Spent the day yesterday shooting a wedding at the St. Regis in Dana Point, CA in a black suit with sunburn. But I guess the sunburn was worth it because at least I have a little viddy to show for it. Enjoy…

Heading to LAX.

Day 5

At around 3:30 AM Ben woke me up from my spot in the back of the truck. Incredibly groggy, but only a little stiff, I climbed out, pulled on my shell to warm up, and followed him into the main compound of Villa Creole. Ben was trying to utilize the time in the middle of the night while everyone was asleep to use the minimal (and usually crowded) wireless signal that was available. We needed to figure out transportation and a method of getting cash in so we weren’t helpless. Most importantly for Ben, however, was his responsibility to get his own mother to safety. I could tell this weighed on him, and the longer we stayed in Haiti, the more I felt his urgency to make sure he got her out and to safety.

While Ben used the internet, I pulled a couple of table chairs together, still aching for a few more hours of sleep, balled up to keep warm, and caught a few more winks. After an hour or so of relatively restless sleep– I’m pretty good at sleeping anywhere, but I guess everyone has their limits– I sat up and chatted with Ben. We reminisced about the last couple of days. We talked about the little boy, about his severed foot, his helpless parents. We talked about Doug– our loyal companion who has, to say the very, very least, a lot of personality. We talked about what we could do to begin getting ready to get Ben’s mother out of Port au Prince and safely to the States. We talked about what we could do for Haiti once we returned.

As dawn crept in, dreary-eyed journalists and doctors began slowly emerging from all areas of the compound– some from tents, others from hotel rooms, others from under blankets in the grass. As they had the mornings prior, the doctors rose early, ate whatever food they had with them, stuffed their day-bags, and headed out with the morning light to work, many of them at General Hospital.

The sky turned from cool blue to pale pink-and-orange, and the hotel staff brought out a meager complimentary continental breakfast. I was incredibly grateful for hot coffee (regardless of quality) and juice, yogurt, and some pastries. It seemed so far out of context, especially after days of mostly consuming Clif Bars. I went and alerted our Haitian brothers, who were emerging from sleep and from the truck outside, that there was breakfast. And though part of me felt guilty how accessible these amenities were for me, and how inaccessible they were for the many outside, I poured myself a cup of coffee, grabbed a pastry and cup of yogurt, and sat down with our “crew,” watching the sun slowly fill the compound with light.

One of the first orders of the day, for Ben and I, was to find a way for Doug to get back to Santo Domingo. It had become clear that his resources were depleted as well as ours, and he wasn’t any good as a rescue worker unless he was able to get back to Santo Domingo and receive aid from the people in his organization back home. He was also a real challenge of personality, and Ben and I decided that for the rest of the trip, we would accomplish the most by breaking away.

Throughout the past several days I had tried my best to be patient with Doug’s temper-tantrums, wild-goose-chases, hyperbolic self-acclimations, and awful bed-side manner. But it was really Ben that seemed to have the patience of Job. Often when Doug was being difficult, I was fuming, but Ben would quietly appease Doug, or seemingly acquiesce to many of his complaints. I understood that, at least at first, Ben felt a loyalty to Doug. It was Doug, after all, that had orchestrated (ahem, conned) his way, along with Ben, onto a plane that brought them in from Florida so that Ben could get to his mother.

But by the morning of that fifth day, Doug had pulled his last antic– even for Ben. And Ben had what he referred to as a “come to Jesus” talk with Doug. Essentially, he shot straight with him. And it was bizarre the impact it had. Instead of retaliating, or throwing a fit, Doug was agreeable. He had no resources, was low on money, and would go back to Santo Domingo where he could contact his people and regroup. Now the only challenge would be getting him there.

Discouraged that we wouldn’t be able to find a way home for Doug, but feeling a sense of responsibility to make sure he made it home safely, we asked around at the now-bustling compound if anyone knew any options for getting back to the Dominican Republic. Somehow through the early part of our search, Doug had befriended some people from The Christian Science Monitor, and before we knew it we were putting his stuff in the back of their large van, and were sending him off with hugs and waves. I don’t think he really wanted to go, because he must have said good-bye four times. Once or twice the door to the van would shut, the engine start, and then our hearts would flutter as Doug would emerge again to retrieve something else he’d forgotten, hug us goodbye again, and then climb back into the van.
But sure enough, by nine o’clock in the morning, we waved and watched the van filled with our friend and the correspondents from The Christian Science Monitor bounce down the road. Ben and I secretly wondered if the nice people on their staff would toss Doug onto the highway after an hour. But we trusted their patience and generosity and went back to the compound, smiling, relieved, bathing in the morning sunshine, and made plans for our day.

We decided that the best option for our driver, his truck, and the rest of our companions, was to send them on home to their families. They had been hired to travel with us up until this point, but we had no money left to give them, and no specific work to offer them. Ben and I would be alright, could find transportation, and had a wealth of resources at Villa Creole that we had access to. So we said good-byes, gave hugs, and watched as they rounded the curve away from us, back to their toppled homes.
Back inside Villa Creole, I cradled another cup of coffee and discussed the days’ plans with Ben, Simon, and a couple of young French reporters. I had a strong urge to go straight to General Hospital to see if their was anything I could do to help there. Another contact of mine, Jakob, who was a Swedish photographer from New York, had been sending me status reports from the hospital. He told me that he’d been able to help the doctors, and they generously allowed him to take pictures as well.

Simon and the two French reporters, who had been working as a set of three most of the week, had already been to the hospital and were making plans to head out into another part of the city. Both of the reporters were on assignment, and Simon, who was in Haiti independently, primarily stuck with them. The compound was pretty well cleared out by ten o’clock. Most of the journalists would work out in the city through late morning and early afternoon and would return by late afternoon to transmit their photos and stories back to their editors.

Short on cash, and pleased at the thought of a nice long walk, Ben and I decided to head down to General Hospital, a few miles away at the bottom of the hill, on foot. I left my big backpack at the front desk of the hotel, packed my day pack with everything I would need for the day including a water-bottle, Clif-bars, my camera, and few other odds-and-ends. I walked down the stairs, past the fallen foyer, the stairs to the second floor dangling above me, and into the bathroom that had been okayed for visitors to utilize.

I looked in the mirror. I don’t know that I’d seen my real reflection in several days. I look haggard. My sinuses were stuffed with exhaust and dust, and there were dirt circles accenting my sleepy-circles under my eyes. I had faint stubble, and hair like Peter Pan’s. I had pulled on a clean white t-shirt for the day, which was at the moment the only thing making me look even remotely presentable. I splashed water on my faces, brushed my teethe, scrubbed out some of the obvious dirt marks, and headed back upstairs.

My plan was to meet Jakob at General Hospital in one hour. The walk was down-hill, but we were unsure just how far it was. An hour? Two? Before we left the hotel compound I handed Ben one of my favorite vintage t-shirts– “No Guts no Glory”– and we ripped it into rags for him to use as a face mask. I had been using the same t-shirt I had torn up my first day in Port au Prince and it had been serving me well. At that we headed out like bandits down the hill.

Taking a long walk through the city was a unique and compelling way to survey the damage. Most of the time one could watch the horrifying scene from the safety of a vehicle. Viewing everything from inside a car gave a false sense of protection, and a very real sense of separation. With a window between you and the fallen bricks and broken people outside, you could watch but not be involved.
Along the way we stopped periodically to chat with locals. One man was selling giant tortoise shells. I stopped and ask if I could take a picture of him with the shells. He struck a dignified pose.

The winding road down the hill from Petionville affords a truly magnificent view of valley below. As we walked, Ben told me about the Haiti in which he had grown up. Although Ben had been born into incredibly meager conditions, he seemed to have mostly fond memories of his childhood in Haiti. After his mother transported him to New York, he had returned often and was always treated like a prince by his family. For those of you well-traveled in the third world, you know there is no feast like the ones prepared for visitors from afar.

Our walk was in some senses light– we laughed and retold the same stories about Doug. As big-hearted as he apparently was, it was such a relief to have the liabilities he carried off of us. Ironically, now with no truck, drivers, or cash, we felt freed to actually help.
But as we walked we also bore further witness to the massive destruction of the city. We walked past one collapsed building after another. Everywhere there were signs that said, “Nous avons besoin d’aide” — “we need help.” As we climbed over crumbled cinder blocks, splintered wood, and exposed wires, we walked past a small cement building that had remained relatively intact. It was sandwiched between two partially collapsed structures, with the spray-painted scrawling in English “God is good.” It reminded me of Ben’s mother the previous day who, on our return home from our long day as a make-shift EMT crew, threw her hands in the air and said in English “Thaaank you God, thank you!” waving her arms. I also remembered the early morning praise songs. I wondered if I’d have had the same perspective in the face of such adversity. Truly, I admired the strength of their faith.

Partially because of the condition of the road, and partially because of our frequent stops, the walk down hill took far longer then I imagined. Jakob, the Swedish photographer, was texting me that he was getting ready to take off. By the time we arrived at General Hospital, he was gone, and the gates to the entrance of the overcrowded compound were packed with Haitians pleading their cases and begging to be admitted. Some had family members with urgent needs, other just hoped that they would get some water or food.
Their hopes were likely in vain as I later discovered that water inside General Hospital was scarce both for the patients who desperately needed it, and the medical staff that were at risk of getting dehydrated as well. Ben and I managed to work our way through the mass of people to a narrow opening in the gate where a few bewildered U.S. soldiers blocked our entry, informing us that the press was being evacuated and no more people were being allowed in without some kind of identification as medical personnel. We told them we were there to help, not take pictures, and they hesitantly acquiesced.

As could be expected part of the hospital had completely collapsed– in fact the nursing education building was flattened. We were told that more then a hundred young nursing students had been crushed. The horrifying smell of the bodies inside wafted throughout the nearby facilities.

Parts of the the hospital complex that had been deemed sturdy were being used as operating rooms, and pre-op and inpatient units. Most patients that weren’t been currently treated were placed outside, where a miniature tent-city had been formed to shade them from the blazing mid-day sun. What formed over the top of the maze of dilapidated hospital beds was a massive network of blankets and tarps, strung with ropes to trees and poles, forming a collective quilt of meager covering.

Ben and I split up and agreed to meet back at the front in few minutes once we’d surveyed the scene. I walked through the constant crowds of people and took in the whole scene. I stopped a couple of times to take a few pictures, but for the most part kept my camera in my bag. Sure enough, journalists were slowly being pushed out. I watched an Australian news crew conclude an interview with a doctor who was clearly in a hurry to get back to his patients. I watched some photographers steal some pictures of a few desperate Haitians, who looked up with big eyes that said, at least in my mind, “Fine, take a picture. I don’t even care. Just take your picture and go.”

One journalist particularly caught my eye, however. She was kneeling alongside her translator at eye level with a patient. I didn’t catch the exact conversation, but her mannerisms with the young man were sincere. Every once in a while she’d tilt her head and say something to the patient, and then look to her translator. The young man would answer and she’d jot a few notes down, hardly breaking eye contact. After what seemed like a great deal of time, she finally lifted her camera and made a gesture that said, “May I?” He nodded, she snapped a couple photos, glancing up at him between shots.

That, I thought, is how it’d done. Make the personal connection. Give them dignity. And ultimately, give them the option to opt out. I realize this isn’t always plausible– and some would find me naive to think that it’s really ever plausible in such circumstances. Maybe that’s true. But it’s ideal. And the interaction not only impacted me, but impressed me as the best example of how to be a good photojournalist.
Before I even had the opportunity to head back to our agreed upon meeting spot, Ben found me. He was heading out with an ambulance crew to pick up people in need of medical care to take them to Sunapi. Ben asked me anxiously (the team was waiting for him) if I wanted to go. I told him no. I decided I wanted to stay and see how I could be of help at the hospital. We had no way of keeping in touch as Ben’s cell phone wasn’t working, so we agreed we would just meet up at Villa Creole later that night. And just like that, we parted ways.
I wasn’t really sure where to be– or who to talk to. There were people at the hospital from organizations from all over the world, including multiple red crosses, and dozens of NGOs. So after making a brief circle of the the ground, getting a feel for the layout of things, I approached a random doctor who simply appeared to be more in charge then other doctors around. Illusion or not, he was the man to talk to. I told him I was a photographer, had no medical background, but was at least a healthy body and would do anything he wanted me to do. I told him I was putting my camera down for the day.

Without a moment of hesitation he slapped a badge on me– he was with the International Medical Corps– and gave me a job: assisting a young doctor named Patrick to put together a new pediatrics ward in a portion of the hospital that hadn’t collapsed. Along with Patrick we assembled a group of young Haitian volunteers and began begging the stout, sharp-tongued Haitian woman who operated as the pharmacist to give us a supplies to stock the ward. Since supplies were terribly scarce, she took her job very seriously as the gatekeeper between doctors in various roles that tried to beg and coerce her into giving them more of this or that. By the end of the day, I’d sweet talked her into giving us pretty much everything on our list, and I think she still liked me when it was all said and done.

Patrick could not have been much older then me. He looked to be 29 years old. But back in California he was an emergency room MD who split his time between the states, and doing work with IMC in Iraq. He was friendly and hard-working and impressed me immediately.
The team of young Haitians that were with me spoke no English, and I no Creole, but we sweated together all day, gathering usable hospitable beds and mattresses from empty, dingy corners of the hospital and corralling them in two large rooms at the top of a stairway in the back portion of the hospital. As soon as a few beds were set up, doctors and nurses were bombarding us with requests to bring children in. There was simply no room anywhere else. Frantically, I continued to haul filthy mattresses in, dust them off, and cover them with hospital gowns so they could start laying children on them.

For the first hour or so of working, there was no doctor in the new pediatrics ward we were assembling. But finally one arrived. She was frantic, clearly stressed. I did everything I could to help her set the unit up comfortably so she could make rounds and give proper care. Her name was Dr. Conde, and she was a Haitian-American from Brooklyn. Other nurses that accompanied her were Haitian-born as well. One of them lived blocks away from me in Harlem.

At first I don’t think Dr. Conde knew what to make of me. I didn’t tell her I was a photographer, just a volunteer with the International Medical Corps– which was true. But the longer I was with her, rushing in and out of the pharmacy, grabbing meager supplies when I could, and helping transport children from stretchers onto beds, the more she warmed to me. And she was a good doctor.

Finally the two rooms that made up the new ward were filled with young children– many of them no older then three– some of them literally minutes old. I was hot and incredibly thirsty when I glanced out the window and saw that the sun was sinking below the horizon. I was losing light, and there was no electricity in the building. I asked Dr. Conde if it would be okay if I took a few pictures. “Of course!” There was no more work for me to do, so I grabbed my camera and made a single round through the ward.

Most of the children I was photographing had seen me around all day. As far as they were concerned, I was a doctor. So when I approached their beds with a smile, there was a warmness already between us. I followed suit with the journalist I had seen earlier. Whenever I took a photo, I made the “May I?” gesture. And sometimes I would even get a smile. There were children with recently amputated limbs, severe burns and lacerations, struggling newborns, head injuries, and on and on.

After I finished taking pictures, I asked the nurses if there was anything else I could do. They had one more request: there were some limited pain medications being given, but the nurses were starting worry. As dusk passed, and darkness set in, they were deeply concerned that in the night, with no pain meds, no one would sleep. That the children would cry in agony all night, exhaust themselves, and exhaust the staff. So I set off on my last mission for the day.

I ran down to the pharmacy to make one last minute inquiry, but found the doors locked and bolted shut. I made a few circles of the compound. Most volunteers had left. The medical help at boiled down to the skeleton crew. But I caught a glimpse of Patrick hauling a man in on a stretcher.

“Patrick!” He looked over at me, clearly exhausted. “We need acedomedophine for the kids.”

He pointed me in the direction of a storage closet that might still be open. “We have some donated supplies we’ve been hiding in there. See if you can get to them.”

As I was walking away something dawned on me and my heart sank. “Patrick!” I called after him again. He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Where are you staying?”

“Villa Creole, in Petionville.” My spirits rose again. “Perfect! Me too. Can I get a ride back there?”

“Of course.”

With that I hurried off to the IMC horde, which turned out to be a few meager boxes of random, mostly useless, medical supplies. But there was adult-strength acedomedophine which could be administered in small doses to the kids. I grabbed a box of it and ran back up to the nurses who almost kissed me.

When I left the ward, it was completely dark. The nurses were making rounds with flashlights and getting ready for another long night shift.
I hurried back to the IMC makeshift headquarters on site and barely made the vanload that was heading back up the hill to Villa Creole. At this point I was well past my deadline for meeting Ben, so I hoped he hadn’t somehow left without me. I piled in with the International Medical Corps crew, who I decided were a pretty likable bunch, and we slowly bounced and bumped our way up hill back to Petionville.
When I arrived at Petionville I managed to scrounge a bottle of water. I pulled two Clif bars out of my bag and sat down at a table by the pool. Virtually everyone, doctors and press alike, had arrived back at the hotel base and were buzzing around me. Ben, however, was nowhere to be seen.

After sitting alone for a few minutes munching on a carrot-cake flavored Clif bar, the IMC crew found me and pulled chairs up around my table. Patrick plopped an ice-cold Red Stripe down in front of me. Most of the day I had been keenly aware of my inability to really help any of the patients at General Hospital. But it was nice to feel appreciated and, more importantly, to feel a sense of community. I sat for a while and chatted with them as they recounted stories from the previous days, as well as from their time in Iraq and around the world.
Around 10 PM, I received a text from my friend Jonathan. Jonathan was a friend of mine whom I’d known for years. We originally met because of a trip I took in 2006 to Uganda. I had stayed with him in Lira, Uganda where he was working to start an orphanage, so we were used to seeing each other in the context of the third world. He traveled far more then I did to impoverished places all over the globe, producing video pieces for various organizations. The night I was contemplating going to Haiti, I had called Jonathan.
“Hey man” I had said, “What are you up to?”

“Oh, just got back to Orange County. Hopefully I’ll be back here for a while.” He hesitated. “Well, actually that’s not true. I’m possibly going to Haiti tomorrow.”

“No way! Me too. That’s actually why I’m calling!”

Jonathan informed me he was waiting for funding for a possible trip to Port au Prince. We exchanged information and he gave me some leads on contacts in Haiti. One of them was an orphanage called Child Hope International.

Jonathan is a rare gem. Once in Uganda we had been driving to meet someone at a local restaurant. It was 10 o’clock at night and we were already hours late. But yet at the site of some street children he recognized, he pulled the van over and spent a half an hour catching up with the boys, making sure they had a place to stay, making sure they had food. He had a preferential view to the poorest– often quoting Psalm 68:5 which calls God the “father of the fatherless.” Fatherless himself, Jonathan has a massive heart for the orphans of the world, and he’s devoted his young life so far to that end.

Jonathan had been to Haiti before and had a lot of quality footage of conditions before the quake– specifically of the orphan situation– which was something few news organizations had. So now Jonathan was working closely with CNN on a documentary on which he later became co-producer, along with CNN’s Soledad O’brien.

Throughout my trip so far, I had been texting back and forth with Jonathan– mostly for general news and to share tips. But now he was texting me, anxious to meet up. I told him I was at Villa Creole. He said he’d been there before and was not far down the road. In a matter of a half an hour he, along with his girlfriend Lindsay, who was there for Food for the Hungry, arrived at Villa Creole.

I was elated to see them. I gave Jonathan a bear hug. He and Lindsay looked at the buzzing makeshift newsroom/compound around them and then assessed me. I was more of a wreck then when I had woken up. Now covered in more dirt, the physical labor of the day had caused me to sweat, the dirt and filth on me to cake and smear, and I’m sure I smelled atrocious.

As they started asking me questions about my situation, I started to become aware of its’ bizarreness. We walked outside of the hotel to the dark driveway where their car was parked.

“Where have you been sleeping, brother?” Jonathan asked me.

“Well, wherever. Last night I slept in the back of a truck.”

“How much money do you have?”

That I didn’t know. I pulled out my wallet and slid the remaining cash out of it. It was then that I realized I had only eight dollars. I didn’t say the amount out loud, they saw it.

“You only have eight bucks?” Lindsay sounded startled.

Well, I had more then that in my bank account obviously, I retorted, but there weren’t exactly a plethora of financial institutions from which to withdraw money.

“Maybe we shouldn’t hang out in the dark out here too long,” I said, “last night there were gunshots over by our truck.”

“Adam,” Jonathan was concerned, “you slept outside while there were gunshots?” The situation was actually starting to strike us as a little humorous. It was apparent to them that I hadn’t really thought about the situation, and we all three laughed a little about it. I probably did look pretty silly– gaunt, filthy, with only eight dollars in my wallet, in a ravaged country far from home, and beaming wildly to them as I retold my adventures over the last few days as if it was all part of a hilarious lucid dream.

“Well, you know something, so far God has pretty well taken care of me,” I said. “I haven’t needed anything.”

“Well maybe us arriving is God taking care of you” Lindsay mused. Almost immediately after she said those words, we heard the “pop-pop” of further gunshots not far from us. We hit the ground. While flat against the ground ducking for cover, with Jonathan’s car next to us, Jonathan smiled over at me, “You’re coming with us.” I agreed.

First, I needed to leave word of where I’d gone in case Ben arrived. At this point it was late, almost eleven. I talked to several of the journalists that had seen me with Ben, as well as the front desk. I told them to tell Ben that I was going to the Plaza Hotel and would be back in the morning. They all agreed, and I climbed in to Lindsay and Jonathan’s car and headed down the road to the Plaza.

The Plaza was a whole other world. It was a fully functioning, fully intact, first-world style hotel. The first thing we did was drop our bags off in their air-conditioned room. I marveled at the amenities. Then we headed over to the hotel restaurant. I filled my plate with food from the buffet and found a seat. Jonathan and Lindsay joined me as well as a young California guy from a small local non-profit. Shortly after I began eating, Soledad O’brien and her producer sat down with us. Everyone began recounting the devastation they’d seen. But mostly, conversation transferred to politics, bureaucracy, and philosophies about the plight of Haiti. As we chatted, I became suddenly insecure of my appearance. My jeans were covered in dust and my fingernails were black. Everyone else here was showered, and under the circumstances, pretty well groomed.

After dinner, I went back to Jonathan and Lindsay’s hotel room and took my first real shower in Haiti. It was, needless to say, so refreshing. I looked down at my feet and watched the gray water drain away.

Before heading off to bed, Jonathan and I went up to the deck overlooking the massive tent city outside in the main square. Anderson Cooper was concluding his evening broadcast. We watched in awe as Cooper did what he does best. It was such a strange site to stand twenty feet from a CNN broadcast, giant floodlights illuminating the tent-city backdrop that represented such tragedy in a country so neglected and spat upon by the rest of the world.

I went to bed early. Jonathan had to meet with CNN producers about his piece, to review footage and talk logistics. I curled up inside my sleeping bag and slept soundly until about 6 AM when the second earthquake shook the grounds of the hotel.

I have clearly been silent here.

In fact, I was shocked to see that the last time I posted was on May 24, 2010.  So, for all of June and some few days in May and July, I just haven’t been present in the blogosphere.  Some time in the middle of June was the two year anniversary of the day I posted for the first time.  Since then I’ve posted some 559 posts.  Blogging, for me, is an outlet.  But mostly a creative outlet.  In general (but with some exceptions) I tend to keep it pretty professional.  Yes, the things I write and the pictures I post are reflective of my life.  But this website is primarily a forum for sharing images, and less a place for spewing my deepest thoughts and desires.

That is why, my friends, I went 40 days without posting.  Because sometimes life takes over, and what can be very therapeutic (blogging) is instead a complete drag.

In other words, when things get heavy for me, sometimes I’m just silent.  But fear not… I’m here.  I’m back.  Ready for action.  After 36 days away from New York, I’m back.  I did some spring cleaning today (since I missed out at the end of May), and I’m now sitting on my bed, with a terrier at my side, on top of a pile of freshly laundered sheets, pillow cases, and duvet covers, thinking.  Feeling relieved.  Feeling like I’m getting back to reality.  Feeling the heaviness start to lift.

I’ll keep things generally brief.  I’m terrible at that… but it’s worth a shot.

For those of you that regularly peruse the images on this blog, Nathan Pelz will be a familiar name.  Or at least a familiar face:

Back in May (oh my gosh– has it really been this long??) it was discovered that Nate had a baseball-sized tumor in his abdomen.  After visiting with an oncologist, Nate and his wife Holly made an appointment for an out-patient needle biopsy for Friday, May 28, 2010.  It was supposed to be quick, relatively painless.

With some freedom in my schedule during that time, I flew out to Phoenix to hang out with Holly and Nate, two of my dearest friends, as they awaited the results of the pathology report.  However, by the time I woke up at 6:00 AM the morning after Nate’s biopsy to head to Laguardia, I had a frantic text message from Holly that Nate had been kept at the hospital overnight and had been in extreme pain.  She was, understandably, terrified.

It would be a project beyond what I’m capable of completing right now to try and transcribe how the next 6 weeks played out.  Your best bet is to head over to the blog we created where you can read and see much of the details of the journey Holly and Nate have been through. I told Holly’s sister, Hillary, that I couldn’t write anything on here until now.  Whatever I would have written would have been charged with way too much melodrama– something I’m often prone to when writing about things that profoundly effect me.  So I’ll refrain from being too verbose with the exception of a few minor points…

When I was in Haiti in January I held a 7 year old boy with a gangrene severed foot while he was anesthetized (needle-to-bone) for amputation.  He weeped, clawed at my neck, cried out, and eventually wet himself in my arms.  In the hospital in Phoenix, I spent four nights up with Nate.  The type of pain he was feeling, I was told by one doctor, is some of the worst pain a human can experience.  I stayed up through the night watching Nate sweating, shaking, yelling.  And there was nothing I could do about it.  It reminded me of that boy in Haiti.

Even now, I have a hard time thinking or talking about those nights in Phoenix.  As much as this last month and a half has been a roller coaster , those were by far the worst parts for me– culminating on the fifth day.  It was then that Nate sat his brother and I down in the hospital room to tell us, with a trembling voice, that he had an aggressive tumor that was wrapped around his superior mesenteric artery, that it was inoperable, and that it was probably going to eventually kill him.  I’ll never ever forget that moment.  Only thirteen months after Nate and I shared the burden of carrying our twenty-six year-old friends’ casket, I was now watching Nate face his own mortality.  And as I sat in the hospital room with Nate, many of the same emotions from that friends’ funeral started flooding back.

But at the risk of continuing my reputation as a plot-spoiler, I can tell you that this story has a happy ending.  However, before things went from bad back to better, there was an interim of waiting.  And during that waiting I saw some pretty powerful things happen.

After being taken by air ambulance from Phoenix to Indiana University Hospital in Indianapolis, I drove Nate’s car, along with Jon’s brother and Holly’s good friend Allison, to Indiana.  On the morning we arrived, a group of people crowded into Nate’s hospital room to pray for him.

I remember he was looking frail and broken.  He was still battling severe pain, was confused by the many unanswered questions, and overwhelmed by the possibility of the worst.  Yet we gathered, a scattered and awkward community, and joined hands around him.  We were a complicated crew.  There was certainly some broken relationships– perhaps some poisoned relationships.  But we all had one thing in common– the desire for a miracle.  I looked around the room.  I knew all those people quite well.  I knew the brokenness. I also knew how all these people loved Nate.

And then Nate’s father, Dave, asked him if he had any thing he wanted to say.

Nate was exhausted.  But he managed to say a few words. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know that God wants to use this to heal broken relationships.”

I guess I don’t know how to feel about everything that happened.  I mean, primarily I’m just thankful that my friend, who I thought might be dead by now, is very much alive.  But when things like this happen I’m always knocking my head against the wall, trying to figure out in the midst of the aftermath– “How should I now live?”

And I know it’s not about me.  It’s not even about Nate.  But it feels right to look inward before I look outward.  So that’s what I’m doing.  Now that my feet are back on the ground, that’s my starting point.

In the mean time, please check out Nate and Holly’s complete story.  Read the comments.  See how a community of people rallied and prayed, and how things went from bad, to worse, to better, to worse, to best.  You can also check out local news coverage of their journey here.

Consider my silence here broken.

I decided captures were in order…

Landing in Denver.

Outside Carnegie Hall before the Opera.

I go past 30 rock every Sunday on the way to church... but this day (I think in Feburary) I decided to take a quick pic... as they say.

Arriving for my end-of-February trip to LA. SNA is becoming my airport of choice thanks to my United loyalty.

A wintry breakfast in Harlem.

Herminone a la Burberry en GQ.

Portfolio is one of my Long Beach, CA haunts... I have a quote above my bed from the Arcade Fire that says "Sleeping is giving in, so lift those heavy eyelids." As I get older, I'm fighting a losing battle with sleep.

Manhattan... Beach, CA. 5:30 AM.

"When you're poor, you live off what you see."

Samuel Lippke Studios.

Charlie wearing my old westsuit looking like a 3-year-old.

A storm coming in from the West towards Denver. Denver trip 1 of 2.

That Denver storm the next morning. Stuck in Denver.

Some MoMA design inspiration.

Out the plane window. Lately I always sit on the left window if I can. That's Manhattan btw.

Denver from above. Trip 2 of 2.

Some vagabond stopping through New York en route to far off lands. We get a lot of those. A LOT. Conner Cress, Ladies & Gentlemen.

LiNK. www.linkglobal.com

Some airport. Maybe Newark?

Downtown LA after a shoot.

The first week of blooming spring.

Our new street. Hamilton Heights. Manhattan.

Central Park.

Spring is a confusing month, weather-wise.

more inspiration.

Central Park. (and Ben Bishop's hands).

I recently teamed up with Apolis Activism– a collaboration with a huge list of other people. Ready for this? Kim Reierson took photos while James Wilson, of the blog Secret Forts, styled and helped art direct a short video by Apolis (specifically Shea Parton) about their spring line and Michael Daube from CITTA as well as a Charity Water story that will run later. Just to add another name to the list here, while finally getting to see the Charity Water headquarters, I was texting friend and photographer Esther Havens, who was in Haiti the same time I was, and whom I was finally able to meet (way overdue) the other day on her stopover in NY en route to Africa.

I feel out of breath.

We shot in David Byrne’s studio for part of the day, and I like what this letter (to him) said:

Check out the video below which I shot and David Christenson edited. I also snapped a few photos throughout the day…

The video:

Day 4

There are some things on my travels in the past that I’ve chosen to share, through stories and photographs, with friends, family, and Loose Luggage readers.  Most things, actually.  But on several of the trips I’ve been on there have been certain sacred moments that were so personal, so meaningful, so soaked with emotion and loaded with personal implications for the trajectory of my life, that I’ve kept them to myself—either in part or in whole.

These moments range from a hilltop in Northern Thailand, to an empty beach in Southern France, to a tiny mud hut, in dim late-night lamplight, in Southern Uganda.  The tying factor in all of these stories is usually (though not always) a bold, starry sky, under which I’m safely and contentedly (though unexpectedly) sprawled out for sleep.

Day four of my life-changing trip to Port au Prince just after the recent earthquake was, in itself, my most uneventful day.  But it ended just such—under the stars in an unexpected place—that it will remain the most potent memory of the trip.  It was a hot, frustrating, disillusioning day, a wild-goose-chase of sorts, and I spent most of the day irritated at feeling ineffective.  It was the mid-point of my entire trip, and the last day our rag-tag rescue team spent together before going our separate ways and setting out on our own adventures.

My fourth day— third full day in Port au Prince—was, more than anything else, a logistical nightmare, a telling testament to the chaotic remains of a city whose infrastructure before the earthquake was already as fragile as glass.  At an early hour, Ben, Doug, and I pulled ourselves out of bed, alerted our driver, loaded up our truck, gathered our team of Haitian friends who were volunteering their time with us, and bumped and bobbed our way down the rocky dirt road through town.

There were two major obstacles that made our day tiresome and made us feel incredibly ineffective.  One, was that we were almost completely out of cash.  The currency in Port au Prince had become, almost exclusively, the American dollar.  Any Haitian money that was in circulation was minimal and limited to what people had in their pockets before the quake.  All the banks were defunct and, though rumors kept circulating that they would re-open the next morning—it would never happen while I was there.

The second problem was directly linked to the first—we were nearly out of gas, and gas was becoming increasingly hard to come by.  A fascinating result of the presence of media and aid/rescue workers in the city were two booming industries: private drivers and translators.  Every day the average cost of a ride—both short and long—rose steeply.  They all seemed to be communicating well with each other across the city, because every morning there seemed to be a new consensus on what the going day-rate was for a driver or translator.

It isn’t that we weren’t happy to use their services and pay them well, but cash was becoming a precious commodity since there was no way of getting one’s supply replenished without leaving the country or having a colleague bring in a fresh supply.  And the gas stations were running out of gas.

Doug, a member of the Peruvian Fire Department, who had been allegedly contracted (unofficially) by the Turks, Chinese, and Peruvians to head up a rescue effort, was insistent on meeting up with their respective leaders.  So amidst efforts to get even a gallon of gas from somewhere, we were also bouncing around from compound to compound, in and out of UN headquarters and Sunapi, attempting to locate the Turks, Chinese, and Peruvians.

One by one, we managed to get in contact with all of Doug’s people.  It turns out that the Chinese had landed in Port au Prince, and within eight hours of arriving, had climbed back on a plane to head home.  The Turks—though we discovered a lively team of Turkish Red Cross workers, didn’t seem to have any organized rescue effort, at least that we could locate.  Upon meeting the Turkish authorities at the UN, Doug was greeted warmly but told there was no rescue team being assembled.

Doug, who was growing increasingly irritated at the overall situation, was at the very least satisfied that there was nothing more to be done at the UN, and we spent the better part of the afternoon driving around the city, attempting to find a gas station that still had gas.  Throughout the course of the day I remained in the bed of the truck with my three Haitian brothers.  The vehicle leapt and bounced violently over pot-holes and ill-paved roads.  We covered our faces with make-shift masks to vent the dust and smell of rotting bodies, and surveyed the damaged city—whose destruction was new at every turn, becoming more apparent and more visceral around every corner.

Throughout the past couple of days I had been in contact via text-messaging with several people.  A couple of them were photographers that I had never met but had been connected to just prior to my trip.  We had been keeping each other in the loop with any and all information we had gathered individually—what hospitals had vacancies, which hotels or consulates to sleep and eat at, etc.  One of those photographers, the only one that I met up with while in Haiti, was Simon, a commercial photographer from New York.   He had been texting me his whereabouts throughout the day, and informed us that he was currently working at Villa Creole, an upscale hotel in Petion Ville that had become a central hub for rescue workers and international press.

Desperate to find a way to get gas and cash—without these we were no help to anyone—we decided that we would use what remained in our gas tank to drive to Villa Creole and utilized the resources there so we could continue to be of use in the city.

The drive up the hill to Petion Ville turned out to be a long and winding two-lane road that was completely grid-locked with vehicles—both from locals and from the international community that was filling the city.  UN vehicles, ambulances, press vans, and local buses had turned the roads into clogged arteries that made traveling anywhere—even a few miles—a half-day trip.  My eyes were stinging as I sat in the back of the truck, dust and filth filling the air around me.  The day was beginning to feel like a complete daze, and I was growing more and more anxious to actually do something.

The major problem in those first days after the quake, both on a micro and macro scale, was that it took ten times longer to get anything done.  There were so many resources coming to Haiti—hundreds of millions of dollars, supplies, aid workers and doctors—but because of the limited infrastructure and level of devastation from the quake, they were all bottle-necked coming in.

Every day we were hearing the sad stories—and I assure you they were not rumors—of piles and piles of food, water, and medical supplies that were simply sitting on the tarmac at the airport.  We were hearing story after story of doctors and rescue workers whose planes circled the Port au Prince airport before returning to Miami or Santo Domingo, unable to land.

In general it was difficult to imagine what could possibly be stopping these resources from making it into the hands of Haiti’s desperate people.  But that day, Day Four, though I can’t very easily articulate it, I understood.  There were so many countries, so many organizations, so many individuals with their own agenda, their own interests, their own way of doing things.  And people were in a panicked state.  The Haitians were getting desperate and fearful, and the rescue and relief efforts were understandably rushed and hasty.   In those first few days after the quake, there was such madness on all fronts, and it was a self-perpetuating, constant handicap to accomplishing even the smallest task.

About halfway up the hill to Villa Creole, we finally found a gas station that appeared to have gas.  It was completely crowded, with people and vehicles stuffed into every crevice of bare space, with no order whatsoever, as if simply getting near the pump would cause fuel to be magically transferred into one’s tank.  We inserted ourselves into some semblance of a queue, and waited our turn.

While waiting for gas, a man approached our truck.  He was probably in his sixties, with matted gray hair and a gnarled gray beard.  He was carrying a sack with his things in it and appeared to be of European-Haitian mixed heritage.  His clothes were tattered and layered and his skin weathered and filthy.  Yet he had a dignity to the way he dressed and carried himself.  In general, he reminded me of many of the homeless men I’ve met in Los Angeles or New York City.

The man looked at us, noticing, I imagine, the white guy in the back of a truck filled with Hatians, and spoke almost prophetically.  “This is hell if you’ve never seen it!”  The sentence struck me as strange—both it’s message and it’s structure.  But there was also something sinister about it’s delivery—as if he was an authority on the matter of hell on earth.  I wondered where this man had come from, and what else on the earth had he seen in his lifetime?

We reached the pump and began fueling the vehicle, paying with the remaining crumpled Haitian bills I had in my pocket.  After a few gallons of gas had dripped into our tank, the pump had run dry.  Haitian men were crowding around our vehicle and both Ben and our driver were working to get them to back away.

After narrowly eluding a debacle at the gas station, we continued our slow, crawling journey up hill.  Late in the afternoon, after stopping for directions four or five times, we finally pulled up to Villa Creole.  At a first glance, it was an exceedingly nice hotel, with traditional architecture akin to the finest buildings in Haiti—a mixture of colonial and Caribbean style.  It was nestled up on the hill, steeply overlooking the city below.

We parked the truck and walked down the narrow cobblestone path that led to the hotel’s entrance.  Outside of the hotel a small tent-city had developed.  Lawn chairs and make-shift tents were spread out in all directions along the edge of the hotel properly—which had a mini-fortress of gates, high walls, and shrubs around it.  Many of the people that were the closest to the hotel walls were severely injured.  I imagine, since Villa Creole was a haven for not only the press, but also doctors and rescue workers, that they had laid their tents out in front of the compound in hopes of receiving medical attention from the people going in and out of the compound.

To get past the gate into the Hotel, I simply had to be white.  The guard at the gate opened it immediately and let me and my Haitian brothers through, quickly squeezing it shut to prevent the Haitians begging at the gate from getting in.

We had entered another world.  For several days, save for Doug, I had been with only Haitians—but this was a place swarming with out-of-towners.  There was a massive pool out back (which was emptied) that was surrounded with the busyness of a newsroom.  Closest to the partially-collapsed hotel was a frenzy of various photographers and staff-writers working away on stories, trying to meet deadlines and fighting with the constantly over-strained and limited wireless connection.

Apart from the journalists’ work stations were tables filled with rescue workers who were taking a break from their work, doctors, and other various aid workers.  Food stands had been set up by the hotel staff to feed everyone, and, though many were staying in rooms in the wing of the hotel that had not collapsed, many tents and sleeping bags were spread out on plots of grass throughout the hotel property.

As soon as we entered the hotel premises, a short, young photographer with black-rimmed glasses and a black long-sleeve shirt approached me and energetically introduced himself as Simon, the photographer friend I’d been in communication with all week.  He gave us the tour of the facility and run-down of protocol—how to get food, where to stay.  He introduced us to all of the other journalists he’d met, and told us all of the connections and tips he could give us.  And then, after the whirlwind tour, he buzzed off with a couple of French journalists to photograph at General Hospital.

Villa Creole became a sort of base, a safety zone, a reprieve from the constant shock of what was happening outside its doors.  Villa Creole had food and drinks.  It had information, internet, empathizing expats.  It provided comfort, a feeling of peace and quiet and retreat.  And I was thankful for that.  But with that comfort came a change in situation—and a complete re-orienting of my Port au Prince experience thus far.   The moment I set foot in Villa Creole, my connection with the Haitian people weakened.  My ties to their suffering loosened.  From that point on, as long as I was at Villa Creole, I felt removed.

Granted, inside Villa Creole’s walls came resources that allowed me to do more—to do some tangible good for the people in there.  But my new partners to accomplish these things were doctors from the states, journalists from abroad.  They were no longer “my Haitian brothers.”  If my story in Haiti had two chapters, the first one would come to a close that night.  The second chapter, though it’s characters worked for CNN and Medicins sans Frontiers, was a little more detached from the reality of Haiti’s broken state.

I learned a great deal about journalism that week.  And I met a lot of fabulous journalists.  But I was incredibly thankful that I was not in Haiti as a journalist.  A documentarian, yes.   The difference was that I had no assignment, no budget, no time constraints, no insurance concerns.  No agenda.  Up until that point my “story” had been drawn out in front of me only a few moments at a time.  I followed where that story led me without, most of the time, knowing how it would turn out.  But I kept following that line in the sand, several steps at a time, and that mentality led me straight to the heart of the people.

I do not want to demonize the work that foreign correspondents do.  Quite the contrary.  I have a great deal of respect for the work that they do—for facing human suffering on nearly a daily basis throughout their year.  But most of them tended to operate within their own circles, within their own carefully-drawn boundaries and standards of practice.  As an outsider, it was fascinating to watch.  And though most of writers and photographers I met were genuinely good people, with deep concern for the people of Haiti, I did see a few unsavory things through the course of the next few days.

As the sun was getting lower in the sky, Ben and Doug set out with Ben’s laptop to try and get a wireless signal.  I sat with my fellow Haitian team and waited.  After a short while, Ben used the remaining cash he had to buy us all plates of hot food that the hotel was providing.  We scarfed them down as though we hadn’t eaten in days.  And waited.

If there’s one thing I’m bad at, it’s waiting.  So I grabbed my camera and took a walk in the tent “town” that had developed outside the walls of the hotel.  I barely took any pictures.  I mostly just walked around and smiled, probably awkwardly, at all of the people.  Waving at this mother bathing her child, or that mother hanging up laundry on a tree branch.  Smiling at this child playing football, or that father relaxing in the shade.

Nearby, a building had crumbled to pieces.  I climbed up on the heap of cinder blocks and could smell the bodies that were rotting underneath.  Covering my face with my t-shirt-mask, I stared out into the valley below.  With the sun setting low in the sky, there was an impeccable, orange-yellow light filling the city, illuminating the hazy dust-filled air.  Below me was a tragic sight of cinderblock dripping down the hillsides as though the ground underneath were melting ice-cream.

After staring out into the valley for what seemed like eternity, I climbed down the mound and began walking back toward the hotel.  Just outside the gate a child no more than 3 years old came bounding towards me.  He and his buddy had been playing some kind of a game of tag, and I had become home base.  He threw himself into my arms, safety zone, and laughed hysterically.  His friend admitted his defeat..  I spun the boy around and set him back down next to his companion and they ran off down the hill to keep playing their game.

Back inside the compound I donated my time to Doug, helping him transcribe some e-mails.  While finishing an e-mail to Doug’s wife, I overheard conversation from a correspondent from a notable New York City news-source that made me sick to my stomach.

As I said before, I have no desire to demonize the work that foreign correspondents do.  And I need to emphasize that most of the journalists I met were hard-working people that were just doing their job the best they could under incredibly difficult circumstances.  But there were several incidences in the media compounds throughout my week in Haiti that were very unsettling.

The man, who was irritable and spoke loudly and sharply, had already been complaining about the rate of inflation of meals at Villa Creole.  Keep in mind that the manager of the hotel, whose home had collapsed, was housing his family in a dilapidated room and was himself sleeping in his car.  As I sat typing, enduring this journalists’ frustrated rants, he started to complain about the people outside of the hotel—the roughly two-hundred homeless Haitians that had set up their homes and families outside Villa Creole’s walls.  They had no where else to go. We were the guests, this was their neighborhood.  We had homes to go back to.  They had nothing.

But apparently, much to this man’s chagrin, they were beginning to stink.  They were “pissing and shitting in the streets” he complained, not to mention that the building across the way was starting to make the air smell like dead bodies.  And he was livid.  How was he supposed to focus on his work with all that nuisance of dead-body-fecal-smell in the air?  And what was the hotel staff going to do about it?

I’ve never fought a man in my life, but I want to rear back and lay him out with one fell swoop.  Here he was in the comfort of the hotel compound, with wireless internet, a place to lay his head, delicious, enormous meals, and even a full open bar, and he was complaining that these destitute people outside dared to stink up his air.  I felt a knot in my throat, but swallowed my words.

As the night crawled on, several empty gunshots were fired outside the compound—mostly likely some kids messing around and less likely any real skirmish—but nonetheless it put everyone in the press compound on edge.  Our driver and Haitian brothers that had been traveling with us, and waiting patiently at the compound, were incredibly hesitant to head back to Ben’s mother’s for the night.  But after Ben, Doug and I discussed the issue, we decided it would still be the safest and best option to pile back into the truck and head back home.

Our primary concern was that, though Doug, Ben and I could likely sleep in the compound with all of the other doctors and aid workers that were spread out on the grass, the rest of our crew would probably be asked to leave the compound before bed.  And since they had already been locked out once by the hotel staff (Ben had fought with all of his entertainment-industry-post-U.S. Marine-skills to get them back in), it was decided that we should head back down the hill for the night where we could all have our own beds in the safety of a quieter part of town.

So we climbed back into the truck—Doug, Ben, myself, and our four companions.  As we started bouncing our way over the dirt road away from Villa Creole and out to the main road, several more gunshots were heard being fired about 25 feet away on the other side of a ten-foot cinder-block wall.  Terrified, our driver made the call, he would not attempt to drive down the hill through Petion Ville in the dead of night.

So we backed back into our parking spot about 30 feet from the gated entrance to Villa Creole.  It was about 11 PM.  Once we had parked I hopped out of the back of the truck and around to the door of the cab.  I looked at Ben.

“What are we going to do?”  I asked him, knowing.

“I guess we’ll just try and get some sleep here.  You and Doug and I can probably go back inside and sleep where it’s safer, but these guys are going to need to stay out here.”  He finished his sentence with an open-ended inflection in it as if he was waiting for me to say something before he continued. I looked at him, knowing that wasn’t going to happen.  We were one in mind.  If anyone slept outside, we all slept outside.

In the back of the truck my three Haitian brothers were situating themselves up against the cab, trying simultaneously to spread themselves out as much as possible, whilst trying to huddle together to keep warm.  For my part, I leaned my backpack against the rear wheel-well and unloaded a couple of things from my bag:  a tiny stuff-sack that I’d brought, my rain-shell, and a fleece.  I unpacked the sleeping bag out of the stuff-sack and unzipped it into a small blanket.  I tossed that towards the back for my three brothers to use as a cover.  I don’t speak Creole and they didn’t speak English, but we nodded at each other and smiled.  “We’re all in the same boat here.”  I pulled on my fleece and leaned back against my backpack.  I pulled my orange rain-shell up over me like a blanket and kicked my feet up on the raised tailgate.  There was no rear window on the truck’s shell, so though we had covering from potential rain, I had an open-air view of the stars glistening overhead.

That moment—sprawled out with my brothers in the back of a truck-cab in ravaged-Haiti, staring up at the stars, is strung together with only a few other major moments in my life.  Strung together with that hilltop in Northern, that beach in Southern France.  It was a rare moment in which I felt fully and utterly in the moment—for once completely un-self-aware or self-conscious.  Pure, bathed in moonlight.  One of the most treasured nights of my life, in a sense.

I’ve slept in the streets of Santa Cruz, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and Harrisburg, PA, respectively.  I’ve also camped plenty, and slept in bizarre situations around the globe.  I’m accustomed to sleeping in uncomfortable places.  And though I didn’t sleep for long—at around 3:30 AM Ben woke me—I slept, once again, soundly, deeply, lost in an abyss of peace.

to be continued (soon I promised)…

Continued from Day 1 & Day 2.

Day 3.

At approximately 5 o’clock in the morning I heard the panicked and urgent voice of Doug.  He had ripped open the zipper of the tent that Ben and I were sleeping in and was staring down at us through the darkness.

“We have to get those girls to the hospital or they’re going to die.” He urged.  “They’re sitting there under that sheet with basic injuries that are easily treatable and yet they’re going to die.  We gotta do something!”

“Okay,” Ben said, quietly, attempting to shake away his sleepiness.  “I’m up.”

I grappled for my t-shirt and iPhone and stumbled out of the tent.  Still head-heavy with sleep, I brushed my teethe, splashed water on my face, and began packing my day pack with the essentials: a water bottle, meager medical supplies, my camera, and some Clif bars.  I then walked out into the courtyard of Ben’s mother’s house.  The entire property had become (and still is) a safe-haven for families in the community that had lost their homes.  Strewn across the yard where I had slept were blankets, cots, and mats.  But by 5:30 everyone had awoken and was gathered in the far corner of the courtyard.  They were singing Haitian praise songs.

I walked over and sat down on the ground in the midst of the small service.  They were in a rough circle, some standing, some sitting.  Their voices were raised, but still felt hushed in the still of the morning.  The sun had not yet emerged and faint stars still peppered the sky.  I closed my eyes and let their upbeat Creole singing—the words dancing in the air—drizzle down over me.  The night before, I had been sitting with these same people when they had learned the news that more of their family members had been crushed in the quake.  I had seen them wave their arms, asking the sky for unfulfilled consolation.  And now they were raising their arms to that same sky, praising God.

When thinking back to the things I saw in Haiti, it seems trite to make suppositions or formulate axioms that can be garnered from the tragedy I witnessed.  I can’t seem to put pen to paper and write sentences that involve “hope amidst tragedy” or “resilience” without feeling like I’m making lightness out of the great suffering the people of Haiti have endured.  The cost of any lesson learned, of any scales that have fallen from the wealthier West’s eyes, is great—and impossible to justify.  But certain moments while I was in Port au Prince spoke loudly to me.  Certain instances seemed to tear through the story of Haiti’s recent earthquake, and alluded to the larger story of a land that was once referred to as “The Pearl of the West Indies.”

I don’t hope for consolation—just as the people of Haiti don’t hope for some kind of an explanation.  None would suffice.  But they hope—if they hope at all—for a greater, stronger future.  They hope—if they can bear it—for wholeness and opportunity.  Nothing, no amount of media attention, no act of compassion, no donation of time or resources, will replace what they’ve lost.  Nobody can look into the face of the man I met who lost every single member of his family, his home, and give him any thing, any words, that will begin to console his great loss.

So I don’t hope, on behalf of the people of Haiti, simply for the playing field to be leveled—for their misery to be assuaged or quality of life to rise back closer to our standards.  Instead, since I believe in my core that they are children of God, I hope that a greater story will burst through this one.  Because this Chapter seems purposeless.  This Chapter has done such violence to humanity that it’s hard to not put the book down.  But my hope, and I think the ultimate hope of these people, is not that this part of their story will someday feel “worth it,” that they will all be able to look back and say “See—we didn’t even know how great things would turn out!”—because 200,000 lives are not easily replaced, reconciled or accounted for.  No, hope will have to mean something greater that escapes words.  Something we can’t write about or articulate.  Something that can’t be argued, synopsized, or summarized.  Something no poetry or prose could convey.

That is why it was unexpected moments like that 5:30 AM worship service where I sensed hope.  It would cleanse me in a way that I couldn’t plan, extrapolate or articulate.  But it was there.  And I’m trying to carry it with me.

That day went on to be one of the longest of my life.  Ben’s mother had arranged a truck and a driver for us.  We filled two large water jugs with water and I used up my ration of water-purification tablets on one of them.  Several of the young men from the village joined us.  And after two hours of slowly readying for the day, we headed out.

A few houses away four people lay waiting for help.  An elderly woman who had been electrocuted, a middle-aged woman with several broken bones, a young pregnant girl, and a child.  With Ben, Doug, and our driver in the front of the cab, Ben’s mother, myself, and one of the young men from the village in the back of the cab, and a couple others in the back, we headed over to load them up and try and get them to a hospital.

As we made them as comfortable as possible in the back of the truck for what would turn out to be a long day of driving and waiting, I took out my camera to take a photo.  It is strange, to me, the relationship a photographer has with the people in his world.  It is strange how acceptable it becomes to take images of people in the midst of pain or anguish.  In my travels as a documentarian I’ve had to learn the delicate balance that exists in those situations, and in Haiti it seemed like the line on which we photographers walked was as narrow as a string.  In situations like the earthquake in Haiti, mere storytelling can easily become exploitation.  Even the most well-intentioned journalist or documentary photographer can cross lines.  I know I did it while I was there.  But I tried to do my best to keep in step with what I feel is the ethical way of telling a story of this nature through photographs.

For my part, that means thinking through the environment, the position of my body with theirs, the meeting of our eyes, the acceptance of the camera, and the understanding that it’s a give as much as it’s a take.  That when I lift my lens, theirs an unspoken contract there.   That their privacy and their rights are just as important as the best-paid supermodels’.  Greater photos come out of that kind of an exchange.  And the other photos—great or not—aren’t worth it if they rob the subject of humanity—especially when their humanity already seems to have been ripped from them.

So I clicked.  And hope (though I know I failed at times) that those images were gifts to me and to us from the person staring back from them, and not something I took.  And I hope that I was always willing to put my camera down if necessary.  That these two hands were used as best as they could be used—whether that meant holding a child, or holding a camera.

Our rag tag team spent the better have of the morning darting around Port au Prince, attempting to find a place where we could take the injured people we were transporting.  Doug, Ben, and I were in and out of so many places throughout the course of those eight hours it’s hard to keep all of the facts straight.  We stopped by a UN Hospital and were told there was no more room—check the Israel Hospital.  But no one knew where the Israeli Hospital was.  Somebody said their might be room at General Hospital, but somebody else told us it was horrific scene there—practically just a morgue.

We were short on gas—the whole town was—but we kept following as many leads as we could.  We stopped at a compound near the airport called Sunapi.  I’m not sure what exactly Sunapi was.  But inside it’s gates were multiple clinic operations, food, and water.  It also appeared to be the base for several of the rescue and aid teams.  A mob had formed outside of its gates and as we tried to drive our makeshift ambulance through the entrance, young men began piling on top of our truck.  We made it through with the aid of several UN soldiers, and once past the gates attempted to find a place where our patients could get care.

Waiting.  So much waiting.  Hurry up and wait.  We parked our truck near a group of exhausted Dominican rescue workers while Doug ran off to get us in and out of trouble three times with officers from four different countries. And we waited.

While we were waiting a white Jeep pulled up beside us with a small family—a father, mother, grandmother, and child.  The child’s foot was wildly bandaged—bulbous and white with tape and cloth.  He was reclining in the back seat.  Ben spoke with the mother as she explained that something had fallen on his foot during the quake and it appeared to be infected.  Ben told her we would do our best to help her find medical care for the boy.  After that, Ben went to look for Doug.

I poured some cups of water from the jug we had purified, and slowly tipped the cup to the boy’s mouth.  Someone had given me sweet crackers, so I ripped open the packaging and handed a few to him.  He looked up at me with curious but trusting eyes.  I lifted my camera, he gave, and I received.

After some time, Doug reappeared.  “Where’s Ben?!” he bellowed.  I wasn’t sure.  “I found a place that will take them.  Follow me.”  Doug cut off through the compound and I instructed the driver to follow the big loud Canadian.  As we drove through the crowded road that led back toward the front of Sunapi, our vehicle got lost in a sea of buses, cars, ambulances, UN vehicles, and people.  I turned around and saw that the white Jeep with the boy in it was not behind us.  I got out of the car and ran back to where we had been, but the Jeep was nowhere to be found.

We reached a medical tent near the entrance and Doug was enraged.  “Where is Ben?  We have to stick together!”  I told Doug I would run and get him immediately while Doug attempted to find care for the three women and girl.  I ran back through the throngs of people to attempt to find the Jeep and the boy.  I checked every white SUV, but couldn’t find him.  Finally I saw Ben walking toward me.

“Ben!” I grabbed him, “The boy! I can’t find him!”  We were one in thought.  We ran through Sunapi frantically until we finally found the white Jeep.  The facts are fuzzy, but if I remember it correctly the following is what took place:  the boy was now lying on the ground amidst a group of badly injured people.  Authoritatively, Ben grabbed a couple of nurses and brought them to the attention of the young boy.  The boy was probably eight years old.  His parents hovered over him helplessly, seemingly paralyzed to do anything for their son.

The nurses unwrapped the gauze and tape and revealed a foot that had been deeply severed from his toe straight back towards his heal.  The gash was massive and left the smaller, severed portion separated and his bones visible.  Having been untreated for days, it was a mess of tissue and oozing with puss.  The de-bandaging had already put the boy in convulsions of agonizing pain and now the nurses needed to give him a shot—straight to the bone—I  assume to ease the pain.

With his parents hovering over us, and a desperate man nearby grabbing at us for attention, we strapped on gloves and I set down my camera—after snapping a quick shot of the whole scene.  My head was getting heavy.  I don’t handle blood well.  But I focused my attention and gritted my teethe.  The nurses were exhausted and were unable to keep the boy still so they could administer the shot.  So Ben looked at me assertively and said, “Grab his upper body with all your might.”

In Creole, Ben began coercing the boy to be still, an impossible task.  He was, fatherly, stern.  “Hold still, if you ever want to walk again!”

“I don’t want to walk again!!” The boy screamed.

“If you ever want to play football again.”

“I hate football!”

“If you ever want to run!”

“I HATE RUNNING!!”

At this point the boy was grabbing my neck, pulling at my bandana and slapping at my face.  Staring up at me with near-hatred in his eyes as if I was the source of the pain in his foot. I wrapped by arms around the boys upper half, bracing my arms parallel to his torso, lowering my chest over him to try and brace him.  Ben continued urging him to be still and holding his lower half.  Finally we had him still for a moment and nurse quickly stuck the needle deep into his severed foot.

The boy arched his back and bent his head backwards and his screams of pain turned into a silent wheeze.  Tears were pouring down his face and a pool of urine expanded outward from under him, soaking the cardboard under him, as well as my arms and sleeves.

After what seemed like an eternity, the nurse pulled the syringe out of the boys foot and he collapsed onto the cardboard and his wheezing transitioned into exhausted whimpers.  My muscles relaxed.  Ben and I stood.  I had a lump in my throat.  I pulled off my gloves and tossed them to the ground.  I walked away and rinsed my arms off in a puddle of water that had formed from a broken water line nearby.

The location in Sunapi where the boy had received the shot was essentially a holding area.  A pile of cardboard had become bedding for a group of desperate patient overflow.  So Ben lifted the boy from the spot on the ground.  We were now intrinsically tied to that boy, Ben and I.  For Ben’s part, he had a son the same age back in States.  And we both felt a deep sense of responsibility for him.  So we ploughed our way through the crowds of people, weaving our way through a mish-mash of vehicles, towards a medical tent where Doug was impatiently waiting.  All the while I ran ahead of Ben to clear a path for the boy and for his foot that was sticking straight into the air, dripping with fluids.

The boy was given priority and disappeared into the bowels of a dark and smelling tent of injured people.  Meanwhile, Doug informed us that our patients, who were still waiting, exhausted and in pain, in the back of our truck, were not going to be admitted at Sunapi.  Mission failed.  Piling back into the car and exiting the compound I felt numb.  And the rest of the day played out like a blur.  Everyone had different information.  I was in communication with other photographers, aid workers and documentarians from the States.  Texting madly, we tried to find the best place to go for medical care with the limited amount of gas remaining in our tank.

As quickly as Doug was able to get himself into trouble, I must admit he had an uncanny way of emerging heroic in certain situations.  A mile or so down the road from Sunapi we stopped at the UN headquarters.  Doug climbed out of the truck and we all waited, afraid of what kind of problems he might be getting us into.  Minutes later he emerged and waved towards a UN vehicle, instructing us to follow him.  And for the next ten minutes we had a UN escort vehicle that lead us through busy, crowded, panic-ridden Port au Prince to the Brazillian UN a few miles away, right through the gates.

However, they, too, informed us that they had no more capacity for patients.  The excruciating heat of the sun was beginning to bake us.  We resolved to try General Hospital, at last, when the engine wouldn’t turn over.  We were completely out of gas.

Everyone climbed out—all but Ben’s mother who had been waiting patiently inside the truck this entire time—and we pushed the truck outside of the inner gate of the UN, off to the side of the road, and our driver walked off with a gas can.

More waiting.

Outside of the gate of the UN there was a small crowd of starving people spread out in the shade near the wall.  They had been told that at 2 PM they would be allowed in and given food.  While we waited for our driver to return, we chatted with a group of street kids—orphans—gave them some water, and tried to explain (feeling like quite the silly Americans) that we didn’t have any money we could give them.

I took some photos of the boys I met there.  One of which—though it isn’t a very clear photo—struck me as particularly poignant.  A young boy in a baggy t-shirt, a boy with an energetic and humorous extroversion typical of kids that are used to hustling in the streets, had wandered off toward a UN tank about a hundred yards away.  The tank was piled with UN soldiers who were staring down at him.  The part of Port au Prince that we were in was desert-like, dry, flat, and at that moment, very windy.  The boy stood in the center of the road looking up at the soldiers with his arms outstretched, the hot breeze flapping at his baggy shirt.  Though the picture I took is from pretty far away, the image it burned in my memory is vivid.  Pleading and vulnerable, small and desperate, arms wide open in surrender against the might of the world, and yet he will sleep in the street tonight and possibly, eventually, starve.

After about a half an hour of waiting in the sun, Doug, whose health was troubling him, disappeared into the UN compound.  After another half an hour, he re-emerged with an ambulance.  Additionally, Doug himself had been given some medical attention, including a vaccination, and he now had a bag of water bottles, masks, and pills.

After a long day of trying to find care for four desperate Haitians, we finally watched as they were loaded into an ambulance and carried away into the UN compound to receive much-needed medical attention.  Shortly thereafter our driver returned with a canister of gas and we headed out for a grim tour of the city to see if there was anything else we could do before sundown.

For roughly two hours before dusk, we drove through the piled ruins of Haiti’s capital.  We stopped here and there to ask if people needed help.  I took pictures whenever I could.  Ziz-zagging through the dusy streets of the city, my t-shirt-bandana pulled up tight over my mouth and nose, we bore witness to the a crumbled piece of civilization—a city laid to waste.

Bodies had been pulled from rubble and covered with blankets, and many  were still buried under cinder blocks.  The smell of death that resulted filled the air, which was already thick with dust that just never seemed to settle.  With Doug and Ben in the cab with Ben’s mother’s, I sat facing forward on the back tailgate with my two Haitian friends.  I photographed the destruction from my seat in the truck, and sometimes just closed my eyes and let the dust, smells, heat, and wind hit my face.  I wanted to touch and smell the destruction around me—to allow myself to be covered in the dust of these people’s homes.  It felt almost baptizing, the filthier I became.

At one point we passed a yellow tour bus that was arriving in the city from Santo Domingo.  It was filled with doctors, aid workers, and journalists who were just arriving on the site of the destroyed city.  I watched as some of them took pictures and others just stared.  “Just wait,” I wanted to tell them.  “Just wait.  You’ll see.”  A man ran up to the bus, beating his chest.  Ben translated what he was saying.  He’d lost his family—everything—and was pleading in desperation for help.  It was an awful thing to witness.  The man ran alongside the bus, waving his arms frantically, crying out.

In the course of our drive through the city back to Ben’s mother’s house, we saw a food storehouse that had been destroyed—and workers trying to salvage the sheet metal from it’s walls and roof.  Ben informed me the building had been a central distribution center that fed all of Haiti.

As the sun was setting, our truck and crew bounced it’s way down the rocky dirt roads that led back to home base.  Once there, Doug collapsed into a snoring slumber, while Ben and I sat back, taking a sigh of relief for rest, recalling the day’s events, and consuming a delicious Haitian meal thanks to Ben’s mother.

For the majority of my trip to Haiti I was contented to eat Clif bars.  But I was able, on a couple of occasions, to have a full meal.  And under the circumstances was always humbled and grateful.  With all of those that were starving around me, it was hard to imagine how I had stumbled into such luxury: home-cooked food made with the love of a mother, a comfortable mat and blanket to sleep on in the enclosed, walled safety of Ben’s mother’s courtyard.

The night was peaceful.  We all gathered around Ben’s computer to view the photos from the day, and after a bucket shower, I stayed up late exchanging stories and laughter with Ben, Doug, and Ben’s cousin under flashlight.  The light of Ben’s mother’s lantern bounced around the walls of the house as she bustled around us, busying herself with duties of hospitality.

That night it became clear to me how much Ben was revered in his community.  The young men we had traveled with hung on his words and watched him with respect and near awe.  The stars were explosive that night, and I snapped some photos of them before heading to my mat for another deep nights rest—my last decent night’s sleep of my trip, and last night sleeping at Ben’s house.

Day 2

The effect the vibrant-hot morning sun made through the dust and filth that was kicked up across the city of Port au Prince was foreboding and ethereal.  It turned everyone on the horizon into shadowy figures.  My drowsiness faded and I sat up in the back middle seat of the SUV we had driven into Haiti.  I craned my neck to look around at the site that was around me.

I’m more familiar with the layout of the city now, but I can’t now remember what part of the city we were driving through those first few minutes.  I just remember seeing a line of people on the side of the road as far as the eye could see, walking nearly single file, as if a mass exodus of the city was taking place.  People gripping their children, holding their wounds, many people carrying their possessions.

The city had awakened to nearly the same desolation 4 days after the quake as it had the day the disaster had struck.  And for my part, the reality of the physical devastation transferred itself from the pages and flickering images of The New York Times and CNN into first-hand experience.  There’s something about actually standing in the midst of tragedy that is so effecting.  Whenever I’ve been personal witness to human suffering—whether it’s been the Internationally Displaced People camps of Northern Uganda, the brothels of Southeast Asia, or with North Korean’s in hiding in China—I’m never fully prepared for the heavy, morose feeling that has a tendency of creeping over you when all of the smells and sounds, the dust, the filth—the pure physicality of the situation—invades your comforts and breaks down your walls of safety.

You have all seen the photographs coming in from Reuters, CNN, Associated Press, so I won’t spend too much time describing in detail what the city looked like upon my arrival.  Primarily I would just like to corroborate what you were seeing.  I was witness to it—and it’s real.  It’s as bad—worse—than the images you have seen.  Building after building after building lay in ruins.  Some structures seem to have collapsed inward, with visible layers lying on top of each other like a stack of pancakes.  Other buildings seemed to have fallen, and then been tossed around like popcorn, resulting in piles of cinder-block that resemble nothing of the structure that existed before.

Richard was directing the driver to take him to the Citibank offices in the city.  For reasons that, to me, were a little bit surreptitious, Richard had made some kind of a commitment to stop by their offices to check and see if there were any survivors—or anyone trapped in the rubble.  And after a brief tour of the city, we finally arrived at the building.  It was a typical case-study of a post-earthquake Port au Prince structure—several stories high, constructed crudely out of cinder block.  We stepped out of our car and I watched Richard approach the building carefully.  He was somber, and seemed to have forgotten I was with him.  Our traveling companions waited back by the car, and I followed Richard at a discreet distance.

My foolishness and naïveté made itself most apparent during certain occurrences that first day.  I had brought with me a thick pair of leather gloves.  I supposed they would come in handy at some point but looking back I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do with them.  Nevertheless I strapped on my fanny-pack-first-aid-kit, pulled on my gloves, and after seeing Richard disappear within the rubble, I followed him in.

A good fifty percent of the building was still standing.  I climbed through a mess of dangling cinderblocks and rebar, and into an office.  The room looked like any American office—cubicles, filing cabinets, gray carpeting.  However, it looked like someone had gone on a rampage.  Under the sagging ceiling the filing cabinets had been tossed opened and there was papers everywhere.  In some places it was hard to believe that much paperwork even existed in one building.  Probably decades of statements and data were tossed and shoved in waves all across the floor.

Richard had was out of sight, so I started calling out his name.  Our driver poked his head in and asked where my “father” was (people just assumed we were father and son and we let them—it was easier then explaining anything else).  I moved slowly and carefully from one room to the next, stepped over bits of cinderblock or collapsed office furniture.  I continued calling out for Richard but heard no reply.  “Mr. Richard,” our driver kept calling out from behind me.

I walked into a room in the back and the walls had were so crumbled that there was probably a 6-foot pile of cinderblock in the middle of the room.  It’s amazing what this earthquake did to places.  Buildings sometimes look less like they collapsed and more like some giant fiend came in and crushed them between his fists and then dripped them back out through his fingers like he was spreading flour over a pie crust.

Standing on the pile of cinder blocks I look around me.  I called out for Richard again.  No answer.  I stood in silence.  Then it came over me—for the first time and not the last—the awful stench of death.  Somewhere beneath me, under a pile of rubble, was… someone.  I covered my mouth and nose with my t-shirt and crawled my way back to the safety outside the building.  Outside I found Richard standing and looking up at the twisted corpse of a building.  I stood next to him and looked up at it.  You would have thought he knew someone that worked there.  Maybe that was the case—if it was he didn’t tell me.  “Nothing?” I asked him.  “Nothing.”

Our traveling companions were now urgently begging us to leave.  When I looked over at our vehicle I could see why.  A small mob of young Haitian men had formed around the SUV and were in a hot dispute with our driver.  They had seen Americans, and they could see inside the vehicle—they wanted water and food.

The time at which I had arrived in Port au Prince was somewhat volatile because people—who had been hungry and thirsty before the quake—were now becoming increasingly less hopeful of the future.  They were uncertain if food would come or not.  Fear and rumors were causing people to believe that the situation was only going to get worse and that soon no food or water would accessible at all.  In desperation—probably even with less violence than New Yorkers would use under similar conditions—they were beginning to get aggressive for the sake of their wives, mothers, sisters, children.

Meanwhile, near where we had parked, a woman with a violently severed and infected leg was moaning on the ground, holding her child.  Richard, his Citibank mission behind him, moved on to the similarly grim task of trying to save people.  Looking back, knowing what I know now, I can infer that that woman definitely lost her leg, and most likely died.  However, I wouldn’t be able to find out for sure because I was about to split from the group.

Richard approached me and told me he needed to get the woman to a hospital.  There was one a few miles away in Croix des Bouquet that he was planning on volunteering at.  But there was no more room in the SUV.  He looked at me, pleading eyes.  I looked at the woman and her child and I understood.

“Well drop me off!  I’ll be fine!”  Richard immediately agreed.

“Okay, get in the car.  Hurry.  Pack up your stuff.  We need to get out of here, because we’re getting mobbed.”

I squeezed in through the passenger door and began scrambling for my things.  I shoved everything back into my bag.  First aid kit, t-shirts, clif bars.  Water bottles?  I looked around me.  They were beginning to shake the car.  Faces were pressed against the window.  I stealthily transferred two water bottles into my backpack.  They then lowered the woman and her child into the front seat—the crowd parted for her—and the rest of our crew jumped into the car.  We began to try and pull away but were unable to get around the mob that was enclosing us.  The back right door wouldn’t shut because hands were grappling inside, reaching for whatever they could grab.  A hand made it to my backpack and began pulling at it with all it’s power.  For a moment I made eye contact with the young man pulling it out—we locked eyes, and then he kept pulling at it.

Our driver hit the gas and people dove out of the way and we left the crowd standing in the dust.  We were all quiet as we drove down the hill.  After about a mile of driving we reached an area that was less crowded.  At this point I was practically sitting on Richards lap.  There were 7 of us in the car.  I hopped out, grabbed my bags.  Richard stepped out.  We looked at each other, smiled, hugged, said good-bye.  The men who were driving us were urging Richard to get back in.  They saw what kind of safety these white guys brought them—and they didn’t want us standing around where people could gather and reproduce the scene we had just escaped.  So I jotted down Richard’s info, he hopped back in the SUV, and they drove off.

And I was there standing in Port au Prince, literally in the dust.  When recollecting moments when I’ve felt completely isolated in the world—and I’ve been in some remote places by myself—I have never felt so alone as I did at that moment.

The sun at that point was beginning to bake me.  My bags were a burden.  I repositioned them and began walking.  The airport was about one-third of a mile away.  I could see what looked like an airstrip in the distance.  I cut into a large field that had probably once been a park but had become a tent city.  As I walked, eyes would turn toward me.  People would stop what they were doing and stand up to look at me.  They all looked starved.  But not 4-days starved.  They looked like a starving people.  They looked like a people that had already seen a great amount of suffering.  There was an expression on their faces that seemed to be commonplace almost everywhere I went.  It was an expressionless expression.  A blank stare.  You can see it in some of my pictures.  That expression was one of the most saddening things I experienced while I was on the island—because it was the look of someone that had nothing left.  It was lifeless—dead.

Children of course were nearly incapable of such a look.  Children, in such a situations, as you can imagine, are silly.  Can’t they see that people are in pain—dying?  Can’t they see that their aunt, their sister, their mother have all been crushed by the fist of the devil?  But no, they have the audacity to play soccer.  To run around, to play games.  Or, sillier still, to lie legless in bed, paraplegics for life, and still smile.  To, in fact, grin ear-to-ear.  For no reason at all, they still smile.  I certainly can’t understand it.  But after spending a week in a city that seemed to be bereft of hope, I can tell you with conviction that I am, without a doubt, thankful for the foolishness of children.

I worked my way through a small lake of people, all staring at me, some begging me.  In my backpack I had two large water bottles and a stack of clif bars.  Barely enough to feed me for a few days, certainly not enough to help these people.  Yet I felt the weight of my things.  My pack might have weighed 300 pounds.  Fatigue, uncertainty, and a bit of my own hunger and thirst were beginning to put me into a fog.  I sat down somewhere but felt unsafe.  People would always begin to gather.  So I continued walking through the tent-city until I got to what I thought was the airport but turned out to be an international press compound.

Outside the gate of the compound was a sea of Haitians.  They were gripping the bars to the gate, staring at journalists drinking water, eating food—the thing they were desperate for just a few yards away.  I saw one Canadian man inside the press area—hot and sweaty from being in a sun that he was unaccustomed to—open a water bottle and douse his face with the entire bottle just feet away from dozens of starving men who watched silently.

I needed no passport.  Didn’t have a press badge with me.  Had no credentials of any kind on me.  But I had the golden ticket to get past the gate: the color of my skin.  I didn’t come upon much racism while I was in Haiti.  But the unfortunate differentiation between the people of Haiti and the people that came in from elsewhere was that we were (mostly) white, and they were (mostly) black.  So as I approached the crowd at the gate, a guard saw me and ushered me through, and they squeezed the gate open to let in the white guy.  This would be repeated everywhere I went.  Any hotel, any press area, any embassy. The UN headquarters even.  I got in because I looked important.  Because I was white.

Once inside I was beginning to be unable to think straight.  Going on almost no sleep, food, or water, in the heat of the sun, I wandered around the press compound—making a couple of passes of the layout, and then I lay down on a spot of grass under the shade of a small tree.  International journalists were scurrying around me and the ground was periodically shaking—I’m not sure if from after-shocks or from the runway that sat several hundred yards away.  After a quick, hidden guzzle of water and a clif-bar, I felt into an uneasy sleep.

I woke in cold sweat.  It was noon.  I tried phoning some of my contacts (my iPhone’s service proved to be almost better in Haiti then in Manhattan).  No answers, no responses.  Cut off.  I wondered around the press compound.  I pulled out an old t-shirt and tore it up to make a face mask for myself.  I walked over to the airport down the road.  The airport was a depressing site, surrounded by Haitians desperate but hopeless to get out.  It was also swarming with Haitians wanting work as translators or guides for foreign journalists.

I hadn’t come to Haiti without a plan of any kind—I had made numerous contacts with various organizations.  I was there, first, to help in any way that I could, and second, to document.  To attempt to tell the story through images—without agenda or assignment.  However at that point, wandering around the airport in the hot sun, I was starting to question why I was there.  I was starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just head back to the Dominican Republic, get a hotel room, and then wait quietly there until it was time to fly back to the States.  I was already exhausted and the people and sights I was seeing were already depressing me in a way that left me paralyzed to make decisions.

I made my way back to the press compound and sat in the entrance out of the heat to think.  I ran my finger over the notes in my notebook.  I read and reread through my plans and backup plans, through all of my contacts with individuals, orphanages, and organizations.  There was so much information in front of my face but I couldn’t seem to form an articulate strategy.  My mind kept drawing a blank.

I believe I had resorted to staring at the wall for a few minutes when two loud spoken men broken the hushed scuffle of the room of European journalists.  One was a black man in his mid-thirties—confident and friendly.  The other, a relatively haggard, stout man in a cargo vest, covered in patches, gray-bearded, with a massive stack of badges hanging from his neck, and the foulest mouth you’ve ever heard.

I overheard the latter man—Doug— conversing with one of the journalists about trying to assemble a rag-tag rescue team.  And at that point, though I was uneasy about almost any plan, I didn’t want to sit around either.  So I offered to join in.

If I was to attempt to describe in detail all of the events that happened over even the next hour, I would be setting out to write a novel.  This is why:  Doug, a rogue rescue worker from Canada who has worked in basically every major disaster around the world in the last 25 years and has a list of a pseudo-credentials a mile long, was constantly blabbing his way into and out of troublesome situations.  He was the kind of man that I can hardly even begin to describe.  Larger than life.  Mythical.

At one point, after having left Doug to his own devices for only a matter of minutes, he had managed to gather a mob of probably a hundred Haitian men.  He told them that if they all signed his list, they would be notified about where and when they could find work in a rescue team with him as the captain.    The problem: Doug meant a volunteer rescue team.  They just wanted to be able to make money—and understatedly so.  So Doug was passing around a piece of paper to get a list of names for “volunteers”—and he gathered over a hundred—while the U.S. military and U.N. officers tried to calm the mob that was forming around him.

Every story, every fact that came out of his mouth was so violently inflated that it was always difficult to determine the reality from the fluff.  For example, a man with many illnesses—some allegedly from his time serving on the rescue teams in 9/11—Doug told me on a couple of occasions that he had to take six cereal bowls of medications every morning just to stay alive.

But it wasn’t all exaggerations.  Doug would be in the middle of a story—usually about some act of heroism on his own part that had saved hundreds of lives—and he would just suddenly and inexplicably vomit on the ground.  Moments later he would continue telling his story, as if he had simply coughed or hiccupped.

Doug’s unlikely companion was a man who has since become a good friend of mine.  By the time I left Haiti, he was like a brother-in-arms.  Ben was a family man, a successful and proud American who had been born into a tin hut in Haiti and has since risen to a successful career in the entertainment industry.  Ben was friendly, good-humored, and got things done. I liked him right away. He had traveled to Haiti because his mother was living there and he wanted to make sure she was alive and safe.

When I met Doug and Ben I knew almost immediately that they were my best lead.  They weren’t journalists—I did not want to be embedded with journalists.  They wanted to help people—and I wanted to help people.  And they had resources that I did not.  For example, Ben, though essentially raised in the Northeast of the United States, spoke Creole, which turned out to be a valuable resource for us throughout the week.

What’s interesting to me is how naturally I joined their efforts—and how naturally Ben accepted it.  He didn’t think twice.  Here I was, some strange photographer of whom he knew nothing, following some random civilians, and we just accepted it.  Because we were all we had.  We were a team.  It just made since.

Ben flagged down a truck for us, we hopped in, and we headed off for his mother’s house.  There he would be able to see his mother, we could regroup, and devise a game-plan to be able be of help in the decimated city.  I felt a wave of peace come over me as we began bumping our way down rocky, dilapidated side-roads.  I watched as new bits of crumbled infrastructure whizzed past me.  I looked out over muddy markets crammed with people.  At puddles of dirty water that had become public baths.  At a people that had had almost nothing, and still lost it all.

By the time we arrived at Ben’s mother’s house, evening was approaching.  I watched Ben embrace his mother tenderly, kneeling down to her level and holding her close to him.  Doug inspected her house—which Ben had built for her—and assured her that it was sturdy and would most likely remain so.  And we ate.  We ate a beautiful, home-cooked, Haitian meal.  Since my stomach is the center of my personal universe, I could not have been happier.

Ben’s mother is an incredible woman, filled with faith and joy, and overflowing with generosity.  She had opened her beautiful home up to the people in the neighborhood whose meager dwellings had toppled.  These people became familiar faces over the next few days, and treated me with the same kind of humbling hospitality that I encounter in almost any third world culture.

After eating a hearty meal, I befriend some of the local young men who were eager to give me a tour of their village.  They warmed to me immediately, and I to them, and we even shared quite a few laughs over some hilarious misunderstandings with the big Canadian, Doug.  As the sun began to sink and evening approached, I took, I believe, some of the most important photos of my trip.  I met the families whose lives had been tipped upside-down.  I photographed them with their remaining family members, surrounded by what things they had salvaged. They were heart-breaking family photos that will stick with me forever.

In the course of the tour of the village, my Haitian brothers showed me a woman and girl who were lying, nearly unconscious, under a canopy.  They seemed to have broken bones and were in agony.  Helpless to do anything before we had a vehicle, we began devising a plan to possibly help them in the morning.

After nightfall I sat chatting with Ben by candlelight in his mother’s living room.  I took a luke-warm, utterly refreshing bucket-shower.  And then, under a beautiful sky filled with stars, I crawled into the tent his mother had set aside for us, pulled my sheet up tight around me, and tasted some of the most grateful hours of sleep of my life.

Continued tomorrow.

Over the course of the next 7 days, I’m going to be publishing here on Loose Luggage a seven-part article about my recent trip to Haiti in the wake of the 7.1 earthquake that has now claimed some 200,000 lives.  Each part of this article will correspond (roughly) with 1 day of my trip.

Day 1

On January 12, 2010 I was sitting in one of the oldest bars in the United States, Frances Tavern, where George Washington used to (allegedly) throw a cold one back.  It sits just south of the site of the World Trade Center and a few blocks away from Wall Street.  It was a wintry sunset that evening that cut through the icy cold and made the buildings look epic against the blue sky.

I was sitting at the bar with a couple of close friends when news of a 7.1 earthquake began flashing in banner form across the game that was playing on the TV behind me.  News of an earthquake in remote Haiti, which I new little about, even geographically—didn’t catch my attention.  However, over the next 24 hours, the gravity of the situation started to catch my eye, along with the rest of the world.

I can’t say that my choice to go to Haiti days after the quake was really a decision I consciously worked through.  As a friend noted to me recently, my soul went before me and I followed it.   That is to say—I wouldn’t say it was any noble reason that caused me to go.  But I saw what was happening there and something drew me in.

As soon as the decision was official, that is to say, as soon as my ticket was booked, I dove in head first.  I began a constant twitter feed that would continue throughout my trip and became a comforting reminder that I was connected to a world outside of that ravaged country.

Support came in from all over the city and country.  A photographer friend from Michigan generously paypaled me support cash.  My good friend at Vera Wang met me in Bryant Park with an envelope of cash.  Martha Stewart Living’s design team gave me a couple of first-aid boxes and a note wishing me safety.  Best Made Co. donated an axe towards the cause.   As I ran around the city all evening attempting to furnish myself with supplies and make as many connections as I could before I headed in, I was answering calls, e-mails, texts, and tweets from people wanting to help in any way they could.

The support that came in was overwhelming and appreciated, but was accompanied by a weight of the reality of what I was about to do.   As I ran from Medicins sans Frontiers’ offices in midtown, to the Red Cross in Hells Kitchen, I busied my mind with the list of last minute to-dos that inevitably accompany a trip of this nature.

About 36 hours after having booked my ticket, and three days after the initial quake, I was on the M60 bus from my apartment in Harlem to LaGuardia International.  I had a large suitcase filled to the brim with generously donated supplies, my backpack with a minimal amount of personal items—some clothes, toothbrush, hand sanitizer, a small sleeping bag—and a small shoulder bag that contained my passport, camera, and notebook.  Additionally, I’d purchased a small fanny-pack first aid kit and leather gloves.

I had a long layover in Philadelphia where I had a chance to send out some last minute e-mails, make some last-minute phone calls, connect one last time with any contacts, and start to think beyond the scurry of preparing and begin thinking about my actual game plan once I landed in Santo Domingo.

At that time most planes were not being let in to Port au Prince.  Those of us that were heading down were hearing reports of planes circling the airport for hours before being sent back to Santo Domingo or Miami where they originated.  For that reason I had booked a ticket into the Dominican Republic, and was hoping to get into Port au Prince by road.  Though in the end this turned out to be a really good tactical plan for getting into the city, I admit I had fears that I wouldn’t have a chance of making it into Haiti at all.

As I sat at in Philadelphia’s airport a sort of shadow fell over me.  I had awoken that morning with the same feeling—“What am I doing? Why am I doing this?”  I was a rogue documentarian heading into a devastated country with no real plan for how I would be able to help.  It’s not something I would recommend to everyone—or almost anyone.  But I usually travel well alone, and have always in the past have managed to find my way.  Deep down I knew all of the experiences I’ve had around the world would help me in this situation.

While in Haiti, networking wasn’t something you did if you were good at it—it was completely essential.  Doctors, aid workers, rescue workers, journalists—we all exchanged information constantly, trading bits of knowledge, rumors, new pieces of news.  I kept a massive pile of notes in my iPhone and my notebook that I referred back to constantly.  Names, hospitals, this US military officer, that UN doctor, this photographer, that Aid Worker.

The first bit of networking came an hour or so before I boarded my plane.  I met a man named Richard.  Richard was a missionary who also happened to be a former Green Beret medic.  On furlough in the States, he had told me that he felt he couldn’t just sit watching the news—he felt he had to actually do something.  So his constituents had quickly raised support for him and he booked the same flight I had into Santo Domingo.  Richard was in his 50s, had a friendly and innocent demeanor, and by the look of his packing techniques, had been around the world a time or two.

Richard, too, was working his people skills.  While at the airport he had made acquaintance with a vascular surgeon from Ohio.  I know I have her name in my notes somewhere but can’t seem to find it.  She was thin and tiny, but had an assertive way about her that showed the confidence and precision that you would expect out of an experienced surgeon (I later discovered that she was the head of her department at the hospital at which she worked).

The surgeon had been called to Haiti because her area of expertise was in amputation.  She donated her time twice a year to a clinic on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—which was where she was heading post-earthquake.

As chance would have it, I sat between the surgeon and the green beret on our flight.  Flanking us were Italian journalists—who immediately began schooling us in the art of networking.  They were leaning over their seats through the duration of our 4 hour flight to Santo Domingo chatting with us about our plans to get into Port au Prince, conversing with each other, devising a game plan.

They offered a spot to me in their convoy.  I told them I was thinking about it—but confided to Richard that I didn’t really trust Italian journalists.  I don’t know why I felt that way, but nonetheless Richard and I decided to “go it alone” without their aid.

Upon arrival, and after claiming all of our luggage filled with medical supplies, Richard, the surgeon, and I stepped out into the wet, warm Dominican air.

Within minutes of stepping out of the airport Richard and I had bartered for a $500 one-way ride from Santo Domingo into Port au Prince.  I was shocked at how easy it had been (though more expensive then I’d wanted it to be).   Our driver, who spoke decent English and turned out to be a very good man, told us it would not be safe to drive through the night by ourselves, and that we should link up with some other cars that were heading in to Haiti.

So he walked off and minutes later returned to the car and informed us that we would drive in with a convoy of four vehicles—one of which was chalk full of our Italian journalist friends (who turned out to be helpful and amiable).  It was just after midnight when we began cutting through the darkness under a canopy of stars towards Port au Prince.

I was in the front seat, Richard in the back, telling me more of his life story.  I haven’t been able to communicate with Richard since my trip, but at the time, and in the midst of what could have been a very fearful trip, he felt like a long-time friend.  We traveled well together, with similar mentalities of open-mindedness.  Before leaving Santo Domingo, I stopped and bought 3 large water bottles—my emergency water supply should there be limited resources in the city.

The following several hours were dream-like.  I nodded on and off, waking here and there to the inky blackness that enveloped our little convoy, save for the stretch of road immediately in front of our car that was illuminated by the headlights.  Our driver had clearly made the trek many times.  It isn’t a long straight road, but rather one that bends and curves through small villages and towns.  Without experience of having traveled it, one would inevitably be lost within the first hour.

In the middle of the night, about two hours into the trip, we stopped so our driver could relieve himself.  As he waded through the brush out of site, Richard and I stepped out of the car to stretch.  Everything was so calm.  We were in a rural part of the country, surrounded by hills, lush with trees.  The air was still, and though slightly humid, light and cool.  The sky was an explosion of stars, and it was hard to imagine that a hundred miles ahead of us lay a country in complete ruin.

Somewhere along the journey we had lost sight of our traveling companions.  We caught them about an hour outside of the border at a roadside stand where we stopped and had coffee and plantains.  Our first sign of car troubles nearly left us stranded there.  The engine wouldn’t turn over and the car had to be jumped with one of the other vehicles we were with.

Another twenty miles down the road the wheels began making such a hideous grinding noise that we couldn’t travel more then 25 mph, and again lost sight of our convoy.  We drove for another half an hour with the awful grind and a pace that was a little bit unnerving as we passed through villages that seemed, in the dark, unfriendly and foreboding.

We reached a town about ten miles from the border and could drive no more.  The Italian journalists had stopped and unloaded their camera gear to investigate a make-shift medical unit that was over-flowing with patients that had been driven in from Port au Prince.  I walked in to the building and caught my first glimpse (and smell) of the disaster that lay ahead.  White eyes stared up at me from all around me.  People in agony, limbs broken, severed, heads gashed.  The walls to the unit were blue-green and the lights ferociously white and flat.  It was a saddening scene.  I took a deep breath while I attempted to smile at the faces looking up at me.

Anxious to unload my large suitcase that was becoming a burden to carry, I decided that this was as a good a time as any to donate the supplies I’d brought in.  I felt sort of silly as I opened the suitcase for the Dominican nurses—who weren’t necessarily unimpressed, but certainly exhausted.  My supplies would help, but were, I realized, a drop in the bucket.

Someone asked me if I wanted a picture of the nurses with the supplies.  I didn’t, really, but felt somehow obligated.  They posed in front of the open suitcase looking tired, and I felt ashamed.  As if I was saying, “Yes!  I got as far as the border.  I saw some suffering.  I passed off some supplies.  I took a picture.  Now let’s get out.”

Our driver apologized, but told us that he would be able to take us no further.  The next hour was a bit of a blur.  I wasn’t really sure what was being negotiated, but somehow we piled into a new car, with some Dominicans that I admit I didn’t really trust.  Just before we took off, I wondered a few hundred feet from where we were and stumbled upon a large encampment of Dominican rescue workers, clad in what would become familiar orange shirts, waking before the dawn to pile into trucks and head back into the quake-ravaged city.

Our car began cutting into the darkness that seemed to become thicker as the towns and houses grew more meager.  Before long we were in the back of a long line of vehicles waiting to get through the border into Haiti.  Looking at the length of the line ahead of us I wondered if it might be hours before we made it to the border.  But almost sooner then I had this thought, our driver cut off of the trail onto the muddy shoulder and began racing his way to the front.  It turned out that our driver was a border patrol officer, and we were now being driven, not only directly the front of the line, but straight through the border without any questions asked.

If it seems odd, it was.  And this event, like so many other events on my trip, seemed to happen outside of my abilities and will.  Like a dream I had no control over, events, relationships, experiences, seemed to unfold in front of me like a story that had already been written and was simply taking it’s due coarse.

As we passed into Haiti, the sun was just beginning to peak out over the mountains to our left.  The landscape was completely different then those of the Dominican Republic—bare of any trees, it was almost desert-like (unfettered exportation of lumber has left Haiti deforested in many places, depleted of a resource that could otherwise be a major source of jobs and income).

Now sandwiched between some rather loud, aggressive Dominicans, with Richard in the front seat, I began to again nod in and out of sleep.  I fell in to vivid dreams, until I woke, finally, to find myself in a city bathed in morning sunlight that was almost apocalyptic, and my dream-state quickly transitioned into the nightmare that was around me.

Continued tomorrow.

This morning I photographed a Sikh wedding in New Jersey. After which I worked on a contract for a shoot in Turks & Caicos in April and then headed out to SoHo to photograph a cocktail party. At the cocktail party I chatted with someone who currently works in finance, but has interests in becoming a chef. He’s trying to decide whether he wants to take that risk and pursue what he loves.

At 10:30 PM I walked to the West 4th street stop where there was a man who had brought an entire piano down to the train platform and was playing some of the most beautiful piano pieces I’ve heard. Now I’ve seen a great number of buskers down on the subway platforms– but he was far and away the best one I’ve ever seen. And I’ve never– not anywhere in the world– seen so many people pay an underground musician so much money. He had a 5 gallon bucket nearly filled to the brim with bills. He was spectacular.

I don’t know why I’m mentioning all of these relatively unrelated facts. But they all sat heavily with me today.

I guess I’m just humbled and grateful that I get to do what I love.  I’m glad that I live a life of paradox.  Three weeks ago I was traveling through the night from Santo Domingo to Port Au Prince in Haiti. Three weeks later I’m photographing seemingly polar opposite things in New York.  I feel fulfilled in both roles and am glad for the ways in which both areas of my life challenge the other.

I don’t have some profound ending to that series of thoughts– but it something I’m thinking about a lot lately.

Anyways…

I’ll stop rambling. But I do want to introduce some amazing people to you all. First of all, Native Son– an amazing line of men’s suits that showed at the start of fashion week on Friday. The entire show was so well done. Held at Pier 59, it featured just under a dozen models mounted on custom-designed crates, as well as a 3D video. I was quite impressed. The look of the suits, the styling, the video, and the modeling was so well-integrated. Loved the whole thing.

Second, J. Holden Designs. If you scroll down you’ll see his work. Jonathan is a friend of mine from Long Beach in town for fashion week. Had the honor of wearing a piece of his jewelry at the Native Son event. Great stuff.

Third, as someone who is obsessed with bags, I have to plug Temple Bags from McManus Studios. They are the bags that are featured in these photos.

(New) Also, check out Mosley Tribes amazing eyeball coverings here.

And last but not least, a blogger I met at the Native Son show, Ronen.

(Newly added) Here’s the video from the event:

This past Sunday was a real day of rest for me.  I recently got a membership at MoMA– and it’s one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time.  It’s well worth the membership.  The MOMA itself is a great museum with an excellent permanant collection, but there is also an incredible amount of events, films, and exhibits that move through the musuem annually.  There is literally something going on EVERY night of the week.  So I attended St. Thomas’s choral eucharist in the morning, had lunch at the MoMA’s cafe, spent an hour with Monet’s water lillies, and then a couple hours on the second floor of the exhibit, and then watched a film entitled “The Underground Orchestra,” which I really enjoyed.  All-in-all it was a really creatively inspiring day, but most importantly– relaxing and peaceful.

Well, I’m about to sign off (not before a couple of additional posts) but I will just re-emphasize how excited I am about things to come.  Possible Africa trips, a trip to Turks and Caicos, and coming up very soon, a trip to California and Colorado respectively.  As usual, stay tuned…

My photos from Sunday:

St. Thomas on 5th Ave.

Lunch at MoMA's cafe.

Gabriel Orozco's massive piece.

Card for the piece below... loved it.

Avedon.

I’ve finally finished my photos and slideshow from my trip to Haiti, thanks to “Soundslides,” which is a powerful program for documentary photographers who want to share their work with the world. Click on the link below which will take you to the slideshow and then you can watch it full screen, toggle the sound, watch it with or without captions, and navigate through the individual images.

Click here for the slideshow.  And spread it around, friends– let’s let these people’s voices be heard!

Here’s what I wrote to go along with the slideshow:

I did not go to Haiti with any specific expectations. However, the six days I spent there transformed me both as a photographer and as a person.

As so often happens on trips of this nature, the Haitian people did far more for me than I could ever have done for them.

I have few words to share that would express what these images mean to me, but I hope they can be ones that represent a great sorrow that ultimately points to a far greater hope.

Haiti was once referred to as “The Pearl of the West Indies.” It’s people are strong and beautiful– and though they have seen so much suffering, I hope that it will refine them and teach them to build, and rebuild. The country of Haiti is still a great Pearl, seemingly delicate as the child I watched emerge from the womb in a tent in Port au Prince, but like that child they are filled with a vibrant future that is yet unwritten.

And I greatly anticipate a better story for them all.

-Adam

The older I get, the more I begin to appreciate not just where I’m going– but where I came from. While I was home over break I looked at some slides of pictures my dad took when he was traveling in Europe years ago. It’s weird to see pictures of your parents when they were young (he’s younger then I am now in these pictures). But it was even more weird to see my dad standing with his luggage at the airport (I think JFK?), and then looking like an East Village hipster while he travels around Europe.

Berlin.

Then I was born. Somehow this contraption was involved... scary.

Then I became a complete stud.

And the rest is history...

In the midst of an unexpectedly crazy-hectic fall, I never had the chance to finish doing post-production and sorting my images from my trip to China. I went to Northern China in October with my good friends over at LiNK to document their work over there.

It was a truly stretching experience both as a person and as a photographer. It was really challenging attempting (and often failing) to get quality, moving photos in situations where I’m not supposed to appear that I have a camera, that I’m white, or that I’m, more specifically, American.

Many of the photos I took I’m not really at liberty to share due to the sensitive nature of the work that LiNK does helping North Koreans get safe passage to countries where they can start to rebuild lives for themselves.

In general I found the people of China to be kind, but serious, perhaps even hardened by their history and by the kind of life that living in a massive communist country provides. The situation in North Korea is tragic and desperate, and I was honored to meet many of the brave people who have either escaped, or are helping others escape to freedom. Below are a sampling of images that the good people at LiNK approved for me to use.

For more information about the situation in North Korea, and to see what you can do to help, please visit LiNK’s website here.

There is so much more I could share but I’ll let the photos speak from here.

First morning out the window.

First night.

Our fearless guide (can't show his face).

We spent a good chunk of our time in China either on the train, in a van, or waiting in-between.

The morning after our long train ride in a sleeper car. It was literally freezing in our car. I could see my breath while wrapped in blankets in my bunk.

Chinese soldiers.

Because I look Swedish and not... well... Korean OR Chinese, I wore a mask a lot. I think it made me look more conspicuous...

Heading off to a shelter under cover of darkness.

The long drive into the mountains.

Three North Koreans in hiding offer us oranges for a snack.

A North Korean woman (and me in the mirror).

Shelter.

I can't remember this man's story. I believe he was trying to get money to purchase safe passage for family?

Without aid and money, North Koreans living illegally in China are forced to live in hiding and in poverty.

Justin up to no good.

Driving to a shelter.

The Tumen or Tuman River (Tumannaya) is a 521 km-long river that serves as part of the boundary between China and North Korea. So yeah, that's North Korea. And yes, those are North Korean soldiers walking out to the middle. I walked to the line on the middle of the bridge and tapped my foot over the line (much to the chagrin of an onlooking Chinese soldier who was quick to scold me and nearly confiscated my camera).

While standing on the boundary line separating China from North Korea, a group of NK soldiers began walking towards us. That's Justin staring them down. It was creepy, but they seemed to be taking snapshots of together at the border of China... like tourists.

Hiking up the hills overlooking North Korea.

Left bank: China. Right bank: North Korea.

Looking down over North Korea.

North Korea.

Many North Koreans are captured trying to cross this river to freedom. Many are simply shot and killed. This particular stretch seemed relatively safe with men fishing along the bank. We stopped, chatted with some of the fisherman, dipped our feet in the cold water, and I grabbed a stone from the river that I now keep at my desk.

This is a series of 3 photos taken while standing on the bank of the River staring across to North Korea.

This photo chills me to the bone. I don't why. These are farmers going to work in the fields. We waved. They didn't wave back. Maybe that's because there was a group of North Korea soldiers with guns standing on the hills up above...

"Coffee shop"

Had 30 hours back in Beijing. This is the Olympic Stadium. Look at the sky-- haziest city I've ever been in.

2 Chinese women being photographed in front of a government building. I think this image is really telling of the relationship it seems Chinese citizens have with Mother China.

Tiananmen Square

So while I was in Rio I let my time there– the people I met, the places I went, the weather– form the story. What resulted is a narrative pseudo-documentary.

There are two prizes: the grand prize of $100,000 is awarded by judges Chase Jarvis, Rainn Wilson, and iJustine. But there is an audience award of $25,000 that comes from the voting system on the site.

Out of over 1,000 videos, I made the top 50, and the polls are open for voting. So do me a huge favor:

1. Go to my video
2. Watch.
3. Vote.
4. Comment.

This will be my last shameless plug of 2009. Thank you all for your support. Screenshots/poster below…

Thanks to Ben Bishop and Caravel for some of the music and for Nimai Coppieters for being my only character (besides me I guess).

Stay tuned tomorrow for a fun video.

Our storyboard:

Patrick checking out my scribblings:

I’ve been working on a side project for the last 6 months that is now finally (beginning) to come to fruition.  After 1 photo shoot and a very brief video shoot, I’m moving forward with an international “blogumentary” project entitled “Shake The Dust.”  The documentary, which will ideally be shared in the form of videos, words, and photos through Loose Luggage, will also be cut into a final mini-feature documentary.  It will cover break-dancing and b-boy culture in countries across the globe– from Brazil, to Uganda, to the Middle East, to Cambodia.

As I move forward with this project, which, I confess, is my heart, I must appeal to you all, my friends:  we need funding.  We are shooting next week here in New York City to work on putting together our first webisode as well as a promo to help us begin raising money.  In the mean time, we’re working on researching everything from grants to commercial partnerships to make this happen.

I’m already so excited about the potential of this project– not only as a stand-alone piece of art, but also as something that pushes the future of this blog.

Right now this page will operate as the “Shake the Dust” homepage.  I need a few things from you all:

1. A web designer.  I’m looking for someone with web design experience who wants to jump on board and VOLUNTEER (in hopes of future pay once we get funding).  If you’re interested, e-mail your resume/examples of work to adam@shakethedust.org.

2. Funding!  If you know any grants, public or private donors, or great brands interested in commercial partnerships (or just want to donate a bunch of money yourself) please let me know.  All of our funding is being run through The Harrison Center for the Arts who are acting as our fiscal agent.  They will be insuring that all of the funds are handled properly and with integrity as well as helping make any donation TAX-WRITE-OFFABLE.  Again, e-mail me at adam@shakethedust.org.

3. Dancers/Connections!  We’re working on developing connections with B-boys and street dancers across the planet.  We’re excited to partner with people in places like Cambodia, Korea, Uganda, among many other places.  We’d love to hear from you dancers– and anyone else that is involved in the break-dancing/b-boy world.  Once more: adam@shakethedust.org.

4. Follow me on twitter.

Before I show you a little preview of things to come, I’d like to introduce my partner and cinematographer: Mr. Patrick Jones.  You can check out his reel here.

Thank you all for your continued interest in the things that I put up on here.  I look forward to exciting days ahead…

Cat’s out of the bag:

Shake The Dust from Adam Sjoberg on Vimeo.

Until I have a chance to post the, probably… 20 posts I’m behind on… an old random picture of Samuel.

Here’s a few shots from my trip to St. Joseph with my parents today.  It was gorgeous out!