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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 almost of their own avail typing in cheap-flight search engines. Eventually all the accumulated daydreams and ticket prices solidified into a perfect puzzle piece configuration: I had in my possession a ticket that would take me back to Greece for two months, Spain for two weeks, New Zealand for two weeks, Australia for one month, three months in southeast Asia, and back to Greece that spring.

Some entrance of credit card details, an exhilarating click on the “submit” button, and my next 10 months or so were lain out before me, just waiting to be lived.

A Shift

By the time I arrived in Thailand, I had been to some pretty spectacular places. In four months I’d accumulated what felt like four years of experience.

Spain was my time of rampant indulgence, filled with endless pitchers of sangria and tapas in Valencia (though I left with a slightly sour taste after being robbed in Barcelona). I had the time of my life hitchhiking through the jaw-dropping austerity of the south island of New Zealand, and then about half the east coast of Australia, in a rapid-fire montage of pale rainbowed waterfalls, aquamarine lakes and snow-peaked scenery. I slept under the stars in Castle Hill in New Zealand bundled like a mummy in my sleeping bag, catching a 13-hour lift from Byron Bay to Nararra with a truck driver named Shane and then bodysurfing on Terregal Beach in Australia on Christmas Day.

I was utterly untethered, and floating somewhere new and joyous every day. What had I lost but monotony? What had I gained but the world?

It was in that same spirit of enchantment that I climbed my first rock in Tonsai.

Again there were many choices in the crevices and intricate indentations of the limestone I gripped — only this time the destination was a set point, a tangible ring-shaped goal that begged to be tapped in triumph.

Here was a turning point, a solid threshold. It demanded not only my attention, but physical and psychological determination.

Sports cliches gained relevance: wanting something so desperately you could taste it; adrenaline junkie; the word “addiction” assuming new and oddly positive associations.

At breakfast during the interminable wait for a bowl of porridge, my mind would go over a climb I’d done. Was there a handhold further to the right I had overlooked, in the crux of my route?  I would wake in the middle of the night to find my fists sweatily clenched, my feet pressing soft craters in the sheets.

I was struggling, even in my dream state, to reach that elusive pinnacle.

Six weeks passed that way.

At last, with a few new muscles, a close-knit and varied group of friends, and a road atlas of multicolored bruises and scrapes scrawled across my body, I reluctantly departed.

The local climbers presented me with a goodbye cake. What with the lack of ovens and the absence of cake in Thai cuisine, it was actually a large, American-style pancake with “good luck” painted on it in chocolate frosting, garnished with a rose carved out of a tomato, lettuce forming its leaves.

Ah, Thailand, how I miss you and your quirky menu items, aimed at comforting homesick farangs.

Hitting a Wall

Back in Mykonos, I hit another impasse. I was in an island paradise, but with nothing to climb, nowhere to go, and no one in whom to confide my seemingly self-indulgent melancholy. And I was nearly broke.

I found a decent job at a taverna on the beach and proceeded to work every day for the next three months, without a break to climb, write, or even think, functioning on the automatic pilot level that allows us to accomplish what we need but don’t necessarily want to do. In the end I was fired, following an incident in which I’d informed a male associate that wiping glasses was not, in fact, women’s work. When the initial flood of upset and self-righteous indignation subsided, I weighed my options yet again.

What kept coming back was the idea of being somewhere where I would be treated as a human being, where I had contacts with good people, and where I could, once again, dig my fingers into an unyielding, strength-affirming rock surface — not to vent my frustrations, but, in the pure balance of mind and body this created — to render them obsolete.

I stuffed my backpack, and bought another ticket. The climbing shoes and chalk bag were still clipped to the outside of my rucksack, though my carabiner had grown sticky with moisture and the sad dust of disuse.

Since arriving in England three weeks ago, I’ve formulated and discarded several plans.

But here in the pretty rolling hillsides of the English Midlands, I’m learning the delicate art of trad climbing.

I feel that old sense of renewal, and a startling ripple of inspiration. I have finally picked up my long-discarded notebook and pen.

Both climbing and writing seem to open a release valve. Both challenge me, and both occasionally cause my hands to cramp. Even as I continue my gypsy-tinged vagrancy, I have grasped something even more solid than the intriguing English gritstone, and that something is self. It is what keeps us grounded, however high we may ascend.

Writer Julia Reynolds travels the world, waitressing, bartending, and painting houses to refuel her bank account as necessary.

Possibly befitting a structure built to celebrate the hundred-year anniversary of the French Revolution, plenty of people have challenged the Eiffel Tower since it was finished in 1889.

An Austrian tailor, experimenting with a new kind of parachute, fell 180 feet to his death in 1912. Others climbed to demand independence (Basques, Tibetans) or to promote causes (cleaner environment, better government).

British climber and photojournalist Mike Robertson ascended to help publicize a campaign to force French energy giant Total to exit Burma (Myanmar), shortly after a fall 2007 anti-democracy crackdown by one of the repressive military regimes that has controlled the isolationist country for nearly 50 years.

Robertson wore only a TOTAL LEAVE BURMA T-shirt. He climbed without ropes or gear — a practice known as soloing.

“All I could see were loads and loads of people staring out,” Robertson told The Guardian, about his experience of scaling the side.

“They were speechless. Quite a lot of them pointed their phones at me, but nobody said anything. Having said that, I was going really fast.” –The editors

In this video, Paris-based documentarian Nicoletta Fagiolo, a former United Nations human rights official, tells the story of Robertson’s feat.

Continuing on, as he is wont to do, because people these days don’t know these things and after 25 years teaching history in a public middle school, he more than others, understands this: “Well - it was - the first city in the country to have hydroelectric power - hooked it right up to Niagara Falls — lights in every home — marvel of its time.” But that was a long time ago, and the lights were out in Buffalo today on account of an unusually early snowfall.

Between two and three feet in less than 24 hours, the Weather Channel said. Deep into snow season, when the city salt trucks were loaded up, with the snow-blowers oiled and gassed, the city of Buffalo would have handled the storm with practiced grace.

This snow came early, though; in mid-October, before the trees had shed their leaves. Weighed down by ice and snow, branches snapped and older, weaker trees split and fell to the ground. Streets were blocked and lawns were covered. Wet and heavy, trees tore through power lines and punctured rooftops. The beautiful Dutch elm trees, the city’s most magnificent residents, were the most sorrowful victims.

The elms were planted at the turn of the century as the city prepared to host the Pan American Exposition in 1901. The air had been filled with promise and invention. Frederick Law Olmstead, the father of our national parks system, wished that they would canopy the parkways and the parks of the city of Buffalo for a hundred years. The man must have had an acute sense of timing, because a hundred years proved about right. Few survived the storm.

A driving ban had been instated for non-essential personnel. My mother, a registered nurse at Buffalo General Hospital, was able to drive as necessary with her employee ID, but there weren’t many places to go as most of the city was shut down.

When we reached Williamsville, the town where I grew up and my parents presently live, many of the traffic lights were out. Although it was the middle of the day, the whole town was dim and still.

The bare essentials were open: the hospital, Wegman’s grocery, a lone Sunoco station.

I looked over my right shoulder through the condensation and drip of the passenger-side window to see the red glow of the “open” sign in front of Tim Horton’s. Tim Horton’s appeared to be running on an emergency backup generator; the traffic light at the near corner of Hopkins and Sheridan did not.

“Timmy’s” is synonymous with coffee in this part of the world, and thought worthy of its own compartment in the food pyramid. Tim Horton’s coffee shop, started by and named after a local hockey legend, is actually a Canadian chain that found a second home in Buffalo. They have one blend, no Sumatra roast, French roast, Columbian fair trade variety. It’s just coffee, always hot and fresh and exactly the same for $1.15 a cup. Dunkin Donuts barely competes in this market, and at last count there were only a few Starbucks in the area.

A true Rust Belt city, people here worked hard for their money, and a $4 cup of coffee was perceived by most to be laughable, unnecessary and an intrusion. We drove away from Timmy’s with a tray of three large coffees, mixed “double-double,” as the order goes if you’d like twice the standard amount of cream and sugar added for you.

Once home, I could see that our house had no power, and immediately upon entering could feel that there was no heat either. Con Ed anticipated it could be about a week before the power was back on, so our neighborhood had to make do. Blackouts occur nearly every winter in the City of Lights, so many residents have backup generators in their basements or backyards. Last January our furnace broke, and my parents went without heat for days; unconvinced that they needed a generator too. This storm changed their thinking on the subject, and they had been talking to the neighbors all afternoon about finding one.

Unfortunately and expectedly, every Home Depot and appliance center within 400 miles of Buffalo was already sold out. Mrs. Rotecki, our next-door neighbor, was ordering one through her Sears Catalogue, figuring somehow that despite the driving ban, it would be delivered in a jiffy.  My brother wanted to drive the five hours to Albany that afternoon to get one he had reserved over the phone. Dad thought we should try to connect our house to another neighbor’s backyard generator, since they were in Delhi for the month.

We ventured out later that afternoon to find rations for the coming days: extra batteries, candles, bottled water and warm food, if possible. La Nova’a Pizzeria, also a local favorite, was open for service, with a one-hour wait for a pizza. La Nova employs local high school students to work behind the counter and as has been the case since I was in high school, most of them look like they were straight out of juvie. As with Timmy’s, variety isn’t in their sales pitch; one type of pizza is available, and many toppings are not. Locals agree it’s the perfect pizza and needs no improvement or modification. They offer a choice of square or round pies to make you feel as though you have options.

After an hour of waiting in the car in La Nova’s parking lot, we drove our hot, square pizza home to have dinner over candlelight.

Weeks earlier, we’d purchased tickets to the Sabres game. Given that Buffalo was in an official state of emergency, we called to inquire about whether that night’s game was still on.

“Of course it is,” the customer service representative replied, incredulously.

In Buffalo, a hometown favorite, whether it’s the local hockey team, pizza plant or coffee shop, has a devoted and loyal fan base.

So, once again, we took our chances with the driving ban and headed downtown for the match.

At the entrance to Route 33, we reached a checkpoint lighted by emergency flares.  An officer trudged toward our car for questioning, and we prepared to be turned back.

“Where you headed?”

None of us looked like we were in urgent need of medical attention, so I was honest.

“Downtown, HSBC Arena.”

“Going to the game?”

“Yes sir, we’ve got Sabres tickets”

“Can I see them, please?”

Reluctantly, I hand them over for inspection.

“Playing the Rangers tonight, eh? I hear Ryan Miller’s out with a sprain…”

Fifteen minutes later we met the rest of the city in the gray cement monstrosity that is the parking garage of the HSBC Arena.

Apparently, attending the game was reason enough to clear through checkpoints all over the city.

American-made cars filled the lot, snow shovels and flashlights cluttering many backseats. A mass of smiling faces in white, blue and yellow jerseys herded toward the entrance, hungry for a showdown and a Salen’s hotdog. The lights were on and it was warm.  The stadium was packed.

It was hard to tell if this turnout was because of fan devotion, or because it was one of the only well lit and heated places in the city that night. On any other night, I would have known it was the former, but tonight, because of the exceptional circumstances, I believed it might have been a little of both.

Misha Wagner is a writer and aspiring documentarian who, seven years ago, left Buffalo for New York City.

This independent region of the southern Caucasus is officially part of Azerbaijan, but populated mostly by Armenians who fought to secede, and have managed to establish an autonomous if devastated enclave.

A strategically important area, this region has long been flashpoint for empires — the Ottoman sultans and Russian czars fought over it. It also has the misfortune of lying along an oil transit route. And since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought over who should rule it.

From 1991 to 1994, Armenian and Azeri neighbors turned their backs on one another and waged war. The regional capital city of Stepanakert, and other residential areas like Shushi, saw massive air and artillery bombardment. Over 150 villages and towns were destroyed, 60 percent of all homes were ruined and the entire health care and education system collapsed.

Nearly 20 years later, this region is still in limbo, lacking internationally-recognized status.

By Western standards, people here have nothing.

Yet their spirit of giving is boundless.

We met a man who said he’d waited 15 years for his son to return home from war; a woman who couldn’t wait to share pears from her fruit trees; and young students glad to finally be able to attend school again.

We drove to the remote Norashen village of Karabakh in an old minibus, a journey along war-ravaged roads that was not easy, or necessarily safe. Luckily for us, the HALO Trust of the United Kingdom had recently deactivated many of the land mines that had been left on the ground for a decade.

After mud puddles, bumps, off-road detours and several stops to allow herds of sheep to pass, we arrived.

People had scattered during the war. The Armenian General Benevolent Union, the largest international Armenian NGO, headquartered in New York City, had built a school and a hospital nearby, in hopes that such essential institutions in one area would bring Karabakh’s people back to this land.

To an American, the school and hospital seemed to belong to colonial times.

But to the people of Norashen, these buildings represented their dreams for a new life.

As university students, we had to wonder: did our peers here even know what the Internet was? Cell phones? iPods? Facebook? Text messaging?

We looked at these people as if they were museum exhibits, or movie characters. We took pictures, and asked questions of dirty-clothed children playing on the streets, and tired mothers who stared into the distance as they held their babies.

We tried to grasp the reality that the people of Norashen might not know anything about the luxuries of modern technology, but were still satisfied with the life essentials they had.

And as we walked further into the village and met more and more people, these feelings grew clearer. Looking into their tired eyes, we saw that the wounds of war remained.

Yet some expressed hope.

One man, still dressed in camouflage, had been waiting for 15 years for his son to come home from war. His eyes, his clothes, and his dirty, unshaven face showed he was tired, and rapidly aging. Yet, he spoke energetically about the impending arrival of his son.

Neighborhood men were pitching in to try to cobble together a home for their anxious friend, so his boy would have a roof over his head.

This roof, held down by rocks, was made with metal scraps leftover from wartime explosions. But it was a roof.

And that was an improvement. The man was eager to share not only his story with us, but also the fruit he had grown with friends on the trees in his backyard. After his wife pressed pomegranates, nuts, peaches and pears into our hands, we learned that maybe the simple things in life meant the most. The spirit of generosity, no matter how big or small, can always put a smile on someone’s face.

Karabakh’s president, Bako Sahakyan, says rebuilding postwar family life is a huge priority for his government.

Artak Herikian, a young man from Norashen who now lives in Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan, recently told the New Jersey-based Armenian Reporter:

“It’s not because living conditions are good in Norashen that people return. It’s because people love their village, their home, just like I love and miss my home back there. Love for home keeps them there.”

Alexis Halejian is a writer and publicist in New York City. She visited the Nagorno-Karabakh region after studying journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

What is daily life if not with the most basic of human rights? He wondered, in a blue moment in October 2009.

A visual man, he calls some egregious scenes “so ugly it’s beautiful.”

What is even more amusing than the attention the Western media gives Ahmadinejad is how he has managed to completely outsmart them. He feeds them controversial sound bites, they get better ratings and they stay off the real issues facing his presidency and country. In his defense, I think George Bush is a much bigger threat to world peace.

Occasionally he removes a photo, perhaps to keep people he knows from being identified.

The freeze, so everything needs to be done in cash.

death of his aunt

visits germany, spain & france after cousin lucks out & gets a visa

In June 2008, after about 18 months, he goes back to LA

Everybody was hangin’ out, and the musical scene was like never before, and never would be again, with musicians like “Radio Futura,” “Alaska y los Pegamoides,” “Golpes Bajos,” and “Loquillo y los Trogloditas.”

Nowadays, Madrid has become the financial capital of Spain, with a more “usual” kind of nightlife. Let’s say more European.

But life and socializing is still very intergenerational: everybody hangs out with everybody, regardless of age or sex. A 16-year-old will drink a bottle of wine with a 70-year-old. This is typical all over Spain. Every town or village has its party week, usually devoted to the local saint or virgin. During those days, the whole population lives in the streets.

Madrid is an old world place; it’s also a city of the future. Being the capital city, it’s where the economic, political and media businesses are located. All the big decisions for the future of the country are made here. At the same time, it has an old spirit, made of old habits and old memories.

This city is all about timing. Lunch is at 3 p.m., dinner at 10. If you go to hang out in a bar at 11, you won’t find that many people. But if you go around 1 a.m., you’ll find it crowded.

One of the places I like to hang out most is La Cava Baja especially on Sunday mornings. If you go there for the aperitivo, at around 1 p.m., you’ll find families, couples and all the survivors of a Saturday night.

It’s hard to say what’s next for Madrid, because of its strange economic situation.

For 20 years, Spain had the fastest growth in Europe. But over the last two years it has stopped, since growth was pushed, apart from tourism, by the overexploited construction/real estate business.

One thing’s for sure, Spaniards, like Italians, always find a way out of the mess.

Escapista is the pseudonym of a Trieste, Italy-based photographer of Italian-Spanish heritage, who believes every Italian could live well in Spain – and vice versa.

Walking in Madrid

La Cava Baja is a gastronomic heaven on a historic Madrid street. Visitors eat tapas either standing up, or sitting side-by-side, in tiny tiled restaurants. Some of the tapas bars have sublime wine lists, the Madrid wine tour company Cellar Tastings reports. The company finds “Tempranillo,” where wine bottles are stacked to the15-foot ceiling, the best, and also recommends Casa Lucio, Casa Victor, La Cava de Yllan and La Chata.

“A bee. I think it’s a bee,” offered Lucia.

“No. Not a bee!” I responded.

I showed her the finger because it came with a red sting and a dramatic drop of blood. The pain was so severe, I felt I was getting stung again and again. In the smoky hut, Lucia roamed around like a chicken to uncover “what had done that.” She used a stick to inspect the kitchen rag and we soon distinguished a moving coffee-grind stain that was shaped like a scorpion.

“Ahh,” Lucia said.

“See. It wasn’t a bee.”

“I’m calling the emergency.”

By this, Lucia meant that she’d go looking for the promodor de salud (the health promoter) who was working on the milpa, the cornfield.

Where I was, in the Zona de Resistencia Zapatista, a 60-family community six hours away from the small town of Ocosingo on a good dirt-road day, my prospects for  making it to a town clinic were thin. In the phrase of Lorenzo, a community leader who came to check on Lucia and me at night, a car headed to the city came by every day, a veces. Sometimes. Luckily, I did not have to worry about such things. A scorpion bite –when the scorpion is the color of leftover coffee grinds– is a lot like getting partial lobotomy.

Thinking was out of the question. I had become the effort I made to breathe in and out and the motion of the poison, slowly but surely traveling up my arm. I no longer wondered why the big rooster just would not give up chasing after the slim hen that sat at the end of a branch. He’d fall and try again. I, myself, walked in circle for no particular reason. But unlike the rooster and the hen, I was moaning.

Scorpion bites can be lethal. For every person killed by a poisonous snake, 10 are killed by scorpion bites. It mostly happens in poor places like this, miles from any kind of clinic.

An old man whom I think I had not met before walked up to me.

“Scorpio…” I showed him my finger.

He had lines in his face that were kind. Those read that he didn’t understand what I’d said, or that I didn’t understand what he’d replied.

Before I had come to stay in the autonomous community as a human-rights observer, I had been briefed by activists in San Cristobal. They’d talked about the danger of the military, as well of the ticks. But they’d said nothing about scorpions.

“Me mordi un escorpio… scorpia… escorpi…” I tried again.

The old man answered in a low and monotonous voice particular to indigenous peasants south of Mexico City. I could tell that he spoke to me in Spanish, and not in the Mayan dialect Tzeltal. But still I couldn’t make sense of it. I led him to the kitchen and showed him the dark scorpion I had killed earlier with the stick.
“Alacran,” he said.

“Alacran. Alacran.” I repeated.

The pain was reaching my elbow. What would happen when it reached my brain? I don’t remember thinking this, but the words came out instead.

“Am I gonna die?” I blurted out.

The old man looked like any grandpa sitting under the shade on a bench. He did not answer right away.
I explained what I could in my bad Spanish, all high on pain that I was. I had cooked beans on the fire, and had been looking for a cover.  The cover was on the stained rag, but I couldn’t tell because the scorpion was the color of the wet coffee grinds.

“No vas a morir,” he said. “Tienes un cigarillo?”

I handed the old man a Gratos cigarette, made in Chiapas. He opened up the non-filter menthol cigarette and chewed the tobacco. Then he spit it out in his hand. I let him apply that mixture on my finger and hold it in place. He could have sliced off my hand for all I cared.

The pain traveled back to my middle finger. Once there, the pain receded and I became hungry for the black beans and tortillas we ate daily. When Lucia and the health worker arrived, I was eating my third plate of beans. The can of  La Morena jalapeño peppers – the sole green vegetable available at the wood shack tienda –was nearly empty.
“You ate all of those peppers,” Lucia said.
The health worker wanted to give me a shot. He couldn’t understand how I was not in more pain. When he concluded that it must have been a small scorpion that stung me, I protested.

“No. It wasn’t small!” I showed him the dead scorpion, and explained the visit of the old man.

He’d left without my noticing. I didn’t know his name. The promodor seemed to be taking mental notes about the tobacco ointment. Maybe that’s something that he would try next time.

Later that night, in my green hammock by the candle light of “Nuestra Virgen de Guadalupe,” I watched the oversize shadows of bugs and moths playing on the tin ceiling. The night was rich with voices and sounds. I remembered a story about the spirits I’d been told weeks earlier. A man had shot a lynx in the forest. When he arrived home, his brother was dying, because his nagua, his animal spirit, had been the lynx.

I thought about the old man’s strange words.

“What did you do to the scorpion?” he had asked. How I regretted then having killed the scorpion.

New York-based Melanie Griot writes about indigenous culture and ecotourism.

Protected by the mountains from the monsoon, yet irrigated by glacial melt waters, the arid Himalayan valley of Zanskar lies over 13,000 feet above sea level.  You can only reach it on foot, either by walking for four days over the 17,000-foot Shingo La pass, from Himachal Pradesh state from the south, or three days from Padum and Kargil, the only towns in the region, from the northwest. Anything not produced in Zanskar has to be hauled in by donkey.  This is one of the most remote regions of India – indeed, in the world.

I lean back against the rough-hewn wall of the rocky path to let a heavily-laden train of pack-donkeys edge past.  Stones dislodged by the mules’ hooves rattle down the steep sides of the gorge, splashing into the waters of the Kargyak River, perhaps a thousand feet below. As his animals sway under their huge loads of rice, grain and building materials, the mule-herder seems unconcerned about the perilous drop. His confidence is understandable; he and his ancestors have been making this journey for many generations.  Five hundred, or even 2,500, years ago, life was about the same.

Or was it? I look more closely at the mule-herder, and see he’s not wearing the traditional jacket and trousers of thick woolen cloth common in the Central Asian plains. He’s instead dressed in a knockoff North Face jacket, Mountain Hardware trousers, and Etnies skateboarding shoes.  Globalization has arrived.  Because the truth is, Zanskar, however remote, is no stranger to travelers – and never has been.  It lies in the path of an ancient trade route between Tibet and Afghanistan, linking the Ladakhi towns of Leh and Kargil to the market towns of Manali and Kullu in the foothills. So these rough paths carved from the rock have seen steady summer traffic for millennia.

It’s different in the long winter: from October to May, the mountain passes are blocked by snow. Until recently, the only route out was a footpath along the frozen Zanskar river to the Indus valley. Few, though, brave the subzero temperatures: winter finds the Ladakhis huddled in their stone houses with their animals, their roofs piled high with fodder and dried yak dung harvested in September.

I’m visiting during harvest time. Everything is done either by hand or with the aid of donkeys and yaks.  Old Ladakhi men haul massive bundles of dried grass, two or three times as tall as themselves, to their houses for use as roofing, animal fodder, and fuel.  Women gather potatoes and barley, while others turn the soil with hand-carved plows.  In the high pastures young girls herd yaks, making cheese and curd from their milk.  This is a fully-functioning pastoral economy: beyond subsistence, here in this high and wild landscape, the Zanskari are thriving.

While material wealth is rare, there is almost no evidence of the abject poverty so visible in much of India. Tibetan Buddhism remains an important part of daily life: the landscape is dotted with stupas – domed monuments that commemorate Buddha, or significant events; and mani walls carved with religious mantras. Portraits of the Dalai Lama are displayed in most buildings, and the monasteries, called gompas, are still socially important.

A 17-year-old monk I met near the village of Photoskar spoke of the tradition of sending second sons to the monastery at the age of five.  He crouched outside my tent as I heated some tea, and snuggled further into the North Face down jacket he wore over his purple monk’s robes. Coming from a family of seven children, he felt very privileged to have been chosen for the monastery; because of this his family’s prestige had also risen.

A visit to Phuktal Gompa, a spectacular monastery hanging from a cliff over the Tsarap River, further clarified why the monastaries are so important here. In a region of slim educational resources, where learning priorities tend to emphasize the manual needs of subsistence farming, the monks were teaching a syllabus of mathematics, Buddhism, spiritual philosophy, English and Hindi. Sending a child to the gompa meant that at least one family member would be educated.

Among the prayer flags, mani inscriptions and chortens, a small plaque catches my attention: an inscription commemorating Alexander Csoma de Koros, a Hungarian linguist who stayed in the monastery in 1825. It’s another reminder of Zanskar’s history as a temperate summer highway, a safe path for travellers crossing the Himalayas.

Nowadays, the ancient path seems to be widening into a tourism trail. Foreign tour operators have been organzing large trekking expeditions here in recent years, with predictable, and profound, effects on local life. Though the 12,000 people of Zanskar have been surprising resilient, retaining their culture, religion, and basic economy despite the annual summer influx, one can see change. Campgrounds, tea tents and concrete hotels have popped up, to cater to tourists, and their ponies, cooks, and guides.

Rubbish has become a major problem.  There was never much before: buildings were made from stone and mud, roofs thatched with grass and dung, and clothes woven from yak wool. Much was reused and recycled out of necessity.  The tourists bring plastic food containers, water bottles and bags; every camping spot we saw was littered with broken whisky bottles, condensed milk tins, and discarded coffee packets, and the paths are decorated with pink trails of used toilet paper.

Recently cleanup efforts have been made: trekking agencies in nearby Padum and Leh have posted signs beseeching travelers to “keep Zanskar green.” But the signs are often hidden behind piles of rubbish.

Nana Ziesche, who runs the Germany-based Ladakh Travel, has taken more active approach.  In September 2007 she ran a cleanup trek, collecting rubbish along the popular 75-mile trekking route from Lamayuru to Padum. Her idea was a partial success: the large team collected 35 bags of plastic rubbish, and burned much more. But they discovered upon reaching Padum that there was no system for rubbish disposal.  In such an isolated area, in a land with very thin topsoil, waste disposal is very difficult.

Aside from the spread of designer trekking wear and the rubbish problem, a more insidious effect of the summer tourist traffic is revealed by the occasional health warnings daubed on the sides of buildings.

“Life is precious: save our life from dangerous AID diseases,” reads one.

In such a tranquil, remote area, the idea that sexually transmitted disease is spreading comes as a shock. But with so many outsiders arriving, particularly from the busy tourist- and market-towns in Himachal Pradesh, Kashmir and Nepal, maybe the spread of HIV and AIDS is not particularly surprising.

Health clinics and prevention programs have sprung up in Zanskar in recent years, but they’ll have a greater task on their hands in the future. The valley’s isolation is threatened by two roads now under construction.  One creeps from Darcha and the Lahoul valley in the south, with the aim of climbing over the Shingo La into the Kargyak plain.  The other, already 15 miles long, comes from Padum in the west, forcing its way into the steep walls of the Lungnak gorge.

When these two roads meet – it’s not clear where — Manali will be connected to Kargil and Srinagar, and the might of the Indian Armed Forces will have a much quicker route to the senstive Kashmir border. (The current route, the unreliable Leh-Manali highroad, is impassable between  October and May).  This ambitious project will take many years to complete.  The terrain is treacherous, and most of the trail-breaking work is being done by hand, by a mix of locals and drafted-in residents of Bihar, India’s poorest state.

The road will no doubt improve health care, education, and communications for the 12,000 inhabitants of Zanskar.  But it remains to be seen whether this isolated pocket of the Himalayas can survive the combined onslaught of tourism and the Indian Army, and whether the resilient Zanskari people with their millennia-old ways, economy, and culture, can persevere.  The tourist blurb is still true — just.  I’m not sure if it will remain accurate for many more years.

London journalist Ben Spencer specializes in writing about mountaineering and travel.

“Today is now. Yesterday was the day before. Tomorrow is the next.”—Ghanaian school song

A dusty ride west from Accra brings us to Feteh, a town of 700 people, where the only attraction is the Village of Hope, an orphanage of 160 children.

Some of these children are former slaves, sold into bondage by their parents and forced to work in the fishing industry on Lake Volta, the world’s largest man-made lake.
Seven escaped with the help of George Achibra, a local teacher who purchased their freedom, and later brought them to this Christian-run orphanage.

The children range in age, but all are under 12. And their story of neglect is the same.

There is 9-year-old Helga, who remembers the spur-like scales slicing her hands while dressing fish over and over. And 6-year-old Mark, his arms too small to paddle under the gray, moist sky of the lake, was reduced to scooping water out of the fishing canoe with a bucket. Of his experience he could only say with lowered eyes, “I never want to go back.”

They are just a few of the voiceless 39% of children aged five to 14 believed to be working illegally in Ghana under hazardous conditions, according to figures kept by the Ghana Statistical Service. As many as 1.3 million Ghanaian children labor under these conditions, despite a 1998 law that prohibits the use of children in dangerous labor.

Severely abused, malnourished and unable to speak any English, the children Achibra brought here were absorbed into an already-overcrowded home stay facility, after Achibra consulted their parents and discovered that none could afford to keep their children at home.

While the penetrating afternoon sun beat down on a small concrete slab outside a Village of Hope building, the former fishing industry slaves, hunched in a circle, played with one another and showed their scars, left from years of canings and ritual abuse by their former masters.

In those days, the boys dived and rowed. The girls spent hours preparing fish. 
Helga, scrawny with pooling ebony eyes, exposed her legs to show the knotted scars from her three-year servitude in Ghana’s northeast. She did not remember the home or village she came from, only the creed of surviving the bleak 17-hour workdays her parents sold her into for $10 a year.

“You can’t tell your slave mother and father that you are afraid. If you say you are afraid, they will beat you. If you are afraid
you will not survive,” she said. Helga remembered the pain of her life on the lake but looked to John, the eldest of the rescued clan, to tell their story.

Among the white and blue buildings that make up the school and housing arrangements in this sun-baked compound, 12-year-old
 John is known as the boy found with the blood.

The Bloody Boy

John is young and intelligent, with a soft, whispering voice. At 11 a.m., he told us, he would rise to peddle slices of sweet coconut cake in a glass container along the roadside. Until 6 p.m., he sold the moist pieces of cake he wished to one day taste himself, then returned to the vast waters to fish until 6 a.m.

Here John watched several boys die while diving to untangle the fishing nets stuck on trees underneath the water.

“There was a boy called “Old Man” who dived down one day and never came up. After waiting a long time for him to surface, our master took a hook and fished his body out of the water. They buried his body in the sand near the water. After seeing that I never thought I would survive,” he said. “I didn’t think I would see my 12th birthday or ever leave Lake Volta.”

While the fishing was the most dangerous part of his past life, it was a day’s worth of coconut cake that nearly killed and eventually saved him.

The air that day had been thick with a swallowing, engulfing heat. John remembered he had sold nearly $2 of cake and then lay down to sleep in the shade, only to wake to find that his master’s belongings and money had been stolen. 
”I was so scared. I cried and cried. I prayed that my slave mother would understand. I feared for my life because I lost everything,” John said.

After returning home, John was severely beaten. 
”They told me I was a liar, that I lost the money on purpose. Then they told another boy younger than me to beat me. He said no, so they beat him in front of me.” John was then thrown headfirst through a glass window, stripped of his clothing, tied naked to a tree and beaten. After being untied, he was covered in blood. Still fearing for his life, ran to the nearby town of Kete Krachi.

Achibra, a native of Krachi, found John there, crying. He decided to shelter John. He notified the police, and together they contacted his parents.

“I didn’t have any clothing. I didn’t have a cloth to sleep with.  George is a good man. He gave these to me. He saved me,” John remembered.

John, who had long, scratching white scars across his head from his final beating, had not yet been saved.

A Good (But Beleaguered) Samaritan

“I rescued him, thinking I was doing a good thing. His masters abused him. They tied him to a tree and beat him,” recalled Achibra, a noble fiftyish man with a sturdy, youthful build and mature eyes that command attention. “But, after the police gave him to his parents, he was once again sold by his parents, this time to fishermen working on the Bay of Guinea near the Ivory Coast.”

Achibra traveled to the coast and rescued John. With funding from U.S. donors, he then paid for the rescue of six other children in Kete Krachi. Now he runs a small NGO called PACODEP, devoted to helping other exploited children.

Despite Ghanaian legislation that has made the trafficking and exploitation of children in dangerous labor illegal, the corruption of a generation still breeds in Lake Volta’s placid waters. That fact is apparent to Achibra and his NGO workers every day.

“The children that have been rescued by George Achibra are just one in five. That means there are still literally hundreds out on the lake that we have seen but can do nothing about,” said Steve Allen, a
 28-year-old American independent labor researcher who was working in the Volta region. “You need funding, education programs, and you need the police to arrest fishermen. So far they haven’t arrested one fisherman here. The fishermen here have been operating with complete impunity.”

“The police never go to the lake to arrest the fisherman. We want the police to assist us,” Achibra said.

The Ghanaian Ministry of Women and Children Affairs and the International Organization of Migration have undertaken public educational programs, and were instrumental in Ghana’s passage of the Human Trafficking Act of 2005. But the exploitation of children in the dangerous and strenuous fishing industry is still commonplace.

Marlene Annan, who heads the human trafficking unit of the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, which works with the IOM to rescue and rehabilitate the children, recognizes the labor situation and points to progress. “It’s not just a question, this is happening. The social initiatives have been put in place and they are living up to their expectations.”

The IOM, with the help of a donation from the U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, says it has rescued more than 576 children in Ghana since 2002.

Wilbert Tengey, the founder of the African Center for Human Development, believes more progress needs to be made. “The help is here. But to say that we have solved the problem is untrue. Maybe 1 or 2 percent have been rescued from the industry — that’s it.”

After witnessing John’s story of abuse, Achibra decided to start buying children from local fishermen, to house and educate them. He plans to build an orphanage with private U.S. funding. His NGO, PACODEP, is run by members of his family and community.

By the summer of 2007 PACODEP had rescued 39 children, 25 of whom Achibra turned over to a government social welfare program in Accra.

With the assistance of his family, local missionaries and European and Canadian volunteers, Achibra continues to patrol the lake, but is hampered by lack of funding, and under stress from local conflicts over payment.

He’s taken up the cudgels against child slavery in Kete Krachi, but his mission is both draining him financially and making him a controversial figure in his community. Local fisherman, who say the IOM promised to compensate them for the children they gave up – with, say, cows or nets – protest that Achibra hasn’t kept his promises.

Walking along the narrow broken streets of this lake town on evening, the
only light on Achibra is from the scattered stars and orange moon in the
sky. Evening Muslim prayer begins to rattle off a few hundred feet away.
The rhythmic whine of devotion vibrates and lingers while the shadows of bodies flowing through prayer positions is illuminated by a
burning lantern onto a parallel wall.

Two men home in and abruptly approach Achibra out of the darkness. Their arms, rowing arms, are thick and
strong. Tension rises in Achibra’s voice
as he rapidly sputters in conciliatory tones in his native Krachi language to the two
fishermen demanding their promised money. The men depart, but Achibra, usually confident in demeanor, looks uneasy.

“These two men are fishermen,” he says. “They are hungry and want the
money we have promised them for giving up their children.”
Achibra said that Eric Peasah, a director at the IOM in Accra, privately promised Achibra and the fishermen money or goods.

Peasah acknowledges that the IOM funds private NGO groups to carry out rescues of children, but claims he only offered what he called “incentives.”

“We don’t give money to fishermen,” Peasah said. “We will give them incentives like a
goat or a sheep.”
Samuel Acquah, a prosperous fisherman with several trafficked children of his own, believes in Achibra’s
mission, but is angry that he has not received any compensation for other children he gave up.
“We are really worried about the IOM, since we give them away and don’t
get anything in return. We would take anything. Why should we do this
 when we [fishermen] use these children for our work?” Acquah said. “There is one
 child in George’s book now that he wants, but we will not give him now.”

Achibra perseveres in his mission to rescue, educate and feed children forgotten by his Lake Volta community. He sees it as his personal mission, something he cannot give up on.

“I see PACODEP in five years raising good children and changing the 
attitude of the community. In 10 years, I will be able to say I have
 graduated these children from college,” Achibra said.

Researcher Allen thinks PACODEP has made progress in the community, but that it’s hampered by the IOM’s refusal to compensate PACODEP for the rescues it has carried out.

“The IOM has not only lost a resource, but also fanned distrust in an area that needs the promised help,” he said.

In the summer of 2007 three more children ran away, and sought refuge at Achibra’s home. After fleeing for miles from their masters, the 8-year-old boys were bone-thin with ringworm patches on their skulls. Like John, these boys were in need of clothing and a meal — and Achibra was ready for the task.

Sarah Conway is a teacher for the Peace Corps in Madagascar. She wrote this story while studying in New York University’s summer journalism program in Accra, Ghana.

My uncle Nicolino, my mother’s half-brother whom she never met, returned to Rome after two years’ imprisonment on the Russian Front in 1945. He couldn’t find his fidanzata naturale, his lover, and never did. She was presumably lost in the American bombing of San Lorenzo, the working class quartiere that the bombers targeted.

You can easily see that if some civil war broke out anew in Italy, this neighborhood and the quartieri beyond it would host the action. Its grand, grimy 19th century arcades would provide cover for snipers and bombers; its dense stew of peoples, from older Filipino and East African immigrants to newer Balkan, Near Eastern and African ones, alongside a persistent Roman marginal class, already provides the necessary ethnic tension.

Nearly every year, a public debate erupts over how to fix the Esquilino, an argument ancient Rome’s Senate broached as far back as the 3rd century B.C. Esquilino makes the cronaca nera, the “black pages” of Roman newspapers, frequently: a sweatshop with indentured workers busted, a teenage runaway lured into the wasteland south of Termini station and gang raped in a boxcar. Locals tell stories of clandestine sweatshops and prostitution dens walled into grimy buildings. In September 2003, Mayor Walter Veltroni’s administration pledged a 13-item “recipe” for turning the Esquiline into the perfect harmonious blend of traditional Italian and contemporary immigrant cultures, the 13th being to create yet another task force on the Esquiline’s problems.

I pushed farther down Via Merulana and into its side arteries around Piazza Dante, seeking the Historical Museum of the Liberation, housed in the former local headquarter of the SS, where Italian resistance members were imprisoned and interrogated. You can see the exact border of the Esquiline and Caelian hills, a deep fold in the street grid, looking south from the corner of Via Ariosto and Via Galilei. The corner had a big graffiti on one wall: non piu servi degli americani — no more servants of the Americans.  At Piazza Dante I munched a sandwich and battled biting ants; I found one clinging to the inside of my T-shirt.

Suddenly two cops appeared in the scrubby park at the bench across from mine, checking two Near Eastern men’s documents. I waited till the police left because I didn’t want to seem suspicious, and then left myself.

“Wonderful Kid”

At a caffé back on Via Merulana I noticed a sign marking the home of one Carlo Foschi, killed by the Gestapo in 1943. A fat, grizzled old-timer sat at a rickety table parked haphazardly on the street itself, between cars. His T-shirt was stained. Beside him sat a young North African who eyed me unpleasantly as I approached and asked for directions to the museum. An equally unpleasant young Italian stood by him.

The old man’s mouth, its lost teeth so clearly the luckier ones, was his nastiest part.

“You mean the museum of Via Tasso? Where the Gestapo headquarters was?” He pointed and I thanked him and started away, but he called me back.

“Why are you interested in that museum?”
“I’m an American, but my family is tied up in that history.” How far from tourist Rome I was, though just nine blocks from the train station!
“See that sign there?” He pointed up to the Foschi marker. “He was a wonderful kid, just 19. Killed by that son of a whore Captain Kappler.” He spit figlio di puttana when naming notorious Nazi war criminal Herbert Kappler, who massacred Italians with gusto.

“You knew him?”
“I was just nine, but I knew him.”

The old man’s name was Armando Toschi. He warmed upon learning my father was from Lake Como.

“They made a beautiful resistance there,” he said. As for him, he’d lost his whole family between 1943 and 1945.
“To the Gestapo?”
“No, to the Americans!” He almost wailed the answer. “They bombed and bombed, without caring who they killed! We Italians were caught in the middle.”

He was exaggerating. Actually, the American precision bombing of Rome, targeting only a few neighborhoods with German barracks and headquarters, like this one, was a uniquely merciful thing for World War II.

“I’m sorry.”

“Where are you from?”

“Near New York.”
“When the Towers were attacked, I’m sorry, but I said, ‘Now you know what it’s like to be bombed — but you only know just a little.’”

Luckily just then a shabbily dressed Albanian approached, and brazenly offered to sell my new friend a gold bracelet for 30 euros. All three waved him off, more embarrassed at his timing than shocked.

“Do you hate the Germans?” I asked.

“No,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. He and what remained of his family — so he didn’t lose them all, I consoled myself guiltily — had fled east to the Abruzzi , to escape Rome. There he befriended a young German soldier, young like the murdered Carlo Foschi. The soldier started an affair with a local girl. “She just wanted bread, and he needed to, you know.”

He made the famous Italian fucking gesture with his arm. “You know a young man explodes if he doesn’t do it?” Here his fat old toothless face looked up quizzically into mine. “They were innocents,” he said, looking away and back. “One night in the winter, three guys got him. They went up to him and stabbed him like this, in the back, three times.” He pantomimed the stabbing to the scarier looking of his two attendants, who studied Signor Toschi’s jabs with a professional sort of interest.

“I was there,” he continued. He was a little boy. “When I saw what was happening I ran and hid behind a bush. I came out when they left. There was snow on the ground, and he lay there, still alive. He had the bluest eyes, and blond hair. He looked right into my eyes as he died, like I’m looking at you” — and here he fixed his old gaze on mine for the longest time — “and a tear ran down his cheek.” He was silent in the noisy street. “The young people today have forgotten everything,” he said suddenly.

“Maybe it’s better to forget.”
He got angry. “No, it’s not better. It’s worse. We have to remember.” Then he smiled. “You found more than you were looking for, no?”
“Yes,” I said, promising to return.

“I’m here every day, the same spot, at two. I was a bit of a journalist myself, you know.”

Shadows of My Uncle

The Historical Museum of the Liberation stands halfway up a long uphill climb, which made it more annoying but no more surprising to arrive and find it closed for lunch, to leave, to return at four, and to have its doorman bar me because now just an hour remained till closing.

I persisted, however, returning next morning. He tried to bar me again, arguing that no guide was available just then. I told him I didn’t need one, that I spoke Italian fluently and that I was there to see if I could find out more about my lost uncle’s world.

Nicolino had returned from his harsh POW experience with tuberculosis and shattered nerves to the awful discovery of his lover’s death. What was it like to be a hero of the discredited Fascist cause,  a “war invalid,” as those like him were officially declared with attendant little privileges like free tram rides, to begin again, working as a newspaper typographer through the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s, to marry someone new?  Mom and the half-brother she’d never met stopped writing to each other around 1953, my birth year, so we knew nothing about him, not even whether he was still alive.

Ah, but the library is closed, the guard told me, seemingly pleased. That’s okay, I said, just the exhibits will be fine. Luckily his superior appeared and overruled him, and I got in.

Few Romans were eager to enter this building when the SS was in charge.  The left hand doors at No. 155 Via Tasso were not so bad, leading only to SS offices, barracks, and storage. At the right hand doors, No. 145, you were given a mess tin, a wooden spoon, and a thin blanket before being led to your cell, unless you were important enough to be taken right to interrogation.

The building, built by Prince Francesco Ruspoli and rented to the German embassy in the late 1930s, had originally housed the German Cultural Office, but in 1943 there was time for only one kind of German culture. The windows were walled up except for grated 27 by 20 inch openings; in spring 1944, as the prison filled, the doorways got another 16 by 10 inch opening to relieve stench. Doors were removed from toilets to humiliate prisoners, to soften them for interrogation. Prisoners slept on two-meter long hard tables, until those ran out as the place crowded. They could receive nothing from their families except a change of underwear weekly. When even Germans started feeling the food shortage, in spring 1944, they began letting prisoners receive one boiled egg weekly from outside, too.

Awakened at 7, the prisoners had to clean their cells for inspection and then went in groups for two minutes to the bathroom. Those not scheduled for interrogation went to maintenance duties until the day’s single meal, a thin broth with potatoes and cabbage and about 7 ounces of bread. If you were being interrogated during dinner, you missed it. Between 5 and 8 p.m. you could go to the bathroom, during which time you could fill your tin with water for the night. Then at 8 it was lights out, absolute silence, and absolutely no more bathroom trips. What did middle-aged men like me do? Night was a favorite interrogation time, because the Gestapo felt it made a good impression to return a tortured prisoner to his cellmates then.

The museum, however, focused not so much on prison conditions as on the resistance. One hero was Ettore Rosso, a young officer given the hopeless order to secure the city’s northern entrance. He set mined trucks along his roadblock. When the Germans arrived, he answered their order to move by opening fire with his small detachment. As they swarmed in, he blew himself up, along with his men, and many Germans.

On the southern end of town at Porta San Paolo, a wounded Lt. Raffaele Persichetti led a group who discarded their uniforms and wore civilian clothes to confuse the Germans.

“A hero among heroes,” the display said, “with words and example he invited his fellow fighters to the ultimate resistance unto death, sacrificing his young manhood for the vision of a fatherland reborn in freedom.”

Rome Gentrifies, But Esquilino Just Gets Grittier

More footsore than I’ve ever been in Rome, I danced to discs spun by Felix Da Housecat outside the trendy Go Card Club Musica adjoining Termini station, with Eric Bassanesi and Denise McNee. They are expatriate English cofounders of a comic theatrical group called The Miracle Players.
We complained about how expensive Rome was getting, as always.

“Did you notice how 25,000 lire became 25 euros after the change?” Denise asked.

They live in the heart of Esquilino, which seems to be getting grittier as the rest of the city gentrifies. “The prostitutes used to stop two or three blocks south of where we live,” she said. “Now they’re spread way up past Piazza Vittorio.”

On my way to meet the Bassanesis, a fat Congolese hooker had blocked my way for a second on a back sidewalk near the train station.

“Andiamo,” she’d whispered hoarsely. “Let’s go.” Another, a hard looking girl from somewhere east of Romania, had solicited me more professionally in Piazza del Cinquecento, slyly, while her three male handlers stood menacingly curbside.

After the Bassanis left, I lingered around Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele II. La Repubblica’s youth correspondent had breezily urged readers to mimic the young and to go with the flow at Rome’s annual urban culture festival, Enzimi. Tonight the gritty piazza was packed with young roamers. They pushed and pulled me when I got in the way of their relentless search for action.

Still, the strong euro was knocking me for a loop and I needed a budget night. Wow: free music, free Internet access, a falafel sandwich and a beer for 7.5 euros, and more beautiful young romane than I could count. They stuffed down third world food with no apparent effect on their tight bare midriffs. Below the midriffs came long print skirts or baggy harem pants and sandals, though they all still shaved their legs at least, an improvement over my ‘70s salad days. I stayed for a French film about tensions and bonds among French and Arabic schoolkids.

Suddenly Rome felt complicated again. The film concerned some high schoolers producing a play that forced them to confront class and ethnic boundaries. The radical teacher, of course from the generation of ‘68, pushed them hard, eternally hopeful for her revolution. The Moroccan actress was angry at the French actress for the latter’s influence upon the former’s boyfriend. It was intensely adolescent — or adolescently intense, I couldn’t decide — but it perplexed and troubled its young audience, cruelly but honestly offering them the world they would inherit from my generation.

Andrew Giarelli is a writer based in Portland, Oregon.

Nope. They were dune bashers, pelting across the desert in their dune buggies.

Dune bashing is sometimes likened to whitewater rafting in the desert. It’s a very popular sport here in the United Arab Emirates. It’s not some bizarre violent activity, but a serious adventure sport, which involves driving flashy cars/bikes/buggies into the open desert, and having some serious fun climbing up and down the mountain-sized sand dunes. Of course getting stuck, and extricating yourself, is an adventure too.

Since I was new to this, I decided to take the soft option: a ride in a 250cc buggy, followed by a desert drive. Travelers are driven into the desert and taken on an exhilarating ride, up and down sand dunes in 4×4 vehicles, typically powerful Toyotas or Pajeros.

We were picked up in Dubai city by our Lebanese desert guide-cum-driver, who arrived a luxury Toyota Land Cruiser. It only took a half hour to drive from the glittering skyscraper city to the sandy expanses of Hatta.

Before us, we could see the towering range of Hajar, rocky and sandy mountains with pitted and ravaged sides. The Hatta sand dunes are believed to be remnants of an ancient sea that once washed over the Emirates.

We had two hours to jump on the buggies and race up and down over the dunes. A dune buggy is a 4 x 4 with a motorcycle saddle and handlebars. Driving one on soft sand can be very tricky–and sheer power isn’t enough to ensure excitement and fun.

There’s no getting away from the fact that a dune buggy looks odd. It’s built like a scooter, but has four wheels with fat tires. It roars through the desert, sending up clouds of sand as it goes. Out here, caravans of buggies ridden by dune-bashing enthusiasts, followed by a jeep, are a common sight. We could see scores of buggies and cars tearing around the dunes, in what seemed like suicidal escapades.

I was itching to try it. I took off on the buggy, and headed for the nearest dune. Not knowing how to negotiate it, I took a toss and landed in the soft sand. After a few more debacles, I got the hang of bashing the dunes without getting bashed into the sand. Riding up and down the dunes, raising columns and clouds of sand, was exhilarating.

Then we climbed into the Land Cruiser for a desert drive. Our guide bundled us into the vehicle, and took off into the undulating stretches of sand dunes. Soon the undulations increased, as we traversed what looked like large sand mountains. The ride grew choppier. It felt less like driving, and more like sailing in a stormy sea. As we heaved and plunged up and down the crests and troughs of the dunes, our driver cheerfully warned us that it’d get worse. Were we okay? And game for more? We were.

Reassured, he smiled and swung directly into the dunes. Flying across the landscape, he eventually pulled up in front of a place that looked a little like a farm. This, he said, was one of the few farms that used native Arab practices to breed camels.

The few camels in sight took a quick look at us down their long noses, and went back to munching grass. Soon, more Land Cruisers appeared, and lined up alongside our vehicle. Out tumbled tourists of all sizes, shapes and races: Caucasian, Asian, African. They all headed straight for the camels, ambitiously trying to pet them and take photographs.

Meanwhile our driver began to let some of the air out of the tires, checking the pressure with a gauge to make sure it was just right. Slightly flatter tires would give more surface area contact with the ground, and make for greater trail-grip, he explained, adding that we would need all the traction we could muster to negotiate the next set of high dunes.

After a short break, and when all the Land Cruisers had let out air from their tires, we resumed our trip. The dunes rose at least 100 feet; some were higher. Our vehicle edged slowly up the side of the pyramid, slipping now and again. The windscreen framed a rising slope of sand. We were pushed back into our seats, as if in an aircraft soaring into the sky.

The first climb was a thrill. We reached the knife-edge crest of the dune, then began to plunge down the other side. Heading straight down at breakneck speed, skidding on the sand, we got that sinking feeling. Where the sand was too soft, the vehicle went sideways, tilting at a slight angle, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. Sometimes we worried the vehicle would just topple over on its side. But our driver was an expert.

After two hours of rough-and-tumble, we reached a craggy patch of rock. Our fleet of five stopped for a view of the desert sunset. The sun turned from golden to crimson to soothing orange; after our bone-rattling day, it was a soul-soothing experience.

Then our caravan dune-bashed till nightfall.
Raghavendra, who specializes in writing about adventure travel, has biked some of the world’s highest roads, trekked in the Nepalese Himalayas and motorcycled across the Indian subcontinent.

How to Dune Bash
Where. Throughout the Arabian deserts. It’s great fun in the Liwa Desert, Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates — or anywhere that has acres of sand.
How. Agencies offering desert drives include Arabian Adventures, Alpha Tours and Royal Sands Tourism.
How much. Costs start at U.S. $45, including dinner and a desert ride.

– Srinidhi Raghavendra

“I was in a field and I sensed someone, a presence,” he recalled. “I realized I was looking at this great red tree thinking: ‘could this tree somehow be aware of me?’”

His transcendent experience awakened his consciousness of the eastern Caribbean’s pure light and intense color spectrum. “I was having a unique experience of being provoked by color,” he said in an interview.

The flamboyant has since become his signature subject, and he’s popularized it far and wide. Today Richardson, 64, is a leader of Caribbean impressionism, and the best-known artist in the French West Indies.  An impassioned colorist, he’s an en plein air painter whose reverence for the pure Caribbean light is deftly reflected on his canvases.

He also creates woodcuts, copper plate etchings and pastel drawings. Martha Graham, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Harry Belafonte, Ivan Lendl, the Getty family and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands have all bought his work.

His fame notwithstanding, he can often be found perched on a St. Martin hillside, shaded by his wide-brimmed straw hat, and painting the lush green mountains that reach down to the azure ocean.

When the Harlem renaissance painter Romare Bearden saw Richardon’s work at the National Urban League in New York in the 1980s, he was impressed.

“Richardson sees the island with both the lens of a painter and the inward gaze of a poet,” Bearde wrote about Richardson’s work while it was on exhibit at the National Urban League Gallery in New York in 1986. “He is absorbed with delicate renderings of his island in a morning and afternoon light.  He responds, moreover, to the sensuous color of St. Martin and, indeed, to the full glow of nature.”

Richardson’s route to the flamboyant was circuitous.

Growing up on the tiny island his French ancestors helped settle in the 1700’s, he would help his grandfather pull fish-pots in Grand Case Bay, or milk the cows.  Then he’d walk barefoot to school, carrying his good shoes, to be worn only in the classroom. In his hometown of Marigot, a beautiful seaside village of cobblestoned streets, there were no artists or galleries (today dozens of artists live and work in this tiny French-side enclave, and have founded an Art Lovers Association, an annual festival to promote Caribbean visual arts.

Richardson sensed his talent, but didn’t understand it. So kept it secret.

“I knew I had a special gift somehow, but I never believed that it was in art, because it wasn’t part of my vocabulary,” he said. “I wasn’t an American boy who was exposed to things like museums.”

He might have been born American, though, if not for a business disaster. In the 1800’s, an expedition led by his American great grandfather, a sea captain who traded between St. Martin and the U.S. northeast coast, was caught in a terrible storm. The captain’s cargo of salt melted away. Unwilling to travel back to the states with an empty hold, he stayed on St. Martin – and made his future there.

Several generations later, in the 1950s, Richardson’s grandfather, daughter and her six children emigrated to the United States, settling in New London, Connecticut.   Richardson was 13. A high school teacher was the first to notice, and encourage, the shy boy’s artistic talent.  He eventually became one of a select group of art students accepted to the University of Hartford’s Hartford Art School.

“I never dreamt I could go to art school,” Richardson admitted. “I still felt a lack of confidence. I had no bravado.”

Uncertain about his ability to fulfill class assignments, he would overcompensate.

“I couldn’t just create one painting of a mango – I had to paint several, each in different light, different colors, different sizes,” he recalled. “I wasn’t complacent, and I set my own precedent for being prolific.”

Eventually he returned to St. Martin, where he took his paints and brushes outside to rediscover Caribbean nature. That’s when he connected with flamboyant.

The showy tree, native to Madagascar, grows in China and South Florida, but is most associated with the Caribbean. Others have fallen in love with it, too. Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra all recorded a romantic song about it: “Poinciana,” (Song of the Tree).

Today Richardson lives and works in the Marigot building, to which his family has a 300-year-old connection. King Louis XVI commissioned a Richardson ancestor, the knight Sieur de Durat, to build it as a garrison, to protect the harbor on the then all-French controlled island. The original garrison was hand-laid in stone.  As Louis XVI was beheaded in 1789, at the start of the French revolution, the family never saw fit to return to France.

France and the Netherlands, which amicably divide governance of the island, each honored Richardson in 2007. The French gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dutch awarded him a knighthood – the Order of Orange of Nassau, bestowed by Queen Beatrix.

A seven-foot long original painting of the flamboyant now hangs in the governor’s mansion in Curacao.

He’s still going strong. “I have been painting for 42-plus years,” he said, “and I have sworn to never retire.”

Abby Luby is a writer based near New York City.

Experiencing the Arts on St. Martin

You can visit Roland Richardson’s Marigot Gallery, in Marigot, on the French side of St. Martin. #6 Rue de la Republique, tel & fax, 590-590-87-32-24, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, www.rolandrichardson.com, roland.laura@wanadoo.fr.

The Art Lovers Association, to which some 50 local artists belong, holds an annual festival/open studio to promote Caribbean art. www.artlovers-sxm.com/index.html

Music. Try to catch a performance by Tanny and the Boys, St. Martin’s premier string band.

Flamboyants were featured in a recent island photo contest: http://thedailyherald.com/photo-contest/flamboyant2008/

What to Read

“St. Martin Massive! A snapshot of popular artists,” brought out by the local publisher House of Nehesi (2000) $25. www.houseofnehesipublish.com

“The Salt Reaper: poems from the flats,” by Lasana M. Sekou (2005). “[Sekou’s] calibanic voice moves between the public, revolutionary political rhetoric of Linton Kwesi Johnson and the lush, esoteric wordplay of Dylan Thomas.” - Ervin Beck, World Literature Today

St. Martin Book Fair. Annual festival showcasing the work of Caribbean writers.

The Daily Herald (daily newspaper) www.thedailyherald.com/news/daily/j114/tour114.html

Blog.  SXM (the code for Princess Juliana Airport, and a nickname for the island) www.sxmpages.com

Trip Planning

St. Martin Tourism Office www.st-martin.org

DreamBeaches www.st-martin-vacation.com/Thingstodo.html

Everything St. Martin www.best-stmartin.com

What Else to Do

Plantation Mont Vernon, a two-acre outdoor eco-museum on a defunct plantation, features island economic development. 2 Main Road ,Cul-De-Sac, St Martin, (599) 590-29-50-62, 9 p.m.-5 p.m. daily,  http://www.plantationmontvernon.com

The great thing about his job is all the connections that come with it. Connections with renowned pilots, celebrities traveling first class, politicians lounging in their private planes. And connections to London, Paris and Delhi.

Of course I always took advantage of the limited  free tickets the company guaranteed. And every year we went to India. Home.

I recently discovered that one can have two homes — two places so ingrained they become part of your identity. As a child I wasn’t sure where I belonged; I felt uneasy and confused.  In New York it was a longing for my roots that were half a world away, and in India, a pining for my daily routine in Long Island.

That’s why I always loved the airport. No man’s land. People come and go, like fleeting moments. They all have something in common, though. They know that the airport is for transition only, to connect them to their destinations. Nobody actually belongs there. It is not home.

And this is always the same, now matter what city the airport is in. Every traveler becomes an ambassador, representing his or her country.

Ever since I started traveling, JFK fascinated me. Could there be a better place for people-watching? At Air-India’s terminal, it was always the same scene. As if the same people were traveling every time I was there.

Most prominent in my memory is the sari-clad woman. She’s traditional—maybe Mother India herself. Her three children are uninterested and defeated. They’d wanted to go to Disney World. Her husband mans the luggage cart, wearing the new Polo shirt his wife bought him yesterday.

Their luggage is over the weight limit. I know the suitcases are stuffed with Tylenol, Revlon lipsticks, and other novelty items from the dollar store that will surely impress the relatives back home. They couldn’t go home empty-handed, of course. They’ve been gone for six years. After all, what is there to do in this foreign country in which they reside?  The children have become too Americanized, as it is.

The flight has been delayed, but that is inconsequential. For God’s sake, they are going to India! The woman and her husband wait patiently, their passports proudly declaring their citizenship: “Republic of India.”

When the boarding call comes, the children sigh collectively and adjust their iPods, shuffling slowly toward the gate. The woman checks her boarding card for the umpteenth time, as if to confirm that this isn’t a dream. Her husband jumps to attention, already nine feet ahead of them with the luggage. Finally, finally, they are going to India.

This is the immigrant’s story. It doesn’t represent every non-resident Indian in America, but certainly it describes a good number of them.

Perhaps since distance makes the heart fonder, the longing for cultural respite has always been stronger for immigrants. I can close my eyes and transport myself to Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport.

The initial step off the plane, and into the airport, may be my fondest memory. I think it’s because I can remember it, and feel it, so well. Most memorable are the grey tiles on the floor. They’ve always  been there. Five-by-five gray tiles, with four rows of circles in each, splattered all over the terminal. I like this because it never changes; it’s the same in my memory and in reality.

The same plane I arrived in is going right back to New York, with more passengers. Often, I sit in the terminal and people-watch some more.

Most prominent in my memory is the Indian woman in Calvin Klein jeans and red, white, and blue DKNY shirt—maybe Lady Liberty herself. Her three children, uninterested and defeated. They’d wanted to go to Disney World. Her husband, manning the luggage cart, in a Polo shirt his wife bought yesterday.

Their luggage is over the weight limit. I know the suitcases are stuffed with spicy homemade pickles, Batik-designed bed covers, and other novelty items from the street vendors that will surely impress the relatives living abroad. They couldn’t go to New York empty-handed, of course. They’re going there for the first time. After all, what is there to do in Delhi?  The children need to have some exposure to become more westernized anyway.

The flight has been delayed, but that is inconsequential. For God’s sake, they are going to America! The woman and her husband wait patiently, their passports regretfully declaring their citizenship: “Republic of India.”

“Attention all passengers, AI 111 is now boarding at Gate 3.”

The woman checks her boarding card for the umpteenth time, as if to confirm that this isn’t a dream. Her husband jumps to attention. Finally, finally, they are going to America.

This is the Indian traveler’s story.

Too bad that in the glimmer, sparkle, and excitement of contemplating the destination, travelers often fail to appreciate the site of their departure.

I smile because I’ve learned that my South Asian-American identity provided me with a hybrid environment, and an opportunity to find satisfaction and a sense of belonging in two different places. And my father’s job gave me a golden ticket to oscillate between them.

I smile because the customs officials in both New York and Delhi look at me and say: “Welcome home, ma’am.”

Rima Chodha lives and works in New York City—but only ‘til her next oscillation. Reach her at rima.chodha@gmail.com.