People

On Wednesday I sat in the Milligan College dining hall in spring-time Tennessee and, while munching salad, scrolled through headlines on my laptop. Clicking one that said "photojournalists killed in Libya" I read the first paragraph, which made my food lose its taste. By the time I reached the bottom of the article the world itself felt different, like a chunk had just been hacked out of it, violently and irrevocably, and knocked into oblivion. Chris Hondros was dead.

Funny thing is, I didn't know Chris personally, and the only words I had spoken to him were kind of dumb. In the chaos of Cairo's Tahrir Square on February 2, I saw a photographer crouched by a curb who i think was Chris. He was photographing a weary man who had just been bandaged up after having a rock slam into his face. "Good idea," I told the quiet photographer as I waited to also photograph the man. As Chris got up and I got down, our eyes met for a second. And that, I think, is the extent of my encounter with a man whose work I had appreciated for years and who was now dead in the Libyan city of Misrata, his body to be loaded onto a ship bound for Benghazi and then eventually shipped back home.

In Frederick Buechner's book Godric, the main character says of a dead loved one: "It's like a tune that ends before you've heard it out." That's how I felt about Chris' death -- and that of Tim Hetherington, who had also died in Misrata. I respected their work, the stories they wanted to share with the world, the images they brought home to us. I mean, look at this image of an Iraqi girl, and hear Chris tell the story behind it.

The world is not whole. Ask the man in the photo who got hit by a rock in a downtown square where others would die of their injuries. Ask Chris, if you could, and he'd tell you about child soldiers in Liberia, or a mother with hacked-off hands holding her baby in Sierra Leone. Ask Libyans living in Misrata right now, or those who carried the bodies of two dead photographers to a ship.

What is the world? Here's a partial answer: It's a place with chunks ripped away, and where many tunes end before we've heard them out.

For a little more about Chris Hondros and his images, see the New York Times Lens blog's "Parting Glance: Chris Hondros".

The Egyptian man above, who works in Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt, is smoking a cigarette in the Great Hypostyle Hall. Many, probably most of the foreign travelers who step into the hall are here on short holidays. They likely entered through a climate-controlled airport rather than through a more messy land border. They probably wouldn't have needed to do laundry since leaving home. They're on a visit, and they know it will be brief.

None of this is bad, but it does have its disadvantages. As Paul Theroux suggests in his book Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, through this kind of travel we may return home with a less developed understanding of the relationship between "Here and There". He writes:

I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease and speed with which a person could be transported from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

About an hour before Friday prayers began, while walking through Cairo’s crowded Tahrir Square, a man named Mahdy grabbed the sleeve of my shirt and said, “Hey, where you from?” He had a beard (that’s him in the center), a strong, confident voice, and when I said “America” he said, “Oh, which state, I used to live in Texas, in Dallas.” Come to find out, Mahdy had even spent three days in Tennessee. “A nice state,” he said.

Like many other people I had met in Tahrir over the previous ten days, Mahdy quickly left me dumbfounded by his passion, articulateness, and courage. Cairo was in the midst of historic upheaval and Tahrir Square was the epicenter. Mahdy was one of hundreds of thousands who at some point had stood in this square since January 25, demanding change in Egypt.

He told me many things in the 15 minutes we were together, a righteous anger burning in his eyes, and at times I imagined I was listening to Patrick Henry at the Virginia Convention. Here’s a sample of what he said:

• We are eating ful and tamaya; Mubarak and his people are eating shrimp!”
• “I’m not one of the Muslim Brotherhood, but they are my brothers.”
• “Fear is dead. Nobody is going to back down even if they die.”
• “I wasn’t in the square yesterday…my health isn’t good and I needed to rest. But I definitely was coming today. I came prepared to die if I must.”
• “In the U.S. I’ve been questioned by the FBI but they treated me with respect – I even get emails from them sometimes asking me how I am doing. Here the police never treat you with respect. Sometimes when I arrive in the US the immigration official stamps my [American] passport and says, 'Welcome Home.' In Egypt they look at my beard and pull me aside for questioning. And they're not even sensible questions!”
• “My wife is American and my children have U.S. passports. Whenever they go out I make them take their passports. That way if the police stop them they won’t abuse them. But from now on, in this new Egypt, my children will leave their passports at home.”

As he spoke, another Egyptian in the crowd, a stranger, wiped the sweat from Mahdy’s brow. Sometimes Mahdy paused our conversation to translate what he was saying to those around us. The crowd nodded their approval or, in the case of his joke comparing U.S. and Egyptian FBIs, laughed. There was fire in Hamdy's voice. Like so many others in Tahrir he had a vision for his country and his children, a vision for which I am certain he would have given his life this day if indeed it had been required.

But several hours later, in an announcement that sent a deafening roar through Tahrir and all of downtown Cairo, we learned that Mubarak had resigned. Mahdy would return home to his wife and children, a proud Egyptian.

For more of my images from Tahrir Square and Cairo, visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcarillet/sets/72157626017436034/with/5436239812/

The woman in this photo is, her family told me almost a year ago, 110 years old (give or take a year). She outlived two husbands, takes an aspirin a day, and lives in a quiet backstreet in Luxor, Egypt. She has seen a lot of history -- even, perhaps, in the last several days. For a few great images of events in the Middle East this week, check out the always captivating Big Picture blog at "Protest spreads in the Middle East".

As children our journeys begin. They set us upon a road that will surprise and teach, chasten and inspire. Soon enough, if we make it this far (not all do, we will have learned), our legs stretch into adulthood. On occasion we will look back at the ground we have covered and even at the way we have walked it. We might look more carefully forward too, aware not only that the way we walk matters but also that at a time and place unknown our journeys will end.

The boy in this photo is walking a road near the Ethiopian town of Jinka. We were walking together, on about a ten-mile trek, and after a few miles he turned and asked if he could carry my backpack a while. Along with two other people we walked, enjoying conversation and company and the scenery along the way. It was a kind thing that the boy had asked.

We real people have our journeys. Thankfully, so do characters in literature. In Frederick Buechner's novel Godric, we follow the life of a twelfth-century English holy man (named Godric) who wasn't always so holy. "I started out as rough a peasant's brat and full of cockadoodledoo as any," he recounts. "I worked uncleanness with the best of them or worst. I tumbled all the maids would suffer me and some that scratched and tore like weasels in a net. I planted horns on many a goodman's brow and jollied lads with tales about it afterward....A flatterer I was. A wanderer. I thieved and pirated. I went to sea. Such things as happened then are better left unsaid."

Looking back on the day he left his parents and siblings to go see the world, Godric recalls how first a priest named Tom Ball had come to the house. The priest had come to give a blessing, and to share these words:

"This life of ours is like a street that passes many doors," Ball said, "nor think you all the doors I mean are wood. Every day's a door and every night. When a man throws wide his arms to you in friendship, it's a door he opens same as when a woman opens hers in wantonness. The street forks out, and there's two doors to choose between. The meadow that tempts you rest your bones and dream a while. The rackribbed child that begs for scraps the dogs have left. The sea that calls a man to travel far. They all are doors, some God's and some the Fiend's. So choose with care which ones you take, my son, and one day—who can say—you'll reach the holy door itself."

 

As a traveler who writes, you’re intimately acquainted with the way drudgery can become adventure, or at least a story, when looked at in the rearview mirror. Even in your most anxious, stir-crazy moments, you know that one day, back on the far side of Earth, the event you’re experiencing now will somehow seem more spectacular, or at least valuable and defining.

But as a writer who travels, there are other things you see in the rearview mirror, things now well beyond reach because time, and perhaps distance, has carried you too far. You see lost youth, a fading innocence. You see decisions that at the time seemed noble (and probably were) but which now merely leave you silent, staring into the mirror. You see the future for what it became—the past—and suddenly you wish, at least in some moments, to speak and act differently. You wish that the thing in the mirror was ahead of you, but it is not.

In the rearview mirror even idealism looks dangerous, a Titanic launched and sent full steam ahead. You understand well the ship’s design and the confidence with which it departed, but now you also know the iceberg through which history, or at least you, will interpret its voyage. In the rearview mirror you see that life is hard, harder than you ever expected.

But the journey, you remember, is not yet over. You’re not crushed and broken 12,600 feet under the Atlantic, nor are you forever stranded in some emergency lane while the world speeds by at 70mph. And this is why, having pulled off the road and given that rearview mirror a good long look, you will eventually turn your eyes back to the road, and then, slowly but surely, you will pull your vehicle back into the forward-moving stream.

Finally, having removed your hat to better feel the breeze of movement and hope, you will look for a place to hang it. You will choose, at least for a little while, the rearview mirror.

You wouldn’t know it from the photo, but the girl and guy above don’t care for each other much. The scene is the West Bank village of Bil’in, and the protestor (probably from Europe or the U.S.) is trying to take a shield away from an Israeli soldier. The picture almost seems gentle, and so it is not representative of what was actually happening. On the other hand, it reminds me of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” and so maybe it actually is representative of what was happening. What do the Sistine Chapel and the outskirts of a Palestinian village have in common? They are places where hands create.

Speaking of hands, just a few miles from Bil’in and many centuries earlier we’re told that Jesus, during a confrontation of his own, used his hands to create. Face to face with religious leaders and an adulterous woman they had cornered, Jesus listened as they said, “In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

What the men said was true; the law commanded that a stone, perhaps many stones, fly at this woman until she was a bloody corpse. In response Jesus bent down and used his finger to write in the earth. Straightening up a moment later he said to the leaders something like, “If any of you have lived a pure life, go ahead and hurl a rock at her.” He then bent back down and continued writing. We’re never told what he wrote, but when one by one the religious leaders had walked off and only he and the woman remained, he asked the woman, “Has no one condemned you?” No one had, and so Jesus continued, “Neither do I. Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Throughout the ages and in every place, the movements of hands—and sometimes their stillness—have left lines in sand, in history, and on people’s faces. Like the soldier and the protestor, or Jesus and the adulterer, all of us are participants in an ongoing creation, which is to say that there is a little Michelangelo in all of us. Or maybe there is a lot?

In any case, our hands create, and they are at their best when connected to a mind and heart that cares. Just ask a 2,000-year-old adulterer.

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For an image of a man throwing a stone, this one a Palestinian in the village of Bil'in, click on "Anger"

In the photograph above, a young Vietnamese woman prays in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Saigon, built by the French in the late 1800s. In her face we glimpse something about prayer. And in the lines below, excerpted from a poem entitled "Six Recognitions of the Lord" by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, we also glimpse something of prayer:

I know a lot of fancy words.
I tear them from my heart and my tongue.
Then I pray.

 

In his book A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East, Tiziano Terzani recounts a scene in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in which he is at a fortune-teller’s house, sitting in a dark room lit by one oil lamp. Over the door and written in chalk (in Khmer, I presume) is, “Carnal passion, jealously, violence, drunkenness, intransigence, ambition: if you cannot rid yourself of even one of these ills, you will never be at peace.”

A woman, accompanied by her young daughter, has come to the house seeking the fortune-teller’s advice on how to go about selling a plot of land. The fortune-teller offers his thoughts. Next, the woman asks him to say something about her daughter’s future. Terzani writes:

The [fortune-teller] said that for this they would have to return the following week: it is not easy to predict the fate of so young a girl. That struck me as fair: the less past one has, the harder it is to predict one’s future. There are no signs; the face is without any history, and the fortune-teller, who is often nothing more than an instinctive psychologist, has little to go by.

Terzani’s book is a delight for how it weaves together local culture and history with his own wisdom and reflections. In this section the unwillingness of the fortune-teller to speak of the child’s future struck me as poignant. I could picture the smooth face and bright eyes of the little girl, reflecting a future yet to be written, too vague to be guessed. We who are older may wish to help shape the future of those who are young, but we cannot predict what lies ahead. There is a great mystery here.

The picture above is of a young boy, not a girl, but he too is in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. His face is smooth, his future uncertain. He is being formed by a place and culture that he didn’t choose—as none of us do, at least in our early years—and his face, his manner of speaking, and maybe even his gait will increasingly reflect what is around him and how he responds to it. Perhaps, like the child in the wheelchair being pushed behind him, he will lose a leg. Or perhaps, like his relative whose bicycle rickshaw he is sitting in, he will spend his days using his legs feverishly to make a living. All that is certain is that his face will change, and that it will increasingly tell a story. And, of course, that those around him will help shape it.

For my recent Cambodia blog entry at vagablogging.net, click on "Meeting the maimed on the road".

Eric Wiener, is his simultaneously humorous and thought-provoking book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, writes:

It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts.  This explains the popularity of two enterprises: pornography and cafés.  Americans excel at the former, but Europeans do a better job at the latter.  The food and the coffee are almost beside the point.

Like many of you—and like the Korean grad student in this photograph, taken in Bangkok—I spend time in cafés.  For me it’s because I need the stimulus of caffeine as well as the stimulus of people and sound (there’s nothing so unstimulating as being isolated in a library and seeing, in a blank Word document on a computer screen, your silent reflection bouncing back at you).  In the café, you can eavesdrop on conversations, ask attractive women to watch your computer while you venture to the bathroom, and, if you wish to be obnoxious, try to snort the aroma of coffee (or other things, I suppose, depending on where you’re at and what you want in your body).

The café, then, is about more than coffee.  It is about people, connection, and inspiration.  It is about not feeling alone even when you’re working alone.  And on the road it is sometimes even about refuge.   In Kathmandu, for instance, the soft chairs and rich smells were a refuge from weeks of grueling travel through northern Yunnan and Tibet (July 2004).  In Istanbul the café was a refuge from hours of walking in numbing winter wind (Dec 2004).  In Bangkok cafés have frequently been a refuge from midday heat (2000, 2004, 2005, and 2007).  Once in Bogotá, while photographing with an expensive camera, a café served as refuge from the threat of being robbed on the street.  And in Jerusalem a café even offered the opportunity to sit beside a large plate glass window (two days after a suicide bombing two blocks away) and suspiciously watch passersby on the sidewalk, imagining glass and screws ripping through your flesh and scattering it against the back counter (Jan 2002).  If this last example doesn’t seem to fit the refuge category so well, ask me in person one day and I’ll explain.

Some modern travelers bemoan the current lack of blank spaces on the map, since everything is now pretty much mapped and charted and has left us with nothing “unknown” to explore (or so they say).  But at least we have cafés.