded labor in India, a few years before the making of “Slumdog Millionaire.”

But it’s hardly made a dent in the problem.

Millions of Child Labor Slaves

Swapan Mukherjee is the secretary of the organization that runs Muktaneer, India’s Centre for Communication and Development (CCD). The CCD was founded in 1978 to assist vulnerable children.

It initially focused on education, but in 1995, after an explosion at a Calcutta fireworks factory killed 23 children working there illegally, it shifted its focus. The factory had employed only children –1,500 of them, who worked from dawn to dusk for an average weekly wage of Rs 65 or about $1.50. The explosion rocked the entire area; trees were uprooted and concrete pillars were tossed into the air, along with children’s bodies.

The factory owners were not fined for employing children illegally. Nor were they charged in the children’s deaths, or for maintaining unsafe working conditions.

Mukherjee was outraged.

“The factory refused all responsibility for the tragedy,” he told me, disbelief still in his voice 12 years after the accident.

Ultimately, Mukherjee himself took the factory owners to court, and won a judgment for compensation for all the victims’ families.

“From there we moved to a focus on child protection and safety,” he said.

Mukherjee contacted Amnesty International, Equality Now and other human rights organizations for assistance, and the Muktaneer Children’s Home opened in 2000. CCD has since helped bring dozens of child traffickers before the courts for prosecution, and has rescued about 2,000 children from a horrific array of abusive situations, including begging networks that mutilated them to make them more effective at soliciting alms.

As Mukherjee investigated these incidents, he also photographed and filmed the children’s working conditions and their lives.

“The children were fascinated by the camera,” he said. “They wanted to document their own lives, tell their own stories.”

Prostitution and Servitude

Children are forced into servitude and prostitution for one simple reason: they are cheap. A cow or buffalo costs aRs 20,000 (about $430) but a child can be bought and traded for less than a tenth of that sum. They can be paid least, and exploited most; they are basically invisible, and virtually powerless.

While factories in China and Central America that exploit children are often in the news, there are more children labor in India than anywhere else in the world. Official estimates of their number vary greatly, often by definition of who these children are.

Unicef, citing the 2001 census, has said 12.6 million Indian children are engaged in hazardous occupations. But because more than half of all children born in India are never registered, and no records are kept on child workers, it may safely be assumed that this figure is extremely low. The official Indian government figure, based on a 1984 Labor Ministry survey, is 44 million.

At the other end of the spectrum, Human Rights Watch puts the figure at between 60 and 115 million, and Global March Against Child Labour contends that as many as 100 million children work “under conditions akin to slavery.”

In bonded labor, children are indentured to pay off debts. Few sources of traditional credit or bank loans exist for poor people, and since the earnings of bonded children are less than the interest on informal loans, typically these debts are never paid off. They thereby become de facto slaves to their “employers.”

Often families themselves place children in such conditions, when they feel they have no choice. Many unsophisticated parents fall prey to promises by recruiters that their children will be given light work to do, go to school, be exposed to more opportunities in the city, and send money back home.

One Save The Children study found that most child domestic workers toil for up to 15 hours a day, for less than $12 a month. Half are given no leave at all, and 37% never see their families again. The group’s researh found that 68% of child domestic workers suffered physical abuse, and that nearly 90% had been victims of sexual abuse.

In 2006, there was the highly publicized case of a 10-year-old domestic worker in Mumbai who was murdered by her affluent employers. The death of the girl, Sonu, was reported as a suicide to the police, who arrived at the suburban home to find her body hanging from a ceiling fan. Further investigation revealed that Sonu had been beaten and then left to bleed to death by her mistress. Her crime? She had been caught by the employer’s daughter trying on lipstick at the dressing table.

When the truth emerged, it caused an uproar in the media. Sonu became a sort of poster child against domestic child labor, and helped spur legislation that extended the official child labor ban to domestic, hotel and restaurant work.

A Child Who Helped Others

One young man, after being saved from a life of bonded labor, later led the eradication of the practice in his home village. Om Prakash Gurjar, once a bonded laborer working in the fields to repay his grandfather’s debt, was removed by activists and taken to live at Bal Ashram, a rehabilitation center for working children. As a teenager, he quickly rose to the top of his class, and got involved in cricket and theater.

He then returned to his village, where he helped end child bonded labor. In 2006, he was honored with the International Children’s Peace Prize, the world’s most prestigious award for children. He has since campaigned for a network of “child-friendly villages,” where child labor is prohibited.

“I will work to support the families of child laborers,” he said then, “so that children can go to school and enjoy their childhood.”

See an excerpt from “I Am“

Shelley Seale, a writer based in Austin, Texas, is the author of The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India.
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Nearly 22,000 Native Americans have served in the U.S. military, or are now serving in our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. An estimated 30 percent suffer from PTSD.

But conditions at home are hardly adequate to help them through the psychological and physical damages inflicted in war.

There’s no veterans’ hospital in the Navajo Nation, the country’s largest reservation. So veterans desperate for psychological help must drive hours, to Albuquerque or Salt Lake City, for treatment.

But some face racial discrimination or unsympathetic psychologists in the cities.

To deal with anxiety disorders, nightmares or suicidal thoughts, some try traditional healing methods. But many also resort to alcohol or drugs, as they try to keep their lives together in a land as harsh as it is beautiful.

Nicole Tung is a photographer based in Asia and New York. This essay won a 2008-2009 Hearst Photojournalism Award. See more of Nicole’s work at http://www.nicoletung.com.
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Once on the subway, I edit them. I see myself as something between a kid playing Nintendo and an adult reading a good book.

What I like most about shooting while commuting is the variety. People have different flavors. You can always tell the difference between a morning face and an evening face.

At first I was afraid that, by concentrating on shooting, I was detaching myself too much from reality. But then I realized that, on the contrary, I see more this way, because I unleash my imagination, and let my eye be captivated by these unexpected details I would have overlooked otherwise.

I’m drawn to the details.

The iPhone allows you to penetrate someone’s personal space without them knowing. You walk opposite them. You are looking into your phone. They don’t know you’re shooting.

The iPhone doesn’t have a flash. In low light conditions on the subway, the trick is to take pictures at the stops, or to be very still.

This way of working allows creativity, room to breathe. Editing, you also feel much closer to the picture, because you are editing with your finger.

Now I have a collection of nearly 700 pictures, and I’m considering doing what the monks do with their mandalas — posting them all for 24 hours, and then deleting them. It would be a lesson in non-attachment. Each time I see that commercial that asks: “What’s your carbon footprint?” I wonder: “What’s my digital footprint?”

See more of Adrian Mihai’s iPhone photos in his Facebook account.
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I was in Berlin during the week of Dec. 22 through Dec. 27, 1989, documenting “The Fall of the Wall.”  I was an upstart photojournalist, and had quit my job in the States and traveled to Europe to witness and record the historic events in Berlin.

About five days into my stay, events in Czechoslovakia caught my attention. The situation there was lower key, but certainly no less significant.  Over six weeks, a groundswell of anti-Communist sentiment burst into the open, morphing into a peaceful overthrow of Communism that later became known as The Velvet Revolution.

I had to go. I arrived in Prague on the morning of Dec. 28, just in time to witness the change of power and the hysteria of celebration.

Over the following six weeks, using neutral Vienna as a base, I made two more trips to Berlin, four to Prague and Bratislava (in Czechoslovakia) and one to Budapest, Hungary. My goal was to record as much of the rise of democracy in Communist Eastern Europe before maxing out my credit card and being forced to return to the U.S.

On one of my trips back to Prague in February 1990, I was surprised to find Old Town Square shoulder-to-shoulder with an estimated 500,000 anti-Soviet protestors. Though it had been more than three months since the Soviets were forced out of power,  they still hadn’t withdrawn their troops from Czechoslovakia.

The residents were restless and impatient. They rallied most of the day, demanding the Soviets leave.

On my initial trip to Prague, I crossed into Czechoslovakia at a border town called Hate (I swear!). The scenery was beautiful, with snow-frosted trees on rolling hills. This was in stark contrast to the flat grayness of East Germany.

But the horrible stench of air pollution was the same. Communist states were definitely not green.

In Prague, Old Town Square was sea of triumphant humanity. Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds filled the huge plaza as the people ushered in democracy. Folk dancers from all areas of the country performed. One dancer stomped his feet so hard he fell though the stage. Czechoslovakia’s newly elected president Vaclav Havel, a distinguished playwright and leader of the dissidents, spoke briefly and eloquently. His famous battle cry during his five-week faceoff with the Soviet Empire:  “Truth and love will prevail over lies and hate, ” echoed throughout the plaza. There was much laughter, much joy and many tears. At the end, he thanked everyone.

The roar seemed as if it could be heard in throughout Eastern Europe. It was certainly heard in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Moscow. He did not send in the tanks as his predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev, had in 1969. Many walls were falling, and the seeds of democracy had already taken root.

The Prague celebration officially ended at 11 p.m., but the jubilant crowd partied through the night.  People were singing songs and chanting “Viva Havel.” Younger groups were holding hands, kicking up their feet and running in circles as fast as they could. I was thrilled to be in their company, recording their faces and movements. Everybody seemed ecstatic. After the celebration across from the clock tower in the Old Town Square ended, a large crowd began singing and chanting in front of the nearby District Communist Party Headquarters.

Hundreds of empty beer and champagne bottles stood edge to edge, like soldiers in formation, in front of the entrance. They were symbols of triumph and the guardians of future freedoms. Somebody tried to burn the communist sign above the doorway, but was forcibly removed by revelers who insisted on a “peaceful celebration.”

An older gentleman with tears in his eyes was so happy to see a member of the Western media that he ran up and kissed me on the cheek, uttering in broken English, “Thank you. Thank you for being here.”

I saw him sit on a dimly lit bench. As I drew closer, I could see that he was weeping uncontrollably. He was a proud man. He chose this spot away from the crowd so nobody would notice his tears. They were a long time coming.

This was an historic event for me also. In more than 20 years as a photojournalist, it’s only time I’ve ever been “thanked” for “being here.”

Revisiting

Fast-forward 20 years.

In 2009, I decided it was time to return. Naturally, I wanted to take part in any anniversary celebrations, but I was also very curious to see what changes had occurred as a result of two decades of democracy and Westernization.

It was difficult to pre-plan anything, because as wonderful as the Internet is, it was difficult to find information on any planned events the country that was now the Czech Republic, after peaceful separation from Slovakia. I assumed there would be something, but that it would either be low key, or that I wasn’t searching the right way. I downloaded a Czech keyboard, pasted in translated keywords on Czech websites and searched through local Prague newspapers, in English and in translated Czech. Nothing.

Undeterred, I packed my bags went to Prague. I had booked a hotel several months earlier right on the Old Town Square, the scene of much of the hysteria I’d experienced two decades earlier. I figured the worst that could happen would be I’d have a nice five-day vacation in what I remembered to be a very beautiful city.

Arriving on Nov. 14, via train from Berlin, I was amazed how little Prague had changed. If anything it was even more beautiful than I remembered. Somehow, with the exception of graffiti everywhere (a liberty provided by the freedom of speech that democracy had brought), they had managed to stave off the ugly side of capitalization and Westernization. The only signs of it were the occasional KFC and Starbucks. I saw one of the latter on the square, next to the 600-year-old Town Hall clock tower — a polar opposite and cultural erosion of the Old World charm that permeates the historic core of the city.

Across the square, in a storefront in a former Communist headquarters, was a Cartier’s. Not nearly as offensive, but a scar just the same. At least an attempt has been made to blend it in somewhat.

On the morning of Nov. 17th, I walked down to Wenceslas Square, convinced there would be some kind of celebration.  This square also looked exactly as I remembered it.  But now I saw a display of photos about the Velvet Revolution. In front of the Saint Wenceslas statue, where thousands had gathered 20 years earlier and held vigils, was a permanent memorial to Jan Palach and Jan Zajic, two students who had burned themselves alive in early 1969, in protest of the Russian overthrow of Czechoslovakia following the Prague Spring of 1968.

Fifty yards south of the memorial was a man standing on a taxi yelling in Czech to approximately 100 people.  I thought it had something to do with the anniversary, but he turned out to be a taxi driver, wired on Red Bull. He was shouting that his democracy now gave him the right to price-gouge tourists. He was protesting impending laws regulating city cabs.

In the afternoon I wandered about the Old Town Square, where 20 years earlier more than 500,000 people had celebrated the coming of democracy.  It was full now, too, but with beer gardens and food stalls, and revelers celebrating “communist prices.” Bananas, considered a delicacy back due to the fresh fruit and vegetable shortages, were handed around.  Bratwurst, ham, breads, cheeses, chicken dishes, and cured sausages of every variety, complimented free flowing Pilsner. Twenty years ago, I couldn’t find a decent meal.  A restaurant I’d found back then had only two items on the menu; one of them, a meat dish of sorts, sold out. Everything was written in Czech and to this day I have no idea what I ate there, except I know it was disgusting.

I came across a barricaded street with a stage set up, and various events taking place nearby. Those standing around were given a four-roll package of high-quality toilet paper. In Communist times, toilet paper was prized, and its quality very poor. Some in the crowd thrust the toilet paper in the air in jubilation, as if it were trophy they had just won.

At last I learned that marchers would be re-traversing the route the students took 20 years earlier, when they were violently confronted by police.  That event was the catalyst that had triggered the Revolution.

Within hours the crowds swelled to over 100,000; traffic was frozen.  Chanting marchers, waving Czech flags and banners and flashing peace signs, clogged the road. As a light show that ended the festivities showered the crowd, and its sparks faded away,  I thought of how it might symbolize the Iron Curtain and Communism fizzling out. Then came a concert, with bands playing until the wee hours.

I realized that this event was as poorly planned and publicized as the one at the end of the Communist Era – only this time, there was no paranoia. No one was looking around for the secret police, or worried about being thrown in jail for expressing anti-government sentiment.  It was just a good old-fashioned celebration of freedom.

The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe: A Timeline

1989

June 4 Pro-labor Solidarity candidates led by Lech Walesa almost swept the Polish elections, stunning the world by ousting the Communist rulers at almost every level of government.

Early July – The secret police, the Stasi, stand by as anti-Communism protests unfold in the East German cities of Leipzig and Dresden. They feared a repeat of the bloody student protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square the previous month.

August 19 – European unity activists stage a “picnic” at a Hungary/Austria border crossing. The barrier at the border was opened, allowing East and West to join in celebration. More than 600 people who drove from East Germany and Czechoslovakia used the opportunity to slip across the unguarded border to freedom in the West.

October 18 – Rising protests in East Germany force Erich Honecker to resign as Head of State and the Party leader.

November 4 – A huge rally in East Berlin draws 500,000 people, who demand a relaxation of travel restrictions. Demonstrations erupt in 40 other cities, and the  world takes notice.

November 9 – Yielding to pressure, the Politburo rewrites the travel laws allowing East Germans to apply for visits to West Berlin and West Germany. Thousands of East Germans storm the border crossings. Overwhelmed, the crossing guards put down their weapons and open the gates. Within minutes, people are dancing on the Berlin Wall in celebration.

November 17 – Students in Prague demanding reform clash with police during demonstrations that last for several days.

November 22 – Some 500,000 people gather in Prague to listen to Vaclav Havel’s speech calling for peaceful demonstrations and worker strikes, demanding the resignations of Communist government leaders. Over the next six weeks, strikes and demonstrations bring the government to its knees. These events became known as the Velvet Revolution, as the goal was achieved without violence.

November 27 – Following a two-hour general strike, the Communist party announces it will relinquish control in Czechoslovakia, and dismantle the single-party system. Within days, border obstructions are removed between Austria and West Germany, and the East. Communist Czech President Gustav Husak resigned on December 10, paving the way for free elections.

December 16 -19 - Demonstrations over several days in Timisoara, Romania turn bloody as the military fires upon the crowd of almost 750,000, trying to disperse them. 162 people are killed. Rioting spreads around the country, forcing President Nicolae Ceausescu to flee on Dec. 22. He was arrested in hiding, tried the next day and executed on Dec. 25.

December 22 – A portion of the “The Berlin Wall” is torn down at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, bringing together the two divided cities for the first time in 28 years. More than 40,000 people from both sides showed up to witness the historic event that took place in the middle of the night.

December 29 – The Federal Assembly in Czechoslovakia unanimously votes in Vaclav Havel as the new president.

1990

February – Czechs demonstrate to demand the departure of Soviet troops

1994

July 4 Havel is awarded the Philadelphia Liberty Medal for his leadership role in the peaceful overthrow of Communism in Czechoslovakia. In his acceptance speech, he said: “The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world.”

We had been given vague directions by community organizers; supposedly trucks took people from here, the center of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second city and a onetime Mayan capital, to remote mountain communities like the one we wanted to visit, Santa Anita la Union.

The dirt road made for a bumpy ride, but the freshness of the air, dense with fog, and the lush, green vegetation, instantly calmed me. We paid five quetzales each, (about 60 cents in the summer of 2009), and after about three hours, the truck dropped us off in front of an open gate with a sign.

Life in Santa Anita

Children were playing basketball in an open court, the mountains as their backdrop. Some stared; others just said “buenas tardes.” We asked a girl where we could find the community leader Don Sergio, and she brought us to his famil’s small cement house.

Santa Anita was developed after Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, by former leftist guerrilla fighters of the Organizacion del Pueblo en Armas. Now many of the ex-fighters have families, and are trying to support the next generation by developing the coffee-growing cooperative they’ve created here.

We learned that many adults went by two names: their birth name and their nom de guerre. Sergio’s birth name is Rigoberto Augustin.

Building a Community from Bare Land

After the peace accords were signed in 1996, and the guerrilla force to which the members of this community had belonged also signed, turning over their weapons, the ex-fighters were given an opportunity to buy this land.

Many of them had spent years in the jungle, separated from their former lives.

They named their community Santa Anita. They were only 32 families (they are 36 now), but over the past 13 years, they’ve taught themselves to cultivate, harvest and sell coffee.

To earn extra money, they encourage volunteers to bring in foreign visitors like us. Now there’s a community center to host us, with beds and two bathrooms.

Soaking in the comfort of plush couches and the warm richness of their fresh coffee, we sat with Sergio, 55, and the tourism coordinator, Gloria “Teresa” Elena Gomez, 34, and talked about life here, and recent events nearby.

The coup in Honduras was on everyone’s mind, and Sergio said he and others were watching closely, because they were afraid it could set a precedent for other Central American countries.

Sergio gave us a tour of the farm, so we could see the coffee production process, and become acquainted with what he considers his “schoolhouse”: the hum of Guatemala’s breathtaking mountains, where he lived for 17 years while fighting.

“When I walk the mountains, its always like a re-encounter with my house of many years, of much of my life,” he said. He pointed out that, as one of the founders, he had lived in Santa Anita, for 11 years, and that it would be another six before he’d match his 17 years of fighting.

“I think that the greatest memory of the mountain is that it was the bastion for the revolutionary war in Guatemala,” he said, surrounded by the call of tropical birds and the rush of a nearby waterfall.

“That, for me, is what the mountains mean –as a stage of struggle, a stage of liberty, to be able to establish for us in this country a system of peace and democracy, that we Guatemalans struggle now to construct so that this becomes a reality over time.”

People in Santa Anita are still trying to reconstruct their lives, after a war that left an estimated 150,000 people dead, saw hundreds of Mayan villages destroyed and, by the count of a human rights group led by an activist Roman Catholic bishop who was subsequently murdered, displaced as many as one million people. It is considered one of Latin America’s most brutal wars.

Growing Coffee: Another Kind of Struggle

In terms of self-sustainability and autonomy, a coffee plantation is by no means a sure bet.

Ever-changing weather patterns can delay the planting season, and the people of Santa Anita had a lot to learn before they could produce a quality batch of coffee beans, or even a good cup of coffee.

Money is scarce. The group has tried a couple of different models of income distribution, but families still can barely sustain themselves on the coffee harvest. Teresa’s husband must travel to Quetzaltenango for work. When he comes home, he pays other people to help him around the farm.

Coffee prices are volatile, too. In 2002, they fell to a 30-year low, inspiring Oxfam America to publish a report on the coffee crisis.

“Small-scale coffee farmers and farm workers remain extremely vulnerable,” that report, The Coffee Crisis Continues, concluded in 2005.

Santa Anita is still working hard to pay off the high-interest government loans it took out to buy this land. The group borrowed $300,000, at a 12% interest rate; since they’re paying it back very slowly, they still owe the same amount today!

Entire families work together on randomly-assigned plots. Some were lucky enough to draw good areas with lots of shade, while others needed to put more effort into clearing and preparing the land.

Smaller farmers lack the expertise, and equipment, of larger operations.

Here, for example, coffee growing has been based on trial and error. Before the war, some of the adults worked with their families on large farms, as day laborers, and knew how to use machetes to harvest. They have divided the process into stages, assigning each a leader. We met the man who plants and cares for the seedlings, which are first planted in the shade in individual bags and then moved to soil, to grow with direct sunlight.

The village makes its own fertilizer with special vitamins and minerals, which they carry to the vast, mountainous terrain where the coffee plants grow to maturity. During the fall harvest, families carry the heavy baskets of beans back up to the center of town, to be further prepared for packaging and consumption.

Santa Anita works with Cafe Conciencia, an non-governmental organization in Quetzaltenango that specializes in helping worker-owned coffee cooperatives develop their businesses. The Guatemalan country director, Omar Mejia, said the group also wants to broaden the definition of what makes coffee “fair trade.” Labels alone, he said, do not always guarantee fair or equal labor standards.

Cafe Conciencia sells coffee from Santa Anita and a couple of other communities through its website. Mejia, who is finishing a degree in agronomy, also offers scientific expertise about how to grow the coffee, so this community can produce more, higher-quality coffee with every harvest.

The community’s hospitality, and the constant crow of its roosters, were hypnotizing. A people that had lived through so much violence was trying to make life better for its children. But there is no guarantee that the next generation will stick around to maintain the cooperative. Sergio said that the children were like the coffee plants; some grow strong and bear fruit, while others do not receive the proper nourishment, and don’t give back in the end.

Santa Anita has created a supplementary school, with a modest library and a computer lab. The curriculum includes a kind of civil war history locals say is rarely, if ever, taught in state-mandated classes.

Machismo, Eternal Machismo

Sergio’s wife, Aurora Vicente “Juana” Jives, 51, leads a group of indigenous women in the surrounding communities who meet for discussions, and encourage one another to become more independent and self-confident.

Juana said domestic violence is a big problem in this region.

“We give help. If the companera doesn’t want it, she doesnt’ want it, or she is really afraid. If we can’t convince her, maybe we can convince some people who talk with her,” she said.

Juana later added,”The problem that we have had the most with the participation of women is dependence…because here the women depend economically on their husbands, economically on the home, economically on the living situation. So they don’t have this autonomy, this liberty to decide. For anything they have to consult their husbands — and if he says no, then she can’t.

During the war, Juana and Teresa said, they were treated equally with the men, unlike today. Teresa said that she and her husband still split household chores evenly, according to the ethics they followed as guerrilleros.

The war also gave Juana, Sergio and Teresa at chance to “study.” They learned to read and write in the jungle, guns by their sides.

But after the war, women mostly lost status; they began to revert to traditional roles.

Slipping Away Before a Protest

We debated staying an extra day, but were told that a single day could turn into three: area residents were organizing a demonstration against a nearby mine, one of those that had buying up area land. Such purchases force the residents to move, and also make them fear environmental dangers, such as acid rain. The march would block the main roads to Quetzaltenango, so we had to leave before it started.

Our insider information from Santa Anita’s leaders forced us into Sergio’s car at 4 a.m. We waited for a half hour in the cold Jeep, half asleep and speaking softly about the village, the protest and life.

We boarded the bus that Monday morning, clutching our bulky travel bags, to join the people heading to work for the week to compensate for the lack of economic opportunities in the countryside.

“The fighting ended when we turned in our arms,” Juana had said, “but our ideas continued because there wasn’t a change. That is to say that, with the dialogue and the signing of the peace agreement, there wasn’t lot of change. The same system continued. The same injustice continued.”

Learn More

Guatemala's civil war ends at last

Santa Anita de la Union info

Cafe Conciencia

Mining in Central America - an Oxfam report

Tsunahiki, the Great Tug of War, is an annual harvest ritual in the islands of Okinawa. It was said to first symbolize a 17th-century struggle between two kings, and later held to petition the gods for a successful harvest.

Legend has it that the first tsunahiki was held after a wise old man advised a village chief that a tug of war between two rice paddy crews would rid the crop of bugs and disease. It worked.

Separate ropes are woven, one representing male and the other female. Each has a loop at the fighting end. Teams from the east and west sections of the town line up behind their respective ropes. The looped ends are  joined with a large wooden pole, and men playing the ancient kings stand atop the ropes, taunting the opposing team.

Smaller ropes stream from the sides, so the contestants can tug — the main rope is actually impossible to grasp.

An gold-colored ball held aloft by a crane signals the start. Balloons and colored streamers float down over the crowds, who begin to chant and pull. Drums are beaten, whistles blow, muscles strain and the rope disappears into crowd.

In 30 minutes it’s over, with the team able to pull the rope 10 feet toward its side declared the winner. This year (2009) it’s a tie. I hope that still means an abundant harvest!

“It just so happened to be an old 1960s gold Cadillac, with a wonderful cream and velour interior…. I don’t realize it’s a gangbangers’ car.”

He tears down the freeway late at night, eager to get home, and accidentally exits into some dicey neighborhood.

“It’s completely dark everywhere; I can just about see movement in the shadows.”

Relieved to spot an LAPD car, he leans on his horn.

The cops jump out and run over to him, waving big guns.

“Is this your vehicle?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Whose is it?”

He explains.

“See those guys over there?”

And I see like a patch of black guys, hard core gang members.

“Those guys are about ready to kill you for your car. This is a carjacking, gangbanging car. That is the prize car. And you will die in this vehicle if you carry on driving in this area.”

See Normski’s video: 4.18 minutes

See more of Normski Anderson’s work

“The whole idea behind my site is to show that Iran is not a dangerous country,” he explained. “To show that for the most part it’s a beautiful country, with kind, loving and hospitable people.”

The anxious reactions of his L.A. friends to his move inspired him to start the blog, as a way of commuicating with them, of telling them he’d be safe.  “Life Goes on in Tehran,” he called it.

“Their fears and lack of knowledge about Iran [are] justified, and a result of the negative portrayal of this country in Western media - as well as sound bites from a certain controversial president,” he wrote [George W. Bush was president then].

But soon “Life” developed a cult following. Expat Iranians were vicariously connecting to the country through his posts. He started a Facebook page, which attracted more than 2,000 fans.

He fumes about the traffic, the crazy drivers, the cinder block architecture. Tehran is “so ugly it’s beautiful,” he complains. He mourns the loss of a beloved aunt. A new baby is born; month by month, we watch her grow up.

Although he exalts in a visit to L.A., and an extended film-editing assignment in Europe, his connection to the city deepens. We watch him rent an apartment and hire movers, feeling guilty over how little they’re paid.

Sometimes he removes a picture, perhaps to keep people he knows from being identified.

That’s one reason he’s chosen to remain anonymous. Another, of course, is to keep from attracting the attention of the Iranian authorities. We respect his choice here.

Then, after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is declared relected in June 2009, and demonstrators take to the streets to protest that the elections had been fraudulent, he abruptly stops posting.

He says he’s lost the will to shoot.

What is daily life if not with the most basic of human rights? he wonders, in October.

Partly, he says, three years in Tehran have changed him.

I was always an outsider looking in or an insider looking out, and could have the perspective of an “other” to spice up my comments and present a more complete picture of life in Tehran. But right now I feel like an insider looking in, without the ability to rise above the socio-political landscape that surrounds me.

I am hoping that time will provide me with that perspective, he writes, in November. Maybe next month….

See the blog Life Goes on in Tehran

In 1920, he figured the best investment was real estate. He constructed an apartment building in Heliopolis, a flourishing, quiet neighborhood in Cairo. He designed the building with the help of an architect and built the structure from the ground up. “A self-made man,” my mother calls him.

The structure is two small apartment buildings, side by side. The walls of one fuse into the walls of the other. Whenever I visited this building as a child, I was always amazed at the secret doors that passed from the pantry of one apartment to the hallway of the adjoining building. I suppose that’s what happens when families settle in Siamese-twin homes.

One of my great-grandfather’s first tenants was an Armenian named Kevork Hagopian, who arrived in Cairo in the 1930s. At the time, and for many years after, real estate “contracts” in Cairo were based on good faith and a firm handshake. That’s all my great grandfather required when Hagopian took up residence n the 2690 square foot, three-bedroom first-floor apartment — a New York Dream. Just one small gesture of trust: a handshake. In return, Hagopian promised to pay about seven Egyptian pounds a month in rent. That comes out to about one American dollar.

This was more than 70 years ago.

Hagopian was faithful to the handshake, even after he started going a little crazy. Hagopian wasn’t always crazy, though no one in my family can recall when Hagopian started to get a bit loopy. Maybe when he hit 60, around 1980. It’s hard to pinpoint a moment, but he was still paying his own rent in the ’60s, so that was a good sign. He aged with the building. As the walls yellowed with time, he got older. He lived unmarried and alone. His social etiquette dried up like the sickly plants that lined his dying first- floor garden. It was always dark in Hagopian’s apartment. No one visited, no one came. He talked to no one except himself. As he got older, his nephew started to pay his rent.

Over the years, the outer walls of that building in Heliopolis have seen a lot: independence, three presidents, one massive nationalization plan, the assassination of one of those presidents, and a couple of wars, to name just a few. No wonder the walls have aged.

Charles, my great-grandfather, died in 1960. After his death, the Heliopolis property was split up and the various apartments passed down to his five children. He had four girls, and one boy. His only son, now the man of the family, dealt with the tenants and rents. One of the girls, Hilda, was my grandmother.

Inevitably, all five offspring had children of their own. Hilda, my grandmother, met my grandfather, a young lawyer of Armenian descent who worked in her father’s office. They got married and had two daughters, one of whom is my mother.

More offspring came. Bits and pieces of the building were passed down further. Ownership of the apartments was scattered across the globe, as the descendents moved to various places. Some stayed in Egypt and lived in the building. Others left. My mother married my father and moved away. Her sister, my aunt, ended up in France with her two sons. A few descendents remained to take care of the aging building.

Which brings us to the present.

Recently, my father’s foreign service job, which led to 23 years of country-hopping, led my parents back to a post in Cairo again, where they originally met. Suddenly we were re-immersed in the world of the Heliopolis building again. The many complications of its many tenants had exploded since its simple beginning in the 1920s. The storeowners on the first floor didn’t have contracts. The fifth floor tenant left her faucet on, causing an impromptu flood of water that poured down on the apartment below. The list of grievances grew longer and longer.

In the meantime, old Kevork Hagopian, the original Armenian tenant, was still unassumingly wasting away in the darkness of his first-floor apartment. He rarely went out, rarely bought food, rarely ate, it seemed. He was small, pale and perpetually wore a pointy hat on his head. He occasionally could be seen peering out through the slats of his window shades. He took to spitting on passers-by when he could get a decent shot as they entered the building. Once in a while, my aunt got him to talk to her, but she was the only one. I was terrified of him.

When he died in 2007, his death had the gnawing heaviness of any death that almost goes unnoticed. The only one who came to Hagopian’s side after his death was his nephew — who happened to share the exact same name as his uncle; Kevork Hagopian.

No one is sure where he swooped in from to clear his uncle’s belongings, but we presume he lived in Cairo his entire life. It was one of the gray, unknown areas of the nephew’s life that remain obscure. He spoke with my relatives. He insisted that he needed some time to gather all of his uncle’s things, receive grieving visitors, and then he would be off. My relatives agreed that he could stay 40 days, to mourn and collect the leftovers of his uncle’s existence.

He stayed a week. Then two. Then three weeks, which turned into a month, then two months, then several months. Before we knew it, the 40 days had passed without a peep from him.

He refused to return the apartment keys. My relatives, frustrated with attempts to negotiate and get him out, finally filed a lawsuit against him. In response, the nephew took refuge in what everyone knew was an ingenious lie.

He stood up in court, in front of the judge and everyone, and exclaimed, “What are you talking about? I’m not dead. No one has died. I’m Kevork Hagopian. I defy you to find any piece of paperwork that proves that this man, whom they claim to be dead, is dead.”

Since that moment more attention has been paid to Kevork Hagopian than in his entire life. What was his middle name? Where was he born? Where was he buried? Was he buried in an unmarked grave or an Orthodox Armenian cemetery? In December 2008, while visiting my parents in Egypt, I witnessed a macabre chase to salvage any information about Hagopian’s life. My relatives were completely flummoxed, totally frustrated with the lack of viable paperwork, and everyone was running out of ideas.

The entire affair spun even further out of control when the apparent imposter turned the tables. He decided to sue the family for perjury. He claimed that we lied in court about him being “dead.”

The only way my family could retaliate was by finding any documentation of his uncle’s death to prove to the court we weren’t lying. Oddly enough, the certificate of death was nowhere to be found.

I should explain here something about Egyptian rent laws. The law is traditionally on the side of the renter and not the landlord, probably because of the socialist strain in Egyptian law that started when President Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in 1952.

Because so many “contracts” were made with a handshake, it’s practically impossible to kick out a tenant if they are not paying rent, because there is no paper contract. To add to that, rent control is considered hereditary. Hagopian’s rent had risen from seven Egyptian pounds to 15, but due to President Nasser’s rent control changes the 1960s, it has remained 15 pounds — about two and a half U.S. dollars per month — till this day.

Recently, the law was changed to apply only to the first generation of children, and to children who had lived in the residence with their parents. But until recently, you could pass down an obscenely low rent from generation to generation. My mother’s cousin, who had lived in that apartment building practically all her life, one floor up from my grandparents’ apartment, had noticed some changes. From below, from that first floor apartment, she could hear the hollow thud and crash of breaking concrete. It was coming from Hagopian’s. The nephew, a photographer, was knocking down the walls of the place, attempting to build what we presumed was his very own photo studio.

None of us could approach him about this business of breaking down walls. That would be “acknowledging his presence,” the lawyer said.

On my last day in Egypt, my parents took a trip to the Armenian Orthodox cemetery, a bouquet of roses in hand, to find out where the mysterious uncle had been buried. After an afternoon of trying to decipher gravestones covered in Armenian script, and interrogating the graveyard guard, they returned home, defeated and empty handed. No corpse. No grave.

“The guard said he could have been buried in a mass grave,” my mother said. I shuddered at the idea of a faceless, lifeless mass of people pressed against each other, robbed of their place in collective memory.

And that’s where we stand.

This evident imposter had swept in, picked up the neglected pieces of his uncle’s life, and erased any trace of his uncle’s existence. He’d stolen almost seventy years of someone’s life for a rent-controlled apartment.

It kind of begs the question–what won’t people do for a three-bedroom apartment with kitchen and washer/dryer?

This story first appeared in Street Level, the annual magazine of top undergraduate reporting of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

In August of 2008, I took a trip with my friend Natalie to visit them for the first time. Though I didn’t necessarily find the Hawaii I’d always imagined, the clear blue skies or pristine ivory beaches, I found other things.

Nude Beach

“Hi, I’m Little John. What are your names?” asked a middle-aged man with stringy yellow hair and red skin that hung from his tall frame in loose folds. We tried to concentrate on his sun-chapped lips instead of looking down. Little John was not so little.

“Are ya’ll from out of town? he asked, after we took turns shaking his clammy hand. I resisted the urge to cover myself with my towel. “You look like you need some sun,” he said. I felt my pale skin redden.

This was Little Beach, a secret nook hidden between two walls of volcanic rock in Makena. Our hosts had mischievously directed us here without mentioning the main attraction. Fascinated and embarrassed, we found a spot for our towels a safe distance from the all the nudes and stretched out on our stomachs.

Most of our fellow sunbathers were middle-aged and Caucasian, sitting in groups or pairs, chatting, joking, passing joints.  Some had butts as flat as cardboard or as hairy as heads. Their breasts hung low to the middle or low to the sides, with nipples like saucers, or chocolate dimes. To our right, a copper-skinned Hawaiian woman practiced yoga on her towel, every inch of her strong, compact body the same luxurious shade of golden brown. People really do come in all shapes and sizes, I thought.

“Should we?” wondered Natalie.

“Why not?” I said.

Trying to seem nonchalant, we slipped off our suits and turned on our backs. The soft ocean breeze felt different now; more intimate. The sky turned a sharper blue, like the iris of some clear, all-seeing eye. I was just beginning to feel at home in my new skin, when Little John approached, hand outstretched, fuzzy blonde legs planted firmly and confidently apart.

The Fire Dancer

Just upland of Kula is a zip-lining course. Janet and Kelena drove us there one drizzly day for a discounted private tour. Our guides’ names were Sean and Ailani: lean, smart-mouthed daredevils in khakis and Aviators. Through the misty leaf-green light, we zipped from one platform to the next. Sean went first, twisting midair like a dancer, while Ailani clipped carabiners to our diaper-like harnesses and sent us careening through the trees.

“Perfect,” said Sean each time we reached his end of the line, struggling to control our feet as they pattered up the platform. Like graceful little woodland creatures. We liked him. He had strawberry blonde hair and a square, dimpled chin, and was charming and fearless. Probably in his mid-20s, we guessed.

Sean’s passion, he told us later, was fire dancing. He invited us over to his house, a sparsely furnished two-bedroom, whose most notable features were a pink gecko named Alex and a tiny red snake named Zeke. His roommates weren’t interested in meeting us. I had a feeling we were not the first young tourists to pass through Sean’s life, freshly-tanned and curious, collecting adventure stories to tell their friends at home.

Sean took us out to his backyard, which had a perfect view of the coast and the light-speckled towns below. We passed around a joint for awhile, and then Sean pulled out his flaming batons. He twirled them through his fingers, tossed them into the air, juggled them between his legs. Once he even missed, and a flaming baton went swirling into the bushes.

He was 31, we learned, born and raised in Chesterton, Indiana with five brothers and sisters and the dream of becoming a professional fire dancer.  When we left that night, I watched him fade away in my rearview mirror by the light of his batons.

The Redwoods of Polipoli

On our last day in Maui, we hiked through the Polipoli redwoods. At 6,200 feet above sea level, the highest point in Maui, Polipoli is one of the few places outside of California where redwoods grow. But not many tourists come. Through a mist so thick it blocked our view of the sky, and even the tops of the giant russet trees around us, Natalie and I hiked in silence, bending every now and then to collect a brilliant red or orange or yellow leaf.  No sound but our breaths and the crunch of our shoes on the trail.

For a moment, a mile down a winding path obscured in myth, I thought: how nice it would be just to stay here. Instead of going back to Ohio to wrestle through my second year of college, through the highs and the lows, the piles of paperwork, the inevitable toughening. Why not just stay? Where small-town boys from Indiana make a living flying from tree to tree and juggling flaming batons. Where you come to escape your past, to spread free love, to share your naked body with the sun. Where growing up is someone else’s problem.

Other things were different. The city seemed richer and more developed, but not in a good way. Trabzon had sprawled 15 miles west to Akcaabat, which had been an outlying town before, and east to Yomra and Arakli. To the south, they’d cut down the hazelnut fields, and built apartment houses on that land. This was probably all done with the money people earned working in factories in Germany (there were still daily flights).

And they’d widened the highway that runs along the Black Sea. You used to see hundreds of people strolling by the water there, every day; now the traffic cut them off. I missed the feeling of walking quietly along the water.

One day we visited Uzungol, a village in the mountains nearby that’s become a major tourist attraction. Almost everyone seemed to be running a little hotel or restaurant, though we saw lots of women still working in the fields. Even in June, it was misty and cool. That’s Black Sea climate — good for growing hazelnuts and tea, and for making everything green.

We were in Alappuzha, on the shores of Vembanad Lake in Kerala state. This is a backwater world, with labyrinthine canals, lagoons, lakes and rivers that drain into the Arabian Sea. In the local Malayalam language, Alappuzha (pronounced Allapura) means “a broad river,” or “the land between the sea and a network of rivers flowing into it.”

I was relieved to be on the water. Kerala, a landscape of coconut trees, paddy fields and banana plantations, had invaded my waking hours, and had blundered through my dreams like Shreks with arms of green fronds. I needed a breather from the lushness.

We entered a portal of shimmer globules that rocked on the waters, flashed through the trees and shone on paddy fields and the tips of plants.

How Parasurama Created Kerala

This region rose from the water due to geological seismic shifts in the sea thousands of years ago. For natives, though, the ancient mythological story of Parasurama, the sixth avatar of Lord Vishnu, is closer to the heart. It is said that this warrior sage vanquished all the male members of the Kshatriya clan, the ruling warrior caste of ancient times, and filled five lakes with their blood. To atone for his sin, Parasurama meditated for a long time. He was then blessed by Varuna, the god of the Oceans, and Bhumidevi, the goddess of Earth, and  traveled to the southern tip of India. From there he flung his bloodied battleaxe across the sea. The waters immediately receded from the spot where the ax fell, creating an eight-mile wide shore. And so Kerala was born.

They say that in Alappuzha children learn to swim before they can walk. We see vignettes of daily life on the embankments as we pass. A woman in a blue sari blouse, bare midriff and bright mustard lungi (a cloth wrap around the waist) scrubbed clothes on a stone slab; a group of school children sprinted along a dusty path, their satchels slapping behind them. At a jetty station, clusters of villagers wait for the boat-bus or for catamarans to ferry them to their destinations, while nearby boatmen offload goods wrapped in gunnysacks or Styrofoam.

Dugouts, canoes and paddleboats carry loads of cooking gas cylinders, rocks and sand-filled sacks; cashews and bags of rice; coconuts with their husks gleaming orange gold in the sun. The middle portions of the long country boats are just inches above the water, somehow avoiding being swamped. Fishermen, their boats stationed in the middle of the lagoons, are intent on their catch, while nearby the black cormorant birds stood rock still in Samadhi meditation before zinging into the water for their aquatic meal.

Not many people looked our way. Maybe they were tired of tourists, and just veered around them as they would a shoal of ducks gliding across their path.

And so we moved on this shimmer highway - a phantom water vehicle along with other boats.

Barges Retooled As Houseboats

We began to see the huge exotic domed-roofed houseboats known as kettuvalloms, or “boats with knots.” The planks are held together with coconut fiber, and caustic black resin extracted from boiled cashew kernels holds the ropes in place. It’s an ancient construction technique that uses no nails. Though rustic looking, these behemoths can carry about 30 tons - and if well-maintained, last for generations.

In the mid-18th century, kettuvalloms were commercial barges, shipping rice, cashews, spices and paddy harvest some 40 miles through these canals and lagoons to the port at Cochin. It could take boatmen five days to a week to carry a load to port, and they lived on the waters for most of the year. It was easy to catch the abundant fish, which they marinated with spices and ate with rice.  And when the moon sailed through the night they hung their lanterns in the kettuvallams and perhaps sang native songs before slipping into deep slumber on the thin mattresses on the floor of the hull, no doubt unaware that road and rail construction on the land nearby would one day put them out of business.

And yes, it was only a matter of time. In the 20th century, the lumbering kettuvalloms were sidelined by roads and rails, then air travel.  Then in the early 1970s, a few enterprising local entrepreneurs began to revive them as houseboats.  By the 1990s they were cast as luxury barges for tourists, where visitors could travel for one or several days, accompanied by oarsmen and a cook. Typical onboard dishes are pearl spot fish, rice and prawn curry, with the lentil flatbread pappadam and Kerala payasam, a rice pudding-like dessert.

“Madam, lench?”

Our boatman’s question cut through my reverie. He steered toward an eatery on the banks, where we were offered a simple menu of kappa (steamed and mashed tapioca) with meen (fish curry) and plump rice. The cooks doubled as waiters and cashiers, racing in and out of the kitchen to serve as many people as fast as they could.

Next we headed for Kumarakom, a cluster of islands. The somnambulistic drift of our boat, the slosh of oars, and the water spray erupting with each stroke; the women either working in the paddy fields, hustling after household chores, or drying coconut husks for twisting into strong coir ropes; were all woven into the silver-edged rhythm.

We would later continue another 150 miles by road to Kanyakumari, at the southernmost tip of India, where the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea merge; from where Parasurama had thrown his ax northward; where, amid the crash of frothing waves, Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes were placed before being scattered into the Arabian Sea.

But for now I was cradled in Alappuzha’s luminescent bubble, with life reflecting on itself from above and below on a softly heaving shimmering surface.

Learn more about Alappuzha

Hiring a kettuvallom

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Sometimes I stood in the market or at the Wailing Wall shooting the same challah, woman, or rabbi 18 times; at other times I would see the photo before I took it, and know I could not shoot it again.

I’d visited 15 years before, to celebrate a bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah with four generations of my extended family. This time, I was meeting the family of my boyfriend (who would, soon afterward, become my fiance).

The Israelis I met were friendly, yet tough; the land was warm, but rugged. This mingling of opposing characteristics inspired most of these photographs.

The attitudes of the people - their postures, expressions, laughter or sadness - suggested that their way of life was bound to this particular land.

I carried their energy home. Even though it could not be cultivated anywhere else, it was still deliciously contagious and electrifying.

I was working as an upstart photojournalist for one of the Vegas newspapers. Even though this was just at the dawn of my career, I immediately recognized the historic significance of the events unfolding in the Soviet Bloc countries. Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany were revolting against Soviet dominance, and Communism itself.

What was happening pulled at me to the point of obsession. Nightly newscasts and updates only made it worse. I felt a hunger to be there. After six weeks of inner turmoil, my boss made it easy for me to quit my job.

I didn’t have any money, but my pockets were filled with desire. I only hoped it wasn’t too late. I moved all my belongings into storage, and with nothing more than a credit card, my cameras and a small suitcase, I flew to Vienna, where my older sister was living at the time. The plan was to use her flat as a staging point to travel overland to East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungry and Romania to document the world-changing events, and be a firsthand witness to unfolding history.

Even though I had schooled in Europe and had traveled extensively through Germany and the rest of Europe, I didn’t know much about Berlin, except for what I had read about the “Wall.”

The plane touched down in Vienna around 10 a.m. on Christmas Eve. My sister and I rented a car, drove to her apartment, showered, packed, and an hour later, began the 10-hour drive to Berlin. We had no idea what was in store for us. My sister’s Austrian friends thought we were crazy to drive through East Germany.

Six hours later, as we approached the East German border, we saw barbed wire fencing and a couple of watchtowers with guards holding machine guns. We entered the country through a small border town called Hirschberg. I felt like I was driving into a maximum security prison.

Were They Following Us?

The guards stamped our passports without saying a word, and waved us through. It was around 7 p.m., and Hirschberg looked like a ghost town, except for a gas station and restaurant. The roads were filled with potholes, and the air pollution was awful. There was an ominous feeling of uncertainty and paranoia. All we kept thinking was that we were being followed by the secret police and could be thrown into an underground prison to be tortured and never seen again, or placed on a train to Siberia. We were young.

The trip from Hirschberg to Berlin took three hours. To find our way, all we had was a road map — this was pre-cell phones, GPS and Internet. We decided to keep going into the unknown. The countryside was flat and empty, without houses, but the stinking air quality was the same.

When we arrived in Berlin, it was near midnight of Christmas Eve. The Brandenburg Gate had opened two days earlier, for the first time in 28 years. Thousands of partiers filled the streets, drinking and singing. We saw a young man of around 18 run to the Wall from the East side, jump up and throw his fists in the air. Hundreds, including us, disobeyed bullhorned orders from the East German police, telling us to stay away from the Wall, as the structure was not safe.

But no shots were fired. It was an amazing experience to see guards smiling and waving from the watchtowers in the “death strip,” or no man’s land, separating the two Berlins. Two months earlier, they would have killed people trying to escape to the West.

Tears and Souvenirs

All around us, older people were crying, while the younger ones were busy chiseling pieces of the hated Wall for souvenirs, or to sell.

The most memorable moment for me was when a man in his 60s, with disgust on his face, yanked a sledgehammer out of a young man’s hands, without saying a word, smashed the wall a few times with a vengeance, then threw the sledgehammer to the ground and walked away.

Long ago. The day before yesterday.

Bata, my roommate Jacob and I were crammed into a small Peugeot, clambering along tortuous mountain roads in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The unusual warning, the first tidbit that our gregarious 37-year-old tour guide Bata imparted to us, was a fitting comment on our remarkable trip to Mostar, a city where the scars of the Bosnian war in the early 1990s have yet to heal.

A tall, bearded and big-bellied ex-soldier, Bata had the size and demeanor of a playful grizzly bear. During the war his family’s home was occupied, and they were forced to scatter. Bata told us that he fled to Sweden, where he replaced his upper-class lifestyle with shifts as a taxi driver and a kebab cook. He and his family are now back in their old home, which they’ve converted into a hostel.

Bata’s ability to entertain made him immediately endeared him to us. If our faces betrayed any hint of emotion, he would jokingly yell “SNAG,” his acronym for Sensitive New Age Guy.

He would make us giggle with jokes about Bosnian inefficiency. He would roar, sing, pose, shout –  anything to keep us marching along with him.

But it was his moments of contemplation, when he revealed his thoughts as a survivor of the Bosnian war, that made him unforgettable.

Bata showed us how war still ravages life in Mostar, nearly 15 year after war had ended.

Tour with a View

I had signed us up for an eight-hour tour of Mostar and the surrounding areas, in hopes of making sense of the dilapidation we had seen while wandering around town. Jacob and I had arrived there on a whim, by taking an $8 bus ride from Split, the Croatian beach town where we were vacationing. So we were unprepared for what we would see.

The remains of punctured and burned structures, perhaps someone’s home in the past, now functioned as deposits for disposed beer bottles and used condoms. Broken panes still dangled from the windows of shelled buildings. Bullet holes patterned walls like polka dots. Occasionally a new building with a gleaming coat of paint would emerge, in painfully conspicuous contrast with the landscape. But, strolling passively through around these structures, or through thehe touristy “old city,” or at the famous humpbacked Stari Most Bridge,  destroyed in the war and rebuilt a few years ago, taught us nothing about Mostar, and especially nothing about the war.

We needed a local guide.

Bata pointed at a massive white cross on the summit of Hum Hill. I had seen the Jubilee Cross the night before. Its illuminated form shone brightly, seeming to float in the night sky. Its haunting glow spread for miles across this mainly Muslim city.

I saw now that the cross was perched atop a concrete bunker, from where Croatian forces had shelled the city and destroyed the Stari Most bridge. The summit was strategically perfect — the entire city of Mostar sprawled below;  you could throw a baseball and shatter a window two miles away.

Bata told us that the Catholic Croats had built the 100-foot high cross after lifting their siege on the city. To him, it was a hideous insult, a perpetual reminder of who had really won the war.

He also pointed out the front line, a highway that divided the city like a fault line. Fifteen years after the war, the split was still obvious. The Bosnian side, dotted with small clay-roofed houses, looked like a village; whereas the Croatian half had skyscrapers. Tall minarets pierce the sky on one side, while equally grand church spires abound on the other. They were two separate cities welded into one by the force of the mountains around us.

Bata explained the divides in even the most trivial aspects of life. Mostar had two soccer teams, one supported by Croats and one by Bosnians. Sarejvsko Pivo, the national beer of Bosnia, is apparently not sold in cafes on the Croatian side of Mostar. We (unscientifically) investigated this later, and found even Pabst Blue Ribbon, but no Pivo.

Guide Therapy

“Giving tours is like psychotherapy. I need to tell the world what they didn’t see on CNN,”  Bata confessed. He stepped to the edge of the overlook and shouted, “The truth will set you free!”

Not everybody was as expressive. Bata’s cheerful, pigtailed sister Majda, who ran our hostel, kept urging us to relax. Her persistence made us feel that the worst might be yet come. Unlike her brother, Majda preferred to discuss how well Mostar was doing today, and how modern it was in contrast to the city of her childhood. Whenever I asked her about the war, her smile faded, and she would look away before mumbling an answer. She was one of those who preferred to look hopefully towards the future.

To travel to Mostar means to not just see the damaged buildings and the rebuilt bridge but also to decipher a twisted and tangled history. When you set foot in a place where something terrible has occurred, you can think only: what happened?

Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia were all historically separate regions but were unified as Yugoslavia under the Communist leader Josip Broz Tito. Tito was able to stifle ethnic tensions for most of the 20th century, but after he died and his Ccommunist regime collapsed, tensions resurfaced. In 1992 Bosnia and Herzegovina’s declaration of independence prompted an invasion from the Yugoslav army, which turned into attacks from Serbian and Croation forces.

In Mostar, the largest city in Herzegovina and the most heavily bombed during the war, the Serbian invasion was rebuffed with the help of the Croatian Defense Council. But the Croats wanted the city for themselves, so in a Hollywood-esque twist, the Council attacked the very Bosnians they had helped defend a few days earlier. The Bosnians could not organize an effective resistance, and soon huge swaths of their city were turned to rubble.

It was a confusing war of identity, of choosing between your land and your people in a country with a confusing mix of identities and people, in a city where you didn’t know who your neighbors were. Even for a passing visitor, confusion consumed everything.

The war officially ended with the signing of the General Framework for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina  in December 1995. But it was clear that, 14 years later, a different kind of war was continuing.

Bata took us to Our Lady of Medjugorje, where in 1981 a group of children had claimed to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Now this spot is a magnet for Catholic tourism. As we approached the church, the streets became clogged with charter buses and crowded with hotels, gift shops and expensive restaurants. Suddenly I was counting more expensive cars than on Park Avenue. Occasionally a gargantuan villa would emerge. Construction was everywhere. This was gentrification in the developing world, funded by droves of wealthy Christian pilgrims who lavishly doled out their money along with their devotion. According to Bata, few Bosnians gained from this lucrative industry, and the ones who lived in the village were driven out. Judging from the Croatian flags hung ubiquitously like Christmas wreaths, we thought his words must be true.

Because Bosnians were constantly victimized in Bata’s version of things, I couldn’t believe everything he said. But obviously they weren’t embracing one another.

“You can’t expect us to start loving each other just because the UN told us to,” he said over a lunch of burek, a meat-filled pastry. (We had stopped at a place that promised “best burek in all Balkans.” I encountered seven such establishments during my two-day stay).

A perpetual feeling of underlying unease made the most striking landscapes feel tragic. We saw Kravica falls, where the roaring blue water found its origins in a series of small brooks, and Pocitelj, a hillside Ottoman settlement that overlooks sweeping vistas of the Nerevta river valley. The stark contrast between the natural beauty and the continuing tensions only emphasized the tension.

At the end of our tour, a large wedding procession swallowed the street and delayed our trek back to the hostel. A three-block long caravan of big, expensive cars brandished Croatian flags and blared victorious music, rolling past the pockmarked buildings and over the bomb craters in the streets. We watched the loud festivities in silence. For a moment, we could almost hear gunfire.

I’d ended up there because I’d written about Mexican farm workers who told me stories about the grinding poverty they’d left behind. Many farm workers in western New York State, where I live, come from the rural areas of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guererro. They’ve traveled over 3,000 miles to get here, sometimes paying as much as $2,500 to be smuggled in. They work on farms doing some of the most strenuous, lowest paying jobs in the United States. I decided I wanted to see conditions in their villages first hand.

I’ve worked with homeless and poor people in a variety of ways. I’ve documented homelessness and poverty across Pennsylvania and Delaware, have worked in shelters and soup kitchens and have visited many migrant worker camps. One winter, I even spent six weeks living on the streets of Washington, DC. None of that prepared me for the poverty I would experience in the mountains of Oaxaca and Puebla.

It’s impossible to get into the mountain villages without connections and a guide. I also needed luck and persistence. A combination of all of these landed me in the offices of Coordinadora Estalal Productores Cafe Organico (CEPCO), a Oaxaca coffee cooperative.

Surprisingly, my interest was met with suspicion and a little hostility. After three days of being the only person to show up for meetings, I met with Pedro Pablo Garcia-Hernandez, CEPCO’s secretary, who put me in contact with coffee growers near San Jose Tenango. The initial suspicion was not unwarranted, given the political climate there. Paramilitary groups are active in Oaxaca, and there are weekly reports of killings of rural workers.

“In Mexico, life is cheap,” said a Oaxaca friend. “And a campesino’s life is very cheap.”

Leaving CEPCO one day, I saw a memorial notice on the coop bulletin board, commemorating a member’s murder by paramilitary forces a week earlier.

Into the Mountains

Candido would be my guide to Tenango. The first leg of the trip is a seven-hour bus ride over roads that are little more than narrow hairpin curves carved out of the mountainsides. We pulled into Huautla at 3 a.m. and sat, in the cold and damp, in the back of a truck for two hours. Camionetas are pickups that have been modified to carry passengers, which means metal benches have been welded inside the truck bed. A ride isn’t pleasant. Eight people can fit inside snugly, but there’s usually twice as many, with more people riding outside.

The roads, just wide enough for one vehicle, are layered with large rocks. People drive as fast as possible, ensuring a jarring ride. There are no guardrails, and although accidents are rare, I did see two overturned vehicles on the slopes.

Arriving in Tenango, you don’t find a quaint Mexican village with a pretty zocalo, colorful market or distinctive old church. Instead, you’re greeted by a small, poor, colorless village, of decaying buildings and a few cement streets usually awash in mud. This, I thought when I arrived, is third world poverty.

I was wrong: much worse lay ahead.

I left for San Martin the next day with another guide, Maximiano. (These “guides” aren’t paid; they’re just people who happen to be going to the same village as you.) San Martin is reached by another camioneta ride, followed by a strenuous 3 1/2 hour hike. Maximiano spoke mostly Mazateco. He knew a few words of Spanish but, unfortunately, I didn’t know the words he knew. About an hour into the hike, Maximiano stopped to eat two tortillas and a small piece of meat. He filled a Coke bottle with water from a small, muddy puddle and took a few sips. I was glad I’d brought a bottle of water.

I arrived in San Martin cold, wet and exhausted. I was taken to Abelardo and Hortencia’s house, and they quickly agreed to let me stay. Hortencia brought soup when I started shaking. Maximiano continued on to his house. I was more than a little embarrassed at my exhaustion when I learned that he was 72 years old. I was shocked at how little he ate during the hike: just those tortillas and meat. (I would be even more surprised four days later, when Abelardo and I hiked out of San Martin, after breakfasting on just a cup of coffee).

San Martin was much poorer than Tenango.

The village is a drab collection of shacks of wood, tin and palm fronds scattered along a path. The floors are packed dirt and bathrooms are outhouses that are sometimes only a hole in the ground. There is no running water or heat, and nights are cold in the mountains. Children are often barefoot and animals roam freely. The place smells of mud and manure. There are a few decaying cement buildings in what’s referred to as “el centro,” an area that includes a clinic that’s rarely staffed.

One evening I asked Abelardo what happened when someone got sick.

“When there’s no doctor and no money to leave for the city,” said, “then you die.” Candido’s wife had died 15 years ago. “She had diarrhea and vomiting for several days,” he’d said. “I don’t know what it was.”

Abelardo and Hortencia’s four children died soon after they were born. “But I am young,” Abelardo said. “There is still time to have children.”

When “Traditional” Means Impoverished

San Martin and other remote villages in these mountains have always been poor. People here live what is often called “a traditional way of life.” That means they’ve eked out a subsistence-level existence for hundreds of years, surviving on beans, tortillas and whatever they could pick or dig up from the land. Campesinos here have grown coffee for generations, and it’s pretty much the only cash crop that grows.

“The temperature and the land are good,” said Jose Garcia Lopez, who works at a Puebla coffee cooperative, “but it is too hilly. It is too difficult to cultivate and harvest anything else.”

Leonor Fernandez Allende, a regional director for CEPCO, tells me that the majority of campesinos have one to three hectares of land, or about two to eight acres, for growing.

Fifteen years ago, that coffee earned about $1.50 a pound, which Candido said was a good price. “I could live well,” he said. “At this price I could buy rice, bread, clothes, shoes.”

But when I arrived in Tenango, in 2003, coffee was selling for a little under 60 cents a pound. Candido pulled up a pant leg and continued, “Right now I cannot afford socks and do not have any. The clothes I have now were a gift. The shoes were a gift, too.”

Felipe Martinez Figueroa estimates that he grows about 1,000 pounds of coffee a year. He’ll earn about 600 pesos (about $60) a month, he said.

That’s only about a fifth of what a local peasant needs for basic sustenance, according to Fernandez Allende. “A campesino needs about 30,000 pesos ($3,000) a year to live,” she said. “To live without hunger, about 80,000 pesos ($8,000).”

Very few campesinos live without hunger. The Instituto Maya, an organization that studies rural issues, estimates that 81 percent of rural dwellers are “extremely poor,” defined as earning less than $2 a day. “People cannot afford meat, medicine or milk,” Garcia-Lopez said.

Virtually all campesinos grow the basic staples of corn and beans for home use, but often can’t produce enough to last an entire year. In previous years, when their supplies ran out, they would buy more food. It’s different now. “We can’t feed our families, our children,” said one, Francisco Martin Julian.

In spite of the poverty and the food shortage, every family I stayed with or visited insisted I eat with them. They have two meals a day, usually beans and tortillas made fresh daily (the best tortillas I’ve ever had). Breakfast was whatever was left over from dinner the night before.

While I didn’t see any large-scale starvation in the villages, I did see several elderly people who were, I’m certain, starving. They had the hollow cheeks, thin limbs and vacant eyes that until this trip I’d only seen in photographs. The children were all small for their ages, and most people I met seemed malnourished. “I have only enough to eat so I do not die,” said Candido. At one point I jokingly asked Candido if he had a car. “I do not have a car,” he replied. “I am a campesino. I have a machete.”

Most of the coffee in these villages is organic and shade-grown. Weeds are cut with a machete. The coffee ripens between November and March, and the beans are collected in small baskets that hang around a picker’s neck. During the harvest, the weather is unrelentingly hot and humid. Sweat poured down my face as I photographed, and I had to stop after every couple of shots to wipe my glasses.

Campesinos also face a number of diseases. I was feeling cocky as mosquitoes buzzed around me, because I had anti-malaria pills. My cockiness quickly faded when I saw warning posters for dengue fever (also carried by mosquitoes and sometimes fatal), cholera and tuberculosis. There were also snakes. I learned about them when one was killed under a woodpile in a woman’s house.

“Is it poisonous?” I asked apprehensively.

“Yes,” she replied. “Very.”

The room I was sleeping in had a large pile of dried corn. I made sure to keep my distance.

Once dried, coffee beans must be hauled to Tenango. Abelardo is fortunate to own a mule, worth about $300. He loads his coffee on the mule and walks with it to Tenango. Felipe isn’t so fortunate. “I do not have a mule,” he said, “I cannot afford one, so I have to carry the coffee. It is a difficult trip. It takes me six or seven hours with a load of 30 to 35 kilos (about 70 pounds). I return the same day and bring more coffee the next day.”

To supplement their income, people sell whatever else they can. “We grow some beans and corn,” said Felipe, “but mostly to eat. When there is enough, we sell it.”

Beans sell for about $1 a kilo; corn for the equivalent of 20 cents. That means that Felipe carries a 70-pound sack of corn six hours to Tenango to make about $6. Candido also sells tangerines. Once I saw him on market day and he was particularly happy.”I have sold all my tangerines,” he said. He’d carried a 40-pound sack of tangerines for 3 1/2 hours, and earned slightly less than $2.

Abandoning the Countryside

Most people work part of the year away from their homes. Felipe works two or three months a year in Puebla. “I work in grocery stores, fruit stores, selling clothes, anything,” he said. “I can earn 1,000 pesos a month there. Here, I am lucky to earn 600 pesos when there is work.”

Candido’s two sons work in Mexico City most of the year now. “We did not have enough to eat,” he said. “They sell tacos and tortas on the street, 10 hours a day, and make 40 or 50 pesos a day. In one month they will return to help with the harvest.”

Facing a combination of brutal work, extreme poverty and hunger, it’s no wonder more and more people leave. “It is difficult to survive in the countryside,” said one campesino. “This is why people are leaving for Mexico (City) and the U.S. Many young men are leaving. Some return, but if they have found work elsewhere, they do not return.”

I was told that I would find very few young men in the villages. It’s not something I’m sure I would’ve picked up on right away if I hadn’t been looking for it. There are children, women and the elderly, but very few men between 15 and 35 years old.

Most of the young men I did see were disabled or drunk. Instituto Maya says the mass outmigration from the countryside has created “an indigenous diaspora.” It contends that, since the late 1980s, Mexico has lost almost 2 million agricultural jobs, and 15 percent of its rural population.

Fair trade organizations like CEPCO try to stave off disaster. Fair trade, which pays a higher rate for rural products, can double campesino incomes. These groups also offer programs designed to lift local workers out of poverty. But campesinos still lack sufficient markets, and often face severe opposition in Mexico.

When I was interviewing Mexican farm workers in and around my home in Rochester, I saw them living under difficult conditions. The work they do–planting, weeding, picking fruits and vegetables–is virtually all done by hand, in all kinds of weather. They live in overcrowded apartments, rundown houses and sometimes in cars or under trees. By U.S. standards, they earn very little money. If they’re here illegally, they live in almost constant fear that the immigration authorities will find them. But they almost never complained.

After my three weeks in their mountain villages, I better understood why. One local farmer told me: “Their lives are so much better here. They’re glad for the work.”

Yes, their lives are so much better in the United States — but only because life back home in their villages is so much worse.

Every year my family tries to find the time to take a vacation, just kick back and get away from the stress of school or, in my Dad’s case, work. Usually we go to Isabela, a beachside town on the other side of the island. Isabela is two hours from our home in Humacao, a small town on the east coast, about 45 minutes southeast of San Juan. This vacation was our first real time together since my sister went away to college, and my last opportunity to be with Mom and Dad before going to college in the U.S.

We pulled into the parador Villas del Mar Hau, where we were staying, the gravel crackling under the tires of my Dad’s Sequoia. A line of colorful cabins that decorated the shore of Montones beach immediately came into view, finishing off on the west end of the beach with a seaside restaurant. The car doors swung open and we hopped out taking in the sounds of the oceans. “Finally,” Dad said, more to himself than us.

This was me and my sister’s first time staying at Villas del Mar Hau. My parents had been there before, and the way Mom tells it, Dad fell in love with the parador the first time he laid eyes on it. It’s been his getaway ever since.

Mom checked us in and we made our way to our cabin. Along the way were tennis courts, a mini gym, a pool and a basketball and volleyball court. The cabins faced the sea and behind them was a large green field that eventually grew into a hillside forest. The soft chatter of families and couples in their cabins and on the beach could be heard drifting through the area, giving the place a familial, calm atmosphere.

Our cabin was blue. It sat four cabins away from the restaurant, Olas y Arena, and had two bedrooms, a living room with a television set, a kitchen and a front porch.

My sister, Lourdes, collapsed onto the hammock on the porch and said: “I’m ready to work on my tan.”

“I want to check out the waves,” I said plopping down on a beach chair. Mom walked over to Dad and took hold of his hand. “And we are ready to take a walk and do some snorkeling?” she asked.

As my sister wanted, we hit the beach first. We decided on Jobos, Isabela’s most popular beach and our favorite, just beyond Montones. I ran and jumped down the beach, splashing and often falling, while my dad stopped every five seconds to pick up and examine a shell he would then stuff into his pocket. Mom took pictures and Lourdes sang along with her iPod, her voice drowned out by the crashing of the waves.

Fifteen minutes into our walk, we reached a big rock that separates Jobos from Montones. It was massive with crevices and small pools of water left there by monstrous waves long gone.

“Hey guys, come here, look at this!” Lourdes yelled out from ahead. She was looking at a gaping hole that led down into the water. It was like a blowhole, the walls of which were jagged and sharp.

“Step back, you’re too close!” my dad said from behind us. “Take a picture, dad,” Lourdes said, offering up the camera. “Step back first,” Dad responded. Lourdes rolled her eyes and took a step away. The wind was strong and the currents rough, causing the waves to explode with a boom in the well. Every time a wave crashed, a spray of salty seawater bathed our faces.

Dad was right: it was best not to mess with this particular hole. It could be a death trap.

The hole, our dad told us, is called El Pozo de Jacinto. Legend says that a young farmer named Jacinto used to tend to other people’s cows on the greens near the beaches here. One day Jacinto was walking with one of the cows, which he had tied to his arm, when the cow was startled, and began to run uncontrollably. Frenzied, it fell into the well, taking Jacinto with her and costing them both their lives.

The next day the owner of the cow went in search of Jacinto and the missing cow, yelling,”Jacinto bring me the cow!” Every time he called out, the water in the well stirred, and crashed furiously against the rocks. It is said that, today, if you stand near the well and call out: “Jacinto, bring me the cow!” the waters below will still stir and crash menacingly.

“Jacinto, bring me the cow!” I screamed into the well. The water thrashed in the hole, making me jump back a bit. “Cool,” thought, even though the water had been thrashing all along.

The beach was packed with families and friends. Coolers, towels and umbrellas of various bright colors decorated the sand. The shrieks and laughter of children mixed with the music coming from the bar, not far from the rock we were standing on. I smiled and walked on, leading my family. The smell of traditional Puerto Rican fried foods from the kiosks made my mouth water as we skipped awkwardly across the burning sand.

We picked a spot near an American family emitting a very strong Coppertone smell, and laid out our towels.
“Put sunscreen on,” Mom ordered, taking a bottle out of her bag. Lourdes and I whined, but gave in and let Mom cover us in the white gunk.”Do have any white anywhere?” Lourdes asked worriedly.

“No, you’re clear. Me?”

You’re good,” she said stretching out on her towel.
The sun was beating down mercilessly, blanketing everyone with its scorching rays. Thankfully, the breeze provided a slight relief from the humidity and heat. Swiping a droplet of sweat from my brow, I noticed the waves were not half bad: a good five to eight feet, big enough for fun but not big enough to terrify me.

There hadn’t been enough space in the car to allow me to bring my trusted board along on our trip, so my dad walked with me to a surf shop, where I was able to rent a nice 6′10 board for the day.

“Thanks Dad,” I said carrying the board out of the shop.

“No problem, my pleasure. Just be careful out there. Watch the current and the other surfers.”

“I will, Dad. You think Mom will watch me this time?”

Dad put an arm around my shoulder and laughed.”Mom gets nervous when you’re out there. Afraid something is going to happen to you.”

My head dropped. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to stress you guys out. I’m fine out there though - swimmer, remember?”

“Liz you could be a lifeguard, marine, sailor, whatever, and your Mom would still worry.”

I looked up and smiled at my Dad.

Mom was already reapplying sunblock when we got back. “Be careful please, don’t go out too far,” she said offering up the sunscreen.

“Are you going to watch me?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“I’m going to go snorkeling with Dad. “I’ll keep an eye out though,” she said, then stood up and gave me a hug.

After I waxed my board and stretched a bit, I strapped myself to the board and paddled out. New beaches are slightly terrifying for me to surf because, not being local, I am always a likely candidate for hazing. I shook the horrifying thoughts of defensive locals out of my head and paddled on. Once in the line-up (where surfers wait for waves), a young local of about 18 paddled over to me and struck up a conversation. His name was Asriel and, luckily for my 17-year-old self, a very attractive young man, with emerald green eyes, tanned skin and a killer smile.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

Was it that obvious that I wasn’t a local?

“Humacao,” I answered, trying not to look intimidated. Humacao is’t the most exciting town in Puerto Rico.
“That’s a long way to travel for a decent set of waves,” he said chuckling, causing his abs to tighten and my eyes to widen. Asriel stayed with me the rest of the time I was in the water. He advised me on what waves to take, and sometimes even cleared them of other surfers. I’d definitely lucked out as far as locals go.

After two hours in the water, my mouth raw from the taste of salt, I was thirsty, and my tummy was beginning to rumble. Mom and Dad, who had been snorkeling, were also ready to get their grub on. We went home and got the car so we could more efficiently scout the town for eating establishments. Available for everyone’s eating pleasure were a number of restaurants and shacks, all of which served traditional Puerto Rican food: fried codfish, fried plantains, rice and beans, pork, seafood salads and seafood turnovers. Dad’s eye, however, was caught by a cheerful sign that read Happy Belly’s Sports Bar and Grill, a casual seaside restaurant overlooking the Jobos coastline. True to its name, the service was friendly and efficient, and the menu boasted a variety of delicious meals that, to my father’s satisfaction, didn’t break the bank. They served everything from ethnic dishes to the more common burgers and fries. I decided on mofongo relleno, or mashed plantains with seafood.

“I sure am going to miss this when I go to college,” I said taking in the sight and smell of the food in front of me. “We’ll have a buffet ready for you when come back on break,” Mom said forcing a smile.

I knew it was going to be harder for Mom to deal with my leaving than it would be for me.

I savored every single bite of that mofongo, each one bringing my departure closer.

“Are you ok?” Lourdes asked, putting down her fork.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied.

My slow eating gave me away; usually I’m done ten minutes before everyone else.

“Comon, I’m almost done, and you’re barely halfway,” she said pointing at my mofongo.

“College,” I mouthed attempting to look untroubled. She winked and dropped the conversation.

“What’s going on? Dad asked. “She’s just tired from the surf, Lourdes responded casually. I smiled at Dad, confirming the response.

We left completely satisfied, and stuffed beyond belief. Wiped from a day of surfing, Lourdes from a rigorous tanning session and Mom and Dad from snorkeling, we decided to stay in for the night.

Our evening entertainment consisted of watching the day darken into night. Our front porch proved the perfect viewing area. Mom and Dad sat side by side in each other’s arms, while Lourdes and I popped a squat on the beach chairs. The sky was a dazzling canvas smeared with a combination of pinks and purples, changing tones and shade every few minutes, as the sun descended into the sea.

“I see a bunny,” Lourdes said pointing at the sky. I love that game. I hadn ‘t played it in a very long time.

“Fish with a top hat,” I said, pointing in a different direction.

“I think I actually see that too,” Lourdes said laughing.

“Flower,” Mom said, followed by Dad’s “Evil cow.”

We all laughed and played until the color was drained from the sky.

Once our full tummies from lunch deflated, we were ready for dinner. Most of the same restaurants were open for dinner, but since we were all tired, we decided to give Olas y Arena, the parador’s restaurant, a try. A variety of wine made Mom and Dad’s evening complete, while their selection of cocktails put Lourdes and me at ease. My sister ordered her favorite cocktail, a Mojito, and I ordered mine, a Cuba Libre (Bacardi Rum and Coke with a lime slice). Lourdes argued that Mojitos are the better choice, perhaps with a salad and grilled mahi-mahi, but I begged to differ. I said a Cuba Libre and some fried calamari were always the way to go.

“Do you want some of my fried deliciousness?” I asked Lourdes, waving some calamari in her face.

“That is so fattening,” she said, following it with her eyes. “But what the hell,” she said, grabbing my wrist and snatching the squid of my fork.

“We are on vacation, we are allowed to splurge,” I said forking some more calamari.

“You guys are still young, enjoy it while you are,” Mom said. “Just always remember to exercise so you stay healthy,” she added, lifting an instructive finger.

“Remember to eat well while you’re gone,” Dad said seriously. “Kids forget to eat well, with studying and all,” he continued, focusing on his food.

“I won’t, I love food too much,” I said, trying to lighten my Dad’s sudden seriousness.

“So how are everyone’s drinks? Mom said, catching my hint.

“Delicious!” Lourdes said raising her glass.

Our meal again left us pregnant with a food baby. We walked back to our cabin and sat around talking about everything and anything before turning in. Mom and Dad were the first to go, leaving me and Lourdes to enjoy the night.

“Were you excited to go to Texas?” I asked, swaying in the hammock. “Oh yeah, finally on my own,” she said, lying back in a beach chair.

“You don’t miss Mom and Dad?”

“Yeah, I do, but it’s nice to get out, you know.”

“I feel bad that I’m so excited.”

“Don’t feel bad, it’s normal. I mean, you’re going to college! Lourdes leaned over and punched my shoulder.

“Yeah, they’re going to be all alone, though.”
“Make sure you call all the time, don’t waste your time out there, and they’ll be happy.”

“I guess,” I said, pushing off the wall.
We sat in silence for a while until the coming and going of the waves lulled us slowly to the point where dreams and reality are inseparable.

The next morning I awoke very early, at about 6. Lourdes was still asleep. I tip-toed out of the room. After making a pit stop in the bathroom and seeing my disheveled hair, I stumbled out to the living room. The door was open; only the screen door stood between me and the outside world. I assumed Mom and Dad, always the early birds, were out walking on the beach. The sun, just having come out of a late night’s sleep itself, was lightly covering the beach in a soft golden light. I pushed open the screen door and plopped down on the hammock. The gentle breeze slowly helped me out of my drowsiness while I took in the view.

Just as I was about to scan the kitchen for breakfast, Mom and Dad arrived.

“You hungry?” Mom asked, grabbing my chin and kissing my forehead. Dad stood on the last step of the porch, taking in the other side of the island not many people care to explore. He took a deep breath, turned to face me and smiled.

“Yeah, lets eat,” I said, walking over to my Dad and putting my arms around him.

It seemed as if Little Lhasa, as Indians call this seat of the Tibetan government in exile, was lost, drowned out by dreadlocks and the stench of infrequent showering. For the transient/resident population of hippies, Israelis, and Israeli hippies, the fact of the Dalai Lama’s residence here in McLeod Ganj was a sideshow to the arts of holistic healing and yoga.

As we began our two and a half journey into the mountains, on snake-like, lightless roads, our driver, Mr. Joshi, pulled over for a steaming cup of spiced chai.

“People, who, you know!” He raised his eyebrows and imitated the motion of puffing a joint, then broke down laughing.

But I was glad to be there. I rolled down the windows, breathing clean, crisp air for probably the first time in the seven months I’d been working in India. In the night, the moon shone and reflected light off the snow-capped peak of Hanuman Ka Tibba, the highest in the Dhauladhar Range.

Travelers come here to Dharamsala visit Buddha Hall, the holistic healing center and hostel where we stayed. Buddha Hall was owned by a transplanted Indian woman named Usha, a friend of a friend. Most of the summer the hostel is booked with travelers who wake at sunrise for yoga on the roof, and learn hypnotherapy and crystal healing. Some stay for months on end. The hot water runs out at 10 a.m., and in the evening the sounds of casual guitar strumming prick the hallways.

My travel companions Bryan and Brian and I have come to see the Buddhist temples. Like everyone else, we also hope to sneak a peek at the Dalai Lama (every once in a while, a lucky visitor is granted an audience).

In March 1959, when Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, fled over the Himalayas and into India after the failed Tibetan uprising against the Chinese, the Indian government offered him refuge in this region. A year later, he established the Tibetan government-in-exile on these snowy slopes. He still lives a few minutes walk down the mountain.

McLeod Ganj is cold for much of the year, the air noticeably thinner, allowing the relocated Tibetan population to continue many traditional practices. In May the temperature was often a scant 55 degrees F (compared to an average of 110 degrees in New Delhi). The snowline is just a two-day hike away.

India is home to a diaspora of some 100,000 Tibetans, with more fleeing by foot across the treacherous peaks of the Himalayas every year. But I had lived in New Delhi for nearly five months before I met any Tibetan. In the city, many live in Majnu Ka Tila, near the decrepit Yamuna River. There are few reasons for Delhiites to visit the area, unless they’re studying at the leftist Delhi University nearby, or living in Delhi’s Tibetan refugee camp.

Unfathomly, Majnu Ka Tila is free from the noise, dirt and smells that even the nicest Indian establishments fail to keep out, and it became my sanctuary from the insanity of daily Delhi. It was easier to breathe, and none of the infamous Indian beggars harassed me for change.

Maybe that’s why I came to like Tibetan culture best, of all the ethnic Indian cultures I learned about. Seeking a better understanding (and momos, the amazing Tibetan dumplings), Bryan, Brian and I ascended into the Himalayas to experience the epicenter of Tibetan culture.

I was disappointed. I had expected a certain amount of dreadlocks and Free Tibet movement T-shirts that became so popular in the 1990s. But Western ’70s culture seemed to dominate the town: outside the confines of the understated Buddhist monastery complex, housing the Dalai Lama’s temple and most of the important Tibetan government offices, it was as if the ’70s had never died.

Sitting in on the stoop of the Tibetan Museum, a Tibetan institution plastered with photographs of a young, bespectacled Dalai Lama making his way over the Himalayas and plastic-encased, blood-soaked garments of Tibetan protestors injured in riots, I wondered how it was possible that a few alleyways in the bustling general chaos of Delhi seemed more authentically Tibetan than the neighborhood where the Dalai Lama himself lived and worked.

Inside the serene monastery were quite a few Nikon-wielding tourists, to be sure, but the fluorescent flyers for yoga classes and film screenings kept a fair distance from the Free Tibet stickers around the monastery. All signs of the Tibetan resistance: the brightly-colored Buddhist prayer flags, the monks in draped in burgundy robes — were confined to the monastery area.

On one side of town, every afternoon, monks engaged in lively debates about the texts and teachings of Buddhism, energetically clapping each time an opponent made a point.

On the other, twenty-somethings learned tarot reading and smoked out, or picnicked along the mountain trails, above the streams where monks came to clear their heads and take a dip.

As we walked along the steep, trinket-cluttered roads of Bhagsu, a tatty tourist enclave a quarter mile down the road from McLeod Ganj, a young man in cutoffs and a fraying wife beater addressed me in Hebrew and handed me a flier.

I stared at the flier, and then at him. Puzzled, he tried again in English: “Jam session tonight at Cafe Haifa. Come?”

This sort of thing was happening every day.

The man was one of hundreds of young Israelis, fresh from military service, staying here in the warmer months of the Himalayan summer.

After four days in the Himalayas I’d eaten the best falafel since my travels in the Middle East. The Indian populations of the area all speak, read, and write Hebrew, and local establishments have names like Hotel Zion and Cafe Haifa. We’d long before given up looking for momos or thukpa, a Tibetan spicy noodle soup.

Eclectic backpacker culture peppers many of the Himalayas’ hill stations. Backpackers go Manali to hike, or Rishakesh, where the Beatles first met their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yog. They infuse the local communities with hemp and granola.

The Tibetans have surely added to the colorful, rich cultural life in Dharamasala, expanding the calendar of Indian festivals with events like Losar (Tibetan New Year), and the Dalai Lama’s birthday, celebrated on July 6 with much pomp. But here, tourist culture overshadowed what we’d come to experience.

On our last evening, as an Indian cafe waiter explained the Israeli dish shakshouka to me (apparently, eggs in tomato sauce), Bryan struggled to play chess with a silent bearded Israeli and speakers pulsed ambiguous-sounding rock music. The notes drifted out into the night, assaulting the serene quiet of the imposing white ridges above.

Learn more

Regional music
Tibetan throat singing
Tibetan language
The Tibet Railway
Dharamsala info

Bannister, a Calgary, Canada, industrial and travel photographer, spent several weeks in Villa in the winter of 2007, teaching photography to local children as part of a volunteer service for an NGO, and shooting his own work as well.

The neighborhood was born in 1971, when some 200 impoverished families “invaded” a tract of empty land on the edge of Lima. Cecilia Blondet chronicled those events in a chapter in The Peru Reader. Word of the invasion spread, and within two days, another 9,000 families had rushed to join them. A standoff between the military government of Gen. Juan Velasco and the settlers ensued.

Upper class Lima residents “with terror watched the fulfillment of their own prophesy: the poor, the mountain hicks, the resentful and angry cholos were taking their city, and were at the point of invading their very homes,” Blondet wrote.

But Velasco happened to be presiding, right then, over a development meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank in Lima. After several failed military attempts to evict the squatters, the government bowed to international pressure, and deeded the settlers a piece of desert-like scrub land nearby.

The settlers built the city themselves. Nearly 400,000 people live there today. About a third of Lima’s people - some 2 million residents - live in such informal settlements.

Bannister traversed the streets carrying $20,000 of camera equipment, but was never threatened or accosted. He was invited into houses, and to dinner. He met the mayor.

Most observers refer to Villa as a slum. It’s the largest and best-known of the shantytowns ringing Lima, collectively referred to as pueblos jovenes, or young villages. But to Bannister, Villa didn’t function in any unusual way.

“There are bakers and shoemakers and people selling coal,” he said. “Cabdrivers and babysitters. “It’s just like everywhere else.”

The foreign volunteers he worked with seemed to feel sorry for the impoverished residents. But Bannister detected other traits, such as a spirit of neighborly cooperation.

“I’d show up [at a schoolyard] and see kids playing foozball at the table at 7:30 a.m. Kids would volunteer their spot at table to other kids. A kid would cede his place! Fascinating.” – Mary D’Ambrosio

Find out more about Villa El Salvador

Villa El Salvador municipal website

Friends of Villa

Microlending efforts

A Villa Story

My family comes from Bryson City, about 10 miles from the Cherokee Reservation. Every year, I go back for our Decoration, on the second Sunday in June. It’s the family event that I look forward to more than any other.

If you’re looking for a mountain vacation spot, this is it. Bryson City is near Smoky Mountain National Park, Fontana Lake and the Blue Ridge Parkway, and has great fishing, biking and hiking. The town web site calls it “one of the best whitewater paddling towns.”

But I don’t know about that, because we never did any paddling. We tubed down Deep Creek, and went home with bruised butts.

Above town are roads that take you into the mountains. These roads are not for the faint of heart. Veer a little to the left, and you run into the mountainside. Veer a little to the right, and you plunge down the mountain. So go slowly; you’ll live longer. And unless you’re the driver, close your eyes.

Family in the Holler

Driving up, you’ll see lots of branch roads heading up small valleys or sunken areas. These are the hollers. (I know the word is spelled “hollow” but nobody I ever met in the state of North Carolina pronounces it like that. “Hollow” sounds like a place in New England).

My grandparents, Will and Edna Jane, lived in one of these hollers.
The next holler over belonged to Will’s brother. I think of their
addresses as “Will Howard Holler” and “Tooge Howard Holler.”

I remember days of sitting on the steps, listening to them jaw on about one thing or another. They never tried to be funny; in fact I think they were trying for “crotchety” (they achieved that too). But they never failed to amuse me. Those two old men could spin stories that would leave us in tears.

Once I spent an afternoon with Will at Christmas. He made me help slop the hogs. If you’re wondering … I don’t ever need to repeat that experience. I just marked it off my “gotta do before I die” list. He also made fun of my city ways, and my weak stomach. But my aunt told me later that he’d said about me that “she’s got some sense to her.”

The man didn’t give out too many compliments, so I wrote that down.

For Decoration weekend, my family members come from far and wide. We hang out in the holler for dinner on Saturday night and catch up. And we tell each other stories, each embellished to be funnier than the last time we told it.

We spend the night in one of the little motels along the river between Cherokee and Bryson, not in the nice B&Bs in town the tourists use. Then on Sunday morning, we head up to the cemetery.

Flowers Shaped Like Elvis’ Head

Church is generally suspended for the day, as the preacher and much of
the flock is down at the graveyard. Folks bring trunkloads of fake
flowers and wreaths. A few might bring live plants and flowers, but
the fake ones last longer. Most of these flowers are stuck straight into the ground.

My favorites are wreaths in unusual shapes. You just can’t beat a wreath of plastic flowers shaped like a guitar, or the head of Elvis.

My sister and I wander around meeting folks we almost remember.

As I age, I’m amazed at how alike we all look. And yet, people still pick me out as someone who “belongs” to my dad or grandmother.

During the wandering and socializing, we are all sticking the flowers into the dirt around the graves.

Feeling the Connection

The preaching starts at 10 a.m., under the big oak tree in the
middle of the graveyard.

I could call it a sermon, but that word doesn’t feel right. Catholics have masses; Lutherans and Methodists have sermons; we Baptists have preaching.  There is always a small group there to sing some hymns, accompanied by guitar.

Our graveyard was started in the late 1800s by my great great great grandfather Abraham Wiggins. His wife in died mid-winter, and he
could not get her body down the mountain for a burial. So he buried
her by the Laurel Branch Baptist Church, where he was the preacher.

That was the beginning of the Laurel Branch Cemetery.

Even when I was a little girl, my dad dragged me from grave to grave, telling me something about each resident.

Sometimes, it was the person’s history or lineage. Sometimes
it was a story that had been passed down about him. But he always
made sure we realized this was person once, not just a name
on a tombstone.

Now at least seven generations are buried at Laurel Branch.

Will and Edna Jane are here. Will chose their spot at the top edge of the graveyard. He told me once that being at the top put him closer to heaven, and let him look down on everyone else.

He could have been kidding but, knowing his personality, I wouldn’t bet on it.

As a child, I would get very bored about an hour in to Decoration.  As
an adult, I want it to last all week.

Two things always strike me. One, I feel connected. There’s just something about spending time with a few hundred people (living and dead) who share your DNA.

Two, there’s the beauty of the place. Trees that are hundreds of years old shoot straight up into the sky. There are lakes and rivers and streams that haven’t met pollution yet, and views that in other places would cost millions.

Not a bad place to spend eternity.

Demmae Wiggins is a writer who lives in Dunedin, Florida.

I am teaching English at Sichuan University for the summer. It’s my first trip to China, and what I’m feeling is sensory overload.

Young Chengdu women step daintily over the ubiquitous spit scattered across the ground as they clutch parasols to protect their milky complexions from tanning. In East Asia, whiteness is next to godliness, at least for the ladies. Not one native eye widens as bare-bottomed children pee in the middle of the busiest downtown street. A tour guide on a later trip explained that Chinese parents dress their children in these crotchless pants for easy relief.

The lack of personal space is daunting at first, as is the dearth of Western-style toilets. In the English teachers’ dormitories where I stay, the toilets are squat-style holes in the ground, and the showers are directly above the toilets. After losing few bars of soap down the toilet, I soon get over my awkwardness, then am humbled by visits to some of my students’ homes. In one apartment, the toilet is in the kitchen, right next the stove.

Sichuan is famous for its giant pandas and for its spicy food. One of better-known dishes of the region is Sichuan hot-pot. To welcome the summer English teachers, two of the program coordinators, both Chengdu residents, generously treat us to dinner at a hot-pot restaurant. Each table holds two inset bowls full of scalding, pepper-red soup brought to a boil with the twist of a knob. The fiery broth is not replaced for each new customer, but sits in the bowl all day to be repeatedly reheated.

Long tables heavy with raw tripe, tendons and unidentifiable meats and vegetables flank the restaurant’s walls, waiting to be cooked in the bowls at the table. At one end of a table, dozens of people line up to pile their plates with little burgundy-colored hunks of meat. Moving closer, I see they are sauce-covered rabbit heads, with eyeballs and spiky teeth still intact. The program coordinators say that the rabbit heads are a delicacy, and they both dig in. None of us English teachers are adventurous enough to try them. The hum of eating and conversation is periodically punctuated with the sound of people hocking spit onto the floor.

After about a week of ultra-spicy meals, blisters form inside and around my mouth, and my stomach is a mess. It hurts to smile, speak or eat. I am taken to Sichuan University’s hospital. The place seems eerily empty, quiet and in desperate need of a good scrub. Drops of what look like dried blood are speckled across the floor on the way to the doctor’s office. The doctor is a plump, middle-aged woman. After a brief examination, she says that because of the spicy food, my foreign constitution and the humid weather, my body has shang huo. Literally translated, that means “on fire.” She prescribes a few mysterious medications that work immediately.

Many of our Chinese students have misconceptions about the United States. One young boy insists that every American home has a swimming pool. Another adult student cannot believe that the bicycle is not the main mode of transportation.

Later in the summer, during a trip to Chengdu Panda Research Center, one of the English teachers is excited to learn that for about $10, foreigners can buy the photo op of a lifetime. Squirming baby pandas are placed beside delighted visitors; then the camera flashes go off.

When it’s my turn, severe-looking handlers bring a panda out of an open-air pen and roughly slam him down on the bench. I reach over to lightly touch his wiggling body. For a moment, he is still.

On our last trip of the summer, we go to visit the temples and monasteries of Emei Mountain. The name Emei refers to eyebrows and, from afar, the two gentle peaks do resemble the lines of elegantly arched brows. We need to take a long, early-morning bus ride. As the bus climbs through the amethyst dawn, the stinging breeze rubs my face. Passengers bounce hard against cracked and fading vinyl seats.

Along the roadside lie broken bowls, perhaps remnants of hurried meals eaten while waiting to be driven up or carried on the bent back of a stranger. With each turn, I am afraid the bus will fly off the mountain. A light rain comes through an open window, and begins to powder my arm.

The bus winds further up the road, like a tiny figurine of metal and flesh. Almost there.

“But I really gravitate towards people first,” she said. (Her master’s is in cultural studies.)

Here Grossman captures the emotions of rural Mexicans as they go about their daily lives: butchering meat, selling flowers, weaving, competing with neighbors, waiting for the bus. - The Editors

Picture this: 225 human beings from 20 countries, wrapped from head to toe in anything that would cover them, looking more like mummies than runners, impatiently pacing in the 120 degree heat.

The organization is all very Spartan; things are run almost like a Foreign Legion campaign.

What?

At the starting line in the small town of Ouarzazate, in southern Morocco, hellishly hot sand blows in my face, but I take it with a shrug. It’s about 110 degrees.

Is it normal to subject one’s body to such extremes? That’s one thing I’m here to find out. We’re going to run 151 miles, over six days.

After 20 years of playing a weekly tennis game together, my partner, a coworker who was a runner, suggested I try running in a marathon. So at age 47, I ran my first marathon in Long Beach, California. Without any training, I finished in 4:05 hours.

I was hooked. Over the past 20 years I have run about 125 ultra marathons — long, multi-day runs, often under severe conditions — on all seven continents, and most of the world’s highest, lowest, northern and southern-most foot races. I’ve run the Mt. Everest Marathon in Nepal, the Mt. Kinabalu Climathon on Borneo, the inaugural Antarctica Marathon, the Comrades 87 k in South Africa, the Inca Trail run in Peru, and the Havana Marathon in Cuba.

Ultra running isn’t cutthroat competitive, and the top performers don’t hold themselves snobbishly apart. That’s likely because there’s rarely any prize money at stake. There is a camaraderie among competitors.
As we wait at the starting line, I hear the French version of the race rules taking about 15 minutes, the English only five. I wonder what they are not telling us.

Then there’s dead silence, as race director Patrick Bauer steps up with a pistol in his hand and, on the count of three, fires a shot, signaling the start of an adventure race most people would say is crazy to even attempt.

Rocky Desert Turf

To have any chance of winning this six-day adventure race, the faster runners and favorites take off like rabbits, while slower, and really slow, runners (like me) trot along in the soft sand, backpacks bouncing.

The first day is supposed to be a little easier — it’s only nine miles — but gives us a taste of what lies ahead.

Most people believe that the desert is mostly sand, which is a misnomer, as many deserts have large areas of ERG, an area of rock-hard underground with stones and rocks of all shapes and sizes. Walking up a dune, no matter how small, is a challenge. It’s like walking in quicksand, taking two steps up and sliding one back down, not to mention the powder-like fine sand that gets into your shoes and socks, rubbing against your skin. Once reaching the top of the first dune I just drop to the ground, trying to catch my breath.

About eight months before this race I severed my hamstring, which relegated me to walking the entire distance. But I am confident I can make the daily cutoffs because I am a strong walker.

Oops

The first night at the camp looked more like an open-air first aid field unit, as many runners showed first signs of rashes, blisters and other ailments. Bandages of all sizes, and ointments and creams were applied. Believing in preemptive treatment, I draped several bands of a large bandage over both shoulders to avoid any shaving from my backpack. I also had modified my backpack with extra cushioning, and wider and padded shoulder and waist straps.

Our quarters were open-sided Berber tents with a couple of layers of carpets laid over the hard and rocky underground. Trying to save weight, instead of a sleeping bag I brought a bivy bag, which had one major flaw; it behaved like plastic, making a racket every time I moved, driving my seven tent-mates crazy. And it retained all moisture, causing me to awake soaked in sweat the first couple of mornings.

This was a self-sufficient event, meaning we had to live with whatever we brought. As a way of training, I’d spent three weeks, four times a week, running and walking on the beach with a 25-pound backpack with snowshoes.

Did I look stupid? Several people who saw me said so, but it gave me an idea of what I was in for. Running for an hour on the beach is one thing; walking (or running, like most every other participant did) for days over sand dunes and rocky terrain with a 25 to 30-pound pack is another.

Follow suggestions in the race instructions, I brought a ton of dehydrated food, but after seeing the other runners’ packs, I left about half of it behind with the staff. Some runners wanted to travel as lightly as possible, and tried to survive on Power Bars and such. But such drastic measures were not for me.

In the morning, the Bedouins were rushing us to get our stuff off of their carpets, wanting to break down the tents. It was like being on a campground without a tent, with the whole world seeing what you are doing.

One morning as I was heating water for coffee and porridge, my small burner burned a hole into one of the Berber carpets. That really pissed the caretakers off, but no one finked on me — camaraderie, you know.

Each day got progressively more challenging, as the distances increased. The ground got harder, and the blisters started to form. The pack got more difficult to carry, making my shoulders sag. Fine sand crept inside my socks, rubbing against the skin, and the rock-strewn hard surface we walked or ran on add more blisters.

At night, the camp looked like an ER unit. People took off their shoes, exposing black & blue toes, shoulders that were rubbed raw, and blisters filled with blood.

But I did okay. My shoulders covered with tape held up, except they were sore from the weight, forcing me to invent new ways to carry a backpack, frontal, over the shoulder and even on my head. I pricked my blisters open with a needle (a sterilized needle — are you kidding?), drained it and covered it with moleskin and a good adhesive bandage. As time went on, the pain became more acute, and I added another layer of cushioning over the old one, not wanting to tear away any skin that remained.

One evening a surprise awaited us. As each runner trotted into camp, most of them hot, exhausted, weary and in pain, we were handed an ice-cold Coca Cola, compliments of the Moroccan military, who had flown in the drinks by helicopter. I am not religious, but someone was looking out for us indeed.

Body in the Sand

One day I was trotting along when the sky became dark, announcing an imminent sandstorm. All you can do is wrap yourself into a space blanket or whatever you brought, lay low and hope it stops before you are totally covered with powder fine sand. Eventually it became eerily quiet, and I peeled myself out of my blanket and cloth, as sand had gotten literally into every crevice of my body.

I saw none of the yellow plastic course markers and was totally lost, but kept walking along.

Soon I saw a form in the sand, which upon closer inspection turned out to be the body of another runner. I heard an animal-like grunt and saw a blistery burned face as he tried to turn over. He was totally exhausted, had no water and seemed near death — he could not talk. I gave him some water to drink and covered him with my space blanket, letting him know that I would summon help (yeah, right).

After walking for 20 minutes more I saw two young Bedouin boys. Not speaking any French, I just grabbed their hands and pulled them toward the fallen runner. Once they saw the battered body, they left, presumably for help.

An hour later I saw the eeriest sight of my life. First came a galloping camel on the crest of a sand dune, one of the two boys riding it. We tried to drape the runner over the camel’s saddle, but he kept falling off. Just then a jeep appeared on the horizon with the other boy, and two race officials. They shoved the runner into the jeep and took off.

Two hours later I arrived at the aid station, exhausted. The runner had an IV in each arm, and had recovered. He thanked me for saving his life.

Hero’s Welcome

After reaching the next aid station three hours later, I wanted to quit, but every excuse I came up with was answered with a solution. A race official walked with me to keep me company, and I was told that I could take all the time I needed to make up for the time I’d lost. When I arrived at the camp at 10 p.m., about 20 runners were lined up to give me a hero’s welcome. I thanked those who would not let me quit the night before. I was glad to still be in the race.

Each morning it got tougher. It was not a question of whether your feet will hurt, but more a matter of minimizing the pain. Walking with blisters the size of walnuts over terrain that is hard as cement is agony. You can feel the rocks pushing against your sore feet and blisters. But having come that far and with only two days to go, I wasn’t about to quit.

The toughest day — a 50-mile trek — was ahead. Walking on a dry lakebed, every step made crunching sounds, but with a full moon overhead it was an eerie but yet gratifying sense to be one with nature. Alone for miles with only a plastic flag every few miles in the wide-open Sahara is about as far away from civilization one can get. It leaves time for reflection.

The next night a German camera crew came into the tent asking if I was up for an impromptu interview. Naturally I was.

Finish Line

On the last morning, the camp looked like a Mash unit after a planeload of wounded soldiers had arrived. I saw bandages and beat-up body parts, but everyone was in high spirits for being so close to the finish. After a quick breakfast I was ready to hobble the last few miles past date palm trees, fields and back into Ouarzazate. With a couple of miles to go, I hooked up with three Moroccan runners who were singing and laughing. Four abreast we linked arms and kind of hopscotched for a few hundred yards.

The last mile I actually ran, not feeling any pain, while locals lined the street and cheered us on as if we were heroes. It was an emotional moment for me. Patrick Bauer greeted each of us at the finish line with a bear hug and a few friendly words, and hung medals around our necks.

Walking practically the entire race, I came in 175th, dead last. But I was happy, since 25 others had not finished at all.

Would I do it again? No. I have nothing to prove. I know what I am capable of. And this experience reinforced my image of the desert: that it isn’t a dead or desolate place, but can be full of life, if one takes the time to explore it on its own terms.

Jurgen Ankenbrand is a writer and photographer who lives in Southern California.

Although South Korea is anxious about its proximity to the North, it’s also used to it. For instance, it circulates an emergency number for reporting North Korean spies. (Some years ago, a South Korean fisherman noticed a North Korean submarine floating calmly down a river, dialed the number, and was given a $250,000 reward.)

The DMZ, a 150-mile long, 4-mile wide strip of disputed land between the two countries, is riddled with landmines and checkpoints. But the authorities have tried to make it appealing. So there’s an amusement park, and other tourist attractions.

I book a tour with a group of fellow English teachers; the drive from Seoul takes about an hour. We stop at Paju City, just south of the DMZ, where besides an amusement park, there are many Korean War-related sites. We find several monuments to the dead, including Freedom Bridge, where 13,000 POWs were released after armistice in 1953. The bridge is covered with mementos left by people touched by war, including from families separated by the border.

On Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving, part of the day is devoted to cleaning the graves of ancestors. For those unfortunate people whose ancestral graves are in North Korea and therefore inaccessible, Paju has erected an enormous urn as a substitute grave to tend.

The Paju Peace Bell is part monument for peace, part ghastly art installation. Tourists must pay to ring the enormous bell (signifying their desire for a unified Korea — it takes a least six people to ring it). A garish six-foot teardrop hangs from the back. A nearby is wall studded with rocks, drawn from battlefieds spanning human history. Rocks from Spanish-American War battlegrounds are embedded beside rocks from the site of the Peloponnesian war.

Life has a way of overtaking sites of death. It’s disconcerting to walk among monuments to the fallen and hear the happy screams and laughs of children on a carousel.

Panmunjeom, where the armistice that halted the Korean War was signed, has become a Korean Mayberry. If a book disappears from the local library, everyone knows who took it. There are few residents, each receiving a stipend from the Korean government for living there, and for acting as ambassadors for peace.

We roll past security checkpoints, showing our passports to South Korean soldiers, then over rivers and around hills. We aren’t allowed out of the bus, except in well-trodden areas, since the woods just off the road are studded with landmines. Despite the danger, we see families with children taking photos along the road. Perhaps they find the beauty of this area attractive; while the DMZ has been in dispute for more than 50 years, most stretches haven’t been disturbed in all that time. So the DMZ seems a throwback, from modernized Korea. It’s full of trees, animals and birds; there is talk of one day, after reunification, turning the place into a nature preserve.

We get our passports stamped at Dorasan Station, the last train station in South Korea before the North Korean border. This gleaming railway station, still under construction, is meant to one day link the two Koreas with the rest of the world. It will eventually be possible to take a train from Korea to Portugal. To Portugal, through Siberia and Paris! My stamp entitles me to free ride to North Korea once the station opens.

Crossing into North Korea, we stop in Kijong-dong village, where a North Korean soldier briefs us on what we may be able to see of the North, through binoculars. This included the world’s largest flagpole, bearing a North Korean flag. The South claims no one actually lives in Kijong-dong, beyond the 20 or so people caring for it, turning lights on and off at set times.

Stepping up to the binoculars, I see an impossibly large statue of Kim Il-Sung, father of current leader Kim Jong-Il - as well as small figures on motorbikes, kicking up dust. I am peering into North Korea, staring at North Koreans, but have no idea if I am looking at army personnel paid to make the village look inhabited, or at real denizens of a village. I take in the sweeping vistas of the mountains - the village is in a valley - then step back to allow others a glance at life in the North.

We’re taken to some narrow, dank North Korean tunnels the southerners have unearthed, and told they could allow some 20,000 North Korean troops to enter Seoul within hours. The South estimates that the North has dug over 20 such tunnels, only about a quarter of them discovered.

And we’re shown unconvincing propaganda films about the future of the DMZ, in which a laughing girl chases a butterfly over the former war zone, ignoring the reality of the landmines that will undoubtedly linger underfoot long after any peace is achieved.

Getting to Korea’s DMZ
Many Seoul-based companies offer DMZ tours, most making the same stops: at Paju City, Panmunjeom, an Army base, and the North Korean tunnels. We used the Panmunjeom Travel Center http://koreadmztour.com/english/main.html Seoul City, Chung-Gu, Sogong-dong, Lotte Hotel 6nd floor (Main Bldg) Tel: 02-771-5593 x5; Fax: 02-771-5596.

We were in the mountain village of Paramin, north of Trinadad’s capital, Port of Spain. Paramin’s 4,000 or so inhabitants have Spanish roots, and speak a patois dialect based on French.

The waiting crowd gathered on the slope and the village square parted to make way for the Paramin Blue Devils, who swirled, leapt and shrieked, jabbing the air with pitchforks, machetes, long sticks and other farm tools. They opened their mouths wide, exposing their crimson red tongues.

Four young boys and a plump adult, swishing a kind of long-grass contraption, swarmed toward us, with rhythmic shrieks that kept beat with the biscuit tin-drums, or pans, as they were called, and the plastic whistles of their strange orchestra.

Humoring them by shaking my hips to the music, and waving
my hands gleefully, did not help. The shrieks became louder, and
the young ones sprang against the fence like spider-gremlins and
slithered up, jabbing their fingers at us. Another scampered from the
side and danced before us, a frenzied zombie. He too jabbed his finger. Now what were we being accused of? It struck me then that this jabbing in the air meant they wanted Trinidadian dollars from us.

I cursed myself for leaving behind my wallet of foreign currency.

I lowered my camera, and gazed with unfazed sphinx-like steadiness at the gyrating beings in front of me. It worked. They retreated, leaving fragments of a blue-rimmed surreal behind. For they were not really in pantomime — but in true character that resonated through the ages and the drumbeats of the past.

There is in each of us a mystic fascination for the raw, primal carnal energy and its mesmeric tribal rhythm and dance. It takes us in its flood, and swells your soul with an ancient call. The whole expression of the parade is rooted in a culture based primarily on oral history and tradition. The blue devils are a form of “jab-jab” as they are called, and are part of the pre-Lenten rituals and festivity.

That very morning, close to sunrise, I had experienced the j’ouvert, or opening day, of the pre-Lenten Carnival, in Port of Spain. Participants caked with mud, ash, black grease paint or ghostly white colors had paraded down the main streets, dancing or wining (a very suggestive dance in which two people or more gyrate together back-to-back, or front-to-back, swiveling and grinding their hips). Their attires were a mishmash of flaming colored wigs, strange headgear and the masks of devils or beasts.

The widely-held belief here is that the jab dance dates back to the days of slavery. In the 1770s, the French overlords celebrated Carnival with flamboyant masks and costumes, as a last fling before the penitence and abstinence of Lent. The slaves held separate dances in their yards and barracks.

With the abolition of slavery in 1838, there was an unleashing of the pagan Carnival celebrations, with wild dances, grease paint and grotesque masks out on the streets, accompanied by loud drumbeats that sent the alarmed gentry fleeing behind closed doors.  Attempts to abolish by force behavior that, in those times, was considered outrageous and obnoxious, only led to rioting: opposition burst the floodgates of its turbulent expression.

Heady over their freedom, the natives of Paramin reputedly mimicked their former masters by painting themselves exaggerated shades of blue, made from laundry bluing tablets ground and mixed with water.

In Paramin, it is customary for the blue devils to dance on Carnival
Monday, a February or March evening. On my night there, we flowed with the stream of people.

I was mesmerized by one of the main figures, a king devil who opened and closed his gigantic white-and-blue splotched dragon wings. His assistant restrained him with a rope, as he swirled and yawed at the crowd, the pupils of his eyes glinting. On the rim, a very young masked devil poked a puppy with his trident, sending it yelping to safety.

The children watched this drama with unperturbed interest. One toddler jabbed his finger right back at a devil who wore a scary beast mask, with horns and a mane. Amazingly, the beast slithered away like a wounded repentant snake.

One devil especially caught my attention, because he was so different from the rest. His tragicomic mask topped was decorated with a bulbous red rubber nose and drooping mouth. He beseeched onlookers for dollars, his sad, entreating visage with its silent plea hard to resist. When he was honored with the booty, he turned up the corners of his mouth with his fingers into a winsome smile. He was by far the tamer version of the retinue from the netherworld.

Most of the others were either bald, or wearing wispy silver-white or multicolored woolly wigs. These strange and gruesome creatures either dribbled foaming beer down their throats, necks and chests, confronted the crowd with mock savagery or swiveled on the wet ground, while the rest danced in short steps legs wide apart.

All of a sudden a lithe young devil with red wings pranced into view and jabbed a finger at me. I indicated I had no money. To my blushing embarrassment he bent backwards in slow motion with the beat and began to suggestively move his fingers in circles on his bare body while flicking his tongue. I turned towards a local girl and asked her to “please send him away. I have no money to give. ” She smiled right back and said, “He will go away if you don’t have any…he won’t stay.”

But the creature before me spread his legs wide, bent further
backward and placed his hand flirtatiously behind his head. “He
wants you to photograph,” the girl said helpfully. I readily

flooded him with a torrent of flashes from my camera as the grotesque model proffered several poses and best angles. He finally and thankfully oozed away towards another victim, tilting his head — a precursor of another brazen drama of foreplay.

I realized that what I thought was a long stick one of the blue devils was swinging was actually a phallus symbol. A pretty teenaged girl ran away giggling, as he brandished and prodded it playfully towards her.

Noroom for prudishness here. I was awed by the raw sexuality displayed - in front of the very young, the pubescent and the very old. Yet, after my initial shock, I realized that the show wasn’t downright sexual. An unwritten code of conduct kept the participants from crossing the boundaries.

I surged through the crowd towards the spot where the spectators were being entertained by the gremlins from hell, who were raking the money with their pitchforks. By now some of them were rolling on the ground in contortions to the hypnotic beat of the tin drums.

Though the whole performance seemed raucous, raw-edged and ribald, it had embedded in it hours of firing the tin drums to tune the beats, hours spent on creating the characters they represented, practicing the dance that had to keep in step with the pan drums, grinding the tablets of bluing agent to make the paint, rubbing baby oil before the color is applied so that it stays on the skin. As one of the persons in the documentary film “Jab-The Blue Devils of Paramin” states, “”My father used to tell me …as long as you put that blue on your skin and you hear a pan, you just totally different…”

Some of the blue had smeared on my arm and elbow … and with it I carried the beat of the pan, the infectious dance of the Paramin devils. And I realized that I had been more than a spectator.

Indo-Canadian writer and photographer Shobha Gupta Gallagher is based in Ottawa.

I’d always wanted to visit. The first time I tried I was in Chengdu, in central China.  I wanted to buy a plane ticket to Lhasa, but as a foreigner was told I had to go through a Communist travel agency, to apply for a special permit. I never made it then, but I promised myself I would try again.

A few years later, I applied for the permit in Nepal, and got it.

Reaching Tibet involved a seven-day journey over the Himalayas, on a bumpy, dangerous, mountainous road. It was very tiring, but I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here are some of the people I met.

Despite what they’ve gone through, their spirits seemed high. People I spoke to often expressed a strong belief that they would one day be free.

[Editors' note: China imposed unofficial martial law in Tibet in March 2009, after a year of angry uprisings by nomads in the highlands.]

In their faces you can see how much they have suffered. I have tried to capture that emotion through my images.

Knowing this, boys make pincers of their hands, tuck them into the corners of their mouths and blow until their eyes bulge. Usually they can emit no more than a disappointing “ffft,” like air sneaking from a tire. But they persist until one day, out comes a whistle so shrill it rings their ears. They keep blowing until the entire block knows that another man has been born.

They soon realize that the most important whistle is one they knew all along: the wolf-whistle. They’d heard men use it — that sharp rise in pitch followed by a fading descent — but until puberty, they didn’t know why.

It’s a game of courtship played throughout Latin America, but perhaps nowhere with more regularity than on the streets of Piura, Trujillo and other cities on Peru’s northern coast. It’s a game so predictable that it feels scripted, as if the men and women are actors in a lazy street troupe.

I was heading down the coast by bus from Ecuador to southern Peru, along northern Peru’s so-called Gringo Trail. Nowadays it’s more like an international highway, full of tourists with luggage and printed itineraries, not hippies with backpacks and mangled guidebooks.

It was in Piura where I had the privilege of experiencing something usually reserved for women: Locals of the opposite sex frequently whistled at me. Flattered rather than offended — they were almost always young, attractive women — I would smile back and they would giggle. And that would be that.

One evening when I was attending a soccer tournament, thousands of men in my section erupted into a cacophony of wolf-whistling. This usually indicated the crowd’s objection to a call on the field. But the Peruvian crowd was showing little interest in the match, which featured the Mexican and Ecuadorian national teams.

Instead, the object of the crowd’s attention was a young blond-haired woman walking between the first row and the field. From men in suits to men in soiled T-shirts, they were all watching on her. To her credit, she didn’t falter, but she blushed, dropped her head and smiled like someone who had just tripped on the street.

I felt no temptation to wolf-whistle — then or ever. But encouraged by one too many swigs of rum, I stood up, turned to the crowd and raised my hands. “Amigos, amigos, por favor,” I pleaded with a smirk, as if nudging them collectively in the side and winking. The crowd erupted into laughter. Whistlers or not — Peruvian or not — men are men.

Nothing on the northern coast compares to southern sites like Machu Picchu, the magical ruins of the famous Incan city, or Colca Canyon, the deepest canyon on Earth. But Trujillo, the northern coast’s largest and most attractive city, is worth a visit.

I liked the place for its bright colonial architecture, spring-like climate, and its history. Trujillo is home to pre-Columbian sites like the pre-Inca Chimú  capital Chan Chan, one of the largest adobe cities in the world, and to temples attributed to the still-earlier Moche culture. Huanchaco, a nearby beach town, is popular with sunbathers and surfers. And the seafood is fantastic. Perhaps the best ceviche in the world is served here.

As in Piura, though, I was most attracted to the people. The Trujillo women were strikingly beautiful. A recent Miss USA was Trujillo native. This, of course, only goads on the whistlers. Sometimes it’s no more than a sign of friendliness.

Trujillians, as well as folks in Piura and the “capital of friendship,” Chiclayo, are more amiable than southern Peruvians, who are accustomed to (and perhaps tired of) tourists.

Every weekday after lunch, Trujillo shuts down for a three-hour siesta. Businesses, even the chain supermarkets, lock their doors between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., and the swarms of cabs dissipate. Men of all ages and classes step outside and stand in groups, idly talking.

Inevitably, an attractive woman approaches. She may be alone or with a friend, or even with her parents or boyfriend. Or she could be a tourist. It makes no difference: The men will turn and stare at her shamelessly and then break into whistles.

The woman always keeps walking, eyes straight ahead, as though she hasn’t heard a thing. The men, smiling, turn back toward one another after she passes. They discuss the merits of her body and suggest what they would do if, someday, they happen to find themselves in bed with her.

Peruvian women tell me they hate being whistled at, but then add, “It’s a macho culture,” as if to say, “That’s just the way it is.” Foreign women tend to be less forgiving. I wouldn’t be surprised if the blond woman at the stadium later asked a friend, “Do they really think they’re going to pick up a woman that way?”

But that’s missing the point. The wolf-whistle seems less a mating call than a shallow display of masculinity, like grabbing your crotch or spitting. The whistles, I mean, are not really meant for the women. They are for the men.

“Shark fin,” said Shoko. “It’s a very special dish.”

This was the first course of a banquet at a fancy Chinese restaurant, where my Japanese host family had taken me to celebrate my arrival.

Spoons poised, they waited for me, the guest, to take the first bite. As an unworldly suburbanite, I’d been expecting the Chinese food I knew and loved at home. But if everyday Japanese food was appalling to my Irish meat-and-potatoes palate, this meal was over the top.

I pulled up a mucousy yellow broth that had what distinctly looked like hair in it. I swallowed the sour soup, and the short, bristly potential hairs, and flashed a big smile.

“Oishii!” I said, trying desperately to remember if sharks even had hair. “Delicious!”

I managed to eat everything set before me on that day. The family looked thrilled. The nausea I felt all the next day was worth it.

We were 11 American students on a sister cities friendship visit between my town of Salem, Mass., and the Tokyo suburb of Ota. My host family, the Abes, lived in a nine-room, three-story townhouse in Ota’s Kamiikedai district. A home of that size is practically unheard of in Tokyo. I slept on a futon on the tutami mats in the ceremonial tea room downstairs, separated from the Western-style living room (with its giant karaoke system) by shoji, or sliding rice-paper doors.

My host father, Ken, a CEO of a sound system company, spoke only a few words of English and would change into a comfy white tracksuit whenever he returned home.

Michiko, my tiny, smiling host mother, spoke only a little more English than Ken and was never without her dark hair perfectly curled and her lips carefully painted red. Their three children, 16-year-old Toru, who wanted to be a DJ; 25-year-old Shoko, who was always smiling but posed stony-faced in photos; and 28-year-old architect Junko; all spoke English beautifully. But I knew only 10 words and phrases in Japanese.

On my first night in their home, Michiko carefully prepared a traditional Japanese dinner with steamed vegetables, rice and raw beef and fish. I filled up on the delicious vegetables and rice and, so as not to offend the family, ate what I though was an acceptable amount of the beef and sashimi. I followed my rule of eating half of everything put in front of me for the remainder of my stay.

I thought I’d pleased the family until one day Michiko pulled me aside.

“You have anorexia?” she asked me in careful English. “You eat little.”

Toru later explained that his mother thought all American girls had eating disorders, a point the local media insisted on. My eating half of my portions was proof of the U.S. anorexia epidemic. I hoped my performance at the restaurant had redeemed me.

I saw both modern and traditional life during my weeks in Tokyo. Some days, I would visit arcades, stand high atop the city in Tokyo Tower or race Toru through the obstacle courses in the fitness parks. Other days, I watched kabuki theater, attended ceremonial teas and toured museums, like the Folk Museum in Ota-ku.

Often, I was homesick, and there existed the constant reminders that I did not fit in.

In one museum, while walking through exhibits of traditional dress and the ancient tools of seaweed farming, I noticed an elderly man, not more than 5 feet 3 inches tall, peering at me through thick, gold-rimmed glasses. The man, a noted Japanese historian and one of the country’s official national treasures, adjusted his tie, clasped his arms thoughtfully behind his back and approached me.

“You are very interesting to me anthropologically,” he said in amazement, as he looked up at all 6-foot-1-inch of me. He asked if he could take a picture with me. Afterward, he strolled out of the room.

My height also made me a minor attraction in the streets, especially among young schoolgirls in plaid jumpers. They would stop me with the request, “May I?” and then stand beside me, fingers making a peace sign as their friend snapped a picture. Then they would run away, giggling nervously into their hands.

On our last night, the mayor of Ota invited us to participate in the Peace Day, an annual August jazz celebration to promote world peace. We were taught two songs in Japanese and told we’d also be singing “I’m On Top of the World.”

“The Carpenters are wonderful!” gushed our translator.

It was assumed that we, as Americans, would naturally know the words to all of the Carpenters’ songs.

On the day of the festival, the women of Tokyo were dressed in stately silk kimonos, their tiny waists wrapped in thick satin obis, and their hair twisted into chopsticked chignons.

The smaller American girls were dressed in dainty wooden sandals and brightly patterned kimonos. Those of us too tall for the floral robes, namely me and the males, were given extra-large T-shirts with the phrase “Ota-Salem Exchange” printed in English and Japanese across the front.

Just before the elaborate display of 5,000 fireworks, Mayor Yoshio Nishino invited us onstage before hundreds of thousands of people. Like a sea the crowd stretched east, west and north, until the eye could see no further into the darkness. The spotlights flicked on, and the music cued up to the first Japanese song we’d learned.

“Oh my God,” said my friend Marina, in her blue and white kimono and yellow crepe obi beside me. “Are we supposed to sing all by ourselves?”

As the crowd began to clap and sway, we exchanged confused glances, shrugged and began to belt out the lyrics we’d been taught.

“Ue o muite aruko, namida ga kobore nai yoni Omoidasu haru no hi, hitori bochi no yoru.”

Our host families joined us on stage, hugging us tearfully as our voices limped through the final song. The hundreds of thousands of voices in the crowd then joined in:

“I’m on the top of the world, looking down on creation/ And the only explanation I can find/ Is the love that I’ve found ever since you’ve been around/ Your love’s put me at the top of the world.”

Sunbursts lit up the sky like the Fourth of July as the fireworks sizzled over the last notes. The crowd oohed and aahed. And suddenly, I was home.

We live in voluntary media celibacy, where the only important news is the weather forecast. The author Sven Barthel said: “A sailing boat is an instrument of freedom.” The time and the unpredictability free us from schedules. Sea captain John Wilhelm Frostedt, my grandfather’s grandfather and the master of Brig Siri of Stockholm in the 19th century, signed his letters: “God willing, weather permitting.”

In Thyboroen, Denmark, you wear plain blue workman’s trousers, not designer jeans. Beer is in a bottle, and tattoos are large, to cover the arm and shoulder. This seaport is macho and smells of fish. Huge anchors and propellers decorate the gravel gardens. There are very few flower beds around the houses.

Lisa and I waited three days for the gale to blow over. Now the wind is calmer but the sea is still very heavy. Big North Sea trawlers depart, and waves break over them as they sail offshore. All the yachts stay in harbor. Germans with big bellies wait for big game fishing. They kill time with beer, story-swapping and loud laughter.

We needed diesel and Lisa finds the harbor office and the lady in charge of the pump; no marina with smart young men in white shorts here. The pump station is situated in the bottom of a narrow basin used by the fishermen for unloading their catch. At first they are irritated, but when they understand that we were trying to reach the pump, they become very friendly and supportive. They give us a bucket full of mussels and we trade beer for flounder.

Lisa fries the flounder for lunch, and serves them with capers and pickled beets and new potatoes. She saves the mussels for a few days, as they need to be rinsed of sand in several changes of water, then steam cooked. Then we will use the shells as forks and dip the mussels in “Siri sauce,” made from oil, French mustard, and honey and dill. Fresh baguettes baked on board together with Danish cheese and butter make it a wonderful meal.

Poets and sailors have for centuries sung about their fear and awe of the North Sea. On board Siri we have great respect for it, and prepare meticulously for our crossing to Norway.

We follow this checklist:

-Charts, pilot books, plotter.

-Engine, oil, sweet water, drive belts

-Running lights

-Reef lines in the main sail

-Goosenecks in Dorade ventilators closed

-Chain pipe closed

-Dinner casserole prepared

-Weather forecast from Denmark and Norway

We are tense; no point in denying that. So these activities reduce our anxiety. I walk around in the harbor and listen to the other skippers. Are they leaving or staying? At night I climb up on deck to look and listen to the weather. It is calm in the basin. We are protected from the southwesterly winds predicted in the forecasts.

We have breakfast and dress in long underwear; the water is still cold in June. Up on deck I see that our neighbors are busy too. We are all anxious to get going.

The swell from the gale meets us outside the piers, and Siri dips her bowsprit in the waves. Reed’s almanac warns against entering Thyboroen in Beaufort 5 or stronger. The waves can break dangerously in the sandy, shallow entrance. The professional fishermen do not obey Reed’s, but we who sail for pleasure follow its advice. We use the engine to get out on deep water before we set sail. The wind is around Beaufort 4, and mizzen and genoa give us a comfortable speed of five knots.

I take the first watch and Lisa goes below to rest. The sun breaks through the clouds and the color of the sea shifts from light grey to deep blue, reflecting the sky. Haze still hangs over land. The coast of Jutland is low and sandy, and I soon see only church towers and windmills astern. Regina Arctica, a boat from Spitsbergen, Norway, leaves harbor at the same time as us, but returns. The boys seem to have had some problems in the rig.

I am alone with the sea, and in contact with eternity. We sail literally in the same water as the Irish monk St. Brendan, and the Vikings. Water evaporates into clouds and returns to the Earth as rain, which turns into sea again in the cycle of nature. The sea is the last wilderness; passing ships leave no trace. Life pulsates here. Ninety percent of the biosphere — that is, where life exists — is water, and 75% of the Earth’s surface is sea. We live on planet Ocean, not the Earth. And Siri is the center of a circle with a radius of six nautical miles. That is the distance to the horizon. Upwards I look into heaven, and at night I seem reach to the outer stars in the universe.

Lisa prepares asparagus soup and sandwiches for lunch before taking her turn at watch. At sea we meet and eat. When one of us is on deck sailing, the other can rest or navigate below. We sail for pleasure, not for performance or endurance, but we know we can stay at sea several nights in this way.

The fulmars keep the helmsman company. Small and tubby, they live in the open sea and sail with stiff wings close over the waves. Their aerodynamics are masterful. The fulmar rests high on the water surface with a slightly bent neck. The people of the Faroe Islands call them seahorses; the Swedes call them storm birds.

Lisa takes the watch and it’s my turn to rest. We sleep on the sofa in the main cabin so that the helmsman can get help in seconds if necessary. The sofa is secured with bunk-boards, so we lie safely independent of the boat’s heeling.

When I’m back on deck Regina Arctica overtakes us, and my competitive spirit is aroused. We hoist the main sail, and though our sails only total 100 square meters, sail almost as fast as the Norwegians. But Regina is five tons lighter and 20 years younger, and slowly disappears ahead of us. I see an occasional steamer but no yachts, for they are rare out here.

We normally reduce the sail area at night but the winds are light and we’re traveling at a comfortable six knots, so I let them stay. Lisa does not like to sail when it is dark and I take longer watches then. Lisa supports me with tea and sandwiches and small talk. Now in June the nights are not really dark; there’s a brief twilight between dusk and dawn, and the northern horizon is reddish all the time.

In darkness it is difficult to judge the distance to a source of light, for we tend to believe that a strong light is closer than a weak one. We meet a ship whose course is crossing ours, and I see first the weak red light and a stronger white masthead light, then the contour of the ship’s bridge and finally the green light too. Now the ship is heading directly towards us, and I am all attention. Slowly the red light disappears and I understand that the ship will pass well by our stern. My eyes follow the ship steaming westwards, probably towards the oilfields. After midnight I see the light of the lighthouse on Lista, mainland Norway. Our GPS confirms our position: we are 12 nautical miles from the coast.

The wind dies, and in the east I see that dawn is close. The surface of the sea looks like fluid pewter - it seems to have the same density as the tin I used to make tin soldiers as a boy. The sails flutter and the sheets tap against the deck. The noise wakes Lisa and she brings coffee and breakfast to the cockpit. We wait to see if the wind will return, but we don’t have enough patience. We lower the sails and start the engine. It’s 35 nautical miles to Sirevag, Norway, our next port of call. The current is northerly and gives us two welcome extra knots. (Language is strange; a northerly current runs toward the north, a northerly wind comes from the north.)

We see the high mountains of the Norwegian coast, and the sunlight overpowers the flashes from the lighthouse. Lisa takes the wheel, so I turn in, ready to be awakened an hour before we enter Sirevag. A huge North Sea trawler overtakes us and leads the way into the harbor. Regina Arctica is berthed there already, and the boys are fast asleep. When we have our arrival breakfast of eggs and bacon, they wake up, and tell us that they have arrived four hours ahead of us.

Per Holmlov is a writer who sails with his wife, Lisa, for several months of the year. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Tales from a Summer Ship,” to be published in Swedish by Norstedts in August 2009.

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Daecheon mud supposedly contains minerals good for your skin. About a decade ago, after city leaders realized they could make more money selling that mud as a tourist attraction than they could by using it in farming, the Boryeong Mud Festival was born (Boryeong being another name for the Daecheon area).

The annual festival attracts about a million visitors each year. Most are Korean, but there are plenty are foreigners, too.

It’s an odd clash between two views on mud: clean and dirty.

Korean families view it as a day at the beach, were you have fun covering each other in mud to get beautiful skin. Most foreigners — chiefly English teachers from Anglo countries, and U.S. military personnel stationed around the region — view it as a chance to drink and listen to concerts, and to rub down pretty ladies.

To foreigners like me, teaching in rural Korean towns where the social structure seems reminiscent of 1950s America, stepping off the bus can feel surreal, like when Dorothy landed in Oz. There’s overwhelming color and vibrancy. You see throngs of tourists, bouncy castles and barbecues — and giant vats of watery mud. You can wade in lukewarm waist-high mud in the pool; cover fellow “prisoners” with the stuff in a rope-barred mud prison; and slip down a hundred-foot high plastic mudslide that drops gently into the sea.

Boryeong doubles as a cultural festival, so people in traditional costumes parade past the tourists, playing drums. Invited to join, the occasional sweaty, mud-covered tourist in flip flops will grab a drum or a pair of cymbals, and dance along.

But the big attraction is the beach. Buckets of mud, and brushes, are set up upon row after row of tables along the shore. The idea is to paint yourself, or your neighbor, in a lavish coat of mud, then dry in the sun and wash off in the ocean.

The town I taught in was relatively small, the kind of place where everyone knew everyone else’s business. It was also far away. I considered myself on a hedonistic holiday from stultifying village life.

As I started removing my watch, I noticed out of the corner of my eye someone who looked familiar.

As I prepared to strip down to a bathing suit and be coated in mud by a stranger, I realized that a student of mine was standing about five feet to my right.  She was grinning broadly, and accompanied by her entire family.

I decided to cover myself in mud.

MORE INFO

Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) Headquarters TIC
40, Cheongyecheonno, Jung-gu, Seoul 100-180
9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Tel: 082-2-7299-497 ext. 499
24-hour travel info line: 082-2-1330

At 5:45 a.m., I stumble out of bed. As advised, I am still remotely buzzed, having left a bar only four hours before. By 7 a.m., our group has joined an already-impressive line of Gen-Nexters (and a few lost Baby Boomers), waiting for the Pimlico racetrack gates to open at 8 a.m.

We’re a couple of years older than most of the people we see — and at least a couple of years out of synch.

The actual race, the second part of the Triple Crown series, won’t start until 5. And it only lasts a few minutes, since the course is just over a mile.  While Baltimore’s Preakness follows the Kentucky Derby in chronology, it gallops very much to its own beat.

About A Cooler Per Couple

I’m told that Preakness is known as racing’s blue-collar edition.  It also delineates from the Kentucky Derby and Belmont because it’s the only race that allows spectators to BYOB.

The early birds relish in this — it looks like there’s about one cooler for every two people. Sipping OJ  heavily laced with champagne, I observe my compatriots here in the Infield, the equivalent of the cheapest seats.

I was forewarned not to expect the Lily sundresses, generously-sized hats, and Mint Juleps synonymous with media-endorsed images of horse races, but I am still amused that most of the spectators seemed dressed for a kickball tournament. Most groups of friends are distinguishable because they wear matching T-shirts with not-so-clever silkscreen slogans, such as “Team Drink,” and “Ride a Cowboy–Not a Horse.”  These T-shirts seem to reinforce the already-obvious fact, demonstrated by beers in hand, slurred speech, and tottering stance, that THIS is a drinking event.  One group even holds coordinated beer cozies, hand-crafted with felt horses.

Several girls have donned rain boots, which alarms me, since there’s not a cloud in the sky.  I’m not wearing a sundress — but wonder fleetingly if my casual outfit will protect me from the elements.

Staking Out Our Turf

When the gates open, our designated runner, a college track star, takes off with a speed and agility the jockeys can only hope their horses will mimic, to secure a place for our group. A runner, I am told, is part of the experience. The runner, packing caution tape and stakes, ropes off a section for his or her group of friends. Ours has been extremely successful; our plot of land could support a mansion. It’s a good thing, though, because we need space to inflate our kiddy pool, the incubator for our beer.

We philosophically debate our claim on this land.  As a Preakness virgin, I equate our act to land appropriations of the Wild West. But my compatriots tell me we deserve it, because we arrived first. For awhile, boundaries hold, and our group mingles along our frontier, while other (less timely or agile) groups huddle in the remaining triangles created by subdivision. As the absurdity of claiming land materializes, and the friendliness of inebriation develops, all groups forgo defending their land. By day’s end, 90,000 people will be packed into this space.

As a virgin to horse racing, I am hoping to place bets, observe the classy (in comparison to our digs) grandstands, and to see an actual horse, if not a horse race. I plan to imbibe, for culture’s sake, a Black-Eyed Susan, said to be the Preakness equivalent of the Mint Julep: bourbon, vodka, orange juice and sweet-and-sour mix.

I try to channel the last threads of my college party girl psyche.  A friend had confided that many friends’ rites of passage occurred here at Preakness. At first, I doubted these tales. But by 11 am, I see security guards traveling in packs, for safety.  Before noon, I see a girl being treated for alcohol poisoning; then I see my first pair of breasts.  I wonder if I dare try to use the port-o-potty.

By 1 o’clock, I give in to the chaos of the experience. One of my friends and I try  to numb the we-are–way-too-old-for-this feeling with a pitcher of overpriced Margaritas. No one offers us Black-Eyed Susans.

I feel like an old football quarterback trying to impress a bunch of high schoolers with his spiral. As the sugar and tequila settle nicely into my bloodstream, I begin to time-travel back to a younger, cooler self.

Then the beer cans start flying.

It’s the beer-can bombardment: one of the traditions of the Infield.  I don’t like it; it reminds me too much of actual bombings. Beer cans bounce off my friends’ shoulders, arms, and  heads. People use Tupperware tops to shield themselves. Luckily, no around me gets hit by a full can – which, according to Preakness myth, really does happen.

My father,  excited by the prospect of his daughter attending a horse race, texts me and asks me to place some bets. Apparently, NBC coverage doesn’t disclose the level of mission this will entail. Navigating through the cesspool of people, I manage to arrive at the betting tents, tucked away in a corner like a second thought to the frathouse/Infield revelry.

Enroute, I debate the many glowing offers of the Preakness carnival: free beer, chicken fingers and “a date for the day.”  Undeterred by these gems, I place my dad’s bets.  While I never thought gambling would making me feel ethically sound, my two-dollar “1-and-8 to win” and “place of show” bets make me feel slightly more legitimate. I can only equate it to bringing a gift to a wedding that you crash.

Back with my group, we debate the merits of a Preakness edition of “Girls Gone Wild.” I object; these scenes would probably be too risqué, even for home-video.

All around us, girls ride boys’ shoulders and flash the adoring crowd. Franzia, the bag wine of choice, is funneled into eager mouths. The port-o-potties even become venues of entertainment, as people Spiderman-scale them and run across the tops.

We’re witnessing the spectacle of an unbridled species, and not the equine kind.

My eyes wander to eight adults (actual adults — not children masquerading as adults, or adults masquerading as children). They sit petrified on folding chairs, sipping soda and trying to read the race program, while keeping their eyes focused anywhere but on their surroundings. I romantically cast them as a church group bent on saving ten dollars on the  admission price. I didn’t need to imagine their horror; they wore it clearly in their eyes.

Caving

We flee two hours before the race starts. In our taxis, we critique this younger generation. Were we ever like that?

We continue our Preakness experience with ESPN, and are treated to a clear view of  Curlin trotting to victory, aided by the detail provided by flat-screen HDTV TV. The only shots of the Infield are aerial; from high up, the debauchery just melts into a tiny speck.  I am sure the attendees, their parents and the FCC are happy enough to see the activities of the Infield marginalized.

Bar-hopping that night, we’re the only dust-bedraggled, sunburnt group on the circuit. A guy approaches me and says, “You were at Preakness? And you’re still out? You must be really hard-core.” I didn’t have the guts to explain.

The Preakness Stakes takes place the third Saturday of each May, in 2009 on May 16. The Baltimore Sun reports that the BYOB tradition has ended http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/bal-sp.pimlico17apr17,0,5176171.story : instead, alcohol will be sold. For info about attending, see: http://www.preakness.com/

Ocracoke is the last inhabited island of North Carolina’s Outer Banks and can be reached only by boat (including public ferries) or private plane.  The island is about as long as Manhattan, 17 miles, but barely wide enough in some places to hold its patched and ravaged two-lane stretch of asphalt.  There are roughly 650 locals, O’cockers, whose families stretch back to the first British pilots sent over to lead ships through the treacherous shoals and harbor.

A place with 650 people means, after a year or two, that you will not only know everyone, but also everyone’s family, cousins, grandparents and in-laws.  There are just a handful of names.  A friend of mine was a Gaskill who married a Garrish.  Her mother had been a Garrish who married a Gaskill.  There are hundreds of O’Neals.  I’ve never met two married first cousins, but most people agree without self-consciousness that they are connected “somewhere down the line.”

I’ve read that the Ocracoke “brogue” is left over from Elizabethan English.  I’ve also read that it is not.  Either way, it is a strange accent, coming from somewhere across the Atlantic from a long time ago.  To some outsiders the O’cockers sound Australian.  Others simply can’t understand them.  Fire is pronounced far and if the water is especially high one day you will hear there is a hoi toide.

Ocracoke is inundated with tourists during the summer, and then the accent recedes some.  You’ll hear it best in February, at the height of boredom, after everyone has been drunk for many days, when even the plainest words sound a little like there are marbles in the mouth.

Still in the summer, driving around with a fisherman, you’ll hear a lot of the accent.  If old women are known for relentless gossip, it is only because they do it on the front porch without cover.  Grown men lining and repairing their nets, cleaning fish and fixing boats, are likely spreading as much rumor as anyone else.  A drive around the village is more a series of stops.  People you saw just hours ago, people who have been off the island.

“How much fish did you have this morning?”

“Can I borrow your power washer later to clean my porch?”

“Did you hear who they saw coming out of so and so’s house today?”

You will likely stop at a construction site and have a beer.  You may be put to work helping somebody move something somewhere.  You’ll probably stop at the gas station for a six pack.

There is no reason not to enjoy Ocracoke without drinking. Its beaches are some of the most beautiful in the world, and you’ll always be able to find some kind of just-caught fish or seafood to eat.  More likely, though, you’ll drink.  A lot.

In a village with no stoplights, no movie theaters, no grocery stores, one bar and a handful of restaurants, there’s not much else to do. The boat ride to the mainland is two and a half hours, and it’s easily two hours to the nearest island, where there is a Food Lion and small movie theater.  People drink the way New Yorkers hurry; it is in the texture of each day.  I heard a friend of mine had a little too much one night and ended up having an accident in the bed with his new off-island girlfriend.  She decided that kind of life wasn’t for her, and left him.  I called him to give fair harassment.  “They’ve got it all wrong,” he said.  “I was having a dream she was on fire and just wanted to put it out.”

The best part about the ride in the pickup will be putting it into four-wheel drive and going out to the beach.  In season, a five-mile stretch opens to the southern point of the island.  In the winter, you may drive the whole beach.  All of Ocracoke is protected by the U.S. National Park Service.  There is nothing to interrupt your view of the dunes and the sea oats and the ocean but an occasional low ramp, and boardwalks built every six miles or so.  The rest is open sand.  Even when the island is inundated with tourists, in August, you can find a quiet place to pull off the road, then lug your things across the dunes and have the place all to yourself.

The beach there is as every beach should be: wide, and beaten down by wind and tide.  You will almost always see dolphins swimming by.  As you doze off in your chair, ghost crabs will begin to come from their tunnels and stare at you, looking for something to eat.  Toss them a small piece of shell and see them pounce, disappointed with their prey.  After a good storm you can find any kind of shell or sand dollar.  The Outer Banks are known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, and I have two large pieces of shipwrecks in my apartment found there.

South of Ocracoke is an abandoned island, Portsmouth, with a ghost village and just three or four permanent Park Service residents.  On Portsmouth you can find the big and unusual shells, helmets and spiral conchs, huge pieces of coral, tulip shells and starfish.  I have only ever seen one seahorse on Ocracoke; a friend of mine found it in his fishing nets and brought it around for people to see.

Another friend of mine, gone now, but a lifelong resident who was in his seventies when I knew him, would tell stories about other things that washed up.  He said shoes used to be shipped in two loads, the rights on one ship and lefts on another, to prevent theft.  A ship of lefts wrecked offshore when he was young, and hundreds of boxes washed up.  It was a very poor time for the Ocracokers; brothers may have shared just one pair of shoes between them.  So everyone collected two lefts, larger than the normal size, to make up for the bad symmetry.  For a long time in church and school, he said, you would see many people in two large left shoes.

Another time a banana boat wrecked, and there were enough that everyone could hang many bunches in their attics, and eat them all summer.

More famously, in the 1500s, a Spanish ship wrecked not too far offshore, and the horses aboard managed to swim to shore.  They have survived to this day: the Ocracoke ponies.  They are kept safe and well-fed in a huge stretch of marsh on the sound side of the middle of the island.

Some years ago, one of my vacations to Ocracoke was interrupted by Hurricane Isabelle.  Hurricanes can be very dangerous, but they can also be tremendously fun (or tremendously boring).  I was worried about where to put my rental car in case the flood was as bad as expected.  An old timer, Dan, took me to a small hill on the sound side of the village.  Having ridden my bike around that road since I was very young, I knew there was a hill. But I did not know what Dan told me then: “This is the highest place in the world.  There’ll never be a tide in this yard.”

Visit Ocracoke, and stay for a while.  Understand that the mosquitoes can be fierce, the power comes and goes, and water is all by reverse osmosis, making it salty and soft.  Still, make a long visit.  Hopefully you’ll be there in February when they catch oysters and scallops that are so fresh and fat you’ll probably never want an oyster or scallop from anywhere else.  Stay for Christmas, when all the pickups have wreathes wired to their front grates, and locals sneak into the pines to cut down Christmas trees, risking huge Park Service fines.  Stay for July, when you’ll meet Germans following their tourist guides, people from Japan buying fish, Marines from Fayetteville hoping to catch a fish.  Stay long enough that you hear the brogue.  Let a drunk front blow in and erase all of your real-world worries.

Shea Heard is a business executive and writer.

Confined for safety reasons to Camp Victory, the U.S. military headquarters built atop Saddam Hussein’s ruined suburban vacation retreat, life could get a little, well, dull.

So Cynthia, who studied art for a few years at Penn State before earning a law degree and joining the Army in part to have a career that tandemned with her Air Force officer husband’s, picked up her camera.

“There is only so much to see, and even less to do, when confined to an area of only a few square miles,” she wrote. “Week after week, I haunted the same places and palaces, carrying my camera and a sense of obligation to chronicle my experience and reveal all that I saw.”

She took more than 4,000 photographs during her September 2005 to September 2006 tour.

Many of the images featured here are from the grounds of Camp Victory, also the former headquarters of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party.

Bombed by Allied forces, the eight palaces on the grounds lay in ruins. Cynthia concluded that much of what Saddam had constructed, though sumptuous-looking from afar, was “merely a facade.”

“Saddam’s crystal chandeliers, up close, were really made of plastic; the ceilings were plaster of Paris,”  she said.

She left wondering if she’d seen enough.

“Although my subjects were neither soldiers nor insurgents, neither Americans nor Iraqis,” she wrote, “the devastation tells its own story in the context of two disconnected cultures, and their place in time and history.” — The Editors

Cynthia Roelle is a Honolulu, Hawaii-based attorney and photojournalist.

They call this mountain Cerro Rico - rich hill. In the centuries after the Spanish conquerors discovered it in the 1500s, 137 million pounds of silver were mined here, turning Potosi into one of the biggest, richest cities in the world.  By the 17th century, the population had swelled to nearly 200,000.

Then in the early 1800s, silver production began to decline. Potosi’s wealth, and its wealthy rulers, started drifting away.

The people of Potosi still believed in the wealth of Cerro Rico, and the much-depleted mountain is still worked today. But most foreigners now come for sightseeing, not conquest or silver.

Nor have the primitive, unpleasant working conditions changed much, since the Spanish first made their fortunes here.

Into the Mine

Our group of seven gathers at a small stall in the Miner’s Market, a few streets at the outskirts of town. We’re encouraged to buy a few items to distribute to workers we meet: treats like coca leaves and orangeade, and more practical items, like dynamite and fertilizer. I have mixed feelings about this, because in some places giving by tourists seems to discourage industriousness, and encourage begging.

When the Spanish first discovered silver here, forced labor ensured high productivity.  While every worker now enters the mines freely, working conditions are still arduous.

We are kitted out in overalls, hardhats and headlamps and driven up the steep sides of Cerro Rico, with its stunning views down to the city and over the surrounding mountains.

A few adobe huts - storage for the miners’ work gear - are dotted around the entrance. Two rail tracks lead into a small hole in the side of the mountain.

A steady wind blows from the city, yet none of us are keen to seek protection inside the mine. The small dark entrance seems to summarize all the stories we have heard about this place.

I want to see for myself, but I don’t want to go in first.

Our guide Eusabio worked in the mines for several years. A large man, he is among the few miners who found other work before contracting silicosis of the lungs, known here as mal de mina.

The average Potosi miner works for just 10 years before ill health drives him from the mine. A miner’s life expectancy is only 40 years, we were told; if lucky enough to escape accidents, constant exposure to poisonous gases takes a toll. Once debilitated by silicosis, the miners receive pensions. But it’s already too late for them to enjoy the short life left to them.

Eusabio leads the way into the darkness. We flick on our headlamps and follow. There is an immediate stillness as the wind disappears, and we follow a narrow passage, about three feet wide and five feet high. The only sounds come from the plod of our boots on the dirt, and the hiss of leaking air pipes that supply compressed air to the miners’ tools.

Since I’m over 6 feet tall, I am crouching. And cautious.

Narrow rail tracks, installed to run the heavy ore carts to the stores outside, run through the tunnel. They must be pushed by hand.

The tunnel widens, and dozens of miners pass us. The tunnel is an arch of carefully-placed blocks, created when this mine was dug some 200 years ago.

The entrance (or more vitally, the exit) is the most important part of the mine, and extra care is taken to shore it up. We saw far less attention to detail inside.

Most miners wear no special safety clothing beyond hardhat. Some carry just small flashlights, others have gas-powered torches. As antiquated as these look (and they are old; many passed down through generations), they are surprisingly effective. A flickering flame can also alert a miner to an oxygen shortage.

Close to each entrance, there is a shrine. In one small opening we see a figure that seems appropriate for such a hellish place.  It’s nonetheless a surprising sight, in a place so devoid of anything other practical accoutrement.

Praying to El Diablo

Adorned in streamers and a confetti of coca leaves, gently illuminated by the numerous torchlights, is life-sized papier mache statue of the devil. He has huge red horns, a wide, smoking mouth–from the several cigarettes placed there-and a large erect penis, symbolic of fertility. Virtually all the miners are Catholic, and know that God is in the heavens and the devil is below. So here, in a strange twist on traditional religion, they pray to el diablo for their success and safety.

Once a week the miners gather here to pray for safe and productive seams, as one’s work area is known. Our guide prayed for us, too: “Please no cave ins, no dangers, keep these people safe.”

“And send me more Japanese tourists,” he added as an afterthought. “Good tips,” he said, by way of explanation.

We crouch, then crawl on our bellies over rocks and dirt, as the tunnel narrows. We emerge into another mine, just one route in the maze that links the 300 or so mines that snake their way within Cerro Rico.

“They meet up by mistake sometimes,” Eusabio said. “Usually there is no one here when they drill through.”

“What happens if there is?” I asked. He gives me a sad smile and a shrug - a ‘that’s life’ gesture he used almost every time the question of safety or accidents was brought up.

Since the Spanish first started exploiting this mine in the 1500s, an estimated eight million people have died from working here: from accidents, lung disease or poisoning, but mainly from mercury, used in silver production. It seems no one denies the danger of working here. But no one speaks of it openly, either.

We catch our first sight of miners at work, unloading a derailed cart. They tell us the cart narrowly missed falling on their legs. We see that familiar shrug again. We gather ’round the cart in an attempt to lift it back on to the tracks, but it’s hopeless. The ore weighs too much for seven men to move it even an inch — and we leave the three miners to shovel out the ore, right the cart, and then refill it.

Easy to Get Lost

Though unsettling, these dark tunnels are fascinating. They vary from solid stone to loose dirt and earth, and are scarred by the marks of drills and picks, shining with the speckled deposits of silver or other metals that lay within.

Guided only by the light of our torches, it is easy to lose sight of those in front of me; I struggle to keep up. Were I to get lost in this labyrinth, my only chance of survival would be finding a worker to guide me out. But with huge areas of this mine unworked, I fear it could be a long time before I met anyone.

Most holes in the floor are large enough to swallow a foot, but others could easily consume a man. In the dark their depth is impossible to guess.

Only as we progress deeper into the mine do we get a true feeling for what a hellish place this is. The air gets hotter, and breathing becomes difficult, in some places because of the heavy dust but more often from the noxious gases. A dull ache that began in my throat shortly after we entered has turned into a sharp pain; with every breath, hot needles poke my throat and lungs.

After about an hour we come to the working face of the mine. Piles of dirt and ore lie on the ground, while three men shovel the minerals into rubber baskets. These flimsy baskets, once full, are hoisted to the level above with a basic pulley system; the only evidence of which we could see was a wire hook that slowly lowered, was attached to the buckets, and lifted again.

The bags of ore were hosted directly above our heads. I wondered how often the bags or cable broke, or the hook slipped. But the miners continued to work, apparently unconcerned about the huge weight dangling precariously above. I found myself trying to back into the solid wall behind me, every time a bag rose, and swayed above.

The air gets hotter. Some workers wear dirty cloths over their noses and  mouths. With temperatures topping 100 degrees F, covering one’s face makes it feel even hotter, so only a few wear proper masks.

“They also make it difficult to smoke,” Eusabio jokes. But hand-rolled cigarettes droop from the mouths of several workers.

Each miner has a wad of coca leaves wadded into one cheek. The leaves help them withstand the harsh conditions, made no easier by the high altitude, and ease them through a day without food (the miners believe abstaining from eating keeps them alert). The extended cheek from constant coca leaf chewing is a physical characteristic of the high-altitude miner.

All around us men shovel ore, while others, forced into narrow shafts, hack at the walls with small manual tools. Others push carts down the various tracks, disappearing into the darkness of constant noise and vibration of drilling.

As we walk deeper in to the mine and pass more people at work, I feel increasingly uncomfortable. We often have to stand aside as an ore cart runs down the tracks - with just inches of room between the heavy cart and the tunnel walls. In other places, our passage interrupts shoveling and digging.

I realize our gifts are little compensation for the inconvenience we are causing.

A young man offers me his hand and smiles warmly, welcoming me to “my life.” At 19, Jose has been working in the mine for almost three years. His jovial attitude seems at odds with the terrible conditions here.

“He has just joined the cooperative and hopes to find a good seam,” Eusabio explains, before quietly adding, in English, “many think this. Then, after awhile they realize few are that lucky.”

Poverty, Hunger and Luck

Many miners are members of a cooperative, set up after the Bolivian government introduced incentives for mining in 1987, a time when this mind had all but closed, due to low productivity. There are now about 50 cooperatives here, the members sharing in the profits from the silver they find.

Each miner is assigned a “face,” to work, and luck plays a major part in its productivity.

The average working day is around eight hours long - modest hours by South American standards - but these can stretch into double shifts, or more.

“If a miner has a poor face, then he can work all day, all night, and make no money,” Eusabio told us. “However, the next day, he might get lucky - he may even employ others to help him work a good face.”  Most coop members earn $4 to $6 per day. The ore is typically sold to local processing plants.

Members often work alone, bringing in outside help if they need assistance with a rich dig; casual laborers make up about 70% of the work force.

We offer José the dynamite we’ve brought.  He examines it carefully, measuring the length of fuse against his arm.  “One meter. Good, thank you,” he says, and again he shakes our hands warmly as we leave.

As he disappears into the darkness, I’m struck by the thought that, by the time Jose reaches my age, his working life will probably be over; if he is lucky, he may work into his 30s. He is a cheerful and bright young man, and I hope he’ll find a job outside the mine.

Cerro Rico is Potosi’s largest employer, and attracts people from all over Bolivia. They’re not seeking fortunes; they’re just after a small wage. Their work keeps this mine alive.

It’s a terrible place that Potesi can’t afford to lose, no matter how high the human cost.

It was our last night in Penang, and I wanted wind chimes like those hanging above our table in the bar with the computer you could put ringgits into, where we saw the Indian man in the billowing pirate shirt, billowing though there was only a slight breeze from the fan.

The wind chimes in the bar were the same ones I saw for sale on the street, an hour before, by a vendor whose name I couldn’t pronounce and can no longer remember. At first I thought they might be a bit too touristy, and too big to pack. But sitting in a bustling beach town tourist bar boasting a 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. happy hour, the bamboo wind chimes, and the hollow thunking noise they made, seemed like the most authentic Malaysian thing I could find in Penang that night.

“I’ll back in fifteen minutes, I told my two traveling mates, who were about to order dollar rum and colas. “I want to go back for those wind chimes.”

“So, that’s what, thirty minutes to an hour Anna time?”

“Fifteen minutes at most,” I said as I picked up my bag that held my camera and wallet, and headed for the door.

As I walked past the stands selling pirated CDs, and the Internet and photo developing spots for Western and other wealthy travelers, a guy in front of me stopped suddenly and turned around. Had I not been walking so slowly, I would have run right into him. My head had been swinging from side to side taking in the sights, and I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going. When he saw me, he acted less startled than stunned.

“I cannot believe you are behind me, I need to talk to you,” he said in British-accented English.

“Ahh,” I said in response.  I was a little overwhelmed, since I saw it was the man in the billowy pirate shirt from the bar. I hadn’t noticed him leave. I took my lack of observation as a sign to proceed with caution.

“I’m sorry because I’m a little drunk, and I do not drink that much, so I’m more than a little drunk. But I saw you in the bar. You were with your two friends.”

“Ahh,” I said. He seemed only tipsy. I, on the other hand was perfectly sober. My only bar indulgence had been the use of the vending machine-like computer, which I used to email my friends back home.

“Your skirt is from Delhi. It was made in India. I noticed it as soon as you walked into the bar.”

“Ahh,” I said again, and we began to walk together.

I didn’t mention that from my point of view my skirt was not from India but from a notorious American big-box store, and that I hated the long, maroon skirt with the little mirrors sewn into the hem, since it drew attention to my exposed ankles and sandaled feet, the only parts of my body below my waist that could tan. I had looked everywhere in America for one of these skirts, specifically to wear in Malaysia. Had I known I did not need to wear one here in Penang, I would have been wearing pants.

“It’s beautiful. I used to embroider those skirts.”

“Ahh,” I could not help but repeat. I felt as though I could not say more. But then I managed: “I like your shirt, it’s kind of like a pirate shirt.”

“Then I’ll have to give you one. I embroidered this in Delhi, too.  Do you know who you are? What is your name?”

“I’m Anna,” I said, with a harsh American south emphasis on the An.

“You mean, Ahhna. “I’m Jagdish, he said, shaking my hand in agreement that we were friends. “But do you know who you are and where we are going?”

Where We Went

The street was murky with humidity and the vendors were beginning to pack up. The darkness of 11 p.m. was setting in, and the halogen lamps used to illuminate tourist goods clicked off as we walked. A few last-minute shoppers were mid-route between the bars and their hotel beds, and were quickly buying what they could still see. But otherwise the place was free of tourists– and potential witnesses.

Jagdish, acting as my guide, told me of another place that sold wind chimes. He knew the wind chime guy on the tourist strip, and said he was always the first to close in the evenings.   If only I were willing to walk with him some more we could find the same wind chimes for a cheaper price. I decided to go along, despite suspecting that most sellers of wind chimes were home asleep.

We quickly turned off the tourist strip and walked a few disorienting blocks that left me unsure how to get back to the bar if I needed to make an escape. But for whatever reason I felt completely safe.

“My heart has been beating very fast, ever since I saw you.  But you are too young.”

When he said this, I didn’t panic. In fact, the only thought that went through my head was: how old is he, if I look so young? His face was as smooth as the edge of the moon.

“Ahh,” I said, as aloofly as possible.

“You are my number twenty,” he continued. He explained how he was a spiritual guru of sorts, and how every now and then he meets someone he is meant to enlighten.  He doesn’t know who they are until he sees them, but when he saw me he knew I was one. He had met 19 other tourists and locals before me, and needed to meet 50 in all before he could ascend to higher level of spiritual gurudom.

All of his talk and the diagrams he drew for me in the little notebook I pulled from my bag was dizzying. I didn’t know if I understood.

“Most of the others are older. You are really young. On the way over here, you couldn’t even stop saying Ahhh. I knew I wasn’t wrong when you kept saying Ahh.” Ahh, he told me, is the universal sound of spirituality.

Allahh, Gahhd Budahh. The list went ahhn and ahhn.

What Does it Mean to Arrive?

When we got to what looked like an abandoned storefront he said we had arrived. I couldn’t tell if he meant physically, emotionally or spiritually.

He pressed a buzzer and waited. When no one answered, he looked at me apologetically.

“I guess you are not getting it tonight,” Jagdish said.

I just shrugged. “I need to get back to the bar. I am late to meet my friends. I told them I’d be back an hour ago.”

I was confused and amused, and excited by the spiritual diagrams. I didn’t kow what it meant. I didn’t know if I was number 20 and whether I was Ahhna or still just Anna. Maybe I was just too young.

“Ahh, yes, let’s move you back in that direction. I will have to give you the shirt another time.”

Four blocks further on I see the bar, and Jagdish tells me to go on ahead without him. I hadn’t gone as far as I’d thought. In fact, as easy as it was to feel lost and mixed up with this drunken stranger, he had somehow pointed me in just the right direction.

“Anna, perfect Anna timing,” said my friend, happy to see me back. She’d had a few rum and colas. “You know you cannot go anywhere for just 15 minutes. “That was totally an hour. Come on, it’s time to go.”

All I could think about were those wind chimes and how maybe they really were a bit too touristy and how I was happy to have gotten away.

New York writer Anna Thysell specializes in travel and environmental issues.

As in my last clear memory of him from the night before, Wee had an enormous spliff dangling from his lip, and a bottle of Jack Daniels in each hand.  Perhaps I would be better off not being 80 feet above the ground with him.

Nowhere to Go But Up

Until I’d landed in Tonsai, Thailand, I didn’t realize it was an international climbing center. I came on a friend’s recommendation. I’d planned to stop there for a couple of days, then move on, possibly to train for my diving certification.

The next day I took a top-roping course with an instructor named Sol, and a few other climbing hopefuls. Inwardly I was bitterly cursing my flip-flop, which had broken the day before as we hiked over the razor-sharp rocks.

We arrived at a tiny jewel of a beach, which we crossed to enter dense jungle. The crag itself was easily accessible from here, with the aid of a rope, thoughtfully placed, though of dubious reliability.

We had two climbs. I remember that one was graded a 5, and that to its right was a long and beautiful 6A, called Spiderman. My feet were clad in borrowed and uncomfortably restrictive footwear.

But most of what I remember about that day was the first contact with mesmerizing limestone.

There’s that first injection of adrenaline-releasing high, where you are clinging to a rock face high above the ground, without a map to trace your tentative steps.

You are trusting your body weight on a foothold the size of a non-genetically modified peanut, and you are willing the moisture forming on your palms to evaporate (you’ve forgotten the little drawstring bag of chalk hanging at your waist, meant to treat this problem). Your muscles are strained to capacity, and a little rivulet of blood is making its way down your left shin.

There is no other place to go but up. In the words of the Flaming Lips: suddenly everything has changed.

Adventure Highs

Before I came here, I’d been on a bit of a wander.

I had left the United States in November 2006, to live on the small and absurdly picturesque Greek island of Mykonos, based on the sort of wispy reasoning that can, if lassoed and combined with the proper timing, catalyze change. I feared I’d miss out on something, whiling away my not-unpleasant days in the lovely beachfront community of Narragansett, Rhode Island.

And I had an intense desire for adventure, to open some mysterious box containing sparkling newness.

But after eight months on Mykonos, the novelty had eroded, and had given way to the sometimes-empty, alcohol-saturated reality.

I returned to the United States to reevaluate, and recharge my finances.

Three months in Narragansett, shaking martinis and batting my eyelashes for the 20% tips so crucial to my travel funds, left me as perplexed as ever. I had some money (thank you, eyelashes) and I knew precisely where I did not want to be — but not where I did want to be, or what I wanted to do once there.

The idea of spending another bitter white winter in New England slipping into one of the existential crises into which I tend to submerge after too much idle time in America was unappealing. So was the prospect of another soul-crushing, red wine-drenched winter in Greece.

I found myself online for hours, my hands