Children

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".

Paul Tournier (1898-1986), a Swiss physician who wrote books with titles such as The Whole Person in a Broken World, once said that "no one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person."

I don’t know what was going on in the minds of these two young girls in a village outside Bac Ha, Vietnam, but in the few minutes I watched them I did have a pretty good idea of this: their lives were fuller for their friendship. 

This Costa Rican boy was on a Pacific beach, not the Mississippi River, but still he reminded me of Huckleberry Finn.  And so he also reminded me of one of my dreams: to float down the world’s major rivers—the Nile, Amazon, Mekong, and Yangtze in particular—and invite one or two members of the local broken humanity onto my raft.  We’d fish and chat and cuss, and I’d jot down notes as we rounded a thousand bends (and bypass several dams).

Mark Twain, at the beginning of his book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, warns, “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”  Well, since I’ve always thought some things are worth suffering and dying for, back in 2003 I sat on the Great Wall of China and wrote the following:

Few stories illustrate the wall-breaching value of travel as well as Mark Twain’s account of Huckleberry Finn and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi.  Through adventure and conversation, a white boy and a runaway slave came to develop a sort of friendship, something that wouldn’t have been possible had they stayed put in their normal situations in life.  Like Huckleberry Finn and Jim’s nineteenth-century drifting down the Mississippi, backpacking through distant lands in the twenty-first century is to journey into a complicated world of divisions and prejudices.  Both journeys hold the possibility of getting lost and being found.  Both are ways of living on the edge of society, of escaping it as a means to discover what it is missing and what it could be—or maybe even what it has possessed all along that for some reason you couldn’t see before.  Both are movements beyond black and white and into a shared humanity.  Both take you not only to scenic viewpoints; they carry you beyond the horizon itself, where transformation awaits and where you may even discover why you left home.

If interested in reading the full chapter from which this excerpt is drawn, click on A Journey Begins.

The image above comes from Granada, Nicaragua.  The words below are excerpted from my book 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia:

Not many years ago (in the grand scheme of things), most of us were in diapers, not yet knowing what country we were from or even what a country was.  We didn't yet know we were Christian, Muslim, Atheist, or whatever.  We didn't know we were Republican or Democrat, male or female, or that we needed to fear and maybe hate one another, or that this might lead us to one day kill and die.  As babies we looked out at the world with wide eyes, reaching out for anything we could grab, wanting to feel and understand it.  We were open to learning and we trusted, even when it wasn't wise to trust.  And then we became adults.

It is not bad being adult, but sometimes I wish we were all in diapers, or at least had something of the spirit of those babies who are.

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.

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.

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….