Photoblog

I received an email this morning from a Venezuelan friend who had been celebrating New Year’s Eve at a nice hotel in Panama City, Panama.  She wrote, “The dinner was great, a lot lot lot lot of food it was, but at the moment I ate my food I just can´t stop thinking about the 400 people killed in Palestina, and how it was the new year for that families. The party was awful…I just can´t imagine that the rest of the world were celebrating yesterday while a lot of moms, dads, and sons were crying about their lost in Palestina.”

She writes about a tension with which many of us are familiar.  How does one celebrate while knowing that at the same moment someone else is mourning, or living in absolute fear?

There is no space here to delve into that question.  But like her, the events in Gaza and Israel have been on my mind in recent days.  Of all the places I’ve traveled, none were as difficult as Gaza.  I thought it an often claustrophobic strip of land (at least in the cities and refugee camps) that had taken not only the lives of Gazans but also amazing (and controversial) people like Rachel Corrie—and where one afternoon, in my desire for a photograph, I had feared it might take mine as well.  I had never been to a place where even for a mere 72 hours it was so hard to stay sane.  Unless you’ve been there, you simply have no idea what it means to live in Gaza, to live in a cage.

The photograph above was taken in the West Bank town of Ramallah in late 2006.  The Palestinian boy was part of a protest against Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, which the day before had left three Palestinian children dead in Gaza City.  Some eyes on this Earth take in an incredible amount of suffering.  They take it in, even while many of us celebrate.

I haven't had much time to post the past few days and won't for a few days still (I'm spending the week exploring the Panama Canal).  But perhaps in busy periods like this I'll start a tradition of posting a humorous photo with little commentary.  (Speaking of which, I wish I had taken a picture of diners at the Coca-Cola Cafe here in Panama City last night -- almost everyone was drinking Pepsi.)

As for the photo above, I took it while visiting a string of villages outside the Vietnamese town of Hoi An in July 2007.  This woman thought I might be interested in some Wall Street Whisky.  I surely wasn't, especially in such midday heat.  But looking at the photo now I think she'd do a booming business if her shop was located in lower Manhattan rather than rural Vietnam.  Wall Street could no doubt use a sip these days.

The picture above, taken in 2007, shows a typical home several miles outside Hoi An, a town near the coast of central Vietnam.  The words below also come from Vietnam, though they were written three years earlier—and also several hundred miles away—during my first visit to the country.  At the time I was on the edge of the semi-remote town of Dien Bien Phu, where I had fallen in love with a rickety old bridge near the intersection of two dirt roads.  For a second day in a row I had come to sit and watch the bridge—and the stream of life that crossed it on bicycles, on motorbike, and on foot—from the table of a humble café.   I was two and a half months into a fourteen-month overland journey from Beijing to Istanbul:

I was beginning to see how much “home” would be a theme in the journey still ahead of me.  I had come to Asia with the theory that one should invest more time in building bridges than walls, and that’s what I planned to write about.  But with each passing month—that is, with more time spent in watching ordinary life and realizing how extraordinary this thing we call ordinary really is—I began to think a lot about home as well.  The idea of it as primarily a physical structure or as a place within national borders began to thoroughly dissolve.  In its place was emerging the idea of home as a gift—something too large to be constrained by borders, too spiritual to be only physical, and too untamed for one to claim to own as he might a piece of property.  Home was this bridge at Dien Bien Phu, the moon that shone above it at night, the dust kicked up by motorbikes while I drank Coca Cola.  None of this was ownable; it was all something that had to be received, just as one holds outstretched hands to receive a gift on Christmas.

For the articulate thoughts of another traveler on home (she goes by the name "Sol"), click HERE. 

In the Panamanian island chain of Bocas del Toro, theft is a problem on some beaches.  During the week of my visit, one couple described being approached by two young men who “asked” for their wallet.  They carried no weapon, but their demeanor was intimidating enough—and the travelers sufficiently isolated on their secluded stretch of sand—that they handed it over.  The couple did, however, ask if they could keep the non-cash items in the wallet, which the thieves amiably agreed to.

The theft happened on Wizard Beach, which is sometimes patrolled by police.   In this photo a policeman on the beach talks with an Israeli traveler, likely wishing to assure her that he’d keep a good eye on her belongings.  Later the officer would tell me that she was “very beautiful,” an observation with which I could not disagree.  He also answered my question about the ship that had been anchored offshore for two days: it was waiting to pick up a load of bananas.  (The province is home not only to pretty beaches but also the Chiriqui Land Company, which brings you Chiquita bananas.)

Bananas and beauty aside, one of the most provocative descriptions of theft I’ve ever read is in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.  Here an argument is made that thieves include more than the two opportunistic men on Wizard Beach:

“Good,” Baba said, but his eyes wondered.  “Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one.  And that is theft.  Every other sin is a variation of theft.  Do you understand that?”

“No, Baba jan,” I said, desperately wishing I did.  I didn’t want to disappoint him again.

…

“When you kill a man, you steal a life,” Baba said.  “You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father.  When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.  When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.  Do you see?”

It will be rare that I post a completely bland snapshot to this photoblog, as I am now.  Had I known that I might one day display this picture so publicly, I’d have taken a moment to compose the thing.  But I took it in a rush, thinking that later in the day I would simply download it to my computer (for enlarged viewing), type up the text (which I'd then store in a Word document in case I might one day find a use for it in a story), and then I’d either delete the photo or file it into some dark recess.  I'm sorry the picture's ugly.

But in recently coming across the photo again I decided to post it here--largely because it says something commendable about the people in charge of the Bangkok Mass Transit System.  I love how they very clearly explain what the problem was, acknowledge the domino effect the mishap on train #24 had on others down the line, and then apologize for the inconvenience some may have experienced.  That’s classy.  And to add to the class, they posted the sign in both Thai and English (for all of us foreigners who can’t read a lick of Thai).

The BTSC folks, of course, did something not only classy but also civil and healthy.  It's good to say "sorry" when something you do, even if unintentional, affects other folks.  I suspect that had the narrator in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men been moseying through this Bangkok skytrain station and laid eyes on the posted apology, he would’ve nodded his approval.  Here’s what he says in the book:

My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth.  He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.  And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it.  Dont haul stuff around with you.  I guess all that sounds pretty simple today.  Even to me.  All the more reason to think about it.

In Bangkok I have normally stayed in the vicinity of Khao San Road, where backpackers by the thousands congregate in hotels and restaurants.  Because of all its glitz and commercialism, and because of its foreign hordes, some speak disparagingly about the place.  But I have yet to tire of a neighborhood where one can walk up and down a street and see people from literally scores of countries all in one spot.  There aren’t many places quite like Khao San.

One of Khao San’s beauties is that, if one wants to get away from the throngs (and one probably will), a five-minute walk will accomplish this.  Some seek refuge in Wat Chana Songhkram, the Buddhist temple complex at one end of the road.  Here, while barefoot and sitting on the floor as the ear takes in the monks’ evening chant, the stress of urban crowds and smog dissipates.

But perhaps my favorite respite is Santichaiprakan Park.  Located beside the Chao Phraya River, here you can slurp yogurt at dawn as Thais, more industrious than you at this hour, do aerobics (the yogurt comes from a nearby 7-Eleven).  And then in the afternoon when school lets out, students come to the park to do homework or just hangout.  A modest handful of foreigners are scattered about too, their noses in books, their cameras pointed at river barges, or their bodies stretched out in the grass and their eyes closed.  It’s a wonderful location to people watch.

The photo above was taken one afternoon in the park and shows a child who took great joy in simply running back and forth in front of the water fountains.  While he certainly wasn’t thinking of this line from Kathleen Norris’ book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, it’s not a bad one for us adults to ponder:

There is a vast difference between blindly running away from old ‘nothings,’ and running with mature awareness toward something new.

These are the hands of Abdullah Sharqawi, a Palestinian farmer in the West Bank village of Aboud.  Sharqawi is also Roman Catholic (almost half of Aboud’s 2200 people are Christian).  In late 2006 I spoke with both Sharqawi and his priest, Father Aridah, and learned that Sharqawi was losing much of his land to Israel’s controversial separation barrier, and how some of his olive trees had recently been uprooted and taken to Israel.  Sharqawi was struggling to cope.  With tears in his eyes, he told the priest, “My father said a family can afford to lose a son, but nobody can afford to lose his land.  Tell me, what am I to do?”

The words, Father Aridah explained, were not meant to devalue the life of a son; they were meant to emphasize the crucial role land plays in Palestinian life and culture.  “Some olive trees in Aboud are 1000 years old,” the priest said.  “Family identity is connected to the care and cultivation of these fields.”  In other words, the loss of a child may be tragic, but the loss of one’s land is worse, for it is the loss of a family’s heritage, sustenance, identity, and hope.

In visiting a village like Aboud, you speak with distraught farmers who watch powerlessly as bulldozers rip through their land, and you know these mammoth machines are driven by people and guarded by armed men who at the end of the day will return to homes unconnected to the land they maul and confiscate.  And then later, in reading The Grapes of Wrath and seeing how the Joads relate to the loss of their Oklahoma fields, you think the Joads and the people of Aboud would have something in common.  Here is an excerpt from Steinbeck’s excellent book, in which the displaced Joads reflect on the foreign machinery and people who have taken their land and made them homeless:

All this is easy and efficient.  So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation.  And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation.  For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land.  Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water no calcium.  He is all these, but he is much, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.  The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.  But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself.  When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

The official currency of the Central American nation of Panama is the U.S. Dollar.  If you buy a house, a book, or a stalk of bananas, you use the dollar.  George Washington’s body may have been laid to rest in 1799 in Mount Vernon, but his image lives on in countless nooks and crannies of the world – including in Bocas del Toro, Panama, where this photo was taken.

One of the most powerful aspects of travel is that it introduces people from one socio-economic level to those of another—something that, unfortunately, doesn’t happen often enough back home.  Through these interactions people sometimes even become friends.  But what does deep friendship look like between people who inhabit starkly different socio-economic worlds?   Friendship can seem easy and uncomplicated on a surface level, but when a person with little access to money has to decide which of his children to put through elementary school (while all of yours will go to graduate school), has to watch his spouse suffer from an ailment that you would not because your insurance would cover the thousand-dollar medication, or can only imagine through your photographs and stories what a week-long holiday in another country would look like, what is friendship?  How does friendship navigate the economic chasm between two people?

Though this is just a playful photo, I thought it symbolic of how money can separate people, even people who wish to be friends and in many ways are.  And it reminded me of a quote I read many years ago in an obscure book entitled Missions and Money: Affluence as a Western Missionary Problem, by Jonathan Bonk:

It is humanly almost impossible for a wealthy family to share a deeply fraternal relationship with a family whose material and economic resources are a pathetic fraction of their own….

In my previous post, I left out the final two paragraphs of the Wendell Berry excerpt.  Here they are:

But you have a life too that you remember.  It stays with you.  You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time.  When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was.  You are remembering it as it is.  It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

Your life, as you lived it, is way back yonder in time.  But you are still living, and your living life, expectations subtracted, has a shape, and the shape of it includes the past.  The absent and the dead are in it.  And the living are in it.

The woman in this photograph is Hmong, and she can be found wandering around the streets of Sapa, Vietnam (I say the latter because another traveler, upon seeing this photo months afterwards, said he had seen the same woman; she keeps active!).  Her face hints at a thousand stories to be told, and her eyes somehow sparkle with an unexplainable youthfulness.  I simultaneously found her beautiful while also imaging a defensive lineman who has plowed into time and taken some hard hits.  And I could only imagine how she saw herself, and the world.

There are no icebergs in the Gulf of Thailand, but at any given moment there is, in this and many other seas, someone thinking about the Titanic—or at least about Leonardo Dicaprio.  

I almost didn’t take this photograph.  For most of three hours I had been lying on a bench on deck, seeking out that elusive position where a severely herniated disc wouldn’t make me wish there were icebergs in the Gulf of Thailand.  On top of my physical pain, there was the psychological terror of knowing I still had 20 hours before I reached Bangkok – 20 hours of ship, bus, and train, some of that with 75 pounds of cargo hanging from my shoulders.  Only the day before did I come out of a 17-hour gala of agony in which it felt like a herd of elephants had collapsed on my lower back. The possibility of returning to that state somewhere between here and Bangkok was all too real.

I was alone on this portion of deck except for two German university students on a three-week holiday to Thailand.  Feeling eight times their age (and almost eight times my own) as I navigated my bad back on the bench, we didn’t engage each other that much.  But when the girls turned giddy as they conspired in German to reenact the Titanic bow scene, I eased myself into an upright position and grabbed my camera.  The bow was off limits to passengers—I don’t think the girls knew this—and I thought the expression on their faces would be priceless when the captain roared out the window from the bridge above us.

But the better picture, I think, is the one I’m posting here.  Taken three seconds before the captain got the bridge window open to commence his roar, I love how it seems to capture the feeling of youth, freedom, and lightheartedness.  It was a fleeing moment in time that will never be repeated.

By the end of the week they would be back in university, and the week after that I would be on an operating table in Bangkok.  A year has passed since then, and I imagine their Thailand experience, like my pain, now feels pretty distant.  As the wise narrator in Wendell Berry’s book Hannah Coulter says as she looks back on her life:

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was.  But you can’t remember it the way it was.  To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening.  It can return only by surprise.  Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.