Arriving in Rwanda

Sept. 2012

I was jolted awake at two in the morning by the sounds of a woman screaming. I sat up, trying to get oriented. I had to remind myself that I was in a rural Rwandan village. For a moment, I thought that the scream had come from a dream. Then I heard it again. She was yelling something in Kinyarwanda and it sounded panicked and desperate. I jumped out from under my mosquito net and lurched toward the window that looked out to the red dirt road that ran through the village, next to the Pentecostal church. The moon was nearly full, and it illuminated the banana groves around the church. I couldn’t see anybody. However, as the screaming continued I heard somebody getting up in my house, opening and unlocking doors. I had only been studying Kinyarwanda for a week, but I felt that if I tried hard, I might be able to understand the phrase the woman kept screaming. It was frantic, haunting, and had a distinct cadence. I couldn’t quite make out the words, except I thought I heard “urusengero”, the word for church. I heard our front door open and saw my host father, a Pentecostal pastor, walk across the street and enter the church compound. Whatever was going on, I felt my host father was taking care of it. I had no idea what to make of it, but I forced myself to go back to bed and sleep through the now intermittent wails. If I had been in West Africa, my midnight imagination would have steered me to thoughts of juju, or witchcraft and traditional African beliefs and religious practices. This culture, however, is mostly absent from Rwanda, which is at least 90% Christian. No, in this post-conflict country, these screams seemed far more sinister.

***

New blog, new country, new purpose. Whatever. Let me get to it. I’m in the Peace Corps now. It’s a weird thing for me. While all of my travels have come from completely different motives, this is completely different than anything I have done before. Some people have thought it would make sense for me to join the Peace Corps. After all, I am used to being abroad and can deal with new situations. It’s not that simple though. Not only have I not been abroad for as long as two years, and more importantly, I have not stayed in one place or committed to one job for anything close to two years in a long time. In fact, I have been so transient in the last decade that it has been since high school that I even lived in the same place for more than two years at a time. The same would probably go for a job too. So as much as it might seem like I am going off to do what I have been doing for the last six years, I’m not, and yeah, it scares me.

***

When I woke a few hours later, I came out of my room and found one of my host sisters sweeping the living room floor. I tried to ask her about the woman I had heard screaming in the night. She understood what I was asking about, but my Kinyarwanda was not good enough to understand what she was saying. All I understood was the word “umusazi”, which is a general term for a crazy person. I never got more information about what was going on. All I knew was that she was an “umusazi” and her shrieks had something to do with the church.

It was not the only incident we have had with an “umusazi”. One morning I woke to a couple of loud crashes and bangs that seemed to come from the front of our house. I jumped up and looked out the window. I saw some of the village kids and a few adults from the surrounding area starting to walk toward our house. I threw on clothes and ran out of my room. Our front door was open and a crowd was gathered around our porch. I walked out and saw my host sisters standing outside in the crowd. A huge stone that must have weighed 40 or 50 pounds was sitting in front of the door. Scattered around it were a dozens of photos, that seemed to have spilled from a paper bag that lay nearby. I was still groggy and trying piece this whole thing together. One of my host sisters rubbed my back in a consoling way, telling me it was just an umusazi, and that I need not worry. I found this kind of funny, as I did not feel threatened by the incident, just confused. Down the road I could see a few people hustling in the opposite direction, apparently chasing the man who had done this.

I later found out that this person had stolen a huge bag of photos from a woman that lived nearby and makes a living as an event photographer. He had proceeded to throw the photos and stones at our house and at least one other nearby. I also heard that he was arrested soon after and thrown in jail.

It is strange to have these incidents and know very little about what is going on. My ability in the local language is improving, but I am still in the dark about most of what goes on around me. I feel an urge to connect dots about these incidents. I am living in a country that is still recovering from one of the most horrific events of the 20^th century. Rwanda is rife with posttraumatic stress disorder. It is natural for me to try to put two and two together. However, the genocide seems rarely, if ever, talked about. At this point it is actually difficult to see the realities of what happened only 18 years ago. Is what I was seeing in the mental health of some of my neighbors related directly to this? I had seen plenty of so-called “mad men” in the cities in Ghana and Mali, although never in such small villages. Or, perhaps, this was a result of government policies that keep people like this in their villages and out of the cities. Obviously I have a lot to learn about this small, but complicated country.

***

Besides the bizarre incidents described above, my time in Rwanda, the tiny land-locked country in Central Africa, has been less eventful in blog terms than my previous adventures. My first six weeks here have been full of routine and restraint. The Peace Corps has kept me on a tighter leash than I have been on since I was a child. Although I don’t want to admit it, this is possibly for the better.

Our first couple of days saw us basically locked into the compound at the Peace Corps office in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. All we saw of the capital was a nearby cell phone shop and whatever we could glimpse on the way out of the city as we went to our training site. It was only an hour outside of the capital, but the change was drastic. We drove deep into the hills into a small village that was completely removed from crowds and chaos of Kigali. We were given almost no information about where our training would take place, so I was surprised that such a small village was going to house 34 American volunteers for the next three months. In fact, we would be scattered throughout several villages within eight km. of our training center.

The first thing event in our training site was meeting our home stay families. The volunteers and the home stay parents all gathered behind the training center, underneath a pavilion to protect us from the sudden downpour of rain. Looking back on it, it was amazing how little we knew about what the next few months would be like. We were told nothing about the village, whom we would be living with, what our training schedule would be like or what the living conditions would be. One by one our names were announced and we were matched with our host parents. Most of the host parents outlandishly animated when it was their turn to greet and welcome their new guest. They would jump up and wrap them up in big bear hugs, then drag them over to the seat closest to them. When I was announced, my host mom was markedly more reserved than the others. She gave me a light hug that was more like us patting each other’s shoulders, a common Rwandan style of hug.

After the ceremony, my new mom and I walked to our house. There was a big crowd hanging around the church across the street. My host father was there for a wedding and he came over to greet me. He was stout man with a round head and a huge gap-toothed smile. He was very warm and seemed excited to add someone new to the family. That night, I met my huge new family. Four sisters and two brothers, plus a mystery brother who was studying in Uganda. They ranged in age from ten to mid-twenties.

The first thing that I learned about my family was that they were very religious. At first I thought they were Seventh Day Adventist because it was an Adventist wedding going on at the church. However, it turned out they were actually Pentecostal, and the father, was a Pastor, and leader of the Pentecostal Church for our whole district. His name was Pastor Bonnke, which is my favorite name so far. When I found out that my father was a pastor, I knew that we would probably be one of the wealthier families in the area. While we were not rich, necessarily, we did have a few luxuries that most of the other volunteers did not have. Most of all, we had electricity. This was nice, of course, though I felt it would have been good to go without electricity for the first three months. It was also something of a curse, since we also had a TV and DVD play, which were constantly running videos of church music videos and footage of local choirs performing. The novelty of this wore off very quickly. The main exception, ironically, was that the boys would usually watch action movies dubbed in Kinyarwanda on Sundays.

That night I could hear the choir singing across the street late into the night. It cut through the otherwise silent night with a deeply atmospheric resonance. I felt very happy to be where I was.

On my second morning, I got dressed in my nicest clothes to go to church with the family. The church was large and I sat on one of the long wooden benches with Aline, my oldest host sister. I noticed that it was all women and children in our section, while the men sat in a section to the right. Aline said it wasn’t a problem. As people slowly filled up the benches in the first hour, the four (four!) choirs sang. For the most part, I really enjoyed the music, and we all clapped along. Later in the service, guitars and a drum set were added, which I felt was unnecessary and reminded me of the new age churches that have Christian bands play instead of choirs.

The mass was about three hours, which I was not expecting. Luckily at least half of it was music. The next week, Aline gave me an English Bible, so I read for most of mass, which made it a lot more enjoyable.

Since I have been here I have constantly been in the habit of comparing it to the other African countries I have been to. In so many ways Rwanda is completely different from the West African countries I have been to. That is not to say that Mali, Ghana and Mauritania are that similar, but Rwanda seems completely unique. I have already formed a lot of opinions about this place and made plenty of observations. It is a strange place, however I don’t feel I am ready to give my opinions quite yet. I have only been here for six weeks and I am sure I have a lot to learn. I’m afraid that if I might regret any strong statements that I make at this point.

Transitions: Back to America Pt. 2

 

April 2012

Then things started to look up for me. Around April my transition back to a stable life in the states started to take shape, just in time for it to be over.

It must have started with a joke with a friend. Harley, who had just finished his service in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, had recently moved back to his home New Mexico. When I had asked him earlier about his plans after Peace Corps, he told me he would probably stay in New Mexico with his parents. I told him it would not last long. Sure enough, after a few weeks in New Mexico, I talked to him online and dropped on him the Anchor Man quote “I think after this is all over, you and me should get an apartment together.” It was in jest, but I also meant it. And he was totally down for the idea.

So we moved into a shared house together. I was thrilled to move out of my terrible living situation, and to have another friend around. Plus the people we moved in with were the kind of people that we could live with.

Soon after, I managed to get out of my restaurant job in Bellevue. I replaced it with two restaurant jobs which were a big step up. I had caught wind that I had no chance of advancing from my position at my job in Bellevue, so I figured if I would be a busser, I might as well work closer to home and make more money. One job was at a popular seafood restaurant that was something of a Seattle icon. It attracted tourists, elderly regulars, and boat people. It wasn’t the best group of customers or co-workers, but it was a huge restaurant that provided a steady and reliable income. The other was something of a dream restaurant job. It was as close to an enjoyable service industry job as I could have imagined. It had a mature and friendly staff, a respectable clientele, and a chef that was recently named one of the best in the country. It was by far the best restaurant job as I could have asked for. It was the rare service industry job I could take a bit of pride in.

With things in order, I could enjoy my last summer in Seattle for a while. I had a Peace Corps application in the works, but I had no idea when I would be leaving. It could be anywhere from August to the following winter. I felt like I was finally getting things in order. Plus I was lucky enough to have Lise come and stay with me for the summer. My previous living situation had made her last visit complicated. Now we were free to enjoy each other’s company and have some truly memorable times together. We spent time canoeing Lake Washington, going to Capitol Hill Block Party and camping. It really made the summer perfect.

So now I was waiting to hear from the Peace Corps. I had been jumping through their hoops for months. I don’t feel like going through the details of that, but it was a long process of doctor appointments, dentist appointments, endless paperwork, visits to various government offices and going to copy shops. I even had to go back to Idaho once to get a dental exam because the corrupt dentist in Seattle (recommended by the Peace Corps) said he would need to do over $700 worth of (unnecessary) work to sign off on my paperwork.

After constant waiting, I received a phone call saying that my Peace Corps invitation had been sent. They said that I would probably be going to sub-Saharan Africa. This was a good thing. My dream was to be going to a French-speaking country to go to West Africa. I had done everything possible to set myself up for a French-speaking placement. I didn’t have the formal education in French that was required, but I had studied French on my own for three years, especially in the last few months. I had taken a Clep exam and passed with a high score, which qualified me for a French-speaking placement. I will be honest that my ambitions for joining the Peace Corps were not entirely altruistic, and I wanted to be able to greatly advance my abilities to speak French for many reasons. I had put a lot of personal effort into learning the language and wanted to be place where I could hone these skills.

I figured that the invitation letter from the Peace Corps, which would include my country of placement, would arrive within a few days. Unfortunately the Peace Corps seemed to send it at through the slowest possible means. It got there after about eight days.

Mama called me, saying the letter had come. My heart pounded, yeah yeah yeah, dramatic lead up to my announcement. I was incredibly nervous of course. She told me I was being sent to Rwanda on September 11.

My reaction was tempered by many factors. I was excited to finally know. I was shocked by how soon I would be leaving. It was a tight squeeze. Peace Corps is required to notify you at least 8 weeks in advance, and mine was exactly that much. I can move quickly, but this was still overwhelming. Lise would be staying until two weeks before I left, and I was doing all I could to not be distracted during her visit. I knew that two weeks between her visit and leaving for Rwanda would be nuts.

As far as Rwanda, my reaction was mixed. Yes, it is a Francophone country, but it didn’t mean much. For many reasons, the country has recently switched to English, especially as a language of instruction. This was very important, since I was going to be in the education sector. Also, because of how homogenous Rwanda is, I would not be trained in French, but rather Kinyarwanda, which is spoken throughout the entire country. On the other hand, I was excited about being placed in a country that I completely did not expect. It was a curveball that I welcomed. I had many dream placements, such as Guinea, Togo or Cameroon, but I also kind of wanted to be put in a country that I knew nothing about. Rwanda fit the bill. Of course I had read a lot about the genocide over the years, but I knew that there was still so much to learn. Plus it was in a region of Africa that I was very unfamiliar with. It was East Africa and Central Africa at the same time. It had close historical ties to the Congo, but was also geographically close to East African countries of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. This was a region that I had always overlooked when it came to traveling, but again, my ignorance of it was a big plus.

My job assignment as well gave me pause. I was placed in the teaching sector, most specifically English teaching. This was definitely not my top choice. Over time I had developed a somewhat cynical view of the idea that teaching English to people in developing countries was going to help the country’s situation. For example, teaching children English in a place like Mali or Cambodia seemed like it would only provide opportunities for a few people in the tourism sector or maybe the lucky few that got into international business. It did not seem to be the kind of thing would have a significant impact in alleviating poverty. Plus, tourism in developing countries is very volatile. Take Mali, for example. A year ago tour guides most definitely benefited from their ability to speak English. Now that it is unstable and tourism has dried up, it is no longer putting food on tables or supporting industries.

However, Rwanda was unique. The whole country, which spoke French as its international language, has decided to switch to English. One of the major reasons for this (among many) was the fact that many of the neighboring countries are Anglophone. Rwanda is trying to promote valuable economic ties with countries like Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, rather than the troubled Francophone countries Burundi and Congo, which are far more troubled. The country officially changed the language of instruction in schools from French to English just a few years ago. It has obviously been a difficult change for the country, but it is a change that I feel I can support. It is not because I think that one language is better than the other, but it seems that English will be a more valuable language for Rwandans than French. This is why I feel good about my efforts to help Rwanda in their transition from French to English. Still it is ironic, as I was really hoping to use the Peace Corps to improve my skills in French.

I was also conflicted in a more selfish way. As far as my job with the Peace Corps was concerned, I was hoping for a role that would set me up to learn more about development. I did not feel that English teaching was very different than other posts where volunteers were able operate more like NGO or development workers. It is something I really had a desire to get involved in for the sake of my post-Peace Corps life. At the same time, I know that teaching English as a second language would give me the skills to teach English anywhere in the world, if I so wanted. In the future, if I am ever in need of a decent job abroad, my experience with the Peace Corps will give me a huge advantage if I need some work teaching English.

Once it all sank in, I felt overwhelmed with how soon I was leaving. Eight weeks is not a lot of notice. I had to continue working the two jobs I was about to quit, move out of my house, continue the never-ending barrage of Peace Corps paperwork, make visits to friends in Phoenix and my sister in Indianapolis, and squeeze the most time out of the time I still had with Lise in Seattle. It was an intense last month. Every time someone asked me if I was excited or nervous, I had a difficult time mustering any emotion. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was too busy to contemplate the fact that I was about to spend the next 27 months in an African country I knew relatively little about. Perhaps it was because I had left the country blindly for various reasons in the past and now I was getting used to it. Maybe it was the fact that the Peace Corps was not my first choice of options, but rather the next logical move in my life. Maybe it was all of those and more. It is impossible to say.

When it finally came time to leave home on Sept. 10, I can say that I still felt very little. Of course I was sad to say goodbye to my family, and I knew I would miss them. On the other hand, I had done this before, and knew what to expect. My best guess to explain my calm and tempered mood was that my excitement and my nervousness were counteracting each other, leaving me to appear bored and boring. I wanted to muster up strong emotions, but then again, I knew those would really come flooding in the moment I stepped off the plane. Just like usual.

Transitions: Back to America pt. 1

 

2012

Returning to America this time was the hardest. Before when I had been away for a few months, I was coming back to school, which gave me some stability. This time, I was returning to Seattle with no job, no place to live, and less money than I had ever had before. One time I had been able to live in  my car during the transition, but this time I wouldn’t even have that. I felt lucky to have a bicycle so I could get from place to place faster than on the bus. One difficult aspect of my transition, though, was not knowing what friends were still around, and who I could count on for a place to crash. In college I had tons of places to stay, and I would try not to wear out my welcome. Three years after college, people had left Seattle, moved to the suburbs or had living situations that were not conducive to guests.

The worst part, though, was the feeling that maybe I really needed to grow up. I had my college education, but what had I done with it? Worked a couple of internships, turned down a small newspaper job in favor of traveling for 15 months? Now I was almost 26, and applying for restaurant jobs. I could never say that I regretted it though. People always say, “Joey, you are so lucky that you are getting to travel when you are young. I wish I would have done that!” Everyone wants to drop everything, and go see the world, but steady jobs, marriages, mortgages, kids, etc. all seem to get in the way. This is something that drives me to not give in yet. As much as I feel I am not progressing in my life, I also know this is the time to go out and live life like I want to. College loans are breathing down my neck, and I can only postpone the real world so long. It feels like now or never, because once I commit to anything close to a 9-to-5 it will feel like its over. I guess these were the things I had to keep in my mind as I faced my dire situation. I had a lot of things to get in place.

The friends that were still around for me when I got back were angels. I could not have survived without John Borges letting me crash on his studio floor regularly, and he never made me feel like I was staying too long. After the hospitality I received from strangers in places like Morocco, Mali and the Philippines, I had forgotten about the generosity that can exist back home. With several of my friends, it was alive and well.

The transition was filled with ups and downs. It was obviously great to catch up with so many people I had missed. Trying to find a place to rent without a job, or to find a job without a home are big challenges. Which should come first? I couldn’t really afford much on the housing front. However, getting a job when you didn’t know what to put down as an address, and you don’t have any experience in the last year and a half was tricky. Being a terrible liar does not help with any of this either.

After about three weeks, I finally started to make some progress. I rented a room in a shared apartment in a house in Chinatown/International District. It was a sketchy part of town, but also a neighborhood I had always wanted to live in. It seemed promising at first, however, it ended up being a seemingly endless terrible situation. I should taken a hint from certain parts of the lease agreement that this place would be screwy. For example, the fact that the landlord specified that the use of profanity was forbidden on the premises. Every day seemed to present a new reason why this had been a terrible idea. For example, I learned on my first night that the house had no heat. Incidentally this was also the night of Seattle’s annual blizzard. I had very few possessions at this point. I was sleeping in my warm weather sleeping bag on the floor, and was wearing almost every scrap of warm clothing I had. The next morning, I walked to the nearest restaurant, a Chinese noodle shop. It was not heated either and provided little comfort from the blizzard outside. However, the hot noodle soup for $4 still felt like a blessing. That day John hooked me up with a warmer sleeping bag, and a small space heater. Blake lent me a warm hat and some gloves. Everything was slowly coming together, although my living situation would only get weirder.

One of the two guys that lived in my unit was almost never around. Sometimes I would hear him coming home at 2 or 3 in the morning, but I almost never saw him. The other man, Patrick, who was probably in his late 40’s or early 50’s had some psychological issues that I would become exposed to on one of my first mornings. The entire time I lived there I only heard him speak two words to me. Both of them were “hi”. Both happened the first time I met him. On my second morning, I woke up to him screaming profanity at nobody. He was in his room, cursing at somebody that seemed to be in his space. At first I thought it was a threat to me, but as it persisted, I realized he was screaming at the voices in his head. When I was around him, though he never spoke. Sometimes I would hear the profanity-laced diatribes through his door, but I never saw him speak in person.

When I moved in, there was nothing in the pantries. No food, no pans, no plates, no pots. Nothing, except one paper bowl, which I was always too afraid to touch. The refrigerator had one package of hot dogs, one gallon of milk with a plastic bag on the mouth in place of the lid, and one Styrofoam to-go container from the roommate I would never see, that stayed there for weeks until I threw it out. I would eventually learn that Patrick kept all of his belongings inside his room. When he cooked rice or hot dogs (which seemed to be his two staples) he would bring the pot or pan necessary to the stove outside his door. He would shuffle with his head down between the stove and his room. Like him, I got used to eating in my room, as the common areas were too awkward to linger in. He also didn’t seem to use the bathroom. That was fine with me. The strange part, though was that during his morning routine (which appeared to be quite rigid) I would see him dumping buckets into the toilet. He had a lot of cleaning supplies and seemed to be something of a germophobe. He used plastic bags to touch things like doors and knobs. I found his behaviors fascinating, however, I always felt sympathy for him. He seemed to have a difficult and lonely life. I always felt like I should try to engage him, maybe be something of a friend to him. However, he seemed so distant that I felt I could not talk to him.

And then there was my bizarre illness. Soon after coming back to America, I was diagnosed with schistosomiasis, also known as bilharzia. It is a parasite that is endemic in Africa and can be contracted from swimming in certain bodies of water. It is spread through snail feces and lives in water. It enters through the skin and makes its home in a variety of organs. I had not expected to get it, since the parasite cannot usually live in moving waters and we had only been swimming in the Niger River in Mali. It was a complete fluke that I had even been diagnosed. During a blood test at a doctor in Seattle, they noticed something strange. My doctor, after hearing where I had been traveling, took a stab at the thought that I might have schistosomiasis. He had taken a class in tropical parasites when he was in med school back in the 70’s and had a vague memory of what schisto looked like. Most American doctors would never encounter this in their lives, so it was a complete fluke that he figured it out. I had had suspicions that I had something wrong with me because my body had been doing some strange things since I had left Mali nine months earlier. Most of it, however, I just equated to my traveling lifestyle. The symptoms of schisto are so varied and not that intense for a while, that it is easy to overlook them. I had had a few bouts of fever, one of which led me to a hospital in the Philippines, where they diagnosed me with a urinary tract infection. This was a misdiagnosis, as it was actually a couple months after that episode was over that I noticed pinkish hue in my urine, signaling a bit of bleeding somewhere along the way. In Cambodia I got a couple of unexplained abscesses on my leg that exploded into black and bloody infected mess. A fellow traveler and nurse prescribed me some antibiotics that seemed to do the trick. In India I had developed a rash on my legs, but hey, that’s India right? In addition, since I had left Mali, my bowel movements had been completely out of whack. But then again, I seemed to be in a completely different country with a new diet every month or two; so chronic diarrhea barely raised an eyebrow.

The doctor prescribed me a round of de-worming medication that is also regularly used on dogs. I immediately informed the other three guys I had been traveling with on the Niger River. Jordan, the Australian, had also known something was wrong with him, and had been going to different doctors for months, without solving his problems. It is a lot easier to know when something is wrong when you are back in your home country, however, much harder to diagnose. Since Jordan is a vet, he simply prescribed himself the same dog de-wormer. Blai had also gotten really sick when I visited him in Spain, and the doctors at the hospital could not tell him what was wrong. He quickly got the medication he needed. Jonathan, however, who doesn’t seem to believe he is capable of getting sick (except maybe those TWO times with malaria) didn’t bother getting the medication. His excuse was that he was in New Zealand, where he could not afford the health care. I am still not sure if he has been treated.

The medicine was a single giant dose, and it made me feel terrible. It was like all the symptoms I had been feeling occasionally and mildly for months came back with a vengeance for a last hurrah in my body. I had a terrible fever, blood in my urine, etc. But then it was gone. The rash eventually went away, but it was replaced by some other itchy bites all over my legs. It looked like I had brought back a second parasite from India. Just like my first time there, I had brought back some stowaways. Scabies. It was not a surprise, considering that I was volunteering with a bunch of men who were rife with scabies, plus my guesthouse was filthy. It was an easy fix once I figured it out, though I realize it is pretty disgusting. All things considered, though, for 15 months of travel, mostly in developing countries, those illnesses were a small price to pay. Especially since I had thrown an incredible amount of caution to the wind, and had drank whatever came out of the taps or water pumps, and sometimes wells everywhere from Morocco to Mali to Cambodia to India. That is also not to mention whatever street foods, barbecued organ meats and fertilized eggs I had eaten along the way.

In the meantime, I had been doing a lot of job searching. It was the worst season to be looking for restaurant work in Seattle. I wasn’t about to start applying for journalis jobs, since I was still applying for the Peace Corps. I wasn’t qualified for much more than restaurants and newspapers, which caused me constant stress and mild depression. I finally landed a job bussing tables at a casual restaurant a short bike ride away from home. After accepting the job, though, they informed me that there had been a mistake, and that I had been hired for their new location in Bellevue, a 45-minute bus ride away. I had been back in Seattle for a month, and it was my first offer. I had to choose whether I would start working in Bellevue, officially selling my soul, or hold out for something better. I chose to take the job. I was grateful for the relaxed and friendly atmosphere of the restaurant, as well as the easygoing management, but that was where the positives ended. I should have been hired as a server, but I was too desperate for work, and was willing to take anything. Moving up was never an option either, since the management liked my work ethic as a busser, and didn’t mind the sub par customer service of several of the servers. It was a depressing job that complemented my depressing living situation. I just had to keep reminding myself that I had put myself in this situation and that it is one of the consequences of the traveling lifestyle I had chosen for the last few years. I reminded myself to tell people about these parts of my life when they act jealous of my ability to travel so much. I feel like I pay my dues in a strange way.

It wasn’t all bad, though. One of the highlights of my return to Seattle was the photo exhibit I had I had open at a gallery in Pioneer Square for First Thursday. It felt amazing to have a series of photos on display. It was from the series of portraits I had done in Kolkata. It was the first time I had had my work on display in a gallery and it felt strange. I also had to learn a lot about the process of displaying work. Previously, my work has only appeared in newsprint and online. I had to learn how to print my photos in a digital lab, how to cut my own mats, and how to place the photos in the mats. I can thank my friend Ish who taught me everything I know now about that process. It was a big investment too. I had not anticipated how much the high quality paper and mats would cost. I figured, though that it would be an investment, and it would probably pay off after I had sold enough prints through the gallery.

Unfortunately I over-estimated how many people would be interested in buying these large portraits. I didn’t sell a single print in the two months they were up at the gallery. This was a huge blow to my ego and wallet. I was really only hoping to break even. Now I was left wondering if the $700 and dozens of hours I spent printing and matting were all a waste. Seeing my work on display in  Seattle’s most famous arts district did feel great. Surprisingly it also gave me a great chance to see a lot of the people I hadn’t seen since coming back. I couldn’t believe how many of my friends had come to support me on the night of the opening, including the McKernans, who had come all the way from Portland. That was worth more than I had imagined. Plus, Mama and Papa came all the way from Idaho for both receptions. That also meant a lot. In the end it was easy to ignore the major loss on my investment. Now I don’t have to wonder too much if I should be trying to get my work on display in galleries. It doesn’t seem like it’s for me.

Korea. This one time I was in Korea.

Dec. 17, 2012

Just before landing outside of Seoul, the flight attendant announced that the local time was 10:30 PM, and that the temperature was 18 degrees Fahrenheit. It dawned on me that Korea was in a very different part of the world than I was leaving, and that Thailand had proved enough of a distraction for me to not realize what I was getting into. Luckily I only would be spending 18 hours there.

As I walked through the terminal, I noticed two guys dressed in, what looked like African clothing. They were wearing pants and shirts from cloth that was in the style of kente cloth from Ghana. They were each carrying a djembe on their back. As I got closer, I saw that they were indeed Korean and one of them had a Ghanaian flag sticking out of their backpack. I was curious about what they were just coming back from. Unfortunately, when I tried to talk to them, they could not respond, since they spoke no English. I wondered how they had gotten by in Ghana without speaking English. I’m sure they had a wonderful story.

It looked like it would be too late at night for me to get into the city without paying for an incredibly expensive cab. So I agreed to meet up with my friend, Jenna, the next morning. I had met Jenna a couple years earlier when we interned together at The Arizona Republic. She was now teaching in South Korea.

Since it looked like I would be spending a cold night in the airport, I went to the Korean Air desk and asked if it would be possible to access my checked bags. They were so kind and polite, and without question they brought me my bags. I went through it, found my jacket, shoes and socks, and gave it back. I had very little for warm clothing. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, so this jacket and shoes would hopefully be enough for my hours.

I wandered the airport, I read, I sat. There was not much chance of me sleeping. Finally at 6 AM I took the first shuttle bus into the city. I was sitting near some people who had just flown in. They looked Korean, but spoke English with American accents. I chatted to them briefly, but after it came out that they were from Vancouver and I was from Seattle, they went back to talking amongst themselves. Had I offended them, or was it another Canadian snob that didn’t want to associate with Americans. Maybe I’m paranoid.

I had felt wide awake when I got on, but by the time we started to get into the city, I was dozing. I actually slept a stop or two past my stop. Luckily I was able to figure out where I was and head in the direction I was trying to go. Stepping out of the bus was shocking. It was incredibly cold, especially since I had been in tropical climates for most of the past six months. I was trying to walk towards the central transit point, but it was so cold, that I needed to get inside a building to warm up. I discovered a network of underground malls. None of the shops were open, and it was only a little bit warmer, but it was good enough. I used the network of underground shops to get closer to the central bus station. When I rose to the street level, I found a sleepy market area. It was early and it was Sunday, so not much was going on. I saw some food stalls and a couple of fishmongers. It looked like this would have had a lot of potential on a different day. I bought a little snack from one of the vendors. It was some sort of pastry, shaped like a fish, with a sweet filling made from a bean paste. With a little imagination it was like chocolate. The bit of human interaction in this desolate market made me forget the bitter cold.

Further on, I knew that I needed a real meal. It was still hours from when I was meeting Jenna, so I took my time to get to the station. Almost nothing was open, due to the hour and the fact that it was Sunday. The only thing I was able to find looked like something of a casual chain restaurant. I was really enjoying being in a country that I knew absolutely nothing about and had never had much interest in being in. It forced me to be humble and really learn from simply being there, even though it was just a matter of hours. The menu, luckily, had pictures, and I pointed to something that looked warm and not too expensive. I appreciated that although this was a chain restaurant, and could be considered fast food, that they had not completely taken a completely American approach to it.

As I ate my hot soup (it was not bibimbop, but was maybe in the same genre) a group of college-aged people came in. I had been the only patron until then. I watched them order, and slowly became surprised at the fact that they seemed to be having trouble in their ordering. They had all looked at the menu for a while, while talking amongst themselves. I had not thought that they were foreigners, but as they tried to order, I recognized a serious language barrier. I eventually realized that they were Japanese exchange students. It seemed interesting that of all the people now in this restaurant, nobody was Korean. The food was good, and maybe I started to see some light in a cuisine that I had always shunned. When I was done I headed to the station, which was not far way at this point.

Regardless of it being a Sunday morning, the station was busy. If I had known anything about Korea beforehand, I would not have been surprised at how well dressed everyone was. It was one of the rare times when I became conscious of how scrubby I looked. I was supposed to meet Jenna at ten, but when 10:30 rolled around I decided to give her a call. Turned out she had overslept and was just getting on her way. She lived an hour away, so I did what any sensible young traveler would do on a random layover would do. I sampled the local brew. I gained a great respect for Korea, for the fact that not only did they sell beer at the bus station’s convenience store, but it seemed at least a little bit appropriate to drink it right there in the station. Also, it didn’t count as drinking in the morning, since I had not slept the night before. So don’t judge.

While I waited, I noticed a calligraphy artist doing what turned out to be a public promotion for their calligraphy business. They were doing free calligraphy for anybody that got in line. So I got in line, and had a piece done for me that I heard later actually costs quite a bit in normal cases. I felt like I was packing a lot of little cultural experiences into my short layover.

Jenna finally arrived, and we took a cab to a cool little neighborhood that seemed to have a lot going on. I wish I remembered the name of it. We walked to a street that was pedestrians only, where food vendors and cool shops lined the walkways. Jenna took me to a cool little restaurant where I would finally have Korean bbq done properly. Everywhere else I’d seen it, I hadn’t bothered, since it was usually really expensive. We took our shoes off upon entering, a custom I can always get down with, and sat on the floor at our short table. They brought us a sample of meats and an array of condiments and pickled…things. I can’t pretend that I know anything about Korean cuisine or culture. We cooked our meats on the barbecue that sat at the middle of the table and ate away. The meal was tasty, filling, but not heavy. There seemed to be a lot of balance involved. Although I was only in Korea for a matter of hours, I felt like I did enough to say that I have been to the country.

I felt so lucky to have a friend that would come show me a good time on a whim. It really meant a lot to be able to have this experience while I was there. Unfortunately we only had time for lunch, and after, we went back to the station, so I could get back to the airport in time. Korea seemed interesting, though. I don’t know if it had some of the things that I really like in countries that I enjoy being in, but it had something alluring. Maybe it was the fact that it seemed so distinct in its culture. East Asia is about as far from America as it gets culturally, although Korea has an undeniable American connection. This looked like it could be fascinating. The food has never grabbed me, and the drab buildings provided a less than inspiring urban landscape. However, there was an atmosphere, maybe a smell in the air, that seemed distinct and different enough to make me consider this a place to return to; to figure out and explore. I think only time will tell if Korea ever turns up again on my itinerary.

Now it was back onto another luxurious Korean Air plane, heading back to America. Korea was officially my last stop on my 15-month, three continent, 13 country adventure. Can I sum up this trip in a succinct little conclusion? Should I bother? Is this trip ever really over? Would America even seem like a final destination, or just another long layover? I am already writing this from another country, nine months later, and while I feel like that was a distinct journey, I don’t know if it warrants treating it like the end of an era. I’m still traveling. I’m still learning. I’m still adapting. I’m still trying to explore and figure out this world as much as myself. So considering that, no, maybe there should not be a conclusion. Let it ride?

Wild Hogs

Dec. 10, 2012

The next few days on Ko Pha-Ngan provided a few little adventures, but nothing as serious as the Full Moon Party. One of the days we decided to go out to the island that was just a couple hundred meters off shore. There was a sand bar between our islands, so when the tides were not too high, we could walk and swim across without too much difficulty. In the middle, waves were crashing on us from both sides. Although nothing had led us to believe that the island was inhabited in any way, we immediately saw signs of life when we got there. There were a couple of little Buddhist shrines in a grassy clearing. As we walked further in, we saw a couple of small shacks. As we got closer, one of them appeared to be an abandoned bar. It started to get a little creepier as we weren’t sure whether anyone might be around or not. We started to follow a trail and it took us up to a few wooden bungalows that also looked abandoned. It looked like this had been something of a guesthouse at some point. It was hard to tell how long it had been since it was used. It wasn’t listed in any of the guidebooks, so it was probably built fairly recently. Decay in the tropics happens quickly. We went inside one of the bungalows. The mattress was off the bed and covered in mold. Even some of the wood seemed to be rotting. We found a magazine that seemed to be the Thai equivalent of Maxim. It was dated just six months earlier. The trail petered out shortly after passing the few bungalows so we turned back around. Although it was incredibly creepy to walk around this little ghost hostel, it seemed like it would have been an awesome place when or if it had ever been open. I thought it would be fun to come back out here during the lowest tide and bring things to camp and have a bonfire. Nobody else was that interested, plus it would have been difficult to get our things across without getting them wet.

A couple of the days we rented motorbikes to explore the island. We rode to a trail to a waterfall that was not all that impressive (dry season), but it had great views. We stopped for noodle soups, conquered steep hills, found a rope swing and enjoyed the green scenery. One thing that I did not like about the island was that the tourists seemed to greatly outnumber the Thais. I have a hard time with that dynamic. Although we had come for the beach and the island atmosphere, I feel that I travel because of the people I meet. The fact that we were a big group on a touristy island meant that we would not be interacting much with locals. However, after riding around a bit, I was glad that we had chosen to stay at the place that we had. We were secluded from the towns that were just overrun with tourists, guesthouses, trinket shops and bad western restaurants. At one point in our ride, we stopped at a place suspiciously called “Lady Bar”. We had not taken much notice in that detail though. Other than a young white couple playing pool, we were the only people there. A woman in her thirties served us our drinks and tried to chat us up. I had a hunch where it was going and kept my distance. She told Henry, with a smile and a wink, “You are so handsome.” We later suspected that this lady may have been a boy. This was lost on Henry, and after we left he gloated, saying, “Did you hear? She thought I was the most handsome out of all of us.” I responded, “No, she thought you were the most likely out of all of us to pay for sex.”

I enjoyed Ko Pha-Ngan and I guess it was a fitting way to finish this long travel. It was not as rugged and far more mainstream than most of what I had done in the previous fifteen months, but perhaps it would make for a more normal transition back to America. Going back after a traipsing around obscure Indian states or a river in Mali would be a lot more difficult than a traditional beach holiday where I was surrounded by westerners anyway.

After a healthy dose of the island, we took the ferry back to the mainland. We encountered a strange phenomenon during our transit. It was the backpacker that is stuck in a tube. We realized that most of the people we were around had paid for package deal all the way back in Bangkok, where all of their transport was arranged and paid for in advance. And even those who have not signed onto a package trip are steered into this tourist tube and don’t bother trying to get out. When our minivan got to Surat Thani, the main town and transit hub not far from the ferry, we were dropped off on a random street near a tour company office. All the other passengers were herded off the van and into the office to wait for their connecting mode of transport to either their next island or back to Bangkok. We tried to ask where the main bus station, but nobody would give us a straight answer. They asked where we were going. I knew they just wanted to get us onto one of their buses that would be inevitably more expensive, and, as far as I’m concerned, carried a higher risk for theft or scams.  We knew there was a bus station in the city that had connections to Bangkok, but nobody wanted us to find it. We walked away from the tour office and tried to find somebody who spoke English to help us out. It wasn’t long before we had some reliable information, but it wasn’t the best news. It sounded like the bus station had moved and was no longer centrally located, and that the odds of catching a bus to Bangkok at this time were not very good. We decided to relax and have a night in this mostly ignored town. This was probably one of the few good decisions we made so far in Thailand.

We checked into a comfortable and surprisingly cheap hotel room. It even felt luxurious compared to our rustic beach huts. We proceeded directly to the nearby night market. The food on Koh Pha-Ngan had been expensive and mediocre at best. Now we were back in actual Southeast Asia, where the night market, rather than the hostel, feeds the hungry masses and fried noodles, curry and steamed dumplings, rather than banana pancakes, reign king. Even in Bangkok we hadn’t eaten as well as we did in our two hours in the Surat Thani night market. We ate ourselves silly. We didn’t know most of what we were eating. We just walked around, saw what looked good and put it in our mouths. The night in Surat Thani was actually a far better final memory of Thailand than our time on Ko Pha-Ngan.

The next morning we were up early enough to see the monks walking around collecting alms. We made our way to the bus station and quickly found ourselves heading back toward Bangkok. The bus was surprisingly fast, especially compared to the train, and we were back in the capitol before dark. This time we chose to stay near the horrid and infamous Khao San Road. When we had first been in Bangkok, it had given the Cameroon crew the biggest culture shock of the trip. Nobody actually wanted to go back there. Unfortunately, though, its cheap prices and other convenient amenities lured us in anyway. It always happens to me.

As much as we were against the idea of Khao San Road, we managed to enjoy ourselves. We met some other travelers at a street side bar, and hung out with them. They were typical Southeast Asia backpackers. Nice company, but not so interesting. Then we met a couple guys from Togo. They were far more interesting to talk to, so Harly, Paul and I spent an hour or two hanging out with them, practicing our French and talking about Africa. I had always seen the occasional African in Bangkok, Kolkata and Phnom Phenh, and always wondered what their story was. This guy explained that many of them originally come to play soccer. Maybe they have been recruited by a team or perhaps figured they could get on a team on arrival. This explained why all the Africans in Kolkata said they were soccer players. Unfortunately one of the Togolese guys told us, things don’t work out for most of them as they plan. And since most of them have obligations to a family back home, who expect them to come back with big soccer money, they turn to various forms of crime to support themselves and their families. This explained the reputation the Africans, specifically Nigerians, had in India and Thailand. I had heard that Nigerians ran the cocaine trade in India and various other unsavory activities in Thailand. I was glad to be finally getting a little more of the whole story. I’m sure there is a lot to learn about the African Diaspora in Asia. Perhaps that will be worth another trip this direction.

The next day we languidly departed our filthy flophouse and went back to the guesthouse we had stayed at the previous week. This was simply to pick up some bags we had left there. It was my last stop before heading to the airport. My flight was at 5:30, so it was time for me to start making my way to the airport. As I said my goodbyes, I mentioned how I was always paranoid that I would screw up the 24-hour time that is always on international plane tickets and confuse a 15:30 time with a 5:30 PM time. This was something that I really did worry about every time I headed to the airport. However, this was the only time where I actually did make the mistake. When I got to the airport, I found a bench and an outlet before even checking in, and opened my laptop. The first thing I did was double check my ticket. That was when I realized that my flight was leaving at 3:30 (15:30), not 5:30. I looked at the clock. 2:50. I grabbed my things and ran to the Korean Air check-in, half-expecting them to tell me that it was too late to make the flight. Then began a long series of events that seemed constructed to help me miss my flight. I got to the counter, and as luck would have it, they decided to have a trainee help me. The trainer sat patiently behind them as they slowly asked me all the necessary questions. They made plenty of mistakes, and the trainee calmly, but slowly, helped them along. My urgency was completely lost on them. When I tried to check my bag, they said it was overweight. I started throwing my things all over the place, shoving heavy items into my carryon bag and into my pockets. I got my boarding pass and ran toward security. Then I was blindsided by the customs line I had to get through first. The shortest line had ten people in it. I found myself behind a couple of French girls who looked like backpackers. I started speaking to them in French, explaining that my plane was leaving soon and if it would be at all possible if I could cut. They were more than understanding, and even encouraged me to go right to the front. Everyone was surprisingly happy to let me go ahead of them. I needed it desperately, and finally felt like I was catching a break. On the other side, the security line looked long, but it moved fast. I hustled through and found myself in the terminal with about fifteen minutes before takeoff. I had just enough time to get to my gate, and check my email. I was heading to South Korea and had plans to meet up with a friend during my 18-hour layover. The only problem was that I had not done a good job of getting in touch with her about our plans to meet up. The logistics of how I would get into Seoul had not been laid out. Checking the email didn’t help much either. Either way, I was just grateful to make it onto the plane in time. Peace out, again, Thailand.

I Can't Believe I Went to a Full Moon Party...Thailand. Again.

Dec. 6, 2012

And it was back to Bangkok. This city really was shaping up to be my own personal crossroads for Asia. Unfortunately I am always passing through this city, only having enough time to take care of the things that need to be done before moving to the next place. My fifth time in Bangkok, and I still wasn’t going to give it the attention it deserves. I had more important plans, though. I was about to meet up with Harley, who I hadn’t seen since he left our house in Arizona over two years earlier. He had just finished his service in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, and was now coming to travel Southeast Asia with a few of his friends that he had served with. Meeting up with Harley was particularly significant since I still felt bad for not visiting him when I had been in West Africa. This was now a chance to partially redeem myself.

It was fun to see what this group of guys were like after 27 months in Cameroon, especially as they arrived in a place as completely different as Bangkok. Their eyes were wide and mouths agape at the futuristic transportation, skyscrapers, women in short shorts and skirts, bright lights and great street food. It was quite the contrast for me too, coming from India, but I had just been here a couple months earlier. One thing that they were used to, though, was lots of beer drinking. Cameroon drinks more beer per capita than anywhere in Africa, so what I was seeing in their thirst was not relief from being done with the Peace Corps, but instead business as usual.

Our first night we found ourselves having dinner and beers at a makeshift restaurant with a dirty old Aussie bloke. He was a perfect stereotype of the old man expat in Thailand. He had a Thai wife, who was not around for whatever reason, but he spoke Thai well. He was a good source of information, and an entertaining character. However, he was still a dirty old man who served as a good warning to anyone wanting to spend too much time in Thailand. Do you really want to end up like him?

Most of our couple days in Bangkok was filled with running errands, chasing down street food and playing cards, with all the gaps in between filled with beer. Although we were not staying in Khao San Road, we started to border on that level of obnoxiousness that comes from the frat boy tourists in that part of town. Luckily we would be heading down to an island soon where we would feel a little more free.

The night before we left Bangkok, a couple of Peace Corps Volunteers serving in Thailand came to meet up with us. One of them was going to take us to an island that she liked. Then, in the morning, something came up and she was not able to go. Now we were on our own to figure out our plans. She had been planning to take us to Koh Chang, an island I had already been to, but instead we decided to head farther south. We went to the train station to find the next train that would be heading that direction. An overnight train would be leaving that evening, so we had the whole day to hang out at the train station.

We had been too cheap to spring for the sleeper car, so it was a pleasant surprise when we found that our third class car was not too packed. A couple of us even had room to stretch out. We had decided to go to Ko Pha-Ngan, one of Thailand’s most popular islands. We had chosen it because it was accessible, had a lot to do and was not as developed for tourism as places like Ko Samui. As I looked through the guidebook, I discovered that Ko Pha-Ngan was the island where Thailand’s notorious full moon parties originated. I knew that we all had mixed feeling about something like that. I asked Patrick if he could see the moon out the window. He said yes. I asked how it looked. “Pretty close to full,” he said. Unless it was full the day before, we would be there in time for the world’s biggest beach party. I think the prospect of this made us all nervous, especially since we were just stumbling into it. Everything I read about it made me question if it was even a good idea to go. The amount of people, the drugs, the abundance of police (corrupt or otherwise), thieves, spring breakers, occasional deaths due to undertows or drugs, are all things that made the Full Mood Party a little intimidating. We just had to wait and see if it was actually in the cards.

None of us got much sleep on the train. I hadn’t gotten the best sleep the previous nights either as I had volunteered to take the floor of our double room. When we arrived at the train station at Phun Phin around 7 AM, we were starving. We found the nearest basic restaurant and ordered a round of noodle soups and beers. Then we grabbed a bus going to Surat Thani, the nearest town to the ferry terminal. When we arrived there, we got into a sawngthaew (pickup truck with bench seats) to take us to a ferry terminal. We agreed on the price of thirty Baht each beforehand. When we got there, though, the driver seemed to be unhappy with the money we gave him. He now said the price was 90 Baht per person. I told him he was trying to cheat us, and that we wouldn’t pay any more. I knew that the other Thai passengers had not paid 90. I also assumed that he usually dealt with tourists that wouldn’t question him. We argued further until he threatened to call the police. I told him to go ahead. He walked to the nearby ferry ticket office. Everyone else said they didn’t want to deal with police and wanted to just pay. It was a difference of two dollars each. I just didn’t want to make it that easy for him to rip people off. I wasn’t going to drag them into my stubbornness so we paid up.

As soon as we got to the ferry, we realized we would indeed be there for a full moon party. People boarding the boat were already sporting shirts that read “Full Moon Party Dec. 9, 2012”. Then I remembered that some hippy in India had mentioned there would be an eclipse on the 9^th. So we were heading straight into a Full Moon Party in Thailand’s highest tourist season with an eclipse in the forecast. Plus we were on a very limited amount of sleep. So what did we do on the ferry ride? Well, we had a few rounds of strong beers to see what would happen. Then there were some Thai guys sitting outside that kept inviting us to rounds of Mekong whiskey. It was already getting scary.

When we got off the ferry we past the hordes of taxi drivers and sawngthaews offering rides to various parts of the island. The fares looked exorbitant and we were sure we could find something better. During our search, I ran into a dread-locked Korean guy named Chris that I had volunteered with in Kolkata. Back in India he was a kind and charming character. In Thailand, he was a sloshed party animal. It was an amazing coincidence, but at the same time, it further proves that Thailand is the crossroads of my universe.

As it turned out, waiting around wasn’t the best idea. We had figured that there might be some sort of public transport around the island that would take us close to our destination. This turned out to be a terribly wrong assumption. As it turned out, though, hiring an entire sawngthaew to ourselves was about the same price as if we had taken the shared ones for tourists to begin with.

Half an hour of driving through jungle covered hills and we were eventually delivered to what turned out to be pretty close to paradise, in the cliché sense of the word. There was a beach (a bit small and rocky) plenty of palm trees, dramatic emerald peaks rising behind us, and a mysterious little island a few hundred meters offshore. We checked into our little wooden bungalows. Paul, Harley and I shared a double, while Henry and Patrick shared the other double. We had a hammock on our little deck, but I ripped straight through it within the first few hours. There were thoughts of napping, but who were we kidding? There was a beach and a beer store nearby.

That evening, we caught a sawngthaew that was leaving our area around 9. There were also some German and French girls riding with us. They all seemed either reserved, unfriendly, or perhaps avoiding a group of obnoxious American guys. By the end of the ride, though, they were at least a little more friendly. We had gone through miles of dark, quiet, and almost empty roads to reach the chaos that was going down at Hat Rin, the beach that hosts the full moon parties. The streets were packed with foreigners heading toward the beach. The proper attire seemed to be some sort of white tank top with lots of glow paint on the shirt, face or body. I felt overdressed in my Kolkata t-shirt. After getting out of the truck, the German girls wandered off somewhere, but the French girls stuck around with us. We grabbed a couple of whiskey bucket kits on the way in, which included a bucket, a medium bottle of Mekong whiskey, and Red Bull. Thailand is the only place I’ve been other than Coeur d’Alene, ID where buckets of booze are standard.

Within thirty minutes of getting to the party, I got separated from Harley, Paul and the French girls. So it was just Henry and I for a while. Getting separated and then searching for each other would be a common theme of the night. But with half a mile of beach, endless clubs and tens of thousands of people, it was almost impossible to find each other. It didn’t matter much anyway. Sometimes we were all together; sometimes I was with Paul and sometimes with Henry. Either way, though, it was always a good time. The crowd was exceptionally Euro-trashy. It was far more of a Scandanavian spring break crowd than the fire-spinning hippie crowd one might expect at this party. Beyond the music and dancing, there were plenty of things to keep us entertained. There was a giant inflatable water slide, food stalls, a flaming jump rope, an ocean, a flaming limbo stick and probably other things that I have forgotten about. As expected, I was killing it on the limbo stick, but didn’t get proper recognition as a limbo master since nobody else had respect for the limbo rules. 

Henry and I were the last two standing when the sun started to come up. At that point, people started to really get into the idea of swimming. I couldn’t resist. I set my things on a wooden platform and asked Henry to watch them while I took a dip. When I got out, I didn’t see Henry, or my blue scarf that I had left on the platform. I saw that my scarf had been knocked off and was rolling around in the water. Then I saw Henry dancing off to the side, not paying attention. Then I noticed my zipper pouch that I had had my money in was gone. I looked around and suddenly saw a Thai guy walking away with it. I approached him and said it was mine, and he just handed it back, apologized and scurried off.

Not long after, Henry and I decided to make our way back home. It was surprisingly easy to find a Sangthaew going in our direction. In the chaos of the night, almost all the people around us had been strangers. Now we were back in a more social context, meeting the people that we had been partying alongside the whole night. It was almost awkward, especially since I did not want to be the same kind of person as those we were riding with. Either way, we could all partake in the camaraderie of having been through a full moon party together.

I woke around 1 PM the next day, which is incredibly late for me no matter the circumstances. I was amazed to find the whole crew already at a table on the beach getting into their first (or third for some) beers. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that, but the peer pressure and the desire to kick around stories from the night before got the better of me. Of course I felt great after a bit. It turned out that three of the four of us that went (forgot to mention that Patrick didn’t want to go to the party) had had thieves try to work their magic on us. Harley, who had left the earliest of all of us, had his phone picked from his pocket. Paul, however, had the best story. At some point in the night, in a crowded area where everyone was dancing, a Thai woman approached Paul. She began to dance with him closely. After a few moments, he realized she was a lady boy. Before he knew it, she had smiled and left. Paul immediately checked his pockets, and realized his wallet was missing. He ran after her and grabbed her shoulder. She turned around, pulled out his wallet, handed it back, smiled, and said, “sorry!” 

Swords, Fire, A New Tire Sandal, McDonald's...Leaving India

Dec. 3, 2011

My last few days in Kolkata were spent tying up loose ends, taking a few final photos, buying gifts for people, etc. One major task I had was to replace a sandal I had lost in Puri. This wasn’t just any sandal. I was one from a pair I had gotten in Mali almost a year earlier. These sandals were made from tires and were custom-fitted. It seemed that there was only one man still making this kind of sandal in the capital of Mali, and it had been a mission to even find him. The sandals meant a lot to me, and now I was left with one. I felt like it would be a final test for me in India to see if I could manage to get the same sandal I had had made in Mali re-constructed here in Kolkata.

The first thing I had to do was find the source for rubber. I knew that there were people that sold used tires in a nearby neighborhood, but I was also pretty sure that these would not be the right people. I needed to find the neighborhood where people tore apart tires for recycling and repurposing. For a city where nothing is wasted, I was surprised that people weren’t turning tires into sandals. Then again, it was probably because that rubber was more valuable when put to other uses, and locally made factory flip-flops cost pennies.

Two days before I left, I went with Joe to hang out at Abdu and Kartik’s (our deaf/mute friends) place and they made us lunch. We asked them if they knew about where to find rubber from used tires. They had a vague idea, but weren’t sure. 

Hanging out with Abdul (left), Kartik (center) and Joe (right) at their house.

Kartik examines my sandal.

This is the result of a corrupted Compact Flash card.

Then one of their other deaf/mute friends dropped by. He said he knew where to go and that he would show us. We followed him on a surprisingly short ten minute walk and, as expected, we arrived at a neighborhood where it seemed that everyone’s profession or craft was focused around repurposing old tires. At the front edge of the street there were whole tires. Then a little farther on there were long strips of rubber peeled off the tires. It seemed that the farther we walked into the street the smaller the pieces of rubber got. By this time, the man that had brought us there had left. I didn’t mind, but I also thought that his presence might work to our advantage. I had brought the sandal I still had and tried to explain to some of the people that I was looking for a piece of rubber to match mine. We were pointed farther and farther down the street, until we reached a boy who was making what looked like brake pads. I showed him what I was trying to get, and he quickly grabbed my sandal and examined it. Then he reached for a piece of flat rubber. He traced the shape of the sandal onto the rubber with a piece of chalk. I started to ask him how much the piece of rubber was gong to cost. He ignored me in a fashion I had seen before. He was going to try to do the work and then tell me an inflated price. I had to grab his arm and stop him in order to get him to tell me the price. He told me something like 150 rupees, or three dollars, for one sandal-sized piece of rubber. Of course, this was absurd, as I had originally bought this pair of sandals for $2 in Mali, where most things are pricier than India. Arguing against the price didn’t help. Worse yet, people had started to gather and watch what was going on. We tried moving to the next stall that was working with the same cut of rubber. When we asked the price, it was even more. The word had spread quickly about us and nobody wanted to give a lower price. We got incredibly frustrated. In the end, we left in a huff without the rubber.

The next day I went back the neighborhood alone and tried to rush in casually without making a scene, or being seen. I was able to find a different rubber dealer who was caught off guard by me. I used this to my advantage and got a better price, but it was still not that great. I paid about a dollar for the piece of rubber, but I didn’t mind much since the guy I was dealing with was kind, friendly and didn’t seem to be trying to rip me off.

A tire wallah (right) cuts the rubber for my sandal.

Next I had to find material for a strap. My sandal’s strap was made from material that could have been a belt. So I went to New Market in search of a belt with red, yellow and green stripes. It was surprisingly easy to get, so my next stop was the cobbler. Unfortunately it was a Muslim holiday, and not many people were working. I eventually found a cobbler and showed him what I would like him to do. He seemed confident that he could do it, and we negotiated a fair price. It took quite a while, and his method was different than the man who had made them in Mali. It worked out in the end and it was kind of surreal to have a pair of matching sandals with each one coming from two different cobblers in two different countries on two different continents.

That same night, the night before leaving Kolkata, I was walking around a nearby neighborhood, looking for a few last photos for my project. I turned a corner, and suddenly the street in front of me was packed. There was some sort of parade or celebration going on. It was not calm in the least. What I saw was mostly men, with a strong contingent of school-aged kids, dancing around, waving swords, throwing fireworks, and occasionally a fire breather would emerge from the crowd. There were sword fights, which I kept getting in the way of. At one point, a man who seemed at least a little crazed, sad to me, “Do you know about this day? It is the festival of fire and blood! Today is the fire!...Tomorrow is the blood!” What was I supposed to say to that? I continued to walk through the slightly controlled chaos, watching the dramatic performances that swirled around me like unpredictable clouds. I was confused about the occasion, because it was obviously a Muslim holiday, but I had never heard of it before. I would later find out that it was a more obscure holiday that seemed to have particular significance in West Bengal. Although I wasn’t around the next day, Joe would report back to me that he had seen the “blood”. Apparently during the second street parade some of the men walked through the street shirtless, while slapping their chests with razor-clad hands.

Also, I went to McDonald’s and tried a “Chicken Maharaja Mac”.

A final photo for the Kolkata 9-5 project. A photographer in his studio.

Guesthouse managers Raju and Raju (Pagla) snuggle up for bed. They are two of the best guesthouse workers in all of India.

Another task I had to take care of was to find a gift for Papa. I wanted to get him something bike related, and I figured one of the bike seats made out of used tire could be cool. I knew finding this would be another mission. I got my first tip from Raju, our guesthouse manager, who told me the general area where bikes and bike parts were sold. Joe came along with me. The first stop was a bike shop that was selling shiny new bikes. It was the first evidence we were entering a serious bike-dealing district. When we asked about the seat made out of tire, the shopkeeper seemed offended. He told us he sold bikes not seats. I asked if he knew where we might find one. No. He waved us out of his shop. I tried to ask again if he knew where bike seats were sold, or which direction we might walk. He refused to answer and sent us out of his shop. It took a while to get back on track, but we eventually found ourselves finding more bike shops. Like the tire-stripping neighborhood, it seemed that the farther we went into the neighborhood and the more narrow alleys we walked down, the small the parts got. We went from new bike shops, to used bike shops to shops that sold frames and tires until eventually we were walking down some back alleys where the vendors were hawking break pads and bike ornaments. By asking every shopkeeper we passed, we were eventually directed to a shop that had exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately the seat did not look nearly as cool as those that were well worn by the cycle rickshaw drivers that I had seen before. The seat, plus the huge coils it sat upon would be a huge portion of my bag, but it seemed worth it. I also found a giant green horn that made the most ridiculous sound that I knew would go great on my bike back home. Plus I got some mud flaps made of car tire tubes that had sexy pictures of Bollywood stars on them. The whole trip took half of our day, but those mud flaps made it worth it.

So that was about it. Another trip in India. Another couple months in Kolkata, learning that the place is unlearnable. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. That concept seems to be made for India. As foreign as it is, as grinding and grueling as it can be some times, as often as I feel I don’t understand it and want to leave, I will always have a spot in my heart for India. It seems like a lifelong project of a place. Something I can always come back to when I am feeling in a rut or need a pick-me-up or a put-me-down. I know it will never fail to always fascinate. 

Kolkata People

Kolkata is obviously a fascinating city, chock full of interesting individuals that will amaze, disgust, challenge or simply provoke you. But this city also attracts a rich cast of characters from all over the world. Many of them can fit into the categories of hippie traveler on a spiritual journey or religious idealists out to save the world. However, this is simplifying things, and many people I met did not fit so neatly into these boxes. Here are a few stories of the characters I encountered while existing in Kolkata.

The Drunk American

One evening at the beginning of Durga Puja  I was walking down Sudder Street and I heard a guy yell out to me in an American accent, “Hey, where you going hippie?” I stopped, not sure whether to be amused or insulted. Usually people giving you a hard time on the street are not American. I turned and saw an olive-skinned man with a baseball cap sitting on the curb. I looked at him incredulously and just said, “what?!” He said, “Come here!” I did, and I asked, “what makes you call me a hippie?” He laughed, saying, “oh come on. Look at those pants!”. It was true that I was wearing a baggy pair of tie dye pants I had gotten in Mali. I guess I didn’t expect to be lumped together with the stereotypical young backpacker in India since I did not have dread locks, tattoos, piercings or wear the typical traveler uniform of Ali Baba or Thai pants, at least one colorful scarf and a t-shirt featuring a Hindu deity. Alas, my pants gave me away. The guy invited me to sit down and have a drink with him. I saw a plastic bag with a cheap bottle of whiskey inside. I had nothing better to do, so I sat down and took a pull off his bottle. He was a little drunk, and very condescending. He seemed like he needed a friend, but didn’t have more than whiskey to offer. All he could do was complain about Kolkata. I asked him why he was there, but he had no idea himself. “This place is disgusting. It’s gotta be the worst city in the world. Goa, now that’s a great place. Beaches, parties, girls, drugs. Yeah, how come I’m not in Goa?” I wondered what had even brought him to India in the first place. He explained that he knew the country a little bit because his father was Indian. He said he was on his way to Bangkok, a real city, where he could have some real fun. This guy was quite possibly the worst American I’d ever met while traveling, but I found it intriguing. “I bet you voted for Obama!” he scoffed out of the blue at one point, “You hippie liberal.” Then he offered to buy me a beer at the Fairlawn, one of Sudder Street’s oldest and most iconic hotels. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but I did appreciate the fact that this was one of the most unique conversations I’d had with a traveler in India.

When we walked into the Fairlawn he started to chide the security guard outside the gate in broken Hindi. The got in a brief spat, yelling at each other over who knows what. After getting inside he explained how that guard was a real jerk and had kicked him out before. I was starting to regret coming in here. As soon as we sat down, this guy’s eyes locked on a young man sitting with his laptop at a nearby table. “Hey, how’s the book coming?!” he yelled to the man in a mocking tone. The writer glanced up and said in a Kiwi accent, “Piss off.” I seemed to be sitting with the least popular foreigner in Kolkata. I couldn’t believe I was finally meeting an American traveler who lived up to every terrible American stereotype. He explained that he had been kicked out of there a week before for getting into a fight with this Kiwi guy. He was not discreet at all as he explained the situation to me, and even seemed to raise his voice as he continued to make fun of the guy, whether it was for being from New Zealand or being a writer or whatever else he could think of. It wasn’t long before the wait staff, whom he was constantly making demands from, was encouraging us to leave. He knew the score and seemed like he didn’t want as big of a confrontation as he had apparently had before. He just wanted to push everyone as close to the breaking point as possible. When he knew he couldn’t afford to be any more obnoxious, he pushed the second half of his beer toward me and told me I could finish it. Then he paid for the beers and walked out.

I apologized to the Kiwi author, explaining that I was not associated with that man at all. I had never been so embarrassed by one of my countrymen.

Adam

Adam was a tall Swede who looked almost as much like a crazed Viking as anyone I had ever seen. He had long hair that balanced somewhere between wavy and poofy. His beard looked about 9 months and he had dyed it bright red with henna. He always wore a green, loose mesh tank top and baggy Thai pants. He always carried around a deteriorating plastic grocery bag which held his water, cigarettes and money, which just floated around there freely. I saw him repeatedly drifting in and out of Kolkata, coming and going without notice. He had traveled all over India, over the course of a few long trips, but his heart was in Bengal. He was a musician and was fascinated with the Baul musicians of West Bengal and Bangladesh. The Bauls are some sort of minstrels; traveling musicians who lean towards Sufism, but also include Sunni Muslims and Hindus. Adam had made friends with some of these musicians and would go and spend days at a time with them out in the bush or in their villages, just playing music. He was always excited to talk about them and promote their music, but at the same time was always a little secretive or cryptic about his experiences with them. He was an eccentric dude, and I was disappointed that I had just missed him upon returning to Kolkata for the last time.

So

On one of Joe’s first few days in Kolkata, I came back to the guesthouse to find him hanging out with a couple of new guys. One was Israeli and the other was Japanese. I sat down and introduced myself. I saw a notepad on the table with some writing on it. After I shook the Japanese guy’s hand, he grabbed the pen and started writing something. He showed it to me, and it said, “My name is So.” It turned out that he was deaf and mute. Joe and the Israeli guy had been talking to him for a while, using a notepad and easily understood gestures.

So turned out to be a lot more interesting and easier to hang out with than the Israeli who could speak and listen in English very well. So So ended up hanging out with us a lot and even started volunteering at Prem Dan. I could not believe how brave he was. Anyone that has traveled to somewhere like India knows how hard it can be, even with the ability to speak and hear. To anyone who has ever expressed the interest to travel, but said they couldn’t due to flimsy excuses about not speaking the language (or anything that might make travel difficult) I want to tell them to shut up, and point them towards So. And this was his first big trip outside of Japan. He had been traveling for a few weeks before arriving in Kolkata and had managed to make it there somehow. He was so positive and had the kind of spirit that makes you feel terrible for ever complaining about the difficulties of traveling.

Joe spent a lot more time with So than I did, and he actually got pretty good at learning some Japanese and English sign language. One night, over beers on the roof of our guesthouse, we got a good lesson in the names of countries in Japanese sign language. Most of them were funny and surprisingly based on simplifications and stereotypes. Act like you are waving a red sheet in front of a bull, and you have said Spain. Motion the shape of a sombrero over your head and you have said Mexico. Wipe some vodka off your lip…Russia. And so on and So forth.

One day we all met up with our friends Abdul and Kartik. They also happen to be deaf and mute. We were all curious as to how well they would be able to communicate. Sign language, like spoken languages are different everywhere you go. Not only was So very skilled in written English, he could also speak English sign language. It turned out that they were able to communicate quite well, since however they were speaking was similar to English sign language. I am curious how much of Indian sign language actually borrows from English, or whether they were just speaking a mix of the two to make themselves more understood. Either way, it was so interesting to watch the three of them communicate, and try to decipher what they were talking about. Mel was good at communicating with Kartik and Abdul, and Joe was getting good quickly. I still couldn’t say much, but it was thoroughly entertaining to sit there in silent communication with the five of them.

American Students

I started my volunteering in Kolkata around the same time that a group of American students arrived. They were part of a program that seemed to amount to a six-month backpacking trip. There were about fifteen students, and all were all fresh out of high school. Three of the girls were from Portland, and had recently decided to shave their heads, as I find most girls from Portland tend to do when they go to India. Spiritual cleansing, I guess. Or lice removal. Something like that.

I had never seen a program like this before, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Led by a charismatic and rugged young man, the students were spending three months in India, traveling around in typical backpacker fashion. Then they would fly to New Zealand and work for three months. It looked like a great way to expose young people to new cultures and give them a taste for travel. At the same time it made me feel uncomfortable about what it meant for backpacking and budget travel. One nice thing about being bold enough to go travel independently around somewhere like India is that you generally leave the obnoxious tour groups behind. I would be terribly disappointed if backpacking became a popular thing among trust-fund types that wanted to see the world in what they saw as a Bohemian style, but were afraid to do it without their hand being held. The leader of the group, who I spoke with a lot while we volunteered, was well-traveled and seemed to have a plethora of interesting work and life experiences under his belt that made this job look relatively dreadful. The students were lucky to have him. He told me that these kinds of programs weren’t just in India, and that he’d lead another one through East Africa as well. I was impressed, but like I said, couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. The students were nice and open-minded, but also seemed ever bit as naïve and sheltered as you might expect.

I had thought that this kind of group was a rarity, but another one, came through about a month later. In Varanasi I also ran into another one of these groups from Scandinavia. While I would take these kind of tourists over the typical tour bus types any day, I still felt that these people didn’t need to have their hand held throughout India. You learn so much by just being on your own and having to figure it all out on your own. But then again, maybe they couldn’t get daddy to pay for the trip if they didn’t agree to the safety of a guided tour.

Public Health Worker

I have to briefly mention a woman that I met in Kolkata that I found to be so impressive as a person and as a traveler. She was an American public health worker. She had just been in Egypt, where she had been working for the past several years. She had been in Cairo throughout the first nine months of the Arab Spring. In fact, she landed in Cairo the day the protests broke out and had no idea why they were telling her she could not leave the airport. Surely though, this was not the most dramatic thing she had been through. She is the only person I have met to have visas from both Iraq and Afghanistan. She had some serious stories and she was tough enough to handle whatever came her way. I assumed she was the type that you couldn’t faze easily. Then, after her first day of volunteering, she told me that upon entering Prem Dan (home of the disabled and destitute) for her first day of volunteering, it took all of her power to keep herself from breaking into tears from the mere sight of the women she was there to care for. It was a much-needed reality check for me that what I was surrounded by really was that awful, and I had to remind myself not to get jaded.

A traveler’s Future

A couple months into my time in Kolkata, a small group of slightly more mature travelers popped up at the guesthouse. One part of the group was a beautiful woman in her 30’s who was an aid worker in Bangladesh and taking a week off from work. Then there was the Spanish chef who was traveling India to look for inspiration for new menu items. Finally there was the couple that was perhaps in their early 40’s and had a young child. The didn’t know each other before arriving in Kolkata, but they formed a little clique separate from the volunteer/backpacker crew that would generally congregate for drinks on the roof at night.

A life of traveling can lead to a lot of positive things for people. The aid worker and chef were proof of this. The couple with the child, however, was proof that a traveler’s lifestyle can go terribly wrong. Everything about them seemed tense, and the father seemed like he was incapable in taking any part in caring for their child. This is mostly because he was dealing with a serious drug addiction. When he first came arrived I didn’t think much of the fact that he would ask me if I had any hash. He would ask me every time he saw me, and eventually seemed to not believe that I really didn’t have any. Hash wasn’t his problem though. On his third day there, and maybe his eighth time asking me if I had any hash, he said, “Come on man! Please you HAVE to have something! I NEED it man. I’m coming off the brown river and I NEED something.” It was safe to assume that the “brown river” was heroine and he was desperate for something to help ease the painful withdrawals. I couldn’t imagine what this could mean for their child. Could you imagine being pulled around India at the age of three by your vagabond mom and heroine-addict dad? The mother was holding it together though. In the evening, the four of them would gather in one of the common spaces and have some drinks. I would join them sometimes. More often than not, the mother would go to bed early with their child, while the father would get rip-roaring drunk and act unruly. Most of us were just waiting for him to pass out.