Photography/Filling time between travels

Significant events from the last few months of my life. I was photographed for an article in the Washington Post, and I completed a photo project about a covered bridge in Lancaster County, PA. Links below:

Photo Project

Washington Post Article, Smar is one of my students.

See slide 6.

La Villa Capilla (The Slum Chapel)

Buenos Aires: Where Jesus isn't your only savior

Welcome to La Capilla María Madre del Pueblo in the Bajo Flores slum of Buenos Aires.

My article provides a fairly comprehensive summary of what's happening in Argentina's slums. The church is the only organization that's maintains a consistent presence there. I visited the Bajo Flores villa on July 3, 2009. It's also known as Villa 1-11-14. Back in the day the government numbered the villas, so Bajo Flores is essentially a mega-villa, three in one.

Father Carrara had to meet me at the corner across from a nicer neighborhood and escort me into the villa. Below is a brief podcast of the encounter.

Villa Capilla Podcast

What I hope people understand from the article, the podcast, and the photos from this and the previous post, is how amazingly difficult life is here, and how this difficulty produces amazing acts of compassion and courage.

Maté and Catolicsimo

Walls of la Capilla

Glass bottles decorate la Capilla

Father Gustavo Carrara

Slums of Buenos Aires

One of the most interesting things about Argentina is its cultural confusion. Go back to my first post from Buenos Aires and my immediate impression of the city was its european feel. With a mix of French, Italian, and Spanish architecture, there's little to indicate where BA is located. Looking at the faces of people walking around, one struggles to reach a concrete conclusion. Kirchner, as you might have guessed, isn't an indigenous name, and one of the priests I interviewed was named Jorge Oesterheld.

Day one, sitting in my hotel room in the "micro centro" of the city, I could have been anywhere but Latin America. Day two, my interviews for my first article quickly reminded me where I was. There's a sharp divide between European culture and Latin American culture in Argentina. Nowhere is that divide clearer than in the "villas", or slums, of Buenos Aires.

Here, people look different. Speaking with my contacts confirmed fears about discrimination and de facto segregation. The photos below remind me so much of what I saw outside of Mexico City in 2006: a mash of concrete block houses, farm animals, and dirt streets. The villas are isolated ghettos: places without running water, sewage systems, or much of a police presence. They've grown out of peoples' need to survive. They stretch for miles, and there is little consensus about what needs to be done.

I would have gotten closer, but these aren't places where a 6'2" white guy easily blends in. Many of these photos were take from on overpass. My driver Leo was uncomfortable even stopping and rolling down the window. I had to convince him to let me leave the vehicle for even a few seconds.

Friendship at 30,000 ft.

After I stepped on the plane at Buenos Aires' Ezeiza Ministro Pistarini International Airport, I thought to myself: cultural adventure over. I was quickly reminded that one's cultural adventure never stops, it just changes area codes.

I stowed my backpack and from behind me I heard the words "yo estoy acá". I am here.

For a minute or so that's all he said. As we sat down our eyes followed a beautiful Argentine woman coming directly towards us. Tall, with brown eyes and long hair, she stopped right beside our seats. Looking at the seat numbers she unmercifully chose the row right in front of us. Just out of the corner of my eye, I saw my new neighbor looking at the ceiling of the plane and stretching out his arms as if to say, "Why God? I have so little."

I laughed as he turned to me said the equivalent of "**it happens" in Spanish.

For the next 10 hours Rubén and I chatted about New York, photography, movies, and Argentine Beef. Whenever I doubt the value of travel, I think of people like Rubén Andón.

Check out his work.

Check out his favorite music:

Fabiana Cantilo - El Anillo del Capitán Béto

Fabiana Cantilo - La Bestia Pop

Emiliana Torrini - Me and Armini

Emiliana Torrini - Sunny Road

Leon Gieco - Ve La Luna

Leon Gieco - Al Atardecer

An American in Argentina

Rolling round BA...

Matéando en el campo

In Russia: it's vodka. In Turkey: it's coffee. In England: it's tea. In many places it's a cigarette. It's the way you ritualistically share an experience with another person. By giving, you gain. You share your thoughts, your good humor. The process of lighting, steeping, or stirring becomes an extension of the conversation. In many cultures, participation in this ritual is more important than speaking the language or wearing the dress. A man from Senegal once told me, "you never refuse a cigarette in Africa". In Argentina, you never refuse yerba maté.

Pronounced "sherba matte" in Argentina; it's herbs in cup. Yerba comes from the Spanish "hierba", meaning herb or grass. Maté comes from the Quechua word for cup. You drink it in a wood or metal cup with a metal straw that's called a "bombilla". Not bitter, it tastes like green tea mixed with grass. Not impressed? The magic of yerba maté, in addition to it's stimulating qualities, is in how quickly you begin to associate the taste with new friends.

Over the weekend I jumped into the maté stream. While I'm not sure whether to blame the maté or my new friends, my sleep schedule was ruined. Maté can be steeped many times without loosing its flavor or becoming bitter. As a result, it's an extremely social drink. At dusk, I sat in a small trailer on the edge of a cornfield in Las Flores with Raul, his father, and two other farmers.

After heating the water on a small gas stove, Raul took a beat-up yerba cup and filled it with maté, which looks like grass clipping. He poured the water through the maté and passed it to me. I drank it all and passed it back. He filled it and passed it to his father. His father drank it in one sip and passed it back. Back and forth, we repeated the process until the water was gone.

Rule number one of matéando: don't say thank you. That seems to be a common thing in Argentina. Saying gracias usually elicits: "the heck are you saying thank you for?" I've struggled with it.

As the sky got darker behind old tractors and planting machines, conversation became livelier and more friendly. We spoke of politics and the difference between North and South America. They asked me about farm policy in the U.S., I told them we tend to subsidize farmers. They were agape. More on that in a later post. The social atmosphere broke only once. After several rounds of sharing the same maté through the same bombilla, the group turned to the lone American: "How common is swine flu in the US...?"

The night "Kirchnerismo" fell

Nestor Kirchner, trying to silence critics with a vote.

This weekend saw the expected defeat of Argentina's first family, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner. Below I've prepared a short radio clip reviewing the basics. Also included are shots of the protests outside The Intercontinental Hotel, where the Kirchners awaited election results on Sunday night.

Argentinean Election Summary

El Lechón

When I was in middle school, one of the coolest kids around was Chris. He was starting point guard on the basketball team, a team every middle school boy tried out for three times. He smoked, he talked about girls a lot. Somehow, I became friends with him.

When we got to high school, he started on the varsity team. For our entire freshman year, every time we saw each other, he'd open his palm to slap hands and slide into a fresh thumb-war grip. The whole 3 seconds it took for us to complete this salute and move on to class was both the coolest and the most awkward part of my day. Cool, for obvious reasons; awkward, because the handshake was as foreign to me as Tango dancing.

Here is Argentina, I feel that way almost daily. Over the weekend I went to Las Flores, four hours outside Buenos Aires. My buddy Raul was going home to vote. Unlike the US, Argentineans aren't allowed to absentee vote, and there's a penalty for not voting. It's part of the reason turnout for Sunday's elections was around 75%. Voting in Argentina therefore becomes a type of homecoming. Despite there being a ban on alcohol and social gatherings ahead of the elections, Raul mentioned there'd be a lechón: a party with a suckling pig as the centerpiece. This presented me with perfect opportunity to practice feeling awkward/cool.

Las Flores in winter isn't the most lively of towns. Most people are farmers; cattle and soy are the money-makers. The streets are lined with well-pruned trees and the houses look like converted general stores, which strangely, some of them are.

The lechón was at one of these general store/casas. Closing in on 11pm, the night streets were empty and the night air felt like Christmas. Walking towards the casa, the pumping cumbia sound could be heard outside and broke the police-enforced, pre-election silence. Inside, the house looked like an abandoned warehouse: neon painting on the walls, black lights, smoke everywhere, liter bottles of Quilmes beer. Within minutes I had met and kissed all of Raul's friends and second-hand smoked a cigarette and a half. I'll post on Argentine slang later. For now, I'll just say it was a quilombo. So much fun.

What I didn't realize was how men greet each other in Argentina's interior. In the cities, it's a tennis match handshake. In the campo, it's a kiss on the left cheek. And Raul had a lot of friends. As Raul put it later, "puro huevo". When they found out my birthday was Sunday, more kissing.

Tango Electronico
Bajofondo - Grand Guignol

Cumbia Argentina
El Hijo de la Cumbia - Cumbia de los Barrios

The music was a combination of cumbia and electronic tango. Find some examples above. Without a firm grasp of the Argentine accent or the slang, I was often reduced to nodding or changing the subject. Fortunately, the pig showed up. No utensils, just grab a bun and dig in; imagine 20 drunk Argentineans unencumbered by the possibility of offending any judicious Argentinean women.

The conversation swayed from women, to futbol, to Obama, and back to women. We made fun of the guy who owned the house. Everyone called him "el blanco", the white guy. It was his birthday, too. For some reason his friends tried to make signs for him in English. We laughed deep drunk laughs at misspelled signs that read "The Withe Bar" (where do you put the H?) and "Happy Berth Day."

We danced and drank into the night. I never got used to the accent or the kissing, perhaps I never will. No matter, for a whole night I felt the awkward/cool of attempted cultural integration. Eventually we ran out of beer and the cumbia rhythm slowed.

Saturday night shares little in common with my high school days, with one glaring exception. The cool almost always outweighs the awkward. As it was with my baller friend Chris, these moments are always the best of the trip.

Las Madres and me

It's hard to imagine how it must have been...

Imagine you're starving. You haven't eaten in hours and you run around a busy city asking for food, banging on restaurants, yelling at people to give you something, anything. Now imagine it's not food you lack, it's information. Your son has been missing for weeks and no one wants to talk about it.

You're pissed. It's 1976 and a military junta has just taken over your country. No one, and I mean no one is allowed to demonstrate against the government. Fortunately, or unfortunately I should say, there are others like you. The last year has been the worst of your life. Your sons are taken in their sleep without explanation. Now you're all pissed. And one day you decide you've had enough. So, on April 30, 1977 you march down the street wearing cloth diapers on your head to symbolize your missing sons. You march into the most obvious place in all of Argentina: La Plaza de Mayo. You know the police will be there. You don't care. It works, they don't stop you. How could they, you're a mother with a diaper on your head and you're pissed.

I met one of those mothers wednesday afternoon. I called her office and she told me to come right away. Our conversation is below. Her name is Juana de Pargament. She talks about being the oldest member, the treasurer, the one who initiated the fight, and what her group is fighting for.

Juana Interview

Then yesterday it was time for the march on the Plaza de Mayo. Every thursday for the last 30 years the mothers have marched around the Plaza de Mayo and made a speech outside the Casa Rosada (the Pink House) or Presidential Residence. The last part of thursday's speech is below. She declares her support for Nestor Kirchner and all candidate aligned with the former president's Justicialista Party.

Las Madres June 26 Speech

We're mad as hell... and we're not gonna take this anymore!

Back to the room to contact my editor Barb about the abortion article. Showered, got myself a look, grabbed the camera, y me fui.

I wasn't really expecting much. It's always a good idea to shoot at dusk, makes the light look groovy. But no sooner had I crossed avenida "9 de Julio", I saw what looked to be a field trip where the parents outnumbered the kids 10 to 1. Except there was a big banner with Che Guevara on the front...and men with face masks and sticks...and police...

Well, it wasn't as cool as I thought. Apparently this was a mini-protest against the government. I'm not entirely sure what they were protesting. You can tell by the pictures there were a lot of groups represented. Mostly they were exercising their right to get pissed off and shout things in front of the congress.

I did my best to record the event in photos and recordings. Both are below:

Angry Argentineans

In the recording, for the most part, the speaker call for "los campesinos" (the people from the country) to leave their vote blank as a sign of protest.

It was important to look scary, even if no one looked scared.

"For a government of the working class people, don't vote, fight."

So much for a unified front.

Congress in the background. The "Fogoneros" is a militant student group.

Touch down

Damn, long flight. No time to waste. Preliminary impressions of Buenos Aires: it's a lot like Madrid. It's flat, the streets are laid out in a grid with huge "avenidas". Everything seems to feed into the Plaza de Mayo. Lots of pharmacies and cell phone stores. Lots of cafes and kiosks. I settled down in a cafe to read the paper and came across an interesting article on how none of the elected officials up for office on June 28th have come forward to talk about abortion. The economy is the biggest issues, obviously. But it could be a good first article.

Most interesting/frightening moment so far: right as we left the plane, the flight attendants gave us hygienic masks. Yeah, they're freaked out about the "la gripe" (the swine flu). Some passengers kept the mask on, some didn't. Some of the gate security had them on, most didn't. I spoke briefly with the woman who sold me a cell phone. She asked where I was from, and then asked if I had the swine flu. Come on, ask me about Obama, or about how the US soccer team just slipped into the semifinals of the Confederations Cup. I'm going to try and take pictures of people on the street wearing the masks. Hopefully some pictures tonight, it'll get dark fast here.

Sudamerica dreaming

It's winter in Argentina now, and what better time to eat beef, dance the tango, and use words like "sos" and "vos". I'll be trekking to Buenos Aires tomorrow morning. My political side has been piqued by their June 28th elections. Many posts to follow. Stay tuned.

Where everybody knows your name

Our troubles are all the same.

Traveling to Africa usually involves observing things like poverty, food, language, and religion. You constantly compare. We have stuff, they don't. They spend all day outside, we don't. You do this because it's all so different. Returning to the States makes the contrast even sharper. Anyone who leaves poverty for prosperity feels it, but the scariest part for me was time.

Robert Levine, a social psychologist, details this perfectly in his book "A Geography of Time." His research proves the seemingly simple concept that each culture has its own sense of time. More that that, the way you or I perceive time has as much to do with our culture as our religion or our diet. This can show up in big ways like the social punishment for arriving late (we Americans are bloody executioners) or how fast we drive. Or it can show up subtle ways.

Dogon: come for the views, stay for the views

A Peace Corps buddy of mine lived in West Africa for over two years. Shortly before the end of his stint he received training on reintegration into American society. The most striking thing about the training program involved preparing for the underwhelming response of your loved ones to your return. "Prepare a two or three sentence summary of your trip," the trainers advised, "For some of your closest friends and relatives, that's all they'll want to hear." After 28 months abroad, your closest relatives will only want to hear a 60 second summary.

This attitude stands in striking contrast to where my buddy was coming from in West Africa.

If you ever get to Mali, the Dogon Country should be your first destination. You need a guide, and they can be expensive. However, a guide there is worth every penny for two reasons. One: his name might be something unique like Mr. Togo. And two: he'll know everybody.

Dogon greetings are comprehensive partly because time moves slower in the Dogon Country. Remember how an African 2 years had to be distilled into 60 American seconds. Saying hello in Dogon takes 60 seconds by itself.

Mr. Togo, how are you?

Se-om (good)

How's your brother?

Se-om

How's your mother?

Se-om

How's your sister?

Se-om

How's your aunt?

Se-om

How's your wife?

Se-om

How's your chief?

Se-om

How's your boss?

Se-om

What does it say about a culture when greetings take this long? I know it's their custom and the pace of each question was rapid fire, but think how nice it would be if everyone you met cared that much. You'd never get anything done, but maybe that's not the point; I've never seen a more close-knit community.

Maybe we should all spend more time outside.

Curbside Togo (or 5 things I learned walking down the street in Togo)

At first glace, walking down the street in Togo isn't that different from any other third-world nation. You've got livestock. There are a lot of people just chillin. You can get amazing fruit.

But stop and just receive it all, and you come away with some interesting things.

1) The Togolese love Bruce Willis.

I learned that Togolese people literally think Bruce Willis is a superhero. The knock-off video stores are filled with Bruce Willis movies. It's like Plato's Allegory of the Cave: if all you've ever seen of Bruce Willis is him jumping off tall things and killing people you'd think he was a superhero, too. Maybe he is.

2) The Togolese love to ride bikes.

Upon French colonization, motorbikes were introduced instead of cars. Wherever you are in Togo you are just as likely to take a cheap Korean-made moto as you are to take a taxi for transportation. It's cheaper, more fun, and you're more likely to get killed.

3) The Togolese love to ride bikes while listening to songs about riding bikes.

You are now officially up on some serious West African hip-hop. Also, they speak French there. Also, most of their music sounds like this. Also, Togolese people hate French people.

4) You can cook a goat's head.

I don't have a picture, but it's for real. I've seen it.

5) There are few things like FanMilk.

This is more of a relative lesson. If you're like me, you grew up eating sugar and other simple carbs on the average of about 10g an hour. But in Togo (or anywhere in West Africa) going for days, perhaps weeks, without sugar is common. That means, that when my American tastebuds were reunited with sugar in the form of FanMilk, the reaction was an insulin orgasm.

Holla at Fan-man.

Get busy living, or get busy dying

I can't imagine a better use of my time then to interpret, reorganize, daydream, and ultimately share some of the best places I've visited. This project represents a commitment to travel and experience some of the world's most interesting people and places.