in malawi

Got here this afternoon after more than 12 hours of travel and was brought right to the house where I’ll be living.  I’m staying at the guest house of the UNC Project.  It’s pretty nice.  Hot water. A TV?! A real stove.  Seriously living the high life here.  There are a couple of other students here. Things politically have calmed down significantly in the last couple of days.  Word is the protests will stop for a month in order to give time for their demands to be met – not going to happen.  And I’ll be back in the states when they are set to protest again.  I got a tour of the hospital grounds and met with all the people I needed to meet with to get this photography rolling.  I start shooting tomorrow.

conflicted early morning thoughts

I am now sitting in the Mombasa airport. It is 1:15am.  The place is completely deserted. In order to get back into the waiting area I have had to wake up two people from what looked like a very lovely rest.  Security guards all around are sleeping, slouched back in plastic chairs, caps placed over their faces, heads cocked in unnatural positions.  There is music faintly playing from the other side of the large room and a crow cawing above.  The loudest noise is blaring in front of me.  I plopped myself down in a chair right in front of the television.  In a room lined with glass walled shops which are filled with over produced trinkets and duty free liquor, in the middle of wood carved elephants, tusker t shirts, cloth dolls, beaded bracelets and Old Monk rum sits 42 inches of flat screen tragedy.  Al Jazeera is on and with every change of the story I want to weep even more.  Bombings, massacres, famine, disease, drug overdoses, riots, protests, economic failure.  It’s all so overwhelming.  There are images on the screen of the famine in Somalia and the refugees pouring into Ethiopia and Kenya and I can’t help but notice that they look just like images I have in the photography books sitting on my shelf in North Carolina right now.  Images from decades ago immortalized on the pages from Sebastiao Salgado and James Nachtwey and others.  The same sunken faces and hollowed eyes.  Mothers unable to feed their children, children too weak to feed themselves.  People who have walked for days only to have to wait outside already overflowing camps.  This has all happened before.  Right there.  And the medium that I love so much, the one that I claim has the power to change, well what has it changed?  Is this really the powerful tool that I claim it is?  Whats the point?

I find my career choice to be similar, in a way, to medicine or social work. You go into fields like this because you want to see something change. Doctors want to do away with disease or pain. Social workers long for stable, safe homes for kids. I want to see an end to the injustices I see all around. But the truth is, if we all got what we wanted we would all be out of a job.  Our want would no longer exist. What would we fill our time with then?

During a debate in our Swahili class about whether war is ever justifiable (a difficult enough subject in english and we had to do it in swahili), a girl arguing that was can be justified finished a rant with "we need to be realistic about reality."  In a way she is right. It is childish and idealistic of me to think that war will ever not exist. In a way that attitide feels like she has given up. But maybe she and I just have different realities.

These are thoughts I struggle with and will likely continue to struggle with daily as I devote my life’s work to photography.  Ultimately I know that we need to keep working.  Because if I throw my hands up in the air now and think that if this is happening now so it’ll happen again so what’s the point in fighting against it I’ve failed. Many photographers have come before me.  And said all of this better than I can when I’ve been up for 20 hours.  I will photograph to make others see and feel and pay attention to what is going on.  I will continue to work because if I can create photographs that make just one person want to stand up and work against violence and injustice then I will have done some good here.  

the first day home

I leave for Malawi this weekend.  I still have a few weeks before I get back to the states but with most of the girls starting to get excited about going home there has been much discussion about what people are looking forward to the most.  We all have a dream for our first days back and I am no exception.  Some are craving bagels, some can’t wait to wear shorts in public, some have schedules pedicures and haircuts. Its not that this summer hasn’t been luxurious in its own ways.  We’ve stayed at nice hotels on weekends, we’ve been served dinner every night, we have a nice house with a fantastic view.  But there are definitely certain elements of home that are just not to be found here.  Like hot water for example, or fresh water.  The water at the house is essentially pumped right from the ocean so we’ve all been bathing in salty water all summer.  My hair has a texture that I’ve never experience before.  I have no idea what Malawi will be like but right now there is a perfect day in my imagination waiting for me in Chapel Hill. 

I plan to:

Get picked up from the airport and go straight home for a hot, non-salt water shower with real conditioner and will shave my legs with a brand new razor.

Go to chipotle for a steak and black bean burrito bowl with warm, salty, yummy chips and then to weaver for a grapefruit izze and espresso cheesecake. (I’ll go back to veggie right after that, but that delicious chargrilled steak is all I want right now.) 

Curl up on a couch in my pjs and my blanket in air conditioning, with all of my delicious food and watch a movie.

Then it will be a few jam packed days of studying for comps and travelling back to Michigan to see family before schools starts up again but on that first day back I want chipotle, cheesecake and chick flick. Who’s with me?

my running route

Again the photos don't do it justice. Especially that point that you hit the water. It was truly incredible.  Starts out in a small garden/park area and then goes right onto Mama Ngina Drive - a street of mostly government buildings, keeping the traffic low.  Once you hit water the road curves to the right and goes past a golf course and heads toward another big park area.  I miss it already.

one thing I will miss

Hand washing laundry: I know that seems strange.  Washing machines are so damn convenient and the time it takes to hand wash laundry could probably be better spent on other things – like studying or working on my practicum – but I really like it.  It’s relaxing and repetitive enough to allow me to sit and contemplate life and what the hell I am doing with it.  Lets be honest, I don’t know if I will miss it enough to do it when I’m in the States but I enjoy it much more than most here.  Enough to have maybe, possibly taken 40 or so photos of my last load here. 

soundtrack to the summer

When I loaded up my computer and ipod for the trip I knew I wouldn’t have space on this computer to bring all of my music.  I was also in the mood for some new tunes.  So I took a bunch of music from my roommate and a friend.  It was a pretty small selection of music to start with and what I have actually listened to on a regular basis is an even smaller listing.  This list is the soundtrack to my summer.  There have been plenty of other tunes floating around this house but these are the songs I listened to the most.

These songs also evoke memories of the trip so far.  On the drive back from Malindi through the lush green countryside, the window of the bus open and the wind loudly blowing around me while vast fields rushed by,  I listened to Junip.  Grace Potter and Rachel Yamagata remind me of working out on the roof with Katie, the women in the house behind us lined up in their chairs on their roof confusedly watching us work on our buns, guts and thighs and use water bottles for weights as we tried to kill more time after our runs to keep ourselves from stuffing our faces before dinner came.  The National and Bowerbirds songs  will remind me of sitting on the balcony reading or journaling or drawing in the afternoons.  Bon Iver reminds me of sitting on the roof with Elizabeth’s boyfriend’s pink pig guitar playing and singing. And Colin Meloy told me that “you must bear your neighbor’s burden within reason” at times when I needed that life lesson reminder in that crazy house of girls. 

Bon Iver – Skinny Love

Rilo Kiley – Silver Lining

Camille – Mon petite vieux

The Decemberists – Don’t Carry it All

The Decemberists – January Hymn

Grace Potter & the Nocturnals – Paris (ooh la la)

The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio

Bon Iver – Blindsided

The National – England

Rachael Yamagata – 1963

Junip – Black Refuge

Bowerbirds – Northern Lights

Junip – In Every Direction

Fleet Foxes – Montezuma

The Civil Wars – Dance me to the end of love

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emotional necessity

From the window of the coffee shop I frequent here I can see into a shop across the street in which men are carving intricate decorations into wood.  Immense objects like headboards, tables and doors are covered in elaborate scroll designs or precise geometric patterns.  I see the results of the labor all over town. As you walk down the streets in Mombasa you are surrounded by wood carvings like this.  Some pieces are brand new but a lot of it has clearly been there for decades or longer.  Signs of weather and time shaping and warping it even more. 

Watching these men work has reminded me of an article in Yoga Journal in which Bo Forbes states, “spiritual initiation is like a carving knife – it cuts and pierces, but also refines and reshapes you.  Initiations allow you to reinvent yourself completely, or to give yourself over to something greater.  They are windows through which you can glimpse who you really are and what’s possible for you.  They’re not just an emotional necessity; they’re a spiritual imperative.”

When I began this new journey in the spring it very much felt like an initiation.  I threw myself into it full force and immersed my whole life in the practice. In most ways I am not a different person from who I was a few months ago. I wouldn’t say I reinvented myself completely.  I don’t know that I think that that is a possibility. But I am trying to remind myself to do good work and stay on the path I want to stay on.  The carving of this wood, like carving out the life you want, takes effort, patience and acts of love. All things I think I could still use some work on.

go blue

Even 8000 miles away, its great to be a Michigan Wolverine

i'm just going to let lamu speak for itself

safari!

Thank goodness I felt well enough finally to go on the safari.  I would have been crushed if I had to miss that opportunity.  Anyone remember that scene in Jurassic Park where they come across that vast field filled with huge, lumbering brontosauri (is that a word) and other cool dinos running around.  It’s pretty much like that.  Seeing giraffe or elephants that close up is incredible. 

We went to two different game parks, Tsavo and Amboseli.  I recognized Tsavo from a really terrible 1990-something Val Kilmer, Michael Douglas movie about man eating lions. Ghost and the Darkness is a supposed-to-be-scary-but-really-is-comical adaptation of the story.  In the 1898, during the building of a railway these two lions killed a bunch of workers in Tsavo.  Theories about why these two lions started hunting men vary but they managed to kill 135ish people before they were eventually taken down. Now you can go visit them at the Field Museum in Chicago.  When I heard we were going to Tsavo, I made some of the girls watch the movie with me right before we left.  (I don’t know why I find it so amusing to scare yourself before a trip like this.  I watched The Descent the night before I went caving too, makes it more interesting.)  

We got up early and piled in our safari cars to head to Tsavo.  When we got in the park we did a short game drive. It was the middle of the day so we weren’t expecting to see much but it was a really overcast day so the animals were actually out and about.  The drivers in the park all have radios and talk to each other when they find something cool. Someone had somehow spotted a lion in a bush and we rushed there to find it too.  We could only see its face and some movement in the shadows at first.  We stayed for a while hoping it would come out but eventually decided to just come back in the evening. 

We headed for the lodge. We were told we were camping but when we checked in we quickly realized this was not like any camping we had done before.  The permanent tent structures had electricity and hot water and comfy beds and each one had its own patio and pool!  Yeah, this is camping.  We ate a delicious lunch full of fresh veggies and yummy soup.  For the first time in a long time there wasn’t anything fried on my plate.  We got to rest a little bit before heading out for the second game drive.  As soon as we got in the car the drivers starting booking it.  I knew we were in search of something but they wouldn’t tell us what.  We came up to a place where a ton of other safari vans were.  Everyone was looking in one direction but it took us a while to find out what they were looking at.  When we were getting ready for the safari I thought, no way would we see a cheetah. Lions, probably, cheetah, no way.  But there it was.  Hanging out in the grass.  We watched it sit there for a while then walk away into the trees and out of sight.  Of course a cheetah sighting just wasn’t good enough for one night so we drive back to the spot we saw the lion in the brush earlier. It had come out and was lazily hanging out in the grass.  I just wanted to get out and scratch its belly.  We say and watched it roll around for a while but had to get out of the park by 6 so we drive back to the lodge. 

The next morning I woke up and saw some shadows out on the field behind our tent.  Went out and just hanging out, eating breakfast we a herd of elephants.  Can’t really beat waking up next to a herd of elephants.  We made the long drive to Amboseli.  Same deal as Tsavo, morning drive through the park to get to the lodge.  Ambosli was completely different than Tsavo.  Tsavo had a lot more forest and brushland and while we saw a lot of animals, we saw them in small groups, and much closer to our vehicles.  Amboseli had immense open areas and much larger herds of animals.

Our lodging in Amboseli was not quite the luxury it was in Tsavo.  No private pool.  Shucks.  But the food was again fantastic.  We went on a drive in the evening as well.  Again, part way through the drivers picked up speed and in the distance I could see a dozen or so other safari vans.  When we got there I could not for the life of me figure out what everyone was looking at.  All I saw was this huge grassland.  A few minutes later I saw a head pop out of the grass. Then another. Then another.  Eventually we saw eight female lions walking along and playing in the grass!

Back at the lodge that night we watched a Masai dance around a fire and turned in early for a long ride home the next day.  It was one of the coolest weekends I've ever had.  There are a few photos below but you can see more here.