The Hawk has landed.

Haiti: At Play in the Hills of the Lord

2012-02-01T04:56:00.004-05:00

Today's view from the ground: Northeast Grande-Anse Province, Haiti - Saturday and Sunday

To protect the innocent and the annoying, this entry of THHL includes code names for all those involved except Bridget and Kate, who have already been introduced to the reading several. Once again, the lack of photos is due to the theft of my camera last week, so I suppose I will have to make the writing even better.

As usual for Haiti, I woke up before dawn. The porch of the storeroom had a few local kids on it. After a day of travel and being called blan or croix rouge, it was relieving to earn a new appelation from the locals: Mickey Douce. The president of Haiti, with whom I share a first name and last initial, ran with the nickname Tet Kale - Baldie. Since I am also bald, I am often called Tet Kale here. Mickey Douce, or Sweet Mickey, was the president's nickname when he was still merely a celebrated pop musician. Since Danny (or Sugarwalls in code) already calls me Mikey, it made sense and felt strangely comforting.

I met the whole crew at breakfast. Snakebite is an E.R. physician from California with a quick wit and a friendly way about him. Clamslayer is a nurse turned filmmaker who was never seen without his camera, which is fortunate because he is a gifted photographer. Chapati (yes, his kin hails from Mumbai) is a pilot and rescue specialist who immediately seemed to be the emotional anchor of the quartet of Californians. And Sugarwalls, the only one I had spoken to before, is exactly as I pictured him: an imposing man with an Irish face and a combination of good humor and good old-fashioned git-'er-done mentality. Vero Beach, a first-year med student who had considerable finances behind his mission in Haiti, was as excited as first-year med students usually are to get clinical experience in the bush. Chattanooga, the supply chief, is a grisled ex-nurse with a shadowy history and a great way with the local kids (at least to speakers of English). I liked them all instantly.

The group also included Flanders, a mustachioed southern American pastor with the optimistic timbre of speech that one would expect from such a man in such a place. His only vice was taunting the goat who was tied up outside the kitchen, who was about to be prepared for dinner. Jersey, the gynecologist, was as animated and passionate about the trip as I had expected. There was also Happy, a woman who had the look of someone who was preparing to visit an amusement park, and another woman who seemed interested in giving orders but did not communicate with me enough for me to even gauge her medical credentials. And then there was the chief of the outfit, who has more than three decades' experience in rural Haiti and had created a miniature empire of local workers, some of who had been orphans in her organization's care. Everyone in this paragraph is blond and over 40.

Kate woke up while I was bucket-bathing myself and Bridget brought her out to see me, where I could only wave in modesty. She was pleasantly shocked to see me, as the trip thus far had been boring. Much like during her recent trip to India, Kate had been crammed in the backs of all-terrain vehicles on bad roads talking to people about health problems. Neither woman had seen a patient and, contrary to the exigent circumstances that surrounded Bridget's and my previous cholera response (see THHL from November 2010), the entire group had only seen five cholera patients. It was a relief that the horrid disease had not made major gains in the region of late, but it also made me question what any of us were doing there.

The mission runs much like MediShare, where volunteers pay the exorbitant cost of flying to Cayes and driving overland for a couple of hours (or drive from Port-au-Prince in six hours) to work village health clinics, gain experience, and see the sites. The first day of the trip, which I had missed by getting to Pestel (costing me more time but far less money), had been a tour of local medical curiosities and some of the nearly-vacant cholera treatment centers. The crew had spent most of that time talking up weekend health clinics to the indigenous people for whatever medical problems they may have. Saturday's was planned for the school building next to the warehouse. By 7 A.M., the outdoor benches were lined with more than a hundred patients. The clinic did not start for nearly three hours after that, when that number had nearly doubled.

I volunteered to run the pharmacy, as everyone else seemed to be itching to see patients. Vero Beach had brought two hanging shoe racks to act as a dispensary, and we hung them behind a tiny table in the far room of the building next to the exit. Vero, Snake, Chapati, and Sugar saw patients in one room while Happy ran the deworming station and Clam saw patients through from the waiting room. Kate and Bridget helped with the pharmacy for a while before Kate set off on a one-woman mission to rid the world of scabies. Intestinal worms and scabies are two of the most prevalent health problems in Haiti, and both are easily treated (at least initially) by a cheap pill.

Although I did not need one for the simple prescriptions I was giving, I was given a Haitian translator from the mission staff. I named her Grabby, as I often spotted her lifting drugs and other things she shouldn't be taking. When we told the empress, she laughed it off, saying she expected 15% of the supplies to be stolen. Chattanooga took umbrage at that suggestion, saying the head of a mission should maybe instill some of the basic commandments in her flock. Grabby spent most of the day annoying me, seizing things out of my hand and repeating my acceptable Kreyol (often incorrectly) to the patients. She also blocked me into my tiny square of standing room, not moving even as I climbed over her with a dodgy knee, a bit sore from Friday's moto accident and the acrobatics it took to keep her in line.

In order to reduce the confusion of our patients, who seemed bewildered by so much blan activity and shoddy translation, I adopted a symbology that medics and pharmacists learn for places where they don't know the language or work with illiterate people. I would draw capsules on the tiny plastic bags I was dispensing pills in, with a rising sun or a crescent moon to show when they should be taken. Everyone also got a pack of multivitamins, which helped rein in the usual Haitian outrage at being told there was no drug for the malady they complained of. Some people were convinced that a vitamin supplement was enough to ward off headaches and stomachaches, when the real prescription would have been better food and cleaner water. That is a prescription no pharmacist can fill for Grande-Anse Province.

My stamp came in handy as well, as it added to the placebo of officiousness that Haitians are used to. The examiners would write on slips of paper I had cut out of a 72-page village health protocol I had intended to leave for the mission (absurdly, no one else had paper, and Chattanooga assured me there was only one book that anyone read around there anyway). At first, the scraps showed names and ages as well as complaints and prescriptions, but that eventually got reduced to "Grandma" or "Girl in Yellow" as it became clear that most people would not reveal personal information and most had the same medical problems: headache, stomachache, vaginal infections, diarrhea, arthritis. Bridget clashed with Vero once or twice on prescriptions and Kate eventually got sick of cleaning scabies all over people's bodies. The other women had gone off somewhere out of the village. Since I was the only one legally qualified to fill prescriptions in Haiti (not that it mattered in any way), I would stamp the prescriptions as they were filled to make the patients feel better and avoid confusion, as I was often mobbed by patients who tried to grab their scrip back for a double dip and Grabby was grabbing whatever she wanted in front of me unless I slapped her hand away.

We closed up at 5 P.M. after seeing 300 patients. None had been emergent cases and only one was a mystery, which turned out to be a pediatric case of giardia. A pregnant woman had to wait with her family on the steps of the warehouse until well after dark for Jersey to return. After she did, there was a cursory examination and the woman elected to go to a friend's house to give birth. I was surprised that three blond women staring up her birth canal and speaking in tongues wasn't enough to send her into eclampsia.

The day ended with a sour taste in our mouths. No one had done what they expected to do and many of us did not feel good about what we had done. I arrived with no expectations except to find cholera; since they were dashed, I had no disappointment to revert to. But it did seem like a lousy, inefficient, and completely unsustainable way to run village health care.

The Californians and I cleared our heads by walking about the road under moonlight, smoking cigarillos and allowing Clam to try different camera tricks. Sugar was seeking the drums of a voudou ceremony, which we never found. We came back for dinner, which included one of the best goat barbecues I had ever tasted; I did not intend to eat the poor tortured animal but I could not help follow the smell after such a long day. The men stayed up late in the warehouse drinking cold Coke and telling stories.

We discovered that the previous clinic had drained our supplies of pain killers, the most common prescription. I called Fero, the moto driver from Pestel, who offered to bring me a fat sack of acetaminophen from the clinic there in the morning. I walked two towns over to meet him. The stroll led to a entourage of local children and many confused hellos from townspeople. I caught a ride back with Fero, on his way to church and clad in a smart black suit with a tie around his neck (he was not wearing a collared shirt).

Before this, Clam and I climbed the inviting ridge behind the warehouse at dawn in order to see the sunrise from the highest nearby point. The climb was quite difficult, as there were large igneous rocks with sharp edges and unpredictable points amid the ruddy dirt that had covered my boots over the previous 36 hours. The seemingly infertile ground held an orange tree, sugar cane, and sweet potatoes planted with care amid the stone and long vines. Halfway up the ridge, we encountered several bound goats, indicating that the land was certainly being used well.

The view from the top was spectacular, especially as the rosy dawn had filled the sky just as we reached the summit. We sat and talked as the sun crept over Pestel and the sea to the north, burning off the mist that lingered in pools over the deep valleys to the west and the south. It was one of those moments that makes a long trip worth the effort.

We drove two Land Cruisers to a neighboring village, while Kate, Bridget, and the Californians intended to walk. Savior insisted on bringing everyone by vehicle and wasted at least half an hour rounding everyone up and stacking them dangerously on the back while she sped over terrible roads. Runner cackled in delight at the further absurdity that she was creating. We picked up an old woman on the way; her knee was swollen and she wailed in pain. Once we finally arrived at the makeshift clinic, a one-room schoolhouse rigged with palm-leaf walls, a crowd of at least a hundred had gathered outside. They were far less orderly that Saturday's patients. Chapati and Vero spent nearly the whole day screaming at them and trying to keep them from overrunning us. Sugar, Bridget, Kate, and Happy ran a hurried clinic with Dole, a Haitian med student who had come from Port-au-Prince with them to gain some experience. He kept many of the fake translators away from me (they would try to translate for patients and then ask for money for the useless favor) and also escorted Grabby away to translate for the doctors, where there was less for her to steal.

The Haitian clinicians were writing conditions on whatever paper there was, and their prescription was always Tylenol. I had to reassess many cases at my embattled pharmacy desk to give a real effective prescription. The clinic was shorter that Saturday's, only five hours or so, but we saw more than 400 patients. I had again run out of pain killers, even though I was cutting them in half with a razor.

After walking part of the way back, the evening became a party. Clam took photos of the crew waving lit incense sticks in the thin moist air and a drum circle began among some of us and the Haitians who loitered near the warehouse. I made popcorn, which inspired a simple rhythmic song that then demanded more. Clam recorded it for posterity.

Bridget had the beginnings of a painful head cold. Just before I went to sleep, Vero reported a sharp abdominal pain and Snakebite asked me to give him some ondansetron to settle his turmoil. We finally went to sleep before midnight so we would be ready to clear out in the morning and begin the craggy drive to the airport at Cayes and the flight back to Port-au-Prince.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: Cayes.

Haiti: The Golden Sixteen Hours

2012-01-30T17:58:00.005-05:00

Today's view from the ground: Ouest, Nippes, and Grande-Anse Provinces, Haiti - Friday

The "golden hour" has two meanings for me: twilight, when photographs of even the most inane subjects are fascinating and alluring, and the first sixty minutes of a medical emergency, when or actions dictate the survival of a patient. I knew that Friday wold be memorable, but I did not think it wold be as dramatic as it turned out to be when I left Communitere just before dawn.

I was determined to meet Bridget and Kate in Pestel, where they had gone the previous day to fight cholera and work in a village health clinic. That mission also included Danny, a medic I had written and spoken to several times and created a kinship with but never actually met. I was supposed to leave with them, but a meeting about GAI's future detained me in Port-au-Prince. Instead, Friday involved every type of ground transport that a traveler can expect to find in Haiti, and a few others as well.

I had already sorted my supplies for the trek across three-quarters of Haiti's long southern finger-like peninsula, and I had discovered my camera had been stolen. I could not be bother to mourn even the photos that I had taken of the journey to the Dominican border and back, as I was very excited to be alone and roughing it in a region I had never seen. Port-au-Prince was already proud and bustling at 7 A.M., when I walked along Boulevard Dessalines in search of a ride west. It took me until 8 A.M. to find one, as I was carelessly walking along Boulevard Dessalines in the wrong direction.

I hitched on a government gravel truck to Petit-Goave and got on a tap-tap to Miragoane. The combination of rock dust and chicken-bus dirt rendered me filthy by 10 A.M., when the tap-tap lazily circled Miragoane's transport circle just outside town. I stopped to ask someone which road I should start down if I was heading to Grand-Anse Province, and that person introduced me to Dieudonne Basteau (the given name means "given by God"). He is a short man who seemed to be smiling even when he was upset, and he insisted on following the Haitian tradition of holding his new acquaintance's hand.

Dieudonne loaded me onto a tap-tap headed north into the remarkable center of Miragoane, a coastal city with a gorgeous ruddy cathedral and sun-bleached shops and homes stacked up the steep hillsides leading down to the placid gulf below. A grain ferry was bound to points west along the north coast of the peninsula and he hurried me towards the bashful harbor to catch it, as I could avoid the arduous land journey. I had missed the boat by fifteen minutes.

He felt bad about leading me away from the transport hub and offered to drive me by moto to Bahadel, the boat's next stop, if I could help him get the insurance on his new bike. Since I have government identification (and, of course, a new government stamp), I was able to do so after the insurance agent sniffed both credentials for a few minutes until he was satisfied that a blan in a Haitian medic uniform, which he had never seen, was not in fact a charlatan. I took the risk of jokingly saying "zo ayisyen," a colloquialism meaning I have Haitian bones, and he grudgingly stamped the papers and freed Dieudonne's ride.

On the moto, I was closer to Dieudonne than I have been to most men. Since I was carrying more than fifty pounds of medical supplies and personal effects in my backpack, I had to slide up right behind him so he was practically in my lap. We raced along the newly-paved coastal road for a few kilometers until we were forced to stop by a grisly scene. Two motorcycles had collided and one had then hit a public works truck. Three people were on each moto, and all those involved in the accident except the drivers were children.

One boy had exposed grey matter in a massive head wound and was clearly done for. The other four injured were stable but it took nearly all the trauma gear I was carrying to stop the bleeding and prepare them for transport to the nearest hospital in a pickup truck that was also stopped nearby. Once the children and their parents, one of which was still wailing at his loss, were on their way, we continued west past the edge of the pavement and onto the rocky journey to come. Just as the transition came, a Red Cross truck blasted past us, almost running us off the road.

Just before Anse-a-Veau, a river passed over the weak road into the azure gulf. It was swelled to a greater size than usual, as the road was completely obscured and one unfortunate vehicle had been washed into a ludicrous side angle off in the current. A group of men stood ready at the east side of the river to carry people across on their shoulders. Since my pack and I weigh 200 pounds together, I declined the ride and instead revved Dieudonne's moto across the shallowest part of the river that I could see while I held my legs over the handlebars. I managed to keep control of the bike until the opposite bank, where I spun out and dove into the sand. The Haitians laughed as Dieudonne was carried like an emperor to my side by a frail man, also smiling at my stunt.

In Anse-a-Veau, a sleepy fishing village with a picturesque flat town square, the moto got a flat. Dieudonne had it fixed at a local garage while I negotiated with a boat captain to get me to Pestel. He wanted more than US$200, which I laughingly declined. Three kilometers further on, the moto's flat reappeared. With not much more time to lose, I bade farewell to my God-given guide and began walking west, eventually giving an old woman a cigarette to let me ride behind her on a donkey towards Petit-Trou.

That town, or "Titwo" in Kreyol, was slightly bigger than Anse-a-Veau and far more colorful. Lovely blue roofs and walls match the sky and the sea, which stretches out of a tiny bay into the gulf beyond. Tiny tubs of boats, propelled by sails made of rice bags and tarps, bobbed into the quiet wash, adding flecks of white and red to the cerulean scene. I walked to the port, where a fleet of Crosslink boats bearing the insignia of the missionary organization Food for the Poor sat idle near the bay. I sought the owner of the one outboard motor in town, who refused to take me out at such a late hour. He then agreed but charged me more than the captain at Anse-a-Veau, when I balked. I explained the urgency of my situation to other townspeople, who all said it would have been easier to find a boat in Miragoane, and they also tried to convince the owner to bring me out. He still refused. A man sitting in a pickup truck told me the only person who could convince the owner of anything was his cousin, the head of the local Red Cross, who had passed Dieudonne and me earlier that day going the other direction. As I learned this, the sail of the grain ferry began to come into view. My heart sank, as did the chances of my arrival in Pestel.

All of Titwo was now alive with excitement and determination surrounding the new blan in their midst, and everyone tried calling the cousin until he finally motored back into Titwo. He heard my story, related in broken Kreyol, and exploded at the engine owner, who sheepishly agreed to haul me out to the shipping lane and intercept the ferry. We roared after the ferry as the sun burned orange before its nightly banishment. We finally caught up to the boat, another tub stacked dangerously high with a pyramid of rice sacks. The bewildered captain allowed me to board for the journey to Pestel, which was skipping Bahadel anyway, for 200 goud (US$5). The only way I could board the overloaded sailboat was to climb to the top of the pyramid and lie flat on it, still wearing my backpack. I stayed like that until the sun disappeared and the sky unmasked its nightly abundance of stars as we drifted silently out of the gulf into the open ocean.

Once the sky was awash with stars and the waxing moon smiled upon me again, I flipped my body over to look up. After ten minutes of stargazing, I heard the captain begin singing quietly and I fell asleep, arched over the rice and my pack. I awoke as Pestel's light loomed tantalizingly close on the horizon. It was nearly 9 P.M., and the Friday night scene was beginning in town. Music skipped over the sea like a playful bird and the sound drew us into port. I walked up the main street of the seaside town and got some fried chicken over rice and beans at the restaurant, perched precariously over the center of town. The owner directed me further up the hill to the health clinic, where I expected to find my friends. Upon arriving, neither the doctor nor the attendants, who had only three cholera patients, had heard of a dozen blan health workers. I was stunned and exhausted.

After four attempts, I got Bridget on the phone. She told me they were outside Pestel in a village called Joli Guibert. The doctor knew it, as it is home to the mission where my friends were staying. He said it is a four-hour walk but a moto could get me there in thirty minutes. I gave Fero, a young driver who works at the health clinic, US$10 to drive me up the mountain. It was more than the journey from Port-au-Prince to Pestel had cost me.

The road got worse and worse as we continued on, and the moon was shaded by trees. My backpack bounced up and down, nearly pulling me off the moto several times. I tried to look up at the stars to regain my balance, but I missed turns and had to look ahead again. Fero stopped at a man's house for gas, and the man came out with a jar that had held vegetable oil at some point. A Land Cruiser passed us going down the mountain, and Fero struggled to keep the moto going. Five minutes later, he lost control and the moto slid out from under us. I landed on my pack and was fine but for a few scratches. Fero was fine entirely, as he had landed on me.

Just before 11 P.M., we approached white lights and the roar of a generator. Several unfamiliar white people sat under a pavilion tent in front of a small house in a nicely-appointed terrace. Fero gave me his phone number for the future and bade me good night. I introduced myself to the white people, who knew me by name. One was Shelly, the gynecologist who Kate had mentioned was going to the mission as well. Kate was asleep but Bridget was awake to meet me with a long hug. Danny and his team had been in the Land Cruiser, taking a pregnant cholera patient to the health clinic I had just left, and returned to meet me with surprised smiles. I had finally made it.

The trip had taken sixteen hours and cost US$18. If I had left on Thursday with Kate and Bridget, the trip would have taken six hours and cost more than US$100. A strange cast of characters had helped me on my way, and it also appears that three children may have died if Dieudonne and I had not missed the boat from Miragoane. I fell asleep in the storeroom with the other men and prepared for my first shift as a village health clinician.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: Joli Guibert.

Haiti: "We Totally Almost Died"

2012-01-26T05:42:00.009-05:00

Today's view from the ground: Milot, Ouanaminthe, and Artibonite, Haiti (and Dajabon, Dominican Republic)

In the above photo, the Citadel rises from its home peak near Milot.

I woke up at 4 A.M. to a shrieking chorus of chickens outside the room I was sharing with Tifre. We hastily prepared our things and drove out of town. On our way, a smiling man stood in front of us waving. He had stopped us before we went to bed on Tuesday night as well, claiming to be a ticket agent for the Citadel. We talked him into getting the tickets out of his office and drove off as soon as he was out of sight.

In the star-pierced darkness above Milot, the truck climbed the cobblestone road up the great height to the base of the Citadel, where four Haitians awaited us. One wore his national ID card around his neck on a lanyard, which is often enough to convince foreigners of authority and therefore earn a few goud for a fake service. They followed us up the path like a group of stray dogs hoping for scraps, attempting to prove their worth as guides by giving vague information about the Citadel's construction. Clancy and I were not in the mood to share this hard-fought moment with strangers, so we sped up and lagged back as much as we could to keep them at bay.

And then, in a moment, there it was. A massive ship of brick and stone, its prow black against the clear grey sky, stood hundreds of meters above the plain that stretched back north to Cap. It revealed itself to us just as the sun began its orchestral ascent over the horizon behind us, making the low clouds glow red and the lines of mountains to the east take on an ethereal orange hue. The lights of Cap, clinging to the crescent of the hook-shaped peninsula far below and behind, began to tremble under the competition. The stars slowly swept back behind the gathering blue until only the brightest remained. By the time we arrived at the gates of the great Citadel, the sky had swallowed them all.

The castle was closed until 8 A.M., proving that our research on glorious dawns seen from the Citadel needed to be updated. However, the door was open so our "guides," Clancy, Tifre and I helped ourselves. We clambered up the worn steps into the battery, where long cannons lay disused and gathering verdigris on the stone floor. This led to the ramparts, built without battlements and still lacking railings, where we could see half of the province that we towered above. I approached the edge for a picture only to throw myself back at the sight of the terrible fall I would take if I put a step wrong. Clancy, with the sureness of a mountain goat, went straight to the edge and set up her tripod.

We watched the sun peek over the horizon and then cast its golden light on the red walls behind us. Our complement of escorts had doubled, as the guards who live in the Citadel had roused and conversed at length with our "guides" and eventually let us stay despite the early intrusion. When we had our fill of photos, we went back down to the ridge that the Citadel tops and walked down onto the green-coated limestone cliff. A man drove a cow and a horse up the tiny steep path toward us, completely ignoring the morning blans. We took in the wondrous scene: the sun illuminated the bright rice fields below and the tangled plants under our feet as smoke rose from the villages clustered in the distance and the city by the sea.

Shadows were shortening by the time we started back down the path, where we were passed by the poor emaciated horse and its emaciated owner. The pair was preparing to bring less able tourists up and down the steep climb whenever they arrived. Close to the bottom of the peak, children beat a crude rhythm on drums and melodic pan flutes burst into a happy song, for which we paid a dollar. Women crowded us with cheap bracelets and masks, and a toothless old man blasted "Auld Lang Syne" with tuberculotic tones into Clancy's cringing face.

No money changed hands but we gave a half-dozen people a ride down the mountain in the back of the truck. The extra weight and the slickness of the stones made it difficult for me to drive, but I have been well-trained in stickshift truck driving by my father. By 8 A.M., we all made it back to Milot, where Clancy got a cup of coffee and I ate my last apple as Tifre finished his Tampico juice (he is not yet recovered enough from his surgery for most solid foods).

We pointed the truck back north and decided on a lark to spend our extra time in the rolling heartland of northeast Haiti. Route Nationale 6, connecting Cap-Haitien to the Dominican Republic, is a perfect road that is rarely used except by tap-taps and sand trucks. I was delirious with joy to be flying through rice paddies and past cows, goats, and sheep at speeds up to 125 km/h (78 mph), which I never dreamed could be safely attained in Haiti. The one hiccough is the number of "dos d'anes" (speedbumps) that the government saw fit to put near villages to keep traffic from mowing over pedestrians. Some are forewarned by signs, while others are not. It took a few stomach-launching blasts into space for me to recognize the unmarked ones. After some practice, Tifre was able to stop yelling "Dos d'anes!" every time one loomed in front of us.

A few idyllic Haitian towns dotted the road between Cap and Ouanaminthe, the border city. Route Nationale 6 became "Rue Espagnole" within a few kilometers of the thin river bounding Haiti. Ouanaminthe, although as frenzied and pleasant as most other Haitian cities, was definitely influenced by the Dominican Catholics and merchants nearby; the town church is topped by the high pointed spires often seen on Spanish cathedrals and the air was held by some Spanish tunes mixed in with the usual upbeat repetitive Creole music that blast from storefronts. At the edge of town, Clancy spotted a large white building with "Mercado" in blue letters on the side. We were looking at a different country over one of the few land borders in the Caribbean. And, as Americans, we were excited to see that we were beholding a duty-free shop.

Mostly due to our perverse fascination with new places (Clancy had never been to D.R.), we decided to hang the expense and the time restraints and cross the river. We tried driving across the bridge to the "mercado," only to find that it was a "borderless" market, like the many on African borders. We were directed to a different bridge a hundred meters downstream, where hundreds of Haitians stood ready with motos and taxis among street sellers and beggars. The truck had to remain, as rentals were forbidden to leave the country by the customs department. The immigration officer decided not to mess with Tifre's or my passport, as I told him we only planned to spend a few minutes outside Haiti, although this came too late for Clancy, who got an exit stamp. We crossed the metal bridge, passed the Uruguayan UN troops serving as Haiti's border guards, and looked into the river. A large sandbar marked the "official" border, but the river was clearly under Haitian occupation. Women did their laundry in the brown water and naked children bathed in the mud. The Dominican side of the sandbar was, supposedly out of respect to international conventions, vacant.

We passed through the gates and had our passports checked by the slackly-dressed Dominican immigration officials. They balked at Tifre's presence, for he had no visa. We pled to allow him in for a few minutes, but they refused and began to pull him back to the gate. I managed to throw him the keys to the truck so he would at least have a place to wait for us. I earned a nasty look from the officer by muttering a Spanish curse as I walked away. Clancy earned entry with a ten-dollar tourist card and a green stamp in her virgin passport; I avoided the charge because I had not "officially" left Haiti, but paid for Clancy out of fairness.

A woman in a food stand sold us two tostadas and a Sprite for Tifre, accepting an American $5 and giving me 100 pesos in change. We walked to the mercado, smiling at the absurdity of our adventure, to take a pie in the face: the mercado was not open - and not finished. From the Dominican side, it can be plainly seen that the building is under construction. A cheery sign offered an opening date of later this year.

Thus, we walked back to the bridge and exited the Dominican Republic, after Immigration tried to charge Clancy a $25 fee, which sent her into a righteous rage that prevented the legal theft. Our only import was Tifre's Sprite. In Ouanaminthe, I stopped and bought a bootleg hip-hop compilation CD and showed the boy who sold it to me that I was testing it in the truck's CD player. Another pie in the face: the CD player was jammed. I hope I didn't get stiffed.

Just outside the city, we stopped for diesel. The attendant tried to overcharge us for dollars and we were ready to drive off. Fortunately, I have been well-trained in patience with unreasonable people by my mother, and sorted it out by producing $50 worth of goud that I had hidden in my boot. The five Haitians hanging out at the station all laughed as I removed it; I answered by saying "Vous l'aimez? Ingenuite americain!"

We tore back to Cap (avoiding the invisible "dos d'anes") where we discovered we were 45 minutes ahead of schedule. We also discovered that the Haitian need to transport things by moto may know no bounds; a man drove down the crowded road on a moto that bore a coffin lengthwise on the back. I was still driving on the shattered road to Limbe, where UN troops were stoned for not distributing food a month after the quake. The town is much nicer than journalists and peacekeepers led me to believe, although peace in Haiti is always a fragile enterprise. As we left town and began to discuss the future of NGOs in Haiti (much to Tifre's boredom), a full-size bus attempted to pass a slow-moving truck heading the other way and set its course to plow into us. I swerved into a cutout as the bus missed us by inches and threw gravel and dirt into the side of the truck. Clancy yelped as said "Oh my God, we totally almost died!" and then continued our conversation otherwise unfazed. That seems to happen more as we spend more time in Haiti.

The truck climbed slowly into the mountains as the sun reached its zenith and cumulus clouds cast friendly shadows on the valleys below. I had never seen this face of Haiti, this gorgeous mix of bright colors and lush land resting beneath the rugged heights of Artibonite. We stopped several times to take pictures, as well as to pee and buy a grapefruit. At one stop, we were mobbed by women selling fruits and meats; one woman sanguinely held up a goat head with the bloody neck hanging loosely beneath it. Although we are both rather hard-boiled, Clancy and I both thought that was a bit much.

At Gonaives, the road improved again, and I got into the bed of the truck. I drank sache dlo (the bags of purified water sold for pennies on the roadside) and ate crackers as Tifre hauled ass down Route Nationale One toward Port-au-Prince. We occasionally slowed for photos, as the setting sun cast yellow light onto the water of the rice patties, creating gorgeous strokes of dark green in constrast from the rice plants. We reached the easternmost reaches of the Gulf of Gonave as the sun prepared to tuck itself in, and the placid inviting water glowed dark blue under the red sky, the pink mountains, and the lush green rice. The colors faded and disappeared as the sun's trail faded in the sky over the water and the moon smiled on our last few kilometers. I lay back on the mat in the bed of the rumbling truck to visit my night-time friends - Orion, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades - constant companions throughout all my adventure since I first went camping. I must have dozed off, as the next thing I remember is Clancy waking me up to make sure I had not been thrown from the truck on a bump.

We returned the truck without incident - with seven minutes to spare - and took a tap-tap back to Communitere for a few well-deserved beers and dinner at the UN base with Howard. We fell asleep muttering praise to the day when we crossed nearly all of Haiti and brought its soul deep into our hearts.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: Pestel.

Haiti: Highway to Hell

2012-01-26T05:33:00.007-05:00

Today's view from the ground: Cap-Haitien, Haiti - Tuesday

In the above photo, Haitians cross the bay at Cap-Haitien in a dinghy.

The second of the three projects that bring me to Haiti has nothing to do with medicine. There was a period in which the Clinton Foundation was essentially responsible for several government functions in Haiti. One of those functions was the development of access to cheap reliable electricity, preferably generated in a form that does not damage the environment. Through the Global Sustainable Electricity Partnership, dozens of high-yield solar panels were donated by their manufacturers to Haitian government buildings and schools. Unfortunately, the Clinton Foundation ended their operations in December, leaving these panels sitting at a cargo depot at the Port-au-Prince airport. I was offered the opportunity to use my new knowledge of environmental engineering to install them with Haitian workers, who would also learn to maintain them. It is the project that is paying for the other two.

On Monday, those workers gathered at a clinic in Martissant, a rundown crime-ridden section of the city, with the panels and waited for me to arrive in the early morning to direct the installation. They picked up four panels instead of the intended six; where the other two went is still unclear. Electricians wired the complicated controllers and inverters for the system, cement layers constructed a theft-proof retention box, and I angled the panels correctly, surrounding them with high-albedo boards to optimize their functions. By the end of the long afternoon, everything was ready to turn on. The only problem was that the wiring in the clinic was faulty and will have to be corrected.

On the way out of Martissant, I encountered a Sri Lankan troop transport that had struck a ten-year-old in an accident. The child will be fine, but the incident drew angry Haitians to nearly surround the truck. I helped the platoon leader, who speaks no French, to diffuse the situation as best we could. It was another reminder to me that there is significant distrust among Haitians of the UN Stabilization Mission here, and the presence of foreign troops (already blamed for bad responses to the earthquake and the introduction of cholera into the water supply) is often resisted. To thank me for my help, the leader gave me three cigars from Jacmel.

The Sri Lankans drove me to MediShare, where Howard has my old position as a moonlighting fixer. He was arranging transport for a wounded boy to Miami when I arrived. Also present were Armadeus and Tamara, the paramedic and nurse who had come from Medic One – the other known effort to train EMTs in Port-au-Prince – to our testing the day before. They invited us to dinner at the Sugar Cane Factory, a refinery that is now a museum and restaurant near the U.S. Embassy.

We drove in their Land Cruiser, packed with new volunteers from the effort’s home state of Washington, across the city to their house in Tabarre. Their setup is reminiscent of our original home in Delmas 75, with an airy house and pleasant balconies set upon a hill with a brilliant view of Centre Ville. Armadeus and Eric, Medic One’s curriculum director, talked to me about staying with them and possibly taking more of a leadership role in developing Haiti’s emergency medicine protocols. It was all more than I expected to find in Haiti. I feel like an extra that got chosen for a major supporting role. Tamara was also kind enough to replenish my stock of “good will drugs,” the basic medications I always carry in case of encountering typical Haitian medical problems. I like the team a lot and I hope to go back to Tabarre soon.

I could stay the night, however, as Clancy and I had important business. At 7 A.M. on Tuesday, we were heading out of the city with Tifre at the wheel of our rented Ford Ranger. Neither of us had been to Cap-Haitien, the second city of the country, and Clancy had never been outside Port-au-Prince. I did not realize how little time it took to drive out of the frenetic filthy confines of the capital. It was only the same distance between Communitere and MediShare, a trip I took daily and often walked, to land us on Route Nationale 1, the thin strip of asphalt that transects Haiti and was named by the U.S. occupiers who built as the “Highway to Hell.”

At 7:30 A.M., we saw the bay that Haiti holds in its gaping occidental mouth. It was a dark blue, the same color as the newborn night sky, streaked with the yellow of shoals close to the calm surface. There were only a few buildings on the sides of the roads – the usual stores and service stations found in Port-au-Prince, but smaller and distributed farther apart in the tan grasses of the coastal plain. We could also see farther than usual, as the thick smog that plagues Port-au-Prince is contained close to the city, and the mountains of central Haiti towered close and clear, humbling our perceptions of the wrecked land.

There is a construction site not far from the city, the purpose of which is unclear, that incorporates the infamous bogs and swamps where the Duvaliers’ henchmen dumped the bodies of their adversaries during one of the saddest times in Haitian history. Many of Tifre’s generation still remember these lands and are uncomfortable within them, as family and friends unwillingly found their final resting place there. As a distraction from this solemn gravesite turned workplace, fat palm trees bear a red band topped by a blue band, most of which were put there after the election of Aristide ended the uncertainty of terror of that era (the Duvalier-era flag was black and red, and Aristide’s election saw it changed back to blue and red). I noticed the phenomenon for the length of the trip to come.

We quickly passed Wahoo Beach, the swim spot nearest to the capital city, and found ourselves in the heartland of Haiti. The province of Saint-Marc holds many of the rice paddies that provide Haitians with sustenance, and they stretched on both sides of the raised highway to the feet of the mountains and the lips of the sea. The deep green, reminiscent of algae or the glow of distant planets, jutted out in thin wisps around thin palm trees and stunted bushes. Dark bodies and animals showed their upper halves over the crops as they wandered and worked the placid squares of farmland. The happy towns that punctuated our drive every fifteen minutes or so seemed like rude interruptions in a verdant land that could go on forever.

This lasted the whole way up the coast of the bay to Gonaives, Haiti’s third city. Agricultural failures in the northern countryside drove many people to the outskirts of the place, creating massive shantytowns full of idle Haitians desperate for work or aid – most of them found neither. Gonaives is a pleasant place, but the degradation of the land and its spirit is palpable outside the passable city center. As Route National 1 faded from pristine blacktop to perforated gravel, we saw thousands of people milling about a marketplace in search of life’s necessities. Only a few would find it.

The land changed as dramatically as the road. We were entering the craggy Artibonite River Valley, the arteries of the fertile land below. Winter’s drought had baked the riverbed dry in places, but the river still forced its way along our road. Hills bore shacks and hovels, from which people walked carrying bags and boxes on their heads to and from the markets. The road went up and down, side to side, full of pocks and potholes that were relatively easy to avoid. Between us and the river, palms, citrus trees, and towering conifers shaded us and turned the sky green.

After a few miles, the road took a turn for the worse, revealing deep faults in its foundation and maintenance as it strung between mountains and over ridges bearing golden stalks of sugar cane and long strands of green vine. From my position in the bed of the truck, I could look up and down the slopes as we gingerly crossed them beside stubborn motorcycles and fat rigs bearing water and bottles. After another stretch, the road got even worse – barely navigable over 20 miles per hour – and the land bowed into gentle valleys coated with thick greenery anchored around fat old trees. Towns grew smaller and fewer, often boasting only a school and a handful of shops or garages. I avoided staring at mechanics’ work, as open welding shot streaks of white lightning into our view.

The land flattened entirely after Limbe, and this led to the exurbs of Cap-Haitien and the site of the new industrial park, which is trumpeted in photos and texts of billboards and magazines as the first step towards a prosperous future for Haiti. Cap itself is quite small and manageable compared to Port-au-Prince. Its center is on a grid, cut into a crescent by the hook-shaped cape for which it is named. The size, however, does not translate to quiet. The same cacophonous chaos that defines Haitian cities embraces Cap’s alleys and avenues. Clancy, on her first drive in Haiti, honked warnings and wended between rogue motorcycle drivers and the monolithic buses and trucks that forced their way across town.

Tifre got directions to the Hotel Roi Christophe, our first stop in the city. It is an 18^th-century plantation house that has been converted into a lovely open-air restaurant and hotel that makes even the luxurious Oloffson look comparatively seedy. We got good Creole food and walked through the streets nearby, which dissect a curious combination of buildings. Cap, unlike Port-au-Prince, was never destroyed en masse. Early French colonial houses and warehouses still stand from the 17^th century, although most have fallen into ruin and are occupied by tradesmen and squatters. These are surrounded by other buildings from other eras, including the modern practices of creating ornate bannisters and balconies simply from casting cement. The central square of Cap, between a 19^th-century mansion and a giant Catholic church, reminded me of the park in front of Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace when it was still a happy open public space before the earthquake. Clancy and I both questioned our inability to come to such a vibrant city and realize how alive and wonderful Haiti still is.

Tifre drove us over the northern hills, where we saw Cap glowing under the lowered sun, to the beaches of Labadee. I had read of this place, partially because of cruise lines’ controversial choice to land there after the quake as it is the only place in Haiti that is frequented by such tours. It was hard for me to believe that Labadee was that nice. I was completely wrong. Our first view of the string of shoreline confounded us. The water emitting from the bottom of the hills was the same timeless blue as the bay near Port-au-Prince, but flecked by the foam of distant breakers and waves. We parked the truck on a ridge near the water and hiked down the coral scree as the sun met the mountains behind us, gilded by the sun setting behind them. The rock formations, weathered and eroded by the ocean, were burnished into polychromatic glory. Clancy and I were visibly thrilled and ready to move to Cap, perhaps to open an import-export business or any other excuse to never have to leave such a magical place. It is Ireland. It is Bali. It is Uganda. It is all places and no place. Such is Haiti.

I got to drive the truck back over the mountain through Cap into the plain south of the bay on a road peppered by shops and schools. A convoy of white UN transports clustered around the Chilean base, lousing traffic and creating some tight spots. Tifre led us near Milot, where he had his recent surgery, and had us stop at a mission guest house where he knew someone. His friend was not there so we pressed on into Milot proper, just below the massive Citadel. The castle was built two hundred years ago - at the expense of tens of thousands of Haitian lives - to humble a possible French re-invasion, which never came. It is one of the few man-made tourist attractions in Haiti, and Clancy and I had read much about it.

Milot's main street was dark save for lanterns and candles in the street, and the stars twinkled brilliantly above. When the men who ran the guest house learned that two blans had come to stay, they leapt into action and fired the main generator for the town. Lights erupted into the street, dimming the stars, and the noise of radios and TVs interrupted the blanket of chatters in the evening air. We went onto the third floor of the building, over a concert hall and a set of offices, to find a lovely white room that could be a frat pad in Panama City where two Haitians were rigging a big-screen TV to play a pirated copy of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. Clancy and I marvelled that our arrival was enough for the town to turn itself on.

We went to bed early, after a beer and part of my cigar, to prepare for the long pre-dawn trek up the foreboding road to the Citadel, where history promised us a morning to remember.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: The Citadel.

Haiti: A Phoenix from the Rubble

2012-01-23T14:13:00.005-05:00

Today's view from the ground: Port-au-Prince, Haiti

In the above photo, a trio of children in Cite Solidarite, near my alma mater Project Medishare, mug for the white man holding a camera.

Life happens and plans change. Haiti is a place that is famous for foiling the best intentions by throwing the unexpected at the unprepared. It's easy to lose hope and let Haitian problems fade into oblivion because they are so numerous. It is in this atmosphere that the smallest advance can lead to a broad verdant field of hope. For more background on why I am here, review THHL from November 2010 to March 2011.

This is my first trip of 2012, as well as my first trip to Haiti since March. Since then, I have been in Japan, Libya, and New York - fighting different battles in different places. Haiti and our projects here had faded into the cacaphony of cries for help that I hear every time I read the news. I didn't like how that happened, and I made my return to Haiti a priority six months ago. I let nothing stand in my way, even the large chance of failure. Three days after landing, it's hard to imagine being any more successful and happy.

The flight to Port-au-Prince was uneventful, save the acute stab of separation that I felt leaving my life and my friends for two weeks (I'm quite the housecat compared to six short months ago and it's hard to leave the house sometimes). Fortunately, my numerous trips to Haiti in the past and the crawl at which things change here made my reentry easy and pleasant. I landed, collected my numerous things, and walked through the stage of baggage handlers desperately seeking to help me for a dollar or two with cat-like deftness (being a housecat has its advantages). I was met by Bourdeau, a tall smiling Haitian who I know from GRU, who drove me the short distance to the organization's encampment. GRU (now called Haiti Communitere) has always been a fun place to spend time and I once shared many nights there with people from all over the world who all came to Haiti seeking to improve themselves as much as the lives they touched. The staff greeted me warmly and set me up in a tent. I dumped all my belongings and walked with haste to the UN mission's logistics base, as I had my first chance to make a positive mark in Haiti - two hours after I landed.

I once met someone who knew someone who works with someone who is interested in psychological trauma, which is a major problem in Haiti. In February and March of 2011, I worked with several people - mostly women - who were interested in helping people deal with trauma the Haitian way: sharing, conversation, and refusing to mind your own business. The community teams they set up to help assault victims and other grieving souls were quite successful and so efficient that the project was revenue-neutral by the third month. Through the three people who knew each other, I had set up a meeting with a social worker at the UN who worked mostly with foreign personnel dealing with their own psychological problems. She graciously thanked me for the opportunity to work with the Haitian teams and offered to take over the project, advocating for funding and expansion of their model.

I was stunned; I expected to spend an hour pleading for support and walk away with a handshake and - if I was lucky - the name of someone higher up to grovel to. I was also quite pleased that a woman would be leading the effort, as it was strange to be a white man in charge of a dozen Haitian women helping hundred of Haitians, also mostly women with uniquely female problems. Within the first three hours on the ground, I planted a growing seed in a garden and now get to sit back and watch it grow.

By the time I got back to Communitere, Clancy had arrived. She had survived the first two trips with me (November 2010 and January 2011) with an easygoing attitude and the unique ability to keep herself productively busy. We spent most of the evening catching up and talking about the jewel of our week in Haiti together: a road trip to Cap-Haitien, up the entirely of Route Nationale 1.

Saturday was the day to prepare for the first of three reasons I returned here. Gerard, his sister Gerardine, and their team of Haitian EMT students - called GAI (Gwoup Ayisyen pou Ijans, or Haitian Emergency Group) - were finally ready to take their qualifying exam. They had been learning and drilling for a full year, most of which they had spent with Howard, the gifted smiling medic who volunteered to teach GAI after our failed early attempts at rotating teachers in for a week or two at a time. I spent the last year putting their curriculum together and the last two months went into writing the exam, consulting with other seasoned medics, and translating it all into Haitian French. It had been a difficult process, stymied by time constraints and communication failures. I was perfectly ready to take a pie in the face by discovering that no one could pass my exam.

Walter, the EMT who had set the whole project up from New York, was in Haiti for the first time since his relief service after the earthquake in January 2010. He spent three weeks living with Gerard and drilling GAI on basic skills and giving them a practice exam I had hastily written (Victor, his medic partner, had also spent weeks doing the same). Walter, Gerard, and Gerardine met me on Route de Delmas on Saturday morning. All were clad in matching dark blue BDUs and sporting EMT gear. They were ready to work, which is usually a great way to get a job. We crammed into a tap-tap to see the place where we would give the exam: a church on the second floor of a building run by a Christian association of activist doctors. The doctors had also offered to proctor the exam and be mock patients in the practical skills section. They greeted me warmly in French and we all discussed the details, which Walter had already drilled them on as well. I felt ready to work as well; the seemingly aimless process of getting an EMS service to work in a country that desperately needs it and yet seems to reject it has been weighing on me for years, and I was ready to believe we were going to hit the target.

I followed the blue trio to College Fluerentin, where Kate and I had first met GAI just over a year earlier. The two dozen GAI students greeted me like a long-lost friend. But that was nothing compared to the welcome that Howard got when he arrived a few minutes later. His Creole and French have both improved incredibly in the nine months since our last meeting, and he had the students recite by rote the meanings of SAMPLE, OPQRST, DCAP-BTLS, and the other acronyms we base our diagnostic abilities on. It was impressive. It was also impressive to get Walter and Howard in the same room for the first time, as they had been working on the same project for nearly a year and had never spoken to each other.

Both men finished their drills of GAI while I attended to the quirky issue of certification. Most people who have spent considerable time in the developing world know that official documents still look much like the letters of patent carried by medieval knights to prove their lineage, festooned with ribbons, seals, and decorative flourishes. GAI had always been concerned that, since Haiti strangely has no EMT curriculum, their efforts would be in vain without proper certification. Since my previous political maneuvers have rendered my some official authority in the country (for six weeks, I was the only paramedic licensed by the health ministry), I decided to use it the Haitian way: do-it-yourself. I visited Megan and Ben, the current doctor-nurse team running the tuberculosis ward at General Hospital. Megan is now a good friend and Ben, recommended by Howard as a great guy, is obviously a great guy. I asked them if they had some sort of medical stamp I could use to officiate the certificate of passage (I brought notary seals with me, but had nothing to put on them except my notary seal, which is out of jurisdiction as well as irrelevant). Megan suggested I have a stamp made.

Sure enough, you can have that done in ten minutes on Rue Msgr. Guilloux just next to the destroyed National Cathedral. Megan had it done so the TB ward could give prescriptions and discharge orders, after she was told that nothing medical could be done in Haiti unless it was stamped. A man carved the initials of our effort into a blank rubber circle with a razor blade while a man speaking broken English tried to get my opinion on the possibility of Wolverine being real (this turned out to be a pretext to trying to sell me a bootleg DVD of X-Men Origins: Wolverine). I had to carve the caduceus myself.

At 11 P.M., Howard came to Communitere to revamp parts of the exam to be more fair to what they had learned. Although it took all night, I got the test right for Haiti for the first time. Yesterday morning began at 5 A.M. to the familiar tune of passionate vibratto voices extolling the virtues and mercies of God in the nearby churches. I put the finishing touches on the test and the answer codes and walked to the church overlooking the airport and the maddened green sea.

27 students sat for the exam. At times, the afternoon was chaotic. During their two-hour session of silence, members of other educational medical organizations came by to ask us about the curriculum, the test, and the future of EMS in Haiti. One doctor, from Partners in Health, came all the way from Cap-Haitien to see GAI make their move. After the written exam, Walter led the three-ring circus (the expression is inadequate, as there were actually six station) of practical skills testing while I rushed to grade the written exams by the end of the evening. A nurse from one of the other training programs helped, partially to learn how such a test would work in Haiti; apparently, we are the first group to attempt to put Haitian students through a U.S.-style written test.

By sundown, the results were in. All 27 students had passed, most with flying colors. With a 70% pass cutoff, the mean was 83.5%. No one needed more than one retest on practical skills. When I announced it to the group, GAI, the doctors, and the foreigners observing the exam all threw up a cheer that is usually reserved for the Red Sox winning the World Series. The students chanted Walter's name, Howard's name, and my name until Gerard finally got them to settle down. After we all said our congratulations, a doctor from the health ministry roused them with frenetic speech reminiscent of evangelist verve. The leadership all went in the dark to Oloffson Hotel for a well-deserved celebration, which outlasted closing time by more than an hour. We were joined by Tifre, Black, and Baby Girl, the loyal Haitians who helped us in the beginning, and Jen, newly arrived from New York to help celebrate our success.

Tifre drove us back to Communitere in an empty tap-tap. The cool air whipped the sweat off of us and I felt clean, light, and free. Before going to bed, I spent some time in the mango tree that twists up from the ground behind Communitere, where I stared at the stars and felt for the first time in a long time that I was in the right place at the right time.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: Cap-Haitien.

2012: A New Hope

2012-01-10T10:19:00.003-05:00

"Leave all your love and your longing behind -

You can't carry it with you if you want to survive."

- Florence and the Machine, Dog Days are Over

Many people have told me that the first week of 2012 was very difficult for them. I optimistically see this as growing pains. With this new year opening into great uncertainty, many people were forced to jettison parts of their lives that were holding them back from excellence. It is a difficult and painful process, one that I also took part in, but it makes things better for the future. If 2012 is the Year of Apocalypse, let's throw out the bad stuff first.

Even without Mayan prophecy, this year will see many changes, and people will need to change with the world. The 99% Movement is dormant but will probably blossom with spring. The hangover of Arab Spring still obscures the future of the Middle East. A presidential election in this country will be sure to leave us all a little more craven and foolish-looking. Suit up. Bring it on.

Last year was more diverse than many that came before it for me. It can be easily divided into three segments. The first involved Haiti almost exclusively, as 2011 opened during several groups' effort to supply the country with its first efficient emergency medical service. It was the third such venture I had been part of and we had yet to succeed then. We have yet to succeed now. The events that followed, all chronicled on THHL, ran the gamut of hope and heartbreak, throwing a few curveballs at me in the process.

The second segment was largely a cloud of jobless desperation that would not let me see very far in any direction. With growing unemployment and thousands out of work, the earthquake in Japan and the civil war in Libya led me to believe erroneously that there was still a decent future in field work, and it was hard for me to frame a future that I wanted. Every one of hundreds of job applications faded into the past with the "send" button; I can barely recall any of them now. I became more of a statistic with every passing day, moving back in with my parents for a few months and facing student loans with interest stacking up above my head. Between temp work, consulting, and the help of friends and family, I limped to the end of summer, when I finally got a job.

The third was doing the job and realizing it wasn't for me. However, I am past the phase of whining about lost personal freedom, soul-crushing bureaucracy, and mind-numbing boredom (okay, NOW I am). For one thing, the job let me clear my outstanding debts handily while allowing me to enjoy the full pleasures of Manhattan living for the first time since I moved here in 2007. It also has supplied me with a free education in the fascinating and growing field of alternative energy development, which has interested me since college, and put me in an excellent position to actually consult on political and social problems instead of trying to fix them with my bare hands with no backup. Moving out of New York and then back in forced me to organize everything I own - and righteously reduce it all by about 75% in the process.

I am still doing the job and intend to for at least a few months longer, but it does make each day vanish beyond memory. My body is not as steady as it was last year, which could either be my new housecat status or the fact that I turned 28 and every injury one has experienced in youth seems to revisit the body in unison that year. I am in a tiny miserable office with a group of people who never speak, and my only confidant and source of fresh air is my desk plant, Phil O'Dendron (pictured above). I care for him so much more than anything else in the room that I read half a book on caring for him until I learned on Page 71 that philodendrons are the hardest plant to kill since Audrey Two.

But in all this, I have found a healthy moderation for the first time in several years. The closest I got to it in recent times was in early 2009, when I was working at X Corp., studying full-time at the New School, and took a couple of weeks off to feed my inner masochist activist medic. This time, I'm working at my new job, studying solar power, and taking a couple of weeks off to go to Haiti and take a final swing at the project that nearly ended my humanitarian career nine months ago.

This can generally be seen as stupid, but it's also a vacation, or the closest I get to one. After resolving the EMS service's needs, I am trying some new alternative energy schemes on government buildings and schools, followed by a trip to a remote island I have yet to see. There, I will revisit friends, work at a remote clinic, and see the virgin Haiti that made colonists drool hundreds of years ago before everything went to hell.

I made this decision after a good deal of introspection, which has become easier as I am surrounded by silence nine hours a day (I've also been reading more and faster than any time before, even my year in grad school). This is a good time to close up anything left open from the last phase of my life. My mother told me two days ago that my work and my writing affected many people positively, so I'm trying to prevent my employed daze from keeping that part of me down. I leave in ten days, and I will hopefully be able to write about my next adventure in Haiti in a timely manner. If not, like Libya, I will write about it afterward. So - here we go again.

That's the view from the ground.

The Hawk's Guide to Occupations

2011-11-17T19:06:00.004-05:00

Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

One of my greatest loves of science is its ability to name things. Knowing the terminology of politics makes me feel how I imagined scientists to feel when I was a child. They could point at something magically new and give a Latin definition for it along with its commonalities with the dozens of other things out there just like it. I thought people like that were incredibly wise and steadily at peace. I was half right.

I have the ability when it comes to politics. I was well educated in all the different results of people coexisting and eventually attempting to dominate each other. So it was with great frustration that I completely failed to express how I feel about the Occupy movement until recently.

Despite my proximity to the protest, I haven't been all that involved. However, from my gatherings at work and elsewhere in communities of really involved people, I may be more involved than some. I spoke to doctors about the fundamentals of street medicine as practiced during protests, I spread the word of the movement to groups that were previously ignorant of it, and I lent what support I could to actual demonstrations without sacrificing my job and maybe going to jail. So it's okay to feel something. Here it is.

In New York, this has made everyone look bad. If we liked the protesters, we thought they would stay in Zucotti Park longer and be able to articulate our needs better. If we liked the police (by which I mean general opposition to the protesters as well), we expected this to be over a long time ago. If we liked or were the 1%, the 1% do kind of look creepier now. And if anyone left on Planet Earth still likes mass media news, Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly are the last ones left standing, so everyone may as well be as funny as them.

I liked the protesters. I didn't need to go to a leftastic graduate school to see they had some very good points and we need major changes. The financial world had repercussions throughout the world that it shouldn't have had, given how awful it was being to the real world. The future was growing the wrong way and then it stopped growing. Everyone with a bright idea for the future, far and near, has had it darkened a little by how much money mattered and continues to matter. This isn't just climate change alarmists. This is everyone. This is even the gas and oil industry. We are chasing the wrong dream.

I liked how most of the protesters were saying it. They were being observable and observant. After the initial dislike of the protesters by locals and businesses, the former died away and the latter was exacerbated by the ne'er-do-wells who end up everywhere. A lot of strong protest participants (not leaders, as they make attempts to have no leaders) were kind and peaceful although orthodox to their cause to the point of defiance. And let's do away with the exaggerations of the press. New Yorkers weren't terrified of these people. Everyone I talked to about this, from doormen to deans, said "They have good ideas, but. . ." Let's stop right there and admire that. It doesn't have to be "I agree with them" or "I like their ideas." How many ideas these days are good even when expressed from the absurdity of a tent city in lower Manhattan? Even if the protesters were histrionic at times, remember Socrates. People who really believe in good ideas are occasionally prepared to suffer for them.

I like police. They're good people. Anyone willing to put their time in to protect other people's lives and livelihoods with force and responsibility is worth what their paid or more. I work closely with police a lot. I speak their language and I've heard the dreams. As my friend said today, another 99% to consider are the 99% of police who are decent guys. If we really want to yell at the right people, they're usually not cops. This is from someone who has been struck by cops.

Raids of "military precision" like the ones on Tuesday are not engineered by a bunch of guys in blue uniforms with a phone in one hand and a hard-earned beer in the other. The ones who command the police are the ones who can't hear the shouting but still get scared of it. They are the ones who make policy. Although I would never obey an order to beat non-violent protesters, I've never had to make that call for real. I chose a profession that would never involve that choice. What was the first thing I learned from an officer? "The average police shoots his gun zero times in action." The numbers are nearly the same for tear gas and batons.

Police screwed up, first due to a lack of clear orders and second due to an overabundance of them. Several have been and will be punished, some for good reasons. And fortunately, most people aren't throwing rocks and yelling "pig," even among the ones who were being arrested or driven off. The police as a whole were embarrassed, because the entity of law enforcement acted embarrassingly. They tolerated some but not all, meaning they bent and didn't break. The powers that be could have uprooted these occupiers with a backhoe two months ago. They didn't. They were stumped.

This confusion was part of the mystique veiling Occupy Wall Street. Another part was the protesters' dedication. Everyone knew that no one there was well-equipped for an urban winter spent outdoors and felt they were valorous for that. And, of course, they had good ideas. Now, just like in a stressful interview, I will turn those strengths into weaknesses.

The questions outnumber the answers offered by the occupiers. Their ideas were popular but the methods were not. A great memory has imbued this nation with a great disapproval of anarchy, which put us off the partial solutions offered by a people without a leader or a party. A team big enough to tackle real change in generall-assembly fashion will always have dissention, a point unfortunately proven by the small enclave of protesters in Zuccotti Park. With reports of theft and rape being confirmed, the group was unable to be sanitary and respectful - in some cases decent - in a normally clean and polite part of New York, leads us to weakness #2.

The location was chosen for its visibility and not its practicality. Open-air festivals don't happen on concrete with gas fumes for a reason; there were more environmental health problems valiantly beaten back by the street medics in Zuccotti Park than there would have been in a field in Vermont at the same temperature. Even outside the city, the camp would have been Valley Forge by Black Friday. No one would have tolerated that.

Strategically, a movement needing to defend itself - with violence or without - should probably not be easily surrounded, a point well made by the occupation chronicled here. The park itself was not part of a good plan; occupiers admit it. Meanwhile, the drama that made it fascinating became its undoing in the shadow of people's dark sides. It also made it physically injurious to good people on both sides of the barriers standing up for what they believe in. Those condition make for valiant actions but horrible wars.

Now, we arrive at the ideas. As we already established, a lot of us feel cheated out of our dreams. A lot of the people reminding us of that were the people with the means of achieving dreams (maybe not theirs). I witnessed a scuffle in the 125th Street subway station today between a young occupier and a large man. I did not hear the beginning of the argument, but once it was being broken up, I heard the large man yelling "We got enough sh*t up here, we don't need your sh*t up here." Harlem has sympathy for occupiers of downtown, but not for white rich kids' nonsense on their own ground. Harlem was created by an occupation, one that took a lot of blood, money, and patience. The new guys are amateurs. Yes, it's hard to be a white college graduate these days, but still not as hard as other parts of the city.

Even if we are in the 99% (which, for your interest, is defined as a person with an annual income of less than $506,553), we don't like losing more of the things we own. Even if weren't the targets, the idea of a line over which you are a worse person does not sit well in the American mind, especially when the line can move with something as mercurial as money. A life without a home or possessions, as exemplified by the occupiers, is not appealing to people doing it all the time, let alone the rest of us. Social change is fine, political change is great, but this one would be financial. Most people don't like anyone suggesting we mess with finances. Even the 60s didn't get that far. Most of those protesters became lawyers and businessmen.

I can't name the politics of this movement. To do so would weaken it, as what it represents in all of us is what makes it special. It was the people who know and fear the politics that destroyed this incarnation of a good idea just as the police and sanitation workers destroyed the library in Zuccotti Park two days ago. The shame of this situation is that it leaves everyone in disagreement and disturbance about the one thing we knew. Change is needed. Change should be coming. We should be better.

That's the view from the ground.

Regarding an Amiable Child

2011-10-31T15:33:00.004-04:00

Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

In the above photo, the Tomb of the Amiable Child sits in the shadow of the much larger Grant's Tomb and Riverside Church on Riverside Drive and 123rd Street in Manhattan.

As stated in earlier posts, my family has an affinity for the wild and natural. My mother's love of the craggy slopes of Pittsburgh has often defined her purposeful writing. My father's decades-long love affair with the sylvan beauty of Columbia County led our whole clan to call it home. As for me and my many years in urban or suburban environments, I've learned to make do with small patches of earth in some rather unearthly places.

I can always be trusted to find the nearest piece of unused wildland wherever I am. I've found spots of Prospect Park in Brooklyn that would make you swear we're in Lumberjack Country. In high school, my route to the train to Philly wound through a deep wooded valley separating our house from the terminal town (much of that land has since been cleared for development). In my East Harlem roost, I knew six different ways through Marcus Garvey Park and the species of trees that lined each one in order. Since then, several friends have begun to foist tree identification problems on me by texting photos of leaves and bark. I love it. Please send more.

My daily walk to work consists of a few precious moments among the tall solitary pin oaks of Madison Square Park, but that is not enough to satisfy me. On each side of my office, there are sizable parks on unusable land. Every park in Manhattan is in a location that was otherwise unusable: Central Park has no bedrock beneath it, a sinkhole was discovered below Tompkins Square, and steep unconquerable slopes (other than rivers, the only thing Pittsburgh and New York have in common) form Morningside and Riverside Parks. A decent chunk of Riverside Park is so steep that no one bothered laying paths through it and it remains, as it always was, a fit place for no man.

That's what I love about it. When I was a student nearby, our professor would bring us there for meetings, often thinking it annoyed and disoriented us. I found it relaxing and invigorating, so we bonded quickly. Now that I have my own students, I am repeating the tradition, although not to disorient people. My office at the school is far too glum and quiet to speak animatedly about the future of great things; the great outdoors, or as great as New York can manage, seems a better bailiwick. The wild is also where I can usually be found at lunch - beneath the tulip trees or climbing over the wreckage of fallen trunks, now glowing with moss on dark rotting wood. Since this is an acceptable time of year to wear boots, I am well-equipped for my daily trek.

I am not alone in my wanderings. It was quite recently that I found a light path trodden all the way from Riverside Park's northern reaches through the wild to Grant's Tomb, a massive monolithic mausoleum built partially into the hillside overlooking the sanguine Hudson. Today was the first day I passed through all the way, much to the laughter of some women who saw me barrel out, covered in thorns and seeds, at the north end into the solemn scene surrounding the monument. It required more climbing than is usually necessary, and I am now noticeably soiled. Next time, I will wear jeans.

But there was a small reward at the end, which had previously escaped my attention in past visits to the crypt, where I also used to study and meditate in its echoing halls. A small sculpted urn, almost comical in its tiny size next to the tomb, sits peacefully alone at the end of a path. It is below road level, and the road is often peppered with the cars, vans, and recreational vehicles of tourists that dare to penetrate Manhattan this far in search of a national monument. So this stone is almost never seen. On the side facing the road, the pedestal is emblazoned with the words "erected to the memory of an amiable child," followed by the boy's name and the date of his death: 1797, at the age of five.

A nearby city placard tells the story of the boy, a child resident or visitor (it is unclear whether the landowner was the boy's father or uncle) who fell from the nearby rocks to his death. It seems a tragic and terrible fate, one shared by British enemies of American independence during the Battle of Harlem Heights, fought on the same spot as the first victory of George Washington and his Continentals thirty years earlier. The land was sold several times, but the boy's family's request that the grave remain untouched has been honored by private and public interests, making the boy one of the only people in Manhattan still buried on public land.

In the era of his death, the boy was in farm country. Alexander Hamilton's country house was further south and east, in an area now occupied by many businesses, schools, and apartments. Upper Manhattan was where New Yorkers would go to escape the hustle and bustle of hooves on cobblestones and the shouts of hawkers in the narrow streets of the young city below. Now, this place is just as busy as downtown, save for a few spots like these. The boy's grave is the place between the noise, crowding, and angles of the city and the rough, dangerous, wondrous wild that still clings to its side. It is of interest that the family chose "amiable" as the single word to describe the boy; a child who wanted to touch the wilderness, even as it dashed him away, is certainly worthy of affection.

When I first studied environmental science, I loved the idea of "edges." It's the term for the place where one ecosystems ends and another begins. They were like borders, that obsessive touchstone of geography and politics, where one power ends and another begins (I have photos of myself on the Prime Meridian at nine and at Four Corners at 16 to prove how much I love them). But, along with man, edges became too many. Ecosystems were split, mutilated, and sometimes killed altogether by our advance as a species across the continents, like the flattened woodland where I used to walk as a child. Sometimes it seems like we left so little room that we all may die on the rocks below.

The wild where this boy died and where I walk for pleasure reminds even those bounded by cities that edges are everywhere, and nowhere. The outline of moss on a dead tree is an edge. Riverside Drive is an edge, as is the West Side Highway below. Edges are so many that one alone cannot matter. No one chooses isolation over engagement or distraction over enlightenment. We all engage the world as we choose to and pick which edges to pay attention to. The world is the common denominator. And the amiable child has a gift we rarely see anymore; he was returned to the earth where he lay at his end, bound to live on in the last forest of Manhattan, a place he must have loved, his home forever.

There must be hundreds of stories for each remaining gravestone on this sliver of island that I live on. This place must have felt so much love before it was mowed flat and planted with asphalt and steel. I still love its ragged edge, living and dying as Nature means it to, and I feel the presence of good company across the ages.

That's the view from the ground.

A Personal Statement

2011-10-17T14:37:00.008-04:00

Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

"Alive in the superunknown
First it steals your mind and then it steals your. . ."

- Soundgarden, Superunknown

When one applies for graduate school, the personal statement is one of the most important parts of the process. Grades show where one has been, recommendations tell what other people think of one, test scores reveal something that must matter to people who matter more than I do, while the personal statement allows an applicant to tie it all together and say where he or she wants to go. This process was very hard for me when I was applying to my first master's programs, as I was working a job I didn't like and was trying to find a way out. My direction was unclear. As it turned out, the master's program I was accepted into took all of my savings from that job and then some. Meanwhile, it has yet to get me a job.

The job I have, which is partially the result of an entirely different and unrelated master's program, has put me in one of the more absurd situations I've been in. My employer ran a background check on me and discovered some of my humanitarian work. Attempting to check on its veracity, an investigator called former employers of mine, who told them nothing since I did not authorize any of them to confirm I had worked there. Why not? I didn't put those jobs on my resume, as they were completely irrelevant and tend to illustrate that I generally don't belong in an office. I was suspended at 4:50 PM last Friday, after spending the day trying to manually align three antiquated databases that were not designed to work together. I spent most of today trying to get letters of good conduct from my former employers so I can get my job back.

This somewhat embarassing episode and the intervening weekend has dealt a serious blow to my willingness to stay at the job. For one thing, I don't much like working with people who I can't trust (it is not what they did but how they did it that makes me distrust them). For another, the job is not as promising or challenging as the interview process made it appear. The biggest factor is the complete self-humiliation that now seems to be a fixture in the American workplace.

At Occupy Wall Street, a short walk away, many of the participants are not poor. Most are not unskilled. None are stupid, save the ones who thought bringing their dogs was a good idea. And, although most of the conservative commentators on the protest seem unaware of this, many are employed. They are not only protesting the lack of work available to those willing to work. They are protesting a system that requires a loss of independence and free expression, two of the core values of the United States of America since its foundation, in order to work.

Take some examples from my last month of employment. On my first day, my director seemed amazed that I did not have a credit card, saying "How do you survive?" with complete conviction. She then insisted that I get a credit card within a month, with the rationale that I may need to rent a car (two days later, the fact that I had my own car saved her budget several hundred dollars). After a week and a half of sitting at an obsolete computer in a windowless room, I lost my voice due to the lack of ventilation - a doctor found mold in my throat, an ailment that I never had while working in the floodwaters of Katrina or the filthy hospitals of the developing world. A week later, I was in the emergency room with a growth that was related to new environmental factors; the doctor exempted causes from my work in a flood zone last month. During this entire time, I had to borrow money because I had not yet been paid.

I made improvements to my employer's computer system, only to have the changes protested and deleted because they changed proprietary source code (the proprietor is my employer and, in my understanding, I was hired to make those changes.) Other people in the department seem so dedicated to the years-old way of doing business that they have completely ignored changes in the marketplace and dislike any new ideas that are coming in because they probably mean more work and they certainly mean having to learn a new way of doing things. Therefore, most of my day consists of doing work that should not take as long or, when that is over, doing nothing.

Most people would not complain about a job where nothing is done, but I am a hard worker and I showed up to play. The more I talk to other people, here and elsewhere, the more I realize that an increasing number of workers are facing the same situation. It's not that they're not being paid. It's not that they don't have a future. They feel like they don't have a present. They are not making anything. If there is a product, it's something like a computer application or a financial enhancement - it doesn't actually exist, or it serves no worthwhile purpose. Professions all just became jobs, and the jobs all became crap.

And for what? The United States is still selling its manufacturing base in wholesale increments to countries that beat and imprison dissenters a hell of a lot more than the cartoon of an uprising playing out in lower Manhattan. I saw a video clip of several people locked inside a Citibank because they were closing their accounts as a form of protest. One woman was wrestled to the ground by security and city police for attempting to leave. I am not entirely aware of the context of this episode, but I find the contrapuntal ridiculousness amusing. The bank manager was that desperate to save a little bit of his pointless business? The protestors were that desperate to make a scene? Meanwhile, the countries that make most of our consumer goods manhandle people like that regularly in post offices and at sporting events. In the words of V, there is something very wrong with this, isn't there?

I recall "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg: "I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." But this is a new mental and spiritual plague, one that has been a sclerosis of empires in every age before us. We have climbed too high not to fall. The shame of it is that our height is not even a balanced one. If one were to summarize the message that most non-Americans seem to draw from our activity in this great country, it is that we insist the entire world mirror our tendency to accept only a certain type of corruption and call it democracy. Our growth was twisted, verdant on the side of selfishness and stunted on the side of caution.

The only qualification that I will add to this collection of perceptions is that, until recently, I had a very specific and purposeful job which very few people did. It provided me with everything I need as a human being and as an animal while eliminating the need for anything else. I had no credit, no possessions of note, no particular responsibility to one ethos or another, and the impetus to not pick sides in almost any fight I saw. My brain was habitually expanded to accept new truths of life. I was as elemental as a modern man may get and still claim rights to the system. It was free. It was freedom. And it is difficult to come back to a world in which the work I did does not exist as it is sectioned away in a part of the American mind that we rarely visit to any good end. It takes great effort to keep my mouth shut every day about the sort of things that institutions and corporations could be addressing for the true public good, but I do it because I need to work. And now I have to fight for a job I don't want so I can get money to pay for things I don't need, build credit to buy things with money that doesn't exist, and serve people who are just as capable of serving themselves if they ever stopped whining long enough. In essence, I need to be domesticated.

Even without my recent hard drop into the mangled American dream as a explanation, these are strange days and they are unforgiving. However, this intense dislike of my current situation and the circumstances surrounding everyone's dismay does not mean a lack of optimism and hope. Most academic texts that reflect a positive direction usually include some sort of apology or qualification for their views, as if the world is ultimately bound for downfall and one should be sorry for thinking otherwise. I think otherwise. I have been given that right by many who held onto hope through worse times than these. My personal statement is intended to be a reflection of that belief, both in its content and by the nature of its existence. I am applying to schools again because, even though I work at one with problems and I am sure I will attend another with problems, it is worth fighting through the problems to better understand how we got here and - more importantly - how to get out.

In the meantime, I fight for my job. And when I get it back, I will do it. And I will keep doing it until I have fulfilled my social need for standing and property, never forgetting what really matters. So, in this time of intellectual and spiritual hibernation, I hope I will continue to find things funny. Sometimes, that's all we need.

That's the view from the ground.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-12T14:41:00.009-04:00

Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

In the photo above, dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters sleep in Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan this morning.

For nearly a month, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been plastered over New York headlines, as well as on television and numerous Web sites. Many comments printed in the press have been highlighting the ambiguity of the protest's message, especially considering their extended stay in a cramped urban park two blocks away from the World Trade Center site. Several friends of mine from the New School for Social Research have visited and taken part in the protest; one is living in the park himself. I have no call to go downtown anymore, but it was hard to deny the gravity of the event. I finally went there this morning.

Most people who work on Wall Street have a bone to pick with the protestors because it is hard to get around the area now. A few uncharitable banker types went as far as to call them a bunch of lazy useless people who screwed up their days. One of Manhattan's free commuter papers has made a habit of bemoaning some problem or other surrounding Occupy Wall Street, like the $2 million city tab for police officers to be stationed there around the clock or the traffic entanglements when the protestors go on a march (the soon-to-be-ex-head of the city transit authority also stopped cars and ran up a huge bill with a farewell visit on the Verrazano Narrows over the weekend). It's easy to ignore this babbling because New Yorkers love to complain, especially about their commutes. Put a bunch of straphangers in a burlesque show with free drinks and they will still find a way to cry about overcrowding on the 1 train or rising tolls on the bridges. So I went down at morning rush hour to see exactly how bad it is.

It's not exactly bad. Zuccotti Park, the block in question, is between Broadway and Trinity Place (Wall Street itself is on the other side of Broadway). Police barricades line Broadway except at certain pedestrian passes (anyone not used to that after 9/11 services, ticker tape parades, and elevated threat levels should leave town anyway). All the sidewalks around the park and for blocks in every direction from it were prefectly passable, even if a little trimmed by the barricades. There was even room for an hysterical cyclist to ride in a circle around the park screaming "Hey! All you a--holes who think you're doing something good for America! F--- you! All of you! Get the f--- up and get a f---ing job!" He did not look dressed for the office.

That would bother me, but the same yahoos were screaming "U.S.A.!" at the 9/11 service while relatives of the dead were reading names and crying. So I think they just like to yell at inappropriate times. He wasn't getting much of a rise out of the occupiers, most of whom were still asleep. They were lined up neatly in rows of sleeping bags and tarps, leaving aisle spaces for each other and passing businesspeople, never letting a leg or a bag outside of the proscribed line of the park. A man at the information booth on the west side of the park told me that patrollers go around 24 hours a day, making sure that no one is setting up in an unauthorized space. To this, a bearded giant next to him hollered "Do we f---ing look like we need authorization?"

They may not look it, but they do. These trend-bucking revolutionaries are there at the behest of the City of New York and its affiliates. Previous eras have proven that the city has no trouble sweeping such troubles off its doorstep when it wants to; some argue that they have already tried, with mass arrests during the protest's first few days and its disruptive outings. But the truth is that the city and Occupy Wall Street are engaged in a sort of stalemate. No one wants the protest there, but no one wants it anywhere else and no one wants to leave. No one likes what they came to say, but no one minds it much either. And, most importantly, no one has any problem with anyone else there. The cops joke around with the occupiers and the occupiers treat them with respect, even if they may not mean it. There is a great war being waged, but the sides aren't defined enough to pick one.

At 8:45 a.m., most people were just rousing. I circulated through aisles, saying hello to people and responding when they said it to me. I stopped by the medical station, where a decent spread of donated supplies (including a crash cart) was being manned by a nurse. He told me that most of the few medical problems were topical infections and athlete's foot, as well as a few cases of strep and worries about STDs. The FDNY medics came by during each shift to make sure nothing was getting out of control. "We all understand that we're on the edge here," he said. "One step out of line, someone gets hurt over something stupid, and it's all over. Everybody's being careful."

The breakfast line, made up of donated carbs from local muffin joints, was getting into gear in the center of the park. Bins of compost waste sat under a little grey-water reclamation box, like the kind we used to build in Haiti out of old crates and patches of grass. Donated clothing and shoes sat sorted and ready to be given out. Bins of books, mostly high-brow academic texts, sat in the northeast corner as a makeshift library of political thought. The northwest corner and its lonely sapling was decorated as an altar, covered and filled with best-wishes tokens from passersby and self-styled mystics, encouraging love and understanding. A salon was set up around a WiFi hotspot ("closed until powered") in the southwest corner. It all seemed quite pleasant, and everyone seemed to be respecting boundaries.

Each corner had half a dozen cops standing around, idly watching the inner workings of Occupy Wall Street. All of them had been there for days, and most of them had yet to make an arrest, issue a summons, or even tell someone to get out of the street. The profane cyclist was their only excitement so far that day. "Hell, I'd fight for my sh-- if it had all been taken away," one officer said. "But I also got through school without $100,000." Most of the occupiers were not interested in discussing such personal things. The fact that many of them are from privileged backgrounds and are too young to have much work or life experience stands in the way of the message, and that is. . .

That's the problem. Are they trying to make the whole world look like this open-air festival of an occupation? Are they trying to get jobs on Wall Street? Do they want the collapse of the capitalist economy and the forced redistribution of wealth under a government gun? We know a lot about what they don't like. We don't know much about what they like, or how they would get it. That is what scares so many people about Occupy Wall Street. Many of the protesters are the same people who thought it would be a good idea to raise a black flag over the New School in April 2009, scaring the hell out of a lot of people. They are perceived as destroyers, subversives, the gods of death. But their dreadlocks are so cute! I've seen protests turn mean, inside and outside the United States and even New York, and this one is not here to destroy anything. In the minds of most protesters, the thing that must be destroyed is something that should never have existed: wealth. And no one in Zuccotti Park is empowered to do so.

When today's Metro equated Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring (the two-page headline declared "American Spring"), I almost launched my tea across William Street. Arab Spring began with a self-immolation! It had spread across seven countries by its fourth week, the same time that Occupy Wall Street is entering. It was certainly not a pacifist movement, and the protesters had very concrete demands. Those demands included the death or imprisonment of their leaders, so I am fine (and so are the occupiers as well as the cops) without that parallel. Metro substantiated their sensationalism by going into the new use of online social networks and the occupiers' solidarity with similar protests in Britain, Spain, and Greece. It's hard to claim that revolutionaries stay one step ahead of the law using Facebook; the New School protests were cut short because security officials knew where to look for information: online. As far as solidarity goes, the occupiers should try to claim solidarity with some movements that have been the two things they want to be above all: nonviolent and successful.

And so, in classic THHL fashion, the view from the ground is that Occupy Wall Street is not as good as its supporters think it is and not as a bad as its critics say it is. It is harmless to those who seem to hate it the most, unless those people are disgusted by their own hypocrisy. Despite its status as a spectacle and its A-list visitors, it has yet to create any meaningful dialogue at the level the protesters should be at after nearly a month on Wall Street. With winter coming, they should be figuring out a way of getting above the street - for everyone's good.

That's the view from the ground.

The "altar" at Trinity Place and Liberty Street is pictured below.

The Value of Water

2011-10-06T08:36:00.006-04:00

Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

"The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao."

- Lao Tzu

In the above photo, an untitled Mark Rothko painting hangs in a chapel of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan.

I enjoy New York in many ways. It appeals to my appreciation of geometry. Manhattan Island seems naturally shaped to hold a city, although it required some alterations. Its few inperfections in this regard add a welcome character, such as the breeziness of Carnegie Hill, the overlooks of Fort Tryon Park, and the fact I keep getting lost in the Lower East Side because I forget how far east it goes.

My previous urban roost was Pittsburgh, and the geometry was far more complex. It is a very four-dimensional city, constantly moving and shifting forward, across, up, down, and through time. The uniqueness of each street and corner, every broad tree and squat house, stands out amidst the terrain and yet never betrays the original shape of the land it occupies. My mother's writing on this subject is so eloquent and poetic that I will not try to match it. Suffice to say, Pittsburgh has far more hills and valleys than New York, not allowing nearly as many right angles as Manhattan. Their one noted similarity is that their shapes are dependent upon water.

Beyond the non-negotiable reliance that all life has on it, I feel I have a special connection to water. It is the subject of the first dreams I can remember. I am rarely happier than in the sea, near a spring, or (if necessary) under the shower. Its fragility and power still astound me, especially after the number of hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods I have observed. I drink more water than anyone I know. I cannot imagine not being near a natural occurrence of water, and I have noticed my own depression when I have been away from it. Water has no geometry; it cannot be contained. It is stochastic and pure, sometimes the only remainder of the wild and random natural world in places where it has been all but abolished.

In my new life in New York, where natural and artificial channels of water are always in the thoughts of citizens, I have taken to studying the natural sciences. After years of study and work in the social sciences and liberal arts, I have felt my shortcomings in this area (save medicine) and want to rectify that. I love the feeling of emerging from the veil of ignorance and finally understanding how things work around me. Since I am bound to see much less of the natural world for a while, I may as well have it in my books. My current job makes it easy, as I work in a science academy. I was hoping to audit a course on aquatic chemistry this fall but was disappointed to learn that it had been cancelled because no one had enrolled in it.

To whet (not wet) my appetite, I took a field trip to the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, a massive stone and bronze masterpiece overlooking Morningside Park at 112th Street. It is one of those buildings of faith that tends to inspire awe in anyone regardless of their penitence. Its stately Gothic nave, the longest in the country, stretches from a picturesque rose window facing west to the niche-like chapels behind the altar. I used to find little places to hide and do my homework when I was a student at Columbia. The bare rock alcoves were always quiet but never silent, always dark but never without light, much like water.

A few weeks ago, an exhibit called The Value of Water opened. It is a multimedia show spanning the entire nave designed to remind people not to forget the importance of water despite its ubiquity. In the exhibit's own words, water "is not just a precious resource but a sacred creation." Indeed, no religion fails to place water at the center of its values. The space is the perfect place for such an exhibit, as both the church and water seem to elicit an aesthetic response that bypasses cognition and goes straight to our core. It changes us in a way we can't describe or even know. It is something that makes no sense while nothing else would make sense without it.

I looked at a waterfall projected on one of the church's robust majestic columns, primitive paintings of icebergs, and several different depictions of drops (nearly all untrue, as water forms a sphere as it falls). But I was somehow captured by the image of three Mark Rothko works hung ridiculously high in one of the rear chapels. Each piece, untitled as Rothko preferred, was a dark mass of blacks and blues. I disliked their height at first but they did capture the texture of the paint, something often lost in the artist's stark representations of color. The viscous nature of the oil made each painting seem like a sea in itself. I did not think too much on this trick of light as I walked back to work. But for the rest of the day, I noticed every body of water in their free forms - splattered on the street, blown from a hose, resting in a cup. Each body seemed more like that strange definition we give them - a body, with its totality and independence.

Then I thought more on the name of the exhibit. The Value of Water. The element (meant more spiritually than scientifically; I know it is a compound) still needs to be framed in our overdeveloped visions of wealth, like "resource management" and "human capital." I wish it could not be so encoded in human terms, but water has a way of distingushing itself to humans when they have too little or too much of it.

I wish it was safe to go to the banks of the Hudson under Riverside Park and dip my feet in the water. I wish everyone could see and feel it with respect and awe. I would love to share the feeling I had when I was first afloat in a great sea, no land in sight, watching the waves rise and fall like the swirls in Rothko's painting. Nothing anchors us in the world from which we hail like water. It's incredibly powerful for such a simple trick of chemistry.

That's the view from the ground.

Lunch with Sam

2011-10-03T19:26:00.004-04:00

Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

In the above photo, a statue of Samuel J. Tilden watches over Riverside Drive at 112th Street.

This has been one of the first "chilly" days of the season for New York. There is a certain stimulation that I find in the cold. It is a drive to do things and do things fast, as thick air and sweaty skin is no longer an issue. I feel like I am sailing when I run (which I had to do for sixteen blocks this morning because of a subway problem). With those changes, the lackadaisical nature of summer is gone with a flurry of academic years beginning, Supreme Court sessions commencing, and Wall Street protestors getting arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. To quote one of my favorite Bloc Party songs, we are in a state of flux.

I handle change as well as the next guy (which is usually not that well), but I am having a particularly hard time of it now. After more than two years of non-stop activity in the least developed parts of the world, building schools and fighting disease, I now have a 9-to-6 job with benefits, a vacation allowance, and long-term co-workers. Ironically, the predictability of the venture is what mortifies me - the idea that the future will simply be the same as the present. The present would have to be a hell of a lot better for that to be appealing. The office itself is a miserable windowless hole full of sullen functionaries that seem to have no interest in my presence. They rarely rise, take almost no time for lunch, and work with a practiced banality that indicates they could be running a slaughterhouse with the same efficiency and verve.

I treasure my lunch hour now. And I have plenty of friends for that hour. The parks of New York are lined and dotted with statues of everyone from Joan of Arc to Balto, the canine hero of Nome. There are thirty in Central Park alone and ten times as many elsewhere, including several with their own little parkspaces along the northern reaches of Riverside Drive. My lunchtime ritual often involves walking down a busy stretch of Broadway and then west to the river on 112th Street. The illuminated face of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine watches my back as I pass Bank Street College, where the children hang off the scaffolding as their parents wrench them away. It's always a pleasant little tableau as I stroll to visit one of my favorite New Yorkers, Samuel J. Tilden.

Students of American history may think I've lost my marbles. Samuel J. Tilden has been dead for 125 years. We've obviously never met. But his statue stands inspiring high and larger-than-life, relegated to look eternally at New Jersey. The ironies keep stacking up on ol' Sam, and that's one of the reasons I like him.

Tilden practiced law very succesfully for decades but never graduated law school (except for an honorary degree he was awarded in the decade of his death). He spent his political career fighting corruption and ended up losing a chance at the presidency because of it. Tilden was the Al Gore of his generation; he won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote by one due to a backdoor deal that was supposed to heal a country still fractured by civil war. The years following that massive shift in national politics saw the bloody apotheosis of the Indian Wars, the stifling oppression of the laboring classes, and the exit of African American politicians and other leaders from the national stage for the rest of the century and beyond. His second chance at the White House was torpedoed by revelations that his staffers tried bribing vote counters in key states; it is still unclear what he personally had to do with this. But before that, when his defeat was made official, Tilden said that he could retire from public service knowing that he had been chosen for the highest office "as a gift of the people" without any of the bother of having to do the job.

But that's not the only reason I like him. I like him because he could do his job so well that no one cared that he shouldn't have had the license. I like him because he spent a lifetime trying to make politics clean and ended up pretty scummed up, just like the rest of us. I mostly like him because his bequest of $6 million and the huge number of books he owned at his death became the New York Public Library. That alone is worth the memorial, which got so tangled in family squabbles and city politics (the two fights he hated most) that it wasn't erected until more than forty years after his death.

His bronze likeness is gaunt and domineering but somehow still friendly and even playful from its height over Riverside Drive. Upon the base of the pedestal, his name and his accolades are followed by a simple phrase: "I trust the people." There are several ways of reading it: a final fingered salute to a country that took the people's will away from him, or a purely ironic barb that underlines his fight against people's dark side and his lack of success. I prefer to think of it as his willing submission to the gods of his universe, and his willingness to perform their will, even when it made no sense to a mind as keen and wise as his. Perhaps it was his "Keep Calm and Carry On." Apparently, his grave bears the epitaph "I still trust in the people," a statement made ghostly by its posthumous insistence.

In almost all of his professions, Sam was a good guy doing a tough job. He won, he lost, he lived, he learned. The eternal wisdom of humans long dead, their spirits encased in stones and metals, moves me in a way that no living word of advice can. After a person's death and the end of their age, he can be refined to an essence and his name can take on a definition beyond any of his gifts and experiences. George Washington was honest along with Abraham Lincoln, Hitler was evil along with Stalin, Julius Caesar and Churchill were a pair of fighters who would not accept defeat, and Samuel J. Tilden, for his all his successes and failures, never lost who he was: a servant of the people.

And so, even as I spend my days in an office and not fighting my usual fights, I will remember what I have done and how to do it again. It's a shame that I'm making more as an office stiff than I did most of the time as a disaster relief worker. That makes no sense to me. But I have little choice but to trust in the people.

That's the view from the ground.

Submarines, Deep Cleans, and Trampolines

2011-09-17T08:04:00.001-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Espy, Pennsylvania

In the above photo, volunteers shovel mud out of the South Bloomsburg home of noted baseball coach John Babb Thursday morning after the south wall collapsed during last week's flood. The house was condemned later that day.

Thursday morning brought me to the side of Bloomsburg that faces the Susquehanna. Like the Fishing Creek end of town, this part had not only flooded but was also ground up under the fierce current of the wild river. Nearly half of the affected part of West Bloomsburg is part of the fairgrounds; the fair was cancelled the day earlier and the local paper bore the headline "It's No Fair." South Bloomsburg's affected area is nothing but homes and schools. It was a horror show.

The inspection team roved up and down the streets as backhoes and dump trucks hauled the bulk of people's possessions off to be dumped in a heap on the high school parking lot. Few houses were not heavily damaged. Many had to be condemned on the spot. The current had swept them off of their foundations, claimed a wall or two, or left several feet of standing water in the basements. A crew of twenty spent all morning trying to save the 11th Street house that belongs to a local beloved baseball coach, only to have it condemned just before noon. That decision came after a cinder-block wall nearly collapsed on a group of volunteers clearing mud and masonry out of the basement.

Most people took the news of the red tag with resignation, if not the relief I had seen in Fernville the day before. Several of them had been waiting for days to see if they should be planning a return or moving on with their lives. A few people who had spent their lives in their homes and survived earlier floods with them looked and sounded as if the foundations of their lives were undermined as well as that of their houses. Agape wisely had a group of crisis counselors, including my mother, ready to listen to some of the heartbreaking stories coming out of the south side of town.

West Bloomsburg was getting worse. The inspectors had already been through there, and the time had come for tough decisions. I stopped in on a woman on West Main Street who had walled herself into her second floor with her four cats. She showed me around the first floor, with its beautiful tongue-and-groove paneling, old solid-wood furniture, and an upright piano. Most of it was going to be thrown away. She had cleverly stood a HEPA filter against a box fan to avoid the expensive air filters people were using to keep their first floors safe. In her case, it was too late. Mold was already appearing in the walls and cabinets as dust from the drying mud blew in and out. To make it worse, she is asthmatic. I warned her to wear a mask and take several outdoor breaks while she packed up what she could save. She mostly needed someone who didn't live there to come in and give her a fresh opinion on the place. Even though mine wasn't positive, she seemed relieved. I have become a crisis counselor for houses.

As we were talking, a man I knew from years ago came in from the back porch without knocking. West Bloomsburg has always been that kind of neighborhood. He asked to borrow a roll of duct tape. He then showed us why: he was putting a "For Sale By Owner" sign on his front door. The woman I was talking to shortly followed suit. Some property speculators have already begun to make handshake deals, relieving flood-weary residents of their water-logged homes for the price of a new car. Most people here wouldn't sell at such a low rate except for their exhaustion, which was a problem in 2006.

Most of the houses I saw condemned this week may have survived even Lee's record flooding if it were not for shoddy construction and repair work done five years ago. Many people, desperate to return home and not go through the trouble of moving out for proper renovation, hired contractors from out of state with their government disaster subsidies to put in new walls and utilities that would just make it past the hurried inspections that followed. I found Styrofoam used in place of Fiberglass for insulation, two-by-fours spaced too far apart replacing plaster and lath, and - the granddaddy of construction no-nos - cracks and missing pieces of foundations, filled in (if at all) improperly with the wrong materials. Many houses, some more than a century old, got the ax this week because of a shortsighted job done half a decade ago. After Katrina, when the same thing was happening on the Gulf, we called the offending contractors "submarines," as they popped up to do the job and then disappeared, avoiding responsibility later.

A team was pulling plaster and lath out of a century-old house on West First Street which had been spared the red tag. Inside the walls, I found a brown newspaper - the North American, a Philadelphia publication that became the syndicate of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short career as a journalist and Ernest Hemingway's coverage of the Spanish Civil War. That was all still to come when this paper had been nailed to the wall. It was from 1905 and bore stories about President Theodore Roosevelt's policies and the Russo-Japanese War. I was in the wrong crowd to fascinate others with the find, but took the liberty of snapping a few photos before the paper turned to dust in my hand.

I then stopped at The Crimson Lion, Main Street's hookah lounge, where Rachel (who survived a car accident just before the flood) made me a butter beer, a warm combination of cream and cinnamon that helped clear out my ailing nose. I had one more day in which I needed to breathe through masks and dust.

Yesterday, I was sent to Espy, the long line of a town between Bloomsburg and Berwick along the Susquehanna's northern bank. Few buildings were spared damage, and my trip there was when I hit the "Katrina watermark," an expression some psychotraumatologists use for when someone has had enough of this type of situation.

As you can see above, every house on Old Berwick Road had a stack of ruined possessions waiting on the shoulder to be collected and carted off. Most basements had water and mud in them. Many people were dismayed to see their private lives collected in a public pile about to be destroyed further. The smell hanging in the wet air is one that will always remind me of New Orleans' Elysian Field Avenue and the destruction we saw there. A beautiful Victorian home in Espy, built in 1864, had scooted off its base and had to be condemned despite the woeful objection of the owner. It broke our hearts to do it, but any attempt to make it habitable would not be covered by the insurance and there is no room for error when the decision is made for someone to live there safely. Fortunately, most houses in Espy can be repaired.

An Agape crew of teenagers from Benton, the town nearest to our home, were enthusiastically helping clear out mud, appliances, and possessions. In one house, they removed a washer, a dryer, two water heaters, a tool stand, a set of shelves, and hundreds of gallons of mud and water. In another, they removed hundreds of old toys from a basement, including a small trampoline, which was very useful in increasing the bounce factor on throwing things away from a long distance.

Everyone had been working long enough that it was necessary to laugh. One person had a sign outside his filth-ridden home saying "Welcome to the Mud Pit. Please wipe your feet." One of the Benton people said "What, on the way out?" Benton itself got heavily damaged in the flooding of Fishing Creek, but most people have their affairs under control and the locals are already helping elsewhere. It reminded me that I had never seen such a concerted local effort, although I admit I am rarely in situations where help from elsewhere is not there (I am usually part of the help from elsewhere). It is not just that people know what they are doing. It is that they are used to doing what is necessary and neither expecting nor waiting for help. Dad calls it "the real rugged individualism," as opposed to the kind we see on television. It will take a long time to recover from Lee, but it will happen.

The inspection teams calculated that Lee destroyed more than 1000 homes and damaged 9000 more in Columbia County alone. Although the county is one of the least populous in the Susquehanna River Valley, it bore the most destruction. It is one of the prices of having such beautiful waterways: they occasionally come up to visit. Relief continues as the nights get colder. Hopefully, recovery is not too far around the corner.

That's the view from the ground.

Flood Mud - with No Blood

2011-09-14T21:16:00.011-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania

In the above photo, flags are hung on the porch of a house on West First Street in West Bloomsburg after the owner cleared it of the appliances and possessions ruined by Tropical Storm Lee.

It's a rare day in which people are grateful when I tell them their houses will be demolished. It's also unlikely that the day would end with me throwing mud at sorority girls. Natural disasters do strange things to people.

Dad and I went to an early breakfast at Orangeville's Creekside Restaurant, where we go all the time. We read the local updates on the aftermath of Tropical Storm Lee in the paper, including a few reports of looting. It's not like anything that happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Most of our local highwaymen are making off with scrap metal and drowned appliances that have been stacked on the curbs outside ruined houses. The largest problem is that emergency management officials and assessors need to record what was in the houses for insurance reasons before it is taken away. In Columbia County, thieves are lucky not to get shot.

A man sat next to us at the counter who had lost most of his possessions in the flood. Most of his tools and all of his furniture was destroyed. He pleasantly read the paper beside me and took some time to make the waitress feel better about a family problem. If she hadn't asked about his cleaning, he never would have mentioned it. The man's neighbor had to be evacuated on a National Guard helicopter last week because he had refused to leave when he was warned to. The helicopter crew let him take less than he would have saved if he had just driven away when the word came to leave two days earlier.

I drove through the National Guard checkpoint at I-80 and into Bloomsburg. This time, I continued through the second checkpoint into West Bloomsburg. West Main Street is still flaked with mud, while some of the sidewalks are covered in three inches of it. Homeowners were cleaning their flooded homes, pumping water out of basements and tearing drywall off the wood structures. Utility workers were checking gas lines and electricity cables, while a construction team ran backhoes near the washed-out foundation of the Railroad Street Bridge. The Salvation Army and a few other groups were serving food and coffee next to the police tent as soldiers directed contractors and cars through the dusty streets. Everyone was wearing gloves and masks, wise precautions considering the filth that the creek and the river left in the soil.

Closer to the fairgrounds at the west end of town, some houses had been washed clear off their foundations. A few had collapsed into the mud as if it was quicksand. Most people, even the state troopers, stopped to take photos of the spectacle. A homeowner stoically threw ruined possessions into his yard, which had lost three feet of altitude to Fishing Creek as it rose past the top of his windows. Behind his house, the fairground glistened with thick brown mud under the construction vehicles. The fair was supposed to start in two weeks, but the land is wet enough to swallow my feet to the top of my boots. Also, a few of the oldest and most popular stands were damaged by the flooding and wouldn't be there even if the fair started on time. In a heartbreaking yet prudent decision, the pride of the county has its first cancellation in 150 years.

Across Fishing Creek, Fernville sits just above the water line. Its main artery, ironically named Drinker Street, runs between the Railroad Street Bridge and the Red Mill Road Bridge. Both routes were nearly destroyed by the flood; the only way into and out of town is a one-lane road that leads to a gravel path behind the Wal-Mart near I-80. While eight houses were condemned in West Bloomsburg today, more than a dozen in Fernville are slated for demolition and more may be added. Ten feet of flood water covered the plain next to the creek, leaving the following scene in the town park.

Despite the destruction, a certain special air of humor circulated among the dozens of residents, contractors, and relief workers, possibly best exemplified by this particular request added to the scene by a man on Drinker Street.

Thank you, sir. You are a great American and your voice has been heard.

I also enjoyed a wonderful lunch in Fernville, courtesy of the Bloomsburg Food Cupboard. I sat with some of the residents, who were already discussing impending demolitions and new plans, just as they must have after Hurricanes Agnes and Eloise and the Flood of 2006. The flood plain is now notorious among state relief workers, and quite a few people wonder why they bother rebuilding. In Fernville, it's very simple: this is home.

One of the residents, speckled in dry brown mud, was talking about the planned girl's soccer game between Bloomsburg and Benton, played this afternoon at Benton Field. Since Benton was also underwater after Lee, I am assuming the game looked more like water polo than soccer, but at least both teams had the same disadvantage. One unfortunate girl, faced with scraping a cake of stinking chocolate-colored mud off a driveway all afternoon, was zealously offered a brownie by a well-meaning lady in the food tent. She didn't take it well.

Despite the fact that I arrived in their town to tell some of them their homes would be destroyed (more), the citizens of Fernville appreciated my help and had no trouble laughing about their grave situation. Most of the people who found out there was no point in saving their homes seemed relieved; they had been working nonstop to save what they could, and government aid will be on the way at some point. Fernville has learned to be patient and rebuild.

After a break in Bloomsburg for a ginger beer, I went to the far side of the fairgrounds with a crew of students from Bloomsburg University to begin clearing a mud-logged catering business. Like any small-town college, this one and its students have a give-and-take relationship with the town and its residents. However, no one in town, except a few crabby people who had their cars stopped by 18-year-old volunteers directing traffic, has anything bad to say about the students. As one of the fraternity brothers said, "we saw what happened here and there wasn't any option except to help."

We could only drive to within a mile of the site, as the roadbed had been washed out under the railroad bridge at Rupert. I know the place quite well, as I used to sit under the bridge and watch the train roll over me. In my old spot, a displaced tree now lies over a downed stop sign. It was quite the sight - twenty teenagers in shorts and fishing boots hauling shovels and buckets over the ruined road to a huge old barn. The half-dozen people already working inside stared down at us as if we were an enchanted army of mice.

The house and the barn are both immense, and water had brought mud in both to a record thirteen feet above ground level. There were walkways to be unearthed, floors to be scraped, possessions to be hurled out of the doorways, and buckets of water to be removed from basements. Every time I tossed something out of the barn, it showered one of the girls below in fine dots of mud. By 5 PM, we were all covered in it. The owner, also the proprietor of an Italian restaurant in Bloomsburg, expressed her gratitude by giving us each a $50 credit at her establishment. With that kind of offer, I'm surprised the cleaning didn't get done sooner.

I ended the day at the hookah lounge, where I finally got to see my friends. One of them, who gave me a pair of sweatpants to replace my ruined jeans, is recovering from a nasty car accident in which she was mercifully spared most injury. The other is busy inventing new and exciting drinks and hookah combinations. It was very relaxing and satisfying to sit on their sofas as the street grew dark, looking at a town business I helped to build, after ten hours of inspecting and unearthing things that need to be rebuilt. This is certainly a place of great industry, and that is what will save it, now and forever.

That's the view from the ground.

Tropical Storm Lee and the Flood of 2011

2011-09-13T18:45:00.004-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Catawissa, Pennsylvania

It appears that a change of pace will be coming soon. After many months of searching, I have been offered a very good full-time job in New York and I have accepted. As my start date is next Monday, I am taking the intervening time to bring a rather poetic conclusion to my current period of adventures.

Tropical Storm Lee parked over northeastern Pennsylvania last week, dumping three days of torrential rain into the Susquehanna River Watershed. The river rose to nearly 33 feet, topping its previous record set during Hurricane Agnes in 1972. My father helped to clean up after Agnes in Columbia County, where we now live and which bore the most damage during Lee. Our home is undamaged, but large parts of Bloomsburg, Catawissa, and other nearby towns were not so lucky. West Bloomsburg and Fernville, nearly annihilated in the Flood of 2006, were hit even worse this time. I returned home to help after my duties at the September 11 Memorial were over.

Lee claimed no lives in Columbia County, which is a blessing. I arrived this morning as an inspector, helping municipal and state authorities assess damage as the disaster area makes the transition from relief to recovery and residents get their lives back together. It is a relieving thing to bring my skills back home, and also to deal with a disaster that is not tinged with death. As I left New York, I mentioned to my lovely companion that this is wiffle ball. "Good," she said, "because you are usually playing baseball with football players who think it's hockey." As well as the Quote of the Week Award, she also gets to be right. That should not lessen the gravity of Lee's destruction; this is possibly the worst natural disaster ever to hit the area.

Soldiers in the Pennsylvania National Guard were directing traffic at the I-80 interchange, and it took three times as long as it usually does to get through Bloomsburg. The center of town, including my friends' recently opened hookah lounge, is mercifully undamaged. The south and west, where the Susquehanna meets Fishing Creek, did not see such mercy.

As I drove closer to the river, I began to see the mud left on the street, the same clay brown that colors the water after a good rain. It went from a dusting to a three-inch cake during the five-block drive. Homes along Market Street had already put out appliances and furniture that had been destroyed by the flood in great heaps on the sidewalk. In front of the high school, a pile of ruined possessions towered eight feet off the ground. The band shell and the field around it, where the local theater company had hosted a wonderful selection of stories about the Flood of 2006, are recoverable but torn to shreds.

And then there was the Susquehanna, still high in its banks and brown like the mud on the asphalt. It is not a river with a friendly demeanor. It always looks wild, even at its calmer moments. Its height today is a perfect miniature of what its rage looks like at flood level. It is always there to remind us this can happen anytime.

Catawissa, five miles south on Route 487, is a smaller picture of destruction. The first two blocks of town beside the bridge were gutted by the flood and the current. Several houses on the north side of First Street are empty and ripening in the warm sun. Nothing of use remained. A woman standing beside a truck, watching as her neighbor used a pressure washer to get mud off the street, said her son owns one of them. "He'll probably just demolish it," she said. "Twice in five years - he's getting sick of it."

Across Main Street, the Catawissa Christian Church is a center of activity. The century-old brick building, formerly a hardware store and motorcycle dealership, was drowned to its eaves a few days ago. Volunteers were tearing out the drywall and utilities from a decade's worth of businesses, attempting to salvage the carpet and the floor tiles. A dozen adults, teenagers, and children - covered in mud and wearing dust masks - were hauling soaked pieces of the interior out, leaving only the original brick. One man was filming the demolition for part of a FEMA claim.

"We have to make sure the feds do right by us," he said. "We don't need much money to put this place back together, but we can't get cheated. This is why FEMA is here."

The few state and federal officials present looked ill. It was the same look that a man gets when his wife decides to renovate the house. FEMA is already broke, and its Pennsylvania state counterpart is not much better off. Although governors and President Obama were quite vocal and participatory in responding to the damage created by Hurricane Irene, it appears that the children of Lee are bastards already. No one knows how much money the victims will get and how much assistance people will have to rebuild their homes and their lives. Other than the National Guard and a few surveyors, the outside world doesn't seem to be all that concerned.

Fortunately, the inside world in Columbia County is first-rate. Scores of volunteers, recruited through a local organization called Agape, have been working for days to get food and cleaning supplies to people in Bloomsburg and beyond. The local chapter of the Red Cross, backed up with some regional assets, has been making rounds to feed workers and victims as well as housing those who have nowhere to go. Road crews are surveying washed-out road beds and opening new routes around the strangled county. The mayors, police chiefs, and fire chiefs of the county have been going above and beyond their resources to make sure no one is left out of the recovery. Both of my parents volunteered in Bloomsburg to deliver food, prepare supplies, and counsel those who find it hard to believe the river would do this to us.

Damage assessment for a quick and healthy recovery begins soon. I will be in hard-hit areas of Bloomsburg and Fernville tomorrow along with the National Guard, the local volunteers, and the dozens of citizens who are determined to dust themselves off and do what people around here do - whatever they have to.

That's the view from the ground.

After Ten Years

2011-09-11T15:51:00.004-04:00

Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

In the above photo, a crowd of thousands gathers just north of the World Trade Center site to hear the names of those killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001, read by their families.

In most of New York, today is just like any other Sunday. The streets are open and relaxed, no one is in too much of a rush, and the usual characters are gathered around the usual corners. It is a pleasant day, not too hot and not too cold, not too bright and not too cloudy. It has a feel of summer's anticipated demise, but it seems like any other day.

I woke up, put on a suit, went outside, and took the subway downtown. It was there that I got the first tightening in my chest. Two men in the rarely-seen full dress uniforms of the Fire Department of the City of New York sat on the subway, hats in their hands, eyes weighed against the floor. They had that look I know so well in people who work near death. It is the look that comes before telling someone that their spouse or parent won't be coming home or that things will never be the same in a few moments. It's the look that says "this isn't why I love this job."

We got out at City Hall and walked across town. All of the transit that goes near the site of the World Trade Center was suspended until this afternoon. Two 9/11 memorial staffers in reflective vests smiled and pointed us to the easiest route to the site. After that, things began to seem less somber and more like the thing that New Yorkers love and hate more than anything else - a circus.

Dueling newsies tried to press free copies of the Post and the Daily News into our hands. Three men were hawking small, medium, and unnecessarily large American flags. The T-shirt vendors had all types of memorial shirts, including one picturing the Statue of Liberty and emblazoned with the slogan "You messed with the wrong woman." A man in the crowd, obviously drunk or impaired, was screaming "U.S.A.!" into a waiting bank of cameras. Protestors and advocates of everything from job creation to the power of prayers lined Broadway, handing out flyers and shouting their thoughts.

I found this sort of thing upsetting, as President Obama had a positive message with this auspicious day: the inclusion of all peoples and their joint concern for freedom and safety. Ten years ago, everyone was American. When the earthquake struck Port-au-Prince last year, we were all Haitian. When tsunamis hit South Asia and Japan and when Hurricane Katrina came ashore over New Orleans, people came together. Something bad against any human is an affront to all of humanity. This is not an American day. This day belongs to all the changed lives of September 11: everyone.

Once I passed the outskirts of the ceremony, I got some first looks of positivity. Ground Zero has no resemblance to the smoldering heap of poisons it used to be. It does not reek of politics and incompetence and infighting, although we know that never dies. The monument is solemn, respectful, and serene. The waterfalls where the twin towers used to stand combine the feelings of an unhealed wound and a cleansing finale. The families of the fallen - adults, children, firefighters, police officers - circled the monument, finding the names of their loved ones, taking rubbings on papers or tracing the letters with trembling fingers.

Meanwhile, the relatives of the dead read the casualty list, solemnly and in perfect rhythm, for the world to hear on television. Uniformed personnel stood at attention behind the pairs of adults and children, each reading a handful of names and then closing with a short tribute to their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and spouses. I had the honor of standing behind a 17-year-old girl whose father was a financial analyst and a woman whose sister was a maintenance worker. Both were killed in the North Tower. They each read their names, the names of their family, and turned to step down. The girl began crying as soon as she was off the set. She then straightened up, inhaled deeply, and walked off.

Most people can't do that. Most people don't get the chance to find out if they can. I sometime wish this country could shake it all off and move on. But it's part of us now. It's part of what we have given to and taken from the world. Some culture experts call mine the "9/11 Generation." Some of my co-workers in the disaster relief community call today my tenth birthday.

I remember the morning of September 11, 2001, with the same clarity as everyone else. I had just begun college in Pittsburgh. I was in my second carpentry class when someone said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I reacted much as President Bush did: It's happened before. It's a shame. Probably nothing serious. By the end of the class, it was clear we were both wrong.

After 10 AM, the word came that a plane had crashed eighty miles outside Pittsburgh. As a freshman with the college radio station, I went to the press office, where a group of reporters were already preparing to leave. We tore down the Pennsylvania Turnpike listening to reports on the radio. I tried calling my best friend, who had started at NYU the same week, with a friend's cell phone every ten minutes, but nothing was getting through. I didn't know who to talk to. I didn't know who to pray to. As the news director gave us a lecture on how to act once we arrived, all I could think was "he's all right, I know he's all right." Fortunately, he was.

I remember the children from the local school crying as the smoke rose off the ground. I remember the amazed faces of the local first responders, who thought we were still under attack. Both of their worlds changed with that moment; they became first-hand witnesses of history. The headline of the school paper on Wednesday was "Besieged," and nearly every story we read on the air for the next six months had something to do with homeland security, Afghanistan, or the fallen twin towers in New York.

It was a dark and sullen time. I would never have believed that, ten years later, the anniversary would be a circus of souvenirs and local cranks milling around the thousands of relatives who had been ripped apart by the day and its effects. But now, as a part-time New Yorker, I understand why such things happen. It's this city's way of getting past things. It this city's way of remembering. The monument is open, the families feel comforted, and the people who want attention got as much as they could stand. Today was a good day.

I walked past Trinity Church to Battery Park, where my favorite 9/11 memorial stands. It is a sculpture called "The Sphere," which stood in the plaza of the World Trade Center and was nearly crushed by its collapse. It now sits squatly at the entry to the park with an eternal flame flickering beside it. Until tomorrow, it is surrounded by flags that bear the names of the fallen from the attacks, including the rescuers. For all of my misgivings about taking part in these anniversaries, I am not more proud of anything in my life than my privilege of sharing their profession and the family and friends who support me and help reclaim American's global soul.

That's the view from the ground.

Skywalker: Epilogue

2011-09-06T08:16:00.003-04:00

Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

It's all over now. I spent my first night in a bed, surrounded by soft sheets and cool air. I scrubbed the sand off my skin and out of my hair. I had a cautious amount of meat and some welcome vegetables. Morning brought me an apple, another lost privilege. I used a computer for as long as I wanted, discovering a few lines from my collection in wire stories, as well as some coverage of the battles buried in Canadian and European papers. The fall of Zawiya made headlines in America, as Tripoli and the expected end of the war lies close behind. Before that, Libya had been in a grinding stalemate too long to retain American attention.

The streets of Manhattan are hard, lined, and full of people that I awkwardly dodge or force to one side. It is a feeling I did not get even in the riots of Sfax or the chaos of Zawiya. It is the deliberateness of it all, the way the city makes a person feel. New Yorkers are always and at once kings and peasants, able to choose nearly everything in their lives, and that often paralyzes them as much as the imprisoned refugees. I saw a black man on 23rd Street, as thin as many of the children in the camp, wearing a hooded sweatshirt that boldly stated "Africa is the Future." I tried not to react and kept walking.

I also saw a woman in a burqa. All of her was a black mass of breeze and delayed movement through space on Madison Avenue, a more gentle version of the African women in the same clothing. Her eyes barely passed from her fixed veil. No other expression of sense or shape could be discerned. Were Muslim women first cloaked to relieve men of the troubled doubting gazes that women cast on a male-ruled world? Worlds without the voice of women are doomed. New York, Libya - they both feel just as likely to crumble over the decay their mirages are built on as they are even to survive.

My return to the States does not feel like the relieving reveille it often is. The world is too small; too much is connected. I read about four million Somalis, not even including the ones in our camp, poised to die of starvation. Eighteen years ago, the United States fought for the right to survive for less than half that number in Mogadishu. Now, exhausted by Afghanistan and Iraq, this country watches and cries, if it notices at all. The tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001, looms close on the horizon. It brings stories of doubt and despair back to the forefront of our minds. We do not feel safer. We do not feel better. We feel that the events of that day stole something from us and the search to get it back plunged us deeper into darkness.

In Tunisia and Libya, I was not plagued with such thoughts. Life was very simple there, even if the simplicity was harrowing and horrible. I do better closer to the margin. I can't deal with governments in wars of words. I sit at the edge of my chair and wait for someone to start shooting. But I do not wish for it. I have finally rid myself of magical thinking. Magic is there, but it lies in no action. In many ways, magic exists in the absence of action. Faith comes from the discovery that, when there is no reason to, one can still hope for better things and not be ashamed to do so.

The Libyan rebels bear many similarities to al-Qaeda and the Taliban in their fervor of faith, even with their appreciation for American and European help. I choose to believe that a new Libya will be a better Libya, a nation in which it is not necessary to fight in such horrible battles and outsiders are given more opportunities and respect. I believe this with no proof other than what appears in these pages. I believe this with my heart.

--- --- ---

The camp in Ras Ajdir is still home to around 4000 refugees from dozens of countries. They continue to receive aid from Doctors Without Borders, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, as well as other nongovernmental organizations. The Tunisian government still maintains its position of non-inclusion for most of the refugees there, although it has allowed some with prior authorization to travel through Tunisia en route to a sponsoring country. The military remains on the perimeter.

The capture of Zawiya became complete two days after the rebels took the heights, cutting Ghadafi's Tripoli off from oil and other supplies. From Zawiya, the rebels launched Operation Mermaid Dawn, a two-pronged offensive to capture Tripoli. The takeover was nearly complete on the twentieth day of Ramadan, the anniversary of the Prophet Mohammed's conquest of Mecca. Ghadafi was driven from his heavily fortified compound after most of his troops surrendered and is now in hiding while most of his family fled to Algeria. At present, the rebels wait to storm the few remaining strongholds of government support, attempting to effect complex deals with tribes and town elders in order to arrest further bloodshed.

Peter and Tom stayed with the front of Mermaid Dawn, alongside Hassan, Massoud, Ouled, and Hammou. Hassan pressed with the first line of troops against the defensive brigade that surrendered without a shot and became one of the first rebel fighters to enter Tripoli. Massoud and Ouled also advanced along the coast, but Ouled was hit by enemy fire and died two days later. Peter says that, in his last two days, he still refused daytime sustenance and died pure. Massoud stayed with him until the end, foregoing the honor of continuing on. Hammou vanished without word and has not reappeared.

Peter, Tom, Hassan, and Massoud worked triage at Tripoli's main hospital following the capture of the city. During that time, they and their colleagues discovered hundreds of bodies on floors and in shallow graves that had been killed and stored by government troops. Tom's ability to work with the dead became invaluable and he volunteered for mortuary duty with some of the clerics. Peter continues to serve as a medic in Tripoli, finishing the training of Hassan and Massoud as they work alongside him.

Fayed returned to his native Tripoli after its capture and works in the hospital. Abdulbakar is still working as a medic and humanitarian aid worker in Zawiya, receiving more training from French volunteers. Arthur and Mark returned to England. Arthur and his wife are enjoying the end of a beachside summer. Mark lives in Manchester with his girlfriend and admitted to me a week later that he is Canadian, saying "I can't believe you had the balls to say you were American over there." Dani toured Paris and London before returning to his home in Israel for a well-deserved break.

Youssef and Ayesha returned to Tunis without incident and, to everyone's relief, discovered their complete family was unharmed in the upswing of violence. Most of them waited out the worst of the protests in the coastal village of Sidi bou Said while Youssef, along with Dr. Hammami and the rest of the dedicated team from Aziza Othmana Hospital, remained at their posts in Tunis to treat the victims of brutality and confusion. Fortunately, they have reported few deaths.

Operation Skywalker cost at least 45,000 euros (US$63,234), or at least 7,500 euros (US$10,538) per student for a one-week course. By comparison, my initial four-month EMT training in Pittsburgh cost me US$235 plus a US$65 book. However, since it created the foundation for a Libyan emergency medicine course and the first six students saved dozens of lives already, Skywalker was well worth our time and the European Commission's money. The donated equipment that had been lost to Egypt arrived in Malta two days after I returned; it has been trans-shipped to Tunis, where Youssef can see it is brought to Libya.

It was an honor to be part of Skywalker, and a pleasure to see that its positive effects continue. The fate of Libya's new statehood remains a mystery to us, but as long as brave men and women with no hate in their hearts are at its helm, it is surely "mektub" - written.

That's the view from the ground.

Skywalker: Departure

2011-09-03T07:25:00.005-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Sfax, Tunisia

In the above photo, a protestor hurls a piece of concrete near riot police in the southern Tunisian port of Sfax three weeks ago.

This city is less in open conflict - or at least less armed - than Zawiya or the military checkpoints at the border, but it feels grim and sad. Hundreds of people are in open protest against the seven-month-old government, which they see as little different than its predecessor. Blocs of waving and chanting people, visions of white and brown tinged with red and green, assault the air in the main streets. Some face the waiting lines of police officers, standing at a lackadaisical attention and toying with their truncheons. They appear to be waiting for orders, but they are most likely waiting for dusk.

The event is so common that its climax has the practiced ease of a dance. The tear gas will be thrown into the center of the mob as its voices crescendo in anger and alarm. After the gas has weakened them, the police will storm into the melee, striking people at will, cursing, spitting, pushing, downing. The crowd's power will be broken and scattered to the hive of streets and alleys where the lucky and the brave will regroup to attempt another weaponless assault on the establishment. A hundred or more have been arrested and then released. Dozens have been injured and a few have been killed, yet no one has reported the injury or death of a police officer in this new round of protests, weeping entreaties for justice.

What do they want? They want what the other nations of Arab Spring fought for. Egypt's former president and his family sit in a cage in a courtroom, broadcast on television as a humiliated criminal. Yemen's president was nearly killed in a shelling. Ghadafi seems set to burn as his foes close around him. But Tunisia, the land where it all started, had its president escape to Saudi Arabia while much of his clan remained untouched. The revolution that ousted him began when a street vendor, younger than myself, burned himself to death to protest the unfairness of a regional bureaucrat. Now, the followers of his posthumous example bash their bodies against the interim regime's batons just to see their impotent former dictator in jail.

How great and horrible is the power to believe in something more than life! From what part of the human animal comes the will to risk death for such a principle? Is it the knowledge that others died for things to be better and that sacrifice cannot go unfulfilled? Is it the dark force that gives us strength beyond what our muscles and bones can bear? And how is it so restrained that it harms none except itself - that its impassioned foe remains nearly untouched?

The fight is gone from the policemen. They seem to ache from the blows they land on their own people. Empathy can rise from such pathos and devotion. Gandhi, Dr. King, the mythical Antigone - they knew this. Perhaps it is at work here as well.

We cannot fly to Tunis; it is apparently too dangerous, as protests there are larger. Dani and I share a wry smile. Here we are, outlander witness to the fall of Zawiya and we are kept away from a protest more than four kilometers from an airport we won't leave except by plane. But we accept: a flight to France is available from here, and it is at times like these when it is best to avoid any risk, no matter how small. Exhaustion and relief have diminished our guard and we would just as soon stay safe in our epilogue.

Youssef, still visibly shaken by the rage of battle, is returning to Tunis. Ayesha, wrested by uxorial duty from her beloved class of refugee children, is going with him. Their son must be terrified and will be comforted to see them. I try not to think about what is happening to the city in which I met them all seven years ago, the rough-hewn yellow metropolis that first drew me unstoppably towards the beauty of the desert and other Muslim lands. My friends are probably trying to ignore it as well.

We share a ceremonial goodbye, splitting a saltine in half and trading pieces of it to eat (salted bread between men is a lifelong pact of nonaggression). I tell him we could have done none of this without him; he may have preferred it that way, but he still smiles and thanks me. Ayesha smiles, her eyes moist in the dry breeze. I think I feel a tear on my face and find only a drop of blood flecked with sand under my nose. Even the desert, with this last bitter kiss, is saying goodbye. They wave from the ground as we board the plane, slowly turning back to face the noise and the smoke of their wrecked nation.

Another view from the ground: Paris, France

The airport feels like a different planet: its cool sterile look, its refrigerated air, its pronouncements of schedules in voices bouncing off the walls as loud as the Libyan calls to prayer through metal minarets. I rest in a plastic chair, forcing my body into an upright sitting position for the first time in days. I finish sending the last stories and quotes to the newswire at the appropriate length and in the right formatting, vulgar abbreviations of a complex undefinable truth. Our best hope is that the stories will excite some Americans and Europeans to concern, possibly action. The tingling of my fingers after using a keyboard, stretching my writer's grip out of its claw, reminds me I am about to reenter the digital age in full.

And all this because I left my broken computer in the States. The process of writing this all down has bound my hand and turned my heart like decrepit soil for planting. My hands are cut and weary from having them in cars, guns, and bodies, not to mention the damn water filter. They have been exercised back to a manly strength and my whole being feels energy despite my exhaustion. Not energy, precisely. Wakefulness. Like I finally started reading a book and it grabbed me, or I finally got something right for the first time after so much practice. I feel capable yet restrained, interested yet ignorant. I feel like a journey is beginning more than ending.

My skin feels suddenly thick and filthy. I had been pouring sweat through reddened skin until I held no more salt water to lose into the wind. I went days with hands dried to boards by alcohol yet I stank of corrosive dirt and grime on the rest of me. Slightly cleaned and thoroughly cooled, I finally feel how rough the last week has been on my body.

Dani is the first to say farewell, as he is staying in Paris for a few days. How odd to have been surrounded by the vestiges of French Africa and now have green, golden Paris just a short road away. Dani is curt, or perhaps just unemotional, but kind as he leaves us as early as possible. Arthur and Mark seek out the nearest equivalent to an Irish breakfast that the airport can offer us. I join them with a sandwich, not yet ready for meat to perturb my system. We say goodbye with long British handshakes and the offers to come visit. It is nice to have made such friends and have the expectation that they will grow old.

That's the view from the ground.

Skywalker: The Battle of Zawiya - Part 2

2011-09-02T08:43:00.003-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Al-Jamil, Libya

In the above photo, rebel fighters take cover after a shell strikes near their position during their advance on the center of Zawiya in western Libya three weeks ago.

The name of Zawiya comes from the Arabic word for religious centers of learning. They were lucrative, prestigious, universally respected, and offered their services to all who needed them in the taciturn desert. Zawiya may remember this day as its liberation, and there are plenty of lessons to go around for all that are here, and to those now gone.

Even now, after I am sure I saw it happen, I do not know if the rebels have taken Zawiya. The hospital was filled from outside with a crescendo of shouts, rising from anger to joy as they travelled from the south and scrubbed out the cracks and tumbles of gunfire and missiles. All those able looked or went outside. Men in shining sun-fired browns, whites, and blacks walked confidently down the street in front of the chipped and worn side entrance. They were flanked by battered cars and trucks honking their horns and carrying more of the fervent troops. Their arms were largely silent, save the impatient puerile victory shots into the unamused bright sky.

Cheers went up among the throng striding and leaping beside and behind them, a frenetic cloud of relief and joy. Many, including Hammou and Abdulbakar, unleashed fierce choruses of "Allah'ou Akbar" as their proud fists beat the war-filled air. Shortly afterward, a teenaged herald brought news that the rebel flag had been raised over the government center just to the north.

It was the rebels' fifth major attempt to wrest the heights from the well-supplied government troops, and hopefully the last. It cost a few dozen lives of theirs, the same on the government side, and forty citizens of the city at our post alone. There may be more losses on the northern plains, where the government troops have retreated to.

Cleanup seemed impossible and irrelevant. Our building was clearly wrecked beyond repair. A journalist who had been sitting under the table that I was working on emerged to find the wall behind him was on the verge of collapse. Injured people were still coming in both doors and through the blown-out window, some with complaints that seemed frivolous compared to the atrocious wounds that lay waiting before them.

The sanguine manner of a hijab-cloaked mother who brought in a boy about to lose half his left arm, an injury famous in Saharan lore as a punishment of thieves, betrayed the length and depth of the struggle. It was not surprising to her that the battle had taken such a toll. She may have already lost family. She must have lost friends. It seems that even the glory of victory cannot much alter the spirit here, carved deep into their hearts and faces and walls as a simple edict - "survive." Most have obeyed. The rest wait to be borne away, probably by the Boy Scouts, who have spent most of the last six months digging graves.

Victory may be temporary, of course. The rebels have been driven back before. Despite the bravado of the conquering heroes, they are ill-supplied, untrained, and rely on the support of the waiting city to speed the defeat of the troops and tribes arrayed against them. More war waits on the hard road east to Tripoli. The unknown is accentuated in the efforts of the ramshackle elements that took the heights today. But the city does not see that, and may never reflect upon it. For them, it is "mektub" - written.

I stepped away for a moment to look outside. Used needles, tubes, and shell casings made the impression under my boots that I was walking on fresh pine needles and the roots of an ancient tree. The sun was already angled shallowly, skimming the bright buildings with a few stripes of fading yellow and red. Smiling, laughing people lined the crowded streets, giving the impression that a sporting match or election had just been decided in their favor. I passed by armed rebels and their gated checkpoints, already formed amid the chaotic verve, without molestation. I tolerated intent stares trailing me and earned handshakes and shoulder grabs from delighted citizens, delirious in the congratulations. Upon the heights, I could see the sea and the oil depot, still held for a deadly ransom by the government, shining beside the glowing ribbon of road leading from Tunisia to Tripoli, soon to be sliced out from under the rebels' foes.

Two of our original patients from the south stabilized (or what passes for "stabilized" here) and we readied the bus, now complaining of several broken windows and a bullet-sized skylight, to return there. Abdulbakar boarded with Youssef, Dani, Fayed, and me, but the rest of the rebels stayed in Zawiya. Peter and Tom are also staying to serve the makeshift hospital. The moment of their fight has come and none of our caution and safety can deny them that. I worry for them, these men I've known for a week. I told myself last month that these students may not all survive this war, or one that may come after it, if that is written. Peter and Tom are intoxicated with the red-tinged golden day they shared with our new comrades and cannot give one more to the monotonous needy company of the refugees. They are built of more mercurial stuff.

I hold them close for a moment and let them go. Our trials have made us brothers, like Youssef and I, still bound after seven years of absence following a week like this one. Another piece of my heart is gone, as in the many lands before here, missing on the battlefield, perhaps to die. My reward is greater than the loss.

The road is dark and crumpling before our moon-soaked checkpoint. We will have to wait here in the embrace of the emboldened rebels until dawn.

--- --- ---

The supposed last day begins with a battle as Ismail, the leader of the checkpoint unit, wakes me rudely and my head rings with popcorn gunfire over it. It soon falls quiet, as the approaching party is apparently another rebel, wounded in the leg on a northern probe. We had slept through that excursion. His injury is neat and easily patched for a morning trip down the newly-secured road to the hospital.

Dawn has yet to spill over the horizon facing the new prize of the rebel's fight. Some of the men joked last night that they pray a little to Zawiya when they face Mecca, as they lie on the same oriental line from their craggy foothold and it is not much more effort. The ridge we stood atop yesterday afternoon will soon be visible here, its long shadow stretching like a broad avenue to this dark corner of besieged Libya.

All here seem to breathe easier and with more purpose since news flew here that the rebels "held" Zawiya. The government shot back a claim that they had repelled the rebel advance. But their word is hollow to most here now, groaning with the strain of too many lies. A gentle breeze rattles the loose leaves distant and toys with the fabrics of our clothes. It will carry the sun here soon.

--- --- ---

I noticed a bizarre absence of stars near the hour of morning, when the dutiful rebel fighters consumed their last sacred meal of the night. As the sky over Libya becomes an expectant grey, black blots of cloud dot the horizon up to our little fuming town. And then - rain! Tiny bullets of rain drop deep into the loose earth, shot from a cloud impertinent enough to veil the sky. Just as the volley seems poised to become a storm, an extraordinary trick of light commands our attention. The dawn comes, swift as ever, yet strained through an odd series of clouds and mists. All light upon us is turned to a magical hue; rose and orange wash all things, ever the colorless stocks and barrels of the rebels' guns. The soil punctuated by the raindrops likewise becomes this regal tint of warmth and cosmic fire.

Then, as suddenly as all these atmospheric playthings arrived, the clouds sublimate to void and a Saharan day, full of contrast and light, begins over us. The call to prayer is soon issued and the rebels unfurl their prayer mats, facing the sun, Mecca, and Zawiya - the three things holy to their existence. Smoke still rises like a djinn above the conquered ridge, a shadow of the battles still continuing in the north of the city. To the west, the lines of the camp are stark against the yellow sun blinding me. I savor these few moments of mystical temperance at the start of this day, bound to be a long one.

Another view from the ground: Ras Ajdir, Tunisia

We returned slowly under checkered light across the border to the desolation around the camp. It loomed before us as we passed the paralyzed line of trucks headed for Tripoli, probably the last to arrive there for a while, if they ever get there. The rebels' hand is closing around Tripoli's supply line this morning and most drivers will not risk the journey now that news of the victory in Zawiya has spread here and the rebels' supporters show their elation.

I took one last walk, wearing my bathrobe over my Don Quixote shirt and exhausted sand-tinted pants. My feet are stones in my boots even after I extracted them to shake the corrosive sand out and wipe my suffocated skin with alcohol. I burn and boil at the will of the saturnine clouds, offering no real comfort from the sun. The faces of the refugees, some familiar as neighbors now, peer at me in the mid-morning swelter, sweat dripping preciously down their faces from their worn brows. They wait. They see. I am done waiting. I feel the relief in my lungs as I am about to depart. They must see that in my face and in my purposeless stride. It seems cruel to say goodbye in this way.

Fayed and Abdulbakar accompany us to our departing van, sleek and white with cool air and real seats. I look to our beaten bus one more time; the men will take it to Libya to serve as an ambulance, along with Peter and Tom's gear and all our equipment. The bus cannot be denied its service. Its dilapidation and trauma makes it a veteran of the war already.

Both remaining Libyans embraced me and the others. Arthur and Mark both uttered practices "salaam aleycum"s to each and Dani used his little Arabic in a song of farewell words. Abdulbakar held and released me three times uniquely, a traditional farewell of his people, and said "may Allah aid all your works." I bound his right hand to mine for a moment and said "may you meet with no evil," an exaggerated yet equally honored response. I took the moment to read his face. His eyes are drunk with excitement yet his countenance is sober of mission, solemn and ready. I would love to play poker with him.

He appeared ready to pull me away, onto the bus and into Libya, tending the wounded with him all the way past Tripoli and into the desert. But for all we have shared of our covenants, we are bound by our own and no other's. We have each other's fraternal respect but we are not brothers. Accidents of fate and fancies of will make these decisions, but men of covenants can expect peace and ecstasy as reward for their duties.

We hear that the woman gone missing in the sand before we left was found near the border, dead of dehydration and exposure. The refugees are now drowning in sand as well as sea. They are suffering every torture imaginable and the world continues to invent new ones. Few are praying for a rebel victory, as the pressure of the fall of Zawiya is already being felt. The congestion on the road feeding Tripoli is slowing supplies to the camp, including the water filters to replace the ones I brought ten days ago. How ludicrous this war can be, even in the pantheon of insanity that all wars join.

Our farewell banter and light references to the past days, which seems perfunctory on all missions, was interrupted by our last look to the east. The chaotic field around the camp vanished behind a few pitiful refugees, Tunisian soldiers, and the handful of locals that remain, shocked and disjointed by the world's sudden interest in this corner of it. I can already feel the momentous energy granted me here slipping away like a morning dream, and my eyes suddenly feel tormented by the sun. Restless sleep grabs handfuls of me at a time and the cohort's words string together. Part of me wishes to stay in this troubled desert and remember as well as yesterday the great peace and serenity I found here, the inspiration driving me forward.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: Sfax and the rude return to the world

Skywalker: The Battle of Zawiya

2011-08-30T18:54:00.004-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Ras Ajdir, Tunisia

In the above photo, a group of Libyan rebels gather around a man checking his Kalashnikov rifle in western Libya before the final attack on the oil-producing coastal city of Zawiya three weeks ago.

A sandstorm blew across camp in the night. Great curved walls of sand beat against tents and people, brewing chaos among those who had planned to spend the night outdoors. The globes of light above the camp, lit in staggered succession for lack of fuel, became eerily diffuse as sand flew around them like moths. The moon became a pointillist mass, as if all the stars held a meeting over our silky hijab of lofted earth. It became easier to see people by the shadows they cast under the luminous sand as they moved so slowly that they appeared frozen by the weight the air now held.

The patients were weirdly wakeful with the wind whipping the medical center's tents, pushing mountain-shaped piles of ground under the canvas walls. It was hard to tell if the patients were truly aroused, with their earth-colored eyes slitted open amid their exposed faces, round as our lost moon. I took comfort in the thunderous rhythmic snoring of an obese supine patient, mouthing mysterious words in his corner of the trembling room. For all its storming, the night claimed no lives in the medical center. The air now is so cool that steam is rising into a sickly diaphanous haze from the toilet stalls.

A woman disappeared in the sand where I took my respite before shift. She went for a walk and did not come back. Perhaps she was lured by the quiet of the border or was still benignly taking her leisure when the sand joined the wind to envelop her. Some people are looking for her now, poking into the desert's sculpted ridges with sticks to see if there is a choked body within. She may yet survive. She may never be found. Even in this crowded border precinct of it, the desert can swallow someone, body and soul.

The cautious scent of feces does not carry as much in the air today. The air is thinner and filled with the black voluptuous smoke of burning plastic. The Tunisians are burning some of the thousands of spent bottles and wrappers, as well as piles of waste left carelessly in the alleys to be shoveled away. The darkening column and the fire beneath it looks like a funeral pyre, the blue and red flames dancing across flesh, drawing the spirit to the sky. A black man stands puzzlingly at attention in front of the smoke, eyes fastened shut and head held proudly high. Perhaps he is sharing my thoughts and salutes the unknown dead. The heat is already so great in the dawn that it radiates from the black cover of my notebook into my hand. I then see that the man is facing the rising sun.

I sense this morning that I have lost full account of the true horror of this place. I did not come here to learn more lessons of human suffering, but I have. They are somewhat masked amid my deeply intimate lessons of my own character and will. Because of them, I have come to regard this as the natural home of a deep essential part of myself and romanticized the splendor of my surroundings. I have that luxury. I can leave at any time. I have somewhere to go. I will leave soon and probably never return.

The distinguishing element to this mission has been the unintentional openness of my emotions, usually sealed in by the great demands of times such as these. The joy I discovered and the humility I now feel about it have been new in my years of adventures in places of similar despair and need. Even this journal has been a result of my heightened awareness and zeal.

My sense of giving and receiving must accommodate my pride and shame equally. I have done what I can in the limitations I have and can find peace in that. In a place where we are all from a different land, there are no natives to go native on.

--- --- ---

Another view from the ground: Al-Jamil, Libya

A calculated risk: Youssef, my self-proclaimed brother, has come with the rebels, Dani, Peter, Tom and me to see the emergent situation in Libya. He and Fayed have an understanding of some sort that it is their time to lead. Ayesha helped a great deal when she asked to come as well; Youssef refused but conceded to come along himself. I wish I could speak in depth with Ayesha and her continuing work with the children in the camp, but it would be very improper for me to speak to another man's wife.

This mission is a final live drill to treat some of the numerous wounded in the spiraling violence in and around Zawiya, the current target of the rebel forces. The government side is mostly made up of tribes allied to Ghadafi; few regular army soldiers linger foolishly this close to the border. The tribes do not fight out of loyalty as much as for their own survival. They know they will lose everything if the regime is defeated and their enemies hold power.

Most of the wounded, of course, are civilians. The battle for Bir-al-Ghanam, just south of here, impressed upon everyone that war invariably takes most of its fill from noncombatants than soldiers, especially a war so slowly and recklessly borne out in cities and villages full of people in the rapture of worship. Both sides say they respect and avoid the penitent at mosque, but only the rebels can maintain such a claim after the ill-fated attempt to drive them from al-Jamil on a Friday. A coarse distrust languishes in the eyes and voices of the town today.

This is most likely where I will take my leave of Peter and Tom, still committed to joining the fight as medics. It is a better idea than I first thought, as they are exceptional medics and well-suited to training the class further while near battles. I am also pleased about the prospect of Youssef and Dr. Hammami teaching further classes, as they will always be in the region. Perhaps some sort of medical exchange between the new Tunisia and the Libya to come, a beginning of more friendship and efficiency? I do get ahead of myself sometimes. It's nice to occasionally put my head in the clouds.

Several wounded here require advanced care. We are great in number but none of us are doctors. Peter and Tom are happily "treat-and-street"ing the lesser injuries while Dani and I triage and package the remainder, mostly victims of gunshots, shrapnel, and blunt trauma. Time is running out to wait and see. What wouldn't we give for a real damn hospital?

--- --- ---

Another view from the ground: Zawiya, Libya

A real damn hospital sits on the government-held side of the ridged center of Zawiya, the newest and most feared front of the revolution. It is the westernmost city on Libya's Mediterranean coast. On the southern trenchlike outskirts, the first fingers of a rebel offensive harry the government troops, their comrade tribes, and the police. The improvised weapons, from plumbing-pipe shotguns to rifles with books as stocks, are bristling on the bodies and cars of the attackers, who miss as often as they hit a target - assuming there is one. Many here have no discipline. Some have no leader. The positive image that Benghazi broadcasts is as distant as the city itself. Here, it is war, as old and savage as history itself, and everyone will do what it takes to get the job done and go home.

On the southern horizon, several buildings are burning. Some collapse in a puff of white smoke, barely visible in the hazy air. The flames and waves of heat are hidden in the ochre sunlight except against the shadow of the smoke behind them. By the end of the day, the area will look as haunted and sad as the unfortunate frames remaining in al-Assah. By the end of the month, this whole city may be dotted and streaked by buildings just like these. The rebels have taken their cautious pause and pounced headlong towards the sea.

This is war. It stinks of fire and death. It marks the horizon with its ash and corpses. It fills the clear mountain air with sounds that plummet into valleys and rattle off rocks and walls. The globe of sensuality it creates pulls my skin tight and flares my eyes to black despite the diabolical sun. I know this feeling. This is no smoldering siege. Zawiya is afire before us in an extraordinary day.

We clear two rebel checkpoints; the red crosses on our sleeves and our obvious foreign origins earn us the greetings of honored guests. Our students are animated in talks with their comrades; Hammou is an uncharacteristic font of zeal and impatience. Fayed and Abdulbakar relate the chattering to us in guttural voices of satisfaction. The rebels march on Zawiya and are taking the city. Peter cheers and Youssef looks ill. Of all the days. (Note: This was the fifth major attempt to wrest Zawiya from Ghadafi's regime in as many weeks, so we did not give full credence to the rebels' claims at the time.)

Zawiya was sympathetic to the rebels' side at the beginning of the revolution but the government struck fiercely at it in March, razing many buildings and killing hundreds. Ghadafi needed to hold the oil refineries and the highway to Tunisia. The rebels' field hospital was in a mosque that government troops shelled to dust at the end of the siege. The thought of a holy place turned to a hospital destroyed with all souls inside turns my stomach as if I am watching it.

We plod through the southern streets, full of shouts and ringing with weapons. A few bullets clang rigidly down from a spare building and Youssef throws his head down. He did not see the top two floors of the building blast apart a few seconds later, scattering concrete and glass on the street behind us. Peter keeps looking out of the open window of the bus and I pull him back in. His eyes are wild and his mouth is a manic abyss in his arousal. How long has he waited for this liquor?

The bus pushes on under the sounds of battle. We stop as two men speeding around a corner, rifles poised like poignards, run into a field of fire. One falls forward and melts into the asphalt. The other turns in a blow of pain to his side and crumples down next to his partner. Peter drags him and I drag the first man, dead. We add the survivor to our four wounded, leaving the rifles on the street, and the bus lunges forward.

Just as I specifically hope not to, we pass the ruins of the hospital mosque. It is covered with graffiti and papers making simple demands or entreaties in Arabic. Peter hold pressure on the bullet wound in our injured rifleman's side. We brought the victims of battle into another battle. I cannot tell if it is beginning or ending on this wounded ridge.

Our first destination, a makeshift clinic, had been abandoned and picked clean. The second clinic, unfortunately farther east, is already filled with fighters and many of the city's residents. Trauma of all kinds has been visited upon them - broken and missing limbs, gunshots, shell fragments, stabbing, blunt trauma, and burns. One of our patients died in the bus, while the new rebel declines. His liver was most likely lacerated by the bullet; the skill and technology to save him is beyond anyone here. The half-outdoor ward is stained with blood and waste, while the smell of burnt flesh and released body elements eats at our noses. I watch the doctors and nurses rush from table to floor, their movement dynamic and purposeful as if they were dodging bullets as well, while we wait to triage patients and treat minor wounds. Adults and children both stare at me as I write, further perplexed on this grave day by a white man taking notes. It perplexes me as well, but I feel I must.

Music trickles in from outside, a buoyant Arabic dance, full of long lovely vowels and rattling with silvery thin percussion amid the guns beyond. Who elected to give this battle a soundtrack? Perhaps victory has been won outside. I am filled with the thought to flee, but freeze and close my eyes. I open to see this scene and return to work. Many here will live to find out if Zawiya has opened the sea to the rebels today.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: the apotheosis of the siege of Zawiya

Skywalker: The Last Drill

2011-08-27T20:15:00.006-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Ras Ajdir, Tunisia

In the above photo, Somali refugees rally around an abused child in the outskirts of the camp on Tunisian-Libyan border.

Through many of my shifts, I have been wearing a light cotton bathrobe. I brought it with me on a whim, accepting the idea of throwing it out or losing it. It is not a good idea in the camp to wear any kind of uniform, and we want to appear as medical staff outside as well. There are no lab coats even for the doctors. So I safety-pinned a red cross patch onto the breast, which previously had a cruise line logo adorning it, and loaded my supplies into the deep soft pockets. It also turned out to be perfect for warding off the midday sun, as I have avoided any serious sunburn. So I am sitting in front of a medical tent wearing a thin bathrobe, with a red cross on the tent and the robe. The star of life, the symbol for technicians such as myself, is not globally known and I have often worn the red cross. In how many photo negatives do I look like a Swiss guy who likes wars? Now I look like a Swiss guy looking for the spa.

There is a smell of decay in the thick air. It is the odor that freezes an animal in its tracks or makes a person put down his food. It wafts onto the tents at dawn and sucks the hunger from the refugees' minds just when their bodies need food. The patients have been eating less, even the patients who have been malnourished or are Muslim. They cannot help it; our first teacher is deep inside our animal instincts and we cannot eat with that smell lingering to awaken that lesson.

Many of the stronger population in the camp have been shoveling their food down too fast to smell anything. The hungry have been doing it for months; they have now either tired of the practice or perfected it. Deprivation of the taste of food, let alone the scent, seems a torture barely possible in the human or natural world, yet it is accomplished here.

There must be some involuntary asceticism that accompanies the life of a refugee. They lose all they have, even the things they do not know they had. Many of them have lost family and villages to war unchecked by globalization or human decency. Yet so few of them give up. They wait and see if someone will respect them or pity them. So far, few have done either. The only option is for them to respect themselves.

Although the population here hovers at 3800, there is flow in and out. Some people leave to return to Libya and try to reach Europe by sea. Many return here; many die on the way. Few ever get there. Italy outsourced much of its illegal immigration problem to Ghadafi's government a few years ago and the Benghazi government accepted the arrangement as well. There are a few places inside Libya that are worse than this. That thought is atrocious, but I'd like to hope that some of those who do not return after an attempt to reach Europe are still alive and hold their chance at a better life.

Some refugees were just returned here from the Emirati camp nearby. It is smaller and more comfortable, but the population is more Arab in consistency. This group came from here last month, but returned to Libya and attempted to sail north. As they reenter, nearly doubled over in disappointment, some of the camp residents trail close to them to ask about the fates of those not present. The news is never good. The inquirers either freeze in confusion or wail out high tones of grief.

Peter has been taking some lessons from Tom's patience, which has come out in his work on shift. Tom is a gifted diagnostician, considering he speaks only English, and his touch has the gentleness of a caring friend. I sense Peter's craving to make the transition from technician to healer, as well as the ability to be both, but there is a certain artistry in improvised medicine, arguably not present in its most progressive scientific practice, that comes from filling the gap between what we would like to do and what we can do. Tom has the practiced calm to fill that gap.

Arthur and Mark have marked their shifts with some maladroit humor. They are also the hardest workers, as their hours in the clinic are the hottest and the most desperate. I keep finding exam gloves full of cotton or water, probably from a practical joke. The French are not amused.

Double shifts in the oppressive conditions, as well as the restrictions of Ramadan, is taking its toll on the students. Everyone present is working sixteen hours a day. The students learn and drill. We teach and serve in the medical center. Most of us ignore the time we are meant to be sleeping anyway. This place is too active. The solemn mihrab, the post we erected at the Taguelmit drill site marking the direction of Mecca, is worn of color and grain in the sandy wind. Before and after their lyrical prayers, the students face the mihrab anyway, and we have used it as a podium. Fayed wearies of the drills. Perhaps al-Jamil sapped his indefatigable patience and will. Dani disciplined him for not paying attention and he retorted that he already knew everything we were saying.

This may be my last time at this place, made sacred by its status as a classroom and a site of prayer. I have a bittersweet attachment to it - the corners of our stone-lined lot, the fine sand stretching far away, the impression of mine that there is no scent here.

Finally, the drill continues. Allah has been praised for the gifts of this day, and they are numerous. I find myself thanking the unknown for the inexplicable survival of an emaciated girl in the medical center. We thank the supply shipments for oranges. I note that prayer does not seem to inconvenience any of the cohort. They all have their diversions or guides for the interruptions. Arthur and Mark smoke, Peter and Tom talk, Dani reads, I write. Youssef also prays and Dr. Hammami paces. But there is always an element of spirit in our actions. Then the lyrics end and we go back to work.

Today's drill was valuable. Six volunteers simulated battle injuries and the students rotated among them, treating and packing them correctly using the little equipment in the gear crate. Dani and I had to talk them through some of the spinal-immobilization protocols but everyone passed our qualitative level of assessment. We try to behave as if there is a standard to apply, but there is little besides our own experience and qualifications. The students are becoming technicians with enough practice; they will fulfill the first needs of their new country, and probably more as they learn.

Ouled has a fever. He is lying in the shade while his brow is washed by Peter, who threw up his hands at his refusal to drink. What an awful place for such an imbalance, under air as heavy as warm mud, and not able to chase the thirst he must feel. He feels sore limbs tinged with nervous spasms and a head like weighty embers fanned to flame by each hot desert breath. The sun is veiled by shapeless clouds but the heat still draws mirages from the brave sand and stone. They vacillate with each step. Ouled is moaning under the administrations of Abdulbakar and whispers "mekhtub" - "it is written" - through his pain and melancholy.

On our return to the camp, Abdulbakar bids me stop and put more of my sunflower seeds on the grave of the nameless rebel buried last week. The first batch is gone, although I heard no birds to please Allah. I have been taking a handful of sunflower seeds before the daily fast, enjoying the slow trickle of salty food down my throat. Massoud and the stricken Ouled watch the little graveside ceremony from the bus while Peter moistens another cloth and we sit impatiently in the climbing heat, trying to respect the trivialities of the dead and continue our day.

--- --- ---

The water purifier, with which we had several mechanical problems, nearly exploded this afternoon when the tank hatch withstood more flow than the machine was designed to create. It nearly ripped a bystander's arm off, but repairing the machine provided some relaxation despite the pressure, both real and implied, involved. Manual labor has always cleared my head, and I am noticing how unnecessary and decadent the thought clearing my head further is. I am clearer now than I have been in years. I almost welcome further challenge from the purifier, the weather, the intransigent nature and growth of war.

But that is fanciful, and cruel to those who suffer here. At least I cannot create with such thoughts. Such magical thinking has no place here. I enjoyed the machine being laid out before me, its workings like organs and arteries, ready to beat and pump again soon. But it made me smile more when it worked.

I am sitting on the sand outside the camp. The moonlight is so clear I can write by it. A perfect lunar sphere shines on the flat desert, mirrored perfectly in the saltwater lake beyond me that is as still as the sky. Children, black and Arab, were playing in it earlier despite the sun making the water as hot as the sand. A stiff but caressing breeze has created a dune on the windward side of my tea cup. I lift it up to drink and the fine powder pours down like water. I cannot deny visions of this desert in my sleep. I trek through it, I stand naked in it, I watch and feel on my bare feet as its surface turns to water and becomes a tranquil sea. This desolate land has its grasp on me.

The scent of human waste is still overwhelming. I could not find anywhere except here to get away from it. This side faces Libya and the battlefields, but I see no fires tonight. The horizon is silent of the dry cracks of weapons. I am allowed some peace. No one will be safe from the disease that will spread if that odor persists. I can do no more and am trying not to think about it. I wait and I see. The wind is becoming harsh. I need to get back to work.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: the battle of Zawiyah, that opened the road to Tripoli

Skywalker: The Libyan Rebels - Part 2

2011-08-26T08:20:00.007-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Al-Jamil, Libya

In the above photo, a wall in western Libya has been riddled with bullets and hit with shells after political slogans covered it two weeks earlier.

Another exercise delayed and lengthened by a trip to the desert farther from the border. Another gallon of fuel spent. Another ominous morning that feels welcome only for a few temperate moments.

For all their suspicious silence, the Nafusans are fast learners and hard workers. The open-jawed Hammou puts more effort into the drills than speaking to his comrades or anything else. He never smiles but looks at me with an austere nod of satisfaction at the end of drills. It is something I now find myself doing. Which is cause and which is effect?

I continue to nudge Youssef into dealing with the students more, as I am unwilling to confront him on his curiously standoffish manner around them. I would prefer the transformation to come on its own. Perhaps he forgets his own times of accidental ignorance, but I remember him being a student just like them seven years ago. Or maybe he just doesn't like them.

Fayed is a good teaching assistant, explaining anatomy in ways they all understand with the minimal supplies we have. Massoud and Ouled, the "Revolution Twins," are finally listening to him; Dani and I were beginning to feel like hall monitors. One thing is certain: they all understand the solemnity of what we are here for, and its rarity.

The rebels did not wish to spend their day of prayer in a foreign country surrounded by desperate strangers. As they tread deeper into the coastal plain of eastern Libya, Peter and I got our first look at a people still fighting (or waiting) for their country.

The town is ringed with weapons. Men dressed in threatening clothes or mundane streetwear carry rifles and other weapons, lowering or unhanding them only to secure them elsewhere. Some men sit on folded cloth that also binds their guns, in the old tradition of desert tribesmen at rest. A ragged squad at a southern approach to the sunken central district all carry outdated or homemade weapons around a faded pickup truck upon which is mounted a decades-old anti-aircraft gun. It would be more disturbing if any of them, except the team leader, had any ammunition.

The south side is full of rebels and the north and east are lined with government troops and allied tribes. One can hardly tell the difference, as their weapons look similar and their clothes are mostly amalgams of fabrics and slogans. Some on each side are sympathetic locals, waiting until this moment to join their cadres and fight for freedom, profit, old rivalries, personal grudges, or survival.

The arms fade as the center of the town gets nearer (neither side has official permission from the town elders to enter) and we hear the zoual, the first call to prayer. It is trumpeted from speakers and washes through the wide streets, running its current into every alley and window. It seemed the perfect time for spirits, as the sun was approaching its peak, driving fire into the empty stomachs of the people marching slowly towards mosques, stepping over debris and under low passageways. Some heaved breath, their skin sweat dry.

The students followed comrades from the outer ring to a white square building with a signature sun-bleached dome not far from the central district. The brilliant walls were flecked with the shadows of bullets and shrapnel marks. In the mosque's thin shade, we found refreshment so profound that our breath slowed to a meditative pace. I can only imagine the eternal peace that the Muslims find in the cool air inside.

The ground was already awash with boots and shoes; only a few sandals added color to the bellicose footwear. There are no weapons left outside. The men have permission from the mosque to keep them (a rare and questionable offering indeed), but most of them left them with comrades who pray alone at the front. The six students, all now masters in this realm, removed their shoes and filed inside while unraveling tight coils of faded prayer mats. I can see a few columns of light within the mosque, enough to illuminate all of the blank solemn interior, even among the colored mats and dark menacing clothes of the men kneeling on them.

From then on, it was a long steady murmur of prayer: talebs chanting familiar verses of the Qu'ran (students at recital, in its literal meaning), joined by solo performances of stories of Mohammed in voices clearer and louder, waves in the calm sea of submission.

A second call fell suddenly from the heights inside, spilling far out into the street and startling Peter and me. It is a human voice, the same as the source of the tinny echoes from the speakers in the town, but now true and ringing with personal zeal, pealing out prayer in song.

The Muslims below join in, exhaling the last note in relief and ecstasy. We see a few children speed out of the door, hopping past boots into their own shoes (save one, who had filthy bare feet) and continue on, out of sight in a moment. The steady voice of the imam, fluent as script, trailed the sermon before it, inspiring with its beauty even the pair of white men outside who were ignorant of its faith and meaning. He was then joined by a lighter voice, a young man, who repeats his words in a lofty chant. Then "Allah'ou Akbar" resounded from every man within, an undeniable rock of sound heard in echoes around and above.

The men came forth into the sun, submitting to its full height, and reclaimed their shoes. Abdulbakar lingered to recite more litanies with others who are thinking on this troubled time and the other five students sat with us in our strip of shade to wait. They did not speak to each other or us. Even Peter's visible excitement waited to disrupt the hard-fought peace.

There is a satisfaction that borders on serenity I am finding in mirroring parts of the spiritual lives of the rebels and many of the refugees. To deny the fanciful pangs of hunger as many others do on their high holy days and to watch the men here pray for strength to overcome true need. To watch them feel enlightened and closer to the word of Allah, in the purity that Islam first sought before its pursuit became tainted by politics and the pursuers shattered by war.

Many of us worry about these men and their cause. Such dedication is fanaticism, from the root of the type practiced by our most dangerous enemies. It could very well come to pass that Libya descends into dread darkness where even this ceremony becomes a weapon against thought and peace. Who knows? I have been an interloper in nations' most intimate corners and moments. I cannot claim to understand them or to have brought any enlightenment to them. They have given me a degree of self-understanding as a parting gift; the only enlightenment is my own.

If I have not earned respect through my practices around the Muslims, I have at least gained deference from Hassan, who is now well and has stopped asking me if I want water. Hammou transformed his nod into an appreciative smile as he saw how suspended I remained in the incomprehensible words of the prayer, occurring every week yet never the same. Like the prayers and mantras of all peoples, like the mottoes and acronyms we use as medics, it adds the joy of faith to our uncertain work.

--- --- ---

At first, we thought the rebels were trying to take the town. Now it appears the government tried to push them back and used the day of prayer as a distraction. The troops trickled around the ill-defined edges of town until the first armed rebels fired in confusion, falling back to a defensible position along the south meridian of highway. A few residents who had not already left (open battle has been rare lately) fled in haste with whatever they could carry. A few young looters were bold enough to enter some buildings before the government troops arrived to wreak havoc, and one rebel turned them out with indignation. Many want a cleaner war. It matters little, if the shredding, grating conflicts that the last six months have limped through ignites here again, this will all soon be in ruins.

Each side quickly formed a checkpoint a respectable distance from the highway, a move that has become perfunctory in these sieges. The wounded, four rebels and a few townspeople, filtered through the rebels' post and we put the students to work. Two bodies, a rebel and a young man in a stained white robe, came to us later. A woman, sheathed in a loose brown burqa that stopped at her wrinkled writhing hands, came to mourn the young man. He was coming from the mosque to find their home emptied for the battle, too late to be warned. She mutters prayers to the corpse, punctuating them with wails of loss and trepidation. One of the rebels says this has been happening for weeks, even without battles. Some people just turn up dead or injured, and the road to the hospital is checked by further risk.

At a time when war seems even more stupid than usual, the students did their new jobs very well, mirroring the drills through obstructions and the urge to rejoin the fight. That will is the best start one could ask for, and it is much more than most instructors would expect in four days. It is yet another memento that so little time has passed here and yet the place feels worn in, familiar, even comfortable to be in such a strange warm place.

We know little of these men and their intentions. Their ability to be the men of their time and do what is needed is admirable. To see how they would fight and even avoid it in order to serve well adds faith. These may have been the put-upon rejects for combat duty, singled out for this "medical absurdity" by vengeful or hurried commanders. But however they came to us, they made things better on a very bad day for us and this town.

It is now mostly dark; there are now curfews on the little electricity the town has. I can see the fat lamps over our bloated tent city, miles away but still glowing starlike on the horizon of the western plain. Children, changing from imps to companions and back, run around us and probe into our work, mute to us yet staring intently. We wait to see if someone will live or die before we follow our star to the horizon, back where the other Libya awaits the war's verdict.

Another view from the ground: Ras Ajdir, Tunisia

A pregnant Sudanese woman, veiled in oceanic blue, rubs oil on her belly - not the butter she would make at home. She does it absentmindedly, walking one reluctant direction and looking another, cutting up to the speckled sky, the only thing familiar to her. Earlier, a man lay shriveled around his fetal form on an improperly assembled cot at the whimpering edge of a residence tent. He stared at a pile of rice sitting on a plastic lid on his neighbor's bed, just out of reach. The neighbor was not there; he was getting his own food. The man was not covetous. He is Muslim and was waiting for sundown.

I send their profiles and quotes to the newswire on my fifteen minutes of Internet. I use it every two days, as do some refugees trying to find their friends and family or appealing to some government, all seeking life for themselves and others. I met a journalist doing the same as me. He finally had another story, two paragraphs long, appear in print in Europe. It was his first in two weeks. Most of Europe has grown ill of this place. His stories only run next to reports of a ship losing lives in the Mediterranean. Like the refugees, like the undersupplied camp staff, he waits and he sees.

I get relieved at the clinic and hunger crashes into me. As I sit for a meal, I find myself giving thanks to a nameless provider, unknowable yet everpresent. How strange to find such gratitude in a refugee camp, a place of humanitarian extremes, in this land of natural extremes. I heard the overlapping songs and the accidental incantations that their harmonies create. All extremes I knew before have been shattered on the road here. If I can find joy here - and if all others here can - there is nowhere it can be banished from.

How has my soul rallied in a few short days of the world's misery? It is a perversity in this desert of silent lessons and warm cautions. A healer is trying to relieve the pain and revive the spirit of a woman dying of lung problems. Can it be such a spirit, that of a healer in this absurd, horrific, mystical place? What labors on me here?

There are continued images of all things laid bare, shown as they are, and there is no fear of them. When those who have no possessions continuously possess me and we all look to the skies for guidance, we can both honor and doubt its answers. We keep looking. We should never stop.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: the rebels and the refugees coming together in the hour before the dawn

Skywalker: The Libyan Rebels

2011-08-23T11:53:00.007-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Taguelmit, Tunisia

In the above photo, Libyan children signal for peace as they stand atop a wrecked armored car near the Tunisian-Libyan border last week.

An unsettling dream roused me. I have taken to sleeping in the shallow precinct around the medical center, under jeweled black skies with the relatives of patients and the chronic ones who cannot fit inside. A veil of fine sand breezed across us, the caress waking my skin. The draft's fine crystals reflected the ugly lights of the camp back down on us, masking us from the scintillating stars. An old Sudanese man with long yellow teeth and a spare figure stood rocking in his legless clothes, mouthing a song with crackles and breaths. He then lowered himself cautiously, folding up and unfolding out, until he was prostrate on the harsh metallic ground. He prayed in whispers as his spidery limbs twitched. A nearby woman, her breasts full and ripe for nursing, sang softly over him. Her voice was lost in the high strident pounding of the generator. And then, all changed.

The sky slowly lifted from its colorless sleep, atypical for a normal desert dawn. A hand of light closed over us, each of its digits glowing in ecstasy. There were long clouds above, stretching their ends over the tents so we could not see them terminate. Their bellies were painted in reds and oranges over pockets of grey by the sun, not yet high enough to overwhelm their backs or burn them out of the sky. Then, in a captured heartbeat, the colors bled away. The ends of the clouds appeared and the sun began charging the cool earth again.

Another venture into the desert beyond the camp with the class of eager rebels. The Libyan border lies to the east, increasingly irrelevant, and they squinted their grinning eyes to look at it with lament. We stopped just south of a paralyzed village for prayer. Their hard bearded faces, the only exposed parts of their bodies, stab into the sunlight, melting into it and cutting out shadows as they bow.

No one here is a soldier. They are from a nation that was once rich and wild, after being part of an enviable empire and center of learning. Now, their towns and cities are part of the modern world, with all its comforts and crimes, albeit separated by huge distances of unthinkable land much harsher than this. Abdulbakar cheerily tells how this is a temperate respite compared to his diabolical Ghadamis, farther south on the frontier.

Fayed and Hassan are from Tripoli. The other three students, all countrymen of the nearby Nafusa Mountains, are silent except to each other. Massoud and Ouled share some kinship; they are probably cousins from the same town. They are often chirping to each other, helping the other through a lesson and who knows what else. Hammou is altogether quiet, often staring ahead and interrupted by his own short twitches. His mouth hangs open to show chipped teeth while his brown-yellow eyes dart around in nervous inspection.

Those three (I do not know their tribes) do not share their comrades' classical Arab names but match their Muslim fervor. None of the students have broken the fast of Ramadan, and Hassan has been attending classes and demonstrations despite a fever and an infected wound - he bows slower and with more care than the others at prayer. The two halves of the class often speak in melodic outbursts punctuated by debate and silence. The man to end all conversations in Abdulbakar, partly due to his benign origins in the deep south but mostly because of his religious expertise and devotion. He is equally detached from and respected by the Tripolitanians and the Nafusans.

He is also the only man to speak openly of the rebels' causes and the present seeds of discontent between the tenuous allied groups. The others are either ignorant of them or refuse to share such strong and intimate reasons to wage war. The flames of passion ignite all six pairs of dark eyes (sometimes, it appears to be an evident conflagration) but the delicate gleam of intellect is sometimes lacking.

Abdulbakar is Ben Guil, a harshly-treated desert tribe usually associated with Algeria. His home city lies next to the unmarked intersection of Libya, Algeria, and Tunisia; it is the ancient crossroads of numerous trade routes and the site of untold handshakes, money exchanges, and brutal assassinations. He cleverly trades in imports and exports, a practice discouraged by Ghadafi, and studied French as well as Islam and the valuable mechanical trades.

He sees the alliance against the government, grandly called the Transitional National Council (TNC) in its otherworldly eastern capital of Benghazi, as only enough to get Europe to aid their tattered efforts, as the unity is enough to justify the possibility of victory with badly-needed NATO assistance. Ghadafi seemed secure as ever last year, with his control over exports and his lengthy alliances with other African and oil-producing nations. Indeed, he is held in great esteem in Uganda, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, and other places poor in economy but rich in lives. One patient of ours, recovering from gunshot wounds and shrapnel, admitted to being a Bugandan mercenary brought to Libya in March to fight for the government.

"In Benghazi, they want 'a nation of institutions'," Abdulbakar quotes the optimistic and unromantic slogan. "Institutions were here before Ghadafi. Institutions made him possible. (Africa) has had institutions since before the Greeks and the Romans. That does not mean nations of peace." He remembers seeing Ghadafi's grand entrances at African Union summits (Ghadafi was chairperson of the UN-like NGO for most of 2009 until early 2010) and knows how little well-meaning institutions can do to prevent a man like him from gaining power.

Tribes still fight over grain, livestock, and water in most of Libya. The populous Mediterranean coast has those problems and also the tribes that fight out of lost yet immortal animosities that Ghadafi's Arab Socialism and cult of personality did little to quell. Abdulbakar says Ghadafi used those divisions to keep his allies powerful at the expense of most of the country. Even if Benghazi gets their institutions, which they have fought and paid to maintain since the war began in February, much of the country is still poised to shatter along its ancient faults that no map bothered to chart and few foreigners were able to learn.

--- --- ---

We have been bringing the class farther from the camp, not only for drills but instruction. There is a worry that, with the battles for the coast so near, the gesture of teaching the rebels may plunge the camp into the tense conflict. The refugees are also uncomfortable with the rebels' presence. Some of them don't know the difference between them and the government troops. For others, there is no difference - they have been harassed and abused by both sides. We are keeping our reasons away from both the rebels and the refugees; we do not want to bring more harm.

Youssef and the small Tunisian team, who we had hoped would take over as instructors next week, do not seem enthusiastic about their Libyan students. The Tunisian soldiers they recruited to fill the ranks of the class last week have vanished; we do not know why. It is perhaps an old feud or a simple culture shock. Youssef and Dr. Hammami are certainly wise enough to share the concerns that simmer below Dani and Mark: these men may become enemies, national if not personal. Yet they all work and teach dutifully, if warily.

The only one among us who seems entirely satisfied with her lot is Ayesha, who hosts a roving class of of refugees who should be in school. She plays with them, shapes activities out of cardboard and our markers, teaches them French and Arabic, and acts out stories to keep their minds active and their bodies out of danger in the worldly edges of camp.

I had to go out there for a patient transport last night. The tents are haphazard to make room for vegetation, as some dessicated bushes and trees stick wildly out of the sand. At the rate people are picking the leaves to chew and make tea, it will all be dead soon. A woman with heart problems and signs of fast weight loss had to be carried on a raised litter by four volunteers to get through the crowd, which looked like an Arabian marketplace stripped of wares and stallkeepers. Children ran alongside, some looking up at us expectantly and other using the distraction to scrounge and pickpocket. I heard a brief conversation between a man with a grimy smile and a young woman with pride and shame in her face. "Go see your wife." "I see her all the time." A few girls and women tried to walk away on the arms of the volunteers, thinking they may provide freedom or aid for a price, cash or physical trade.

A lot of the people on the edge are latecomers - survivors of oceanic attempts at escape or refugees slow to leave and sped here by the spreading war. But the first on the edge were forced to leave the central camp or left on their own due to bullying and violence based on national or tribal origin. Many of the Somali and west African tribes are visible. Even here, there is an untouchable side of town.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: the Muslim holy day and the siege of Libyan coastal town

Skywalker: The Refugee Camp - Part 3

2011-08-22T17:04:00.005-04:00

If anybody was not paying attention to the situation in Libya before, they are now. In the last 48 hours, rebels have penetrated Tripoli's outer defenses and now control nearly 90 percent of the capital city. President Obama made an address two hours ago regarding the unraveling of Ghadafi's regime and most experts believe that the 42-year reign of the dictator will be completely over in a week. Despite these thrilling developments, the effects of this war are not nearly over. I will continue these reports in the order they happened.

Today's view from the ground: Sidi Toui, Tunisia

In the above photo, African refugees flee a sandstorm harassing their camp on the Tunisian-Libyan border.

Early this morning, before night gave way to day, we faced our first battle. Some Libyan soldiers, frustrated at having been pushed against the last few miles of their border, tried to invade the artificial town near a national park. It had been all but abandoned except for the military, who had been watching as Libyans had been throwing grenades into the buffer zone and took impotent potshots in the air. Both sides must have been surprised by the assault, as eight were wounded and two Libyans were killed. It was a large number for such an incursion on a tiny town they could never hope to hold.

Dani, Peter, Tom, and I tore south into the desert with Dr. Hammami and two nurses, who seemed far more interested in treating their own wounded than the refugees. The men were easily discharged with foolish injuries - jumping off a truck too quickly, tearing skin on a rifle part. Two had been shot; one was superficial and Peter fervently worked on the wound, clumsily suturing but learning a lot. We transported the other back to the medical center, along with the dead. Tom is almost too eager to handle the dead. He has some experience with it as a soldier and shares our disaffection for the moment of expiration. We left the bodies to the rebel imam, Abdulbakar, who vowed to treat them properly. The other rebels awoke and begrudged missing the battle.

Dawn breaks like glass in the desert. Most of the sky is still a smoky grey when the bright drop of sun first appears, turning the ground to glittering shards like the starry night sky it replaces. The neatly rowed tents and the ragged ones behind them ignite in pink and yellow hues before settling their shadows closer to them and beginning the slow wretched burn of day. Many of the refugees are already up in lines for food, medical care, or coveted appointments to seek resettlement. Just like in their countries, they know the secret to getting help is getting up early and waiting.

They wash their laundry and lay it on top of the tents, where the air is so arid that one can watch the moisture vanish and the fabric lighten to paper. Some do watch; there is little else to do. There is no work. There are no schools. A pile of spent supplies and boxes is all there is for a playground. Children sleep half the day and tear around like newborn animals the other half. Adults also rest far longer than usual but spend the remaining time quite idle. They stare, they pray, they talk sometimes, and the lucky ones read. There are four thousand people here and I have yet to see a single man or woman over the age of twenty kick a football, run out of amusement, or even be agitated out of something other than anger or fear. I did not think this would be a story about the people from far away as much as I thought I would know the native fighters.

Sand is frozen water in the wind, even on the coarse coastal beaches of North America and Europe. Here, it is in waves as high as mountains. I now know why the Arabs called the Sahara a "sea," and I am nowhere near its dark heart. Even without the sand, no one wins against the wind.

The Ethiopian foreman and his Somalian-Eritrean team, optimistically assembled by a French administrator, seemed not only to mask their hatred for each other but forget it altogether in the fight against the wind. A sandstorm blanks everything, even as a gust that darkens your eyes for a moment and then falls to lay you exposed to the sun again. The Africans faced it will after the pale irises of the white people, working the hand pump for the water filter until we got the fuel canister refilled on the generator. Then the gusts became a howling wave, driving into our skins, filling our hair, blinding and deafening anything foolish enough to be out in it.

The alleys emptied and everything happening had to wait until it let up. Nothing moved and not one could move it, if only to conserve energy and hope to outlast the storm. The lines for food and medicine disappeared like the sand had devoured them. One patient in the medical center even surrendered her life to the immense paralysis outside the walls of the tent.

Rice and pasta are all they have eaten in days, or weeks. There are no rich and silky grains of Ethiopia, no dark sorghum of west Africa, and no light airy crusts of Arab bread. The diabetic patients have worsened and many others are having heart problems, for which there is little medication to be found here. Even common-sense treatments are unavailable, as common sense is in short supply.

The speed of these people's flight can be found everywhere, but it is so terribly found in the medical center. Some had to wait until they arrived here to treat injuries, and infections spread and deepened. Some who sought medical care in Libya (at relatively outrageous costs) were bitten by the haste or malefaction of their physicians. We had to pull stitches and even instruments of a suspect composition out of patients.

I saw a man placidly standing in the flap of the continuing care tent. He was wearing a necklace and holding a cane tight to his chest. I mistook or perhaps fantasized a stethoscope around his neck. In fact, he was a construction worker who had his foot crushed by a stone or a piece of machinery. He had wrapped some faint herbs and blighted leaves in a plastic binder around his ankle because that was the closest he could come to his know herbal pain remedy in a sparse land completely unlike his native lush Nigeria.

To be here is to watch a beautiful flower die of neglect in a windowbox. These people know more of travel and war than the most brilliant adventurers, soldiers, and poets. Yet, stripped of their land and their arena of skills, of their native food and clothing, they slowly die of heat and thirst and exposure. There is one language I can understand, two I know a lexicon of, and a few more in which I can pick out words and expressions, mostly negative ones. Some tongues are unfamiliar as birdsong. They may all be saying the same thing in a union of doubt.

A fight broke out among Arabs, ending with no injuries. They are as easy to quell as they are likely to jump into a frustrated rage. The men are rarely profane even at their worst. Cursing is considered an indiscretion known only to women. Some tribes attribute profanity to Berbers or other "ruder" nations. Such attitudes do not speak well of this land's future.

The scrap made a woman spill a laundry bucket, casting perfect round drops in the sand, swallowed by the deep, hungry earth, leaving only small bubbles at the surface. Anger crackles through the camp like lightning, vanishing into pregnant clouds again. Once the sand clears and melts back to the ground after a scuffle, the people reemerge in cautious whispers onto the simmering land, just as after the sandstorms.

--- --- ---

Another view from the ground: Al-Assah, Libya

I had been wondering what the camp looks like from the battles we saw a few miles away. As I thought, no mirage can obscure it. We are where the rebels came through three days ago, now the site of a few burned-out crates and vehicles under the cuboid span of a small, high, empty village. The other rebels are gone, in chase of the few unfortunate soldiers who had been stationed last before the border.

The character of this village would be far different if it were not near the border, especially if it was on the other side. This part of Africa, largely consigned to transient empires and the nomadic tribes that crossed them, is now our classroom. Locals, if they exist, have little care for borders and governments - and vice versa.

The rebels, especially Fayed and the other confirmed student Hassan, are picking up the basics of patient transport well. The imam Abdulbakar knows some medicine from his schooling and has been good at continuing care and mechanisms of injury. He began helping around the medical center, as many of the sick and injured are Muslim and need some comfort to receive daytime sustenance during Ramadan.

The camp is nearly dark when supplies finally arrive on trucks, delayed by the sandstorm. They carry fuel, water, medicine, and (joy of joys) vegetables from Italy. They are enough to make a salad for the medical center and the children. Unfortunately, the convoy also came with a dozen new guests. They tried to get to Europe on an overloaded boat and were forced to turn back. They say a few died and two fell overboard, probably to their deaths. Europe still guards its hard-fought comfort jealously, being selective about who it is offered to. Few people in this camp will ever see Europe.

As we are serving a triumphant dinner in the chatty medical wards, we hear drums outside and chanting voices meeting the rhythm. The sound is raw and colorful, with overlapping lyrics that may be different words or separate languages. The key is pleasant, neither excited nor mournful. A few nude feet pound on the sand, softening the bomb-like beats of the drums. The lights flicker as a faint smell of gasoline victoriously joins the odors of sweats and human filth. One of the French doctors has her nose buried meditatively in her shallow cup of coffee. She looks at me with guilt and then smiles before returning to it. She just remember I have my tea. The Muslims have their prayers. The refugees have their songs. Everyone has something to get through the day. And they just got through another one.

Darkness is hiding the page.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: the rebels' live drill and an insight into the new faces of Libya

Skywalker: The Refugee Camp - Part 2

2011-08-21T17:18:00.006-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Ras Ajdir, Tunisia

In the above photo, the western expanse of the Ras Ajdir camp near the Tunisian-Libyan border bakes in the midday sun last week.

Youssef may not be able to talk all four legs off a donkey, but he can talk the hatch off a tank. One of the Tunisian tank officers gave it to him (the tank was too hot to close anyway) for our "metalshop" project - getting the new filters to purify the water in the minivan-sized machine. The first try didn't work. Tom said "I didn't hear anyone pound the piano." He says he associates the feeling of terror at something's utter failure with the sound of holding down the entirety of a piano keyboard. I get a similar feeling - not here yet - and I like the expression.

One of our students, Fayed, is a doctor. Between his translations and those of Dr. Hammami, the other students are "eating their vegetables" - learning basic anatomy and physiology. Without too much testing, their retention seems high. This allows the cohort to take rotating shifts in the medical center of the camp. The class can't sit for longer than 16 hours a day as it is, as much as they want to.

Dani works the night shift with me. He is getting along well with the patients and seems happier on shift than he does teaching. During the deep unmarked hours, he asked me if the students are good soldiers and good men, inquiring if they would make Libya better. His questions are full of his own doubts. He worries more about this part of the world than the rest of the cohort; I had not yet fully appreciated that. In the medical center, he smiles at everyone and plays with the kids. There's something calming in that tendency.

Camps like these, with their uniform tents and blank coarse walls, become canvasses for their tenants to show what ever they dare to of their homelands. Many sit outside them and talk or sing. The few with possessions will color their beds and scraps of wall with them. They yearn for the little of themselves they feel is left. Many will never see their homes again. Many never had one. But here, unlike some camps, there is the feeling that war may be over and some may return to their latest homes. The older and more traveled people do not think so. They have written off Libya as another ex-home.

The desert, even here so close to the sea, is another blank canvas. The sun bakes the ground sterile and untouchable; mirages lift things off the sand and obscure whole buildings. If there were any trees nearby, they too would be erased. It is at once some hell and some heaven, inspiring disgust that we are forced here but awe that it exists. The sun holds so much sway here that all things are colored its own gold.

No mirage, no matter how distant, could hide the camp. It is so vast that the sun's desert cannot mask it with its most cunning lie. Its scope is as vast as its size; thirty countries of origin have lost children here. The Libyans here are also disparate in origin; they speak with calm and concord but their eyes and movements show the distrusts they share.

Mark had a tough beat on his morning shift. A recent mother suffering sepsis died after a twenty-minute code and the absence of basic antibiotics. The high-pitched wailing of a family member rang out from the tent as Mark emerged into the sun. He was all in. I remember the death of a pregnant woman in Haiti last November and how it marked me with the same feeling: that the death was awful, avoidable, stupid.

We rested together at the triage tent, drinking tea and speaking of whatever we thought of. Mark spent two years in medical school and started traveling, never stopping. His brother is in the army and served two tours in Afghanistan. They both think the other has it worse off. I cannot imagine their parents are calm - or humble. He also worries about the future of our students. We all do, but we are bound to the idea that this is all for a good reason and that we'll have something to be proud of.

--- --- ---

Clouds slid across the vast desert plain, reducing the golden territory to a sickly pale yellow. Our bus limped cautiously past villages, scarcely four houses square, that appeared on the ground when the sun's mirages lost their strength. Everything has been blasted and bleached the color of the veiled solar disc. Persistent cracks of weapons fire roused the rebels in the back of the bus like resting dogs. This is as close as they can get to the battle for now - a live drill to recover lost refugees on the harrowing border.

I was enjoying not having to see my own shadow for a time. I thought I felt a raindrop or two, but it must have been a phantom chill on my sunburnt skin. The six refugees appeared, still in a group. Two had been seriously injured - a broken jaw for one, a stab wound in the back for the other. Neither said who did it. The oldest man in the party, his face scarred by (smallpox? impossible. I still don't know what), spoke the history only to Fayed, who did most of the work on the drill thirty-six hours after classes began. He and Youssef make me wish both men were more interested in leading. Arabs are not generally interested in glory after death; some disdain it even as they live. Both men want peace before peace's time. I hope all can get it, and these men can help.

A large victory: the water is being purified for as long as we have fuel. We counterbalanced the tank hatch like my father counterbalances the heavy caps of pressure vessels. There are a few leaks around the rubber seal, but we are getting water just in time.

There were two children with the new group of refugees (new on top of the dozens that have also arrived recently). Dani and I had them following us on shift, giving wordless greetings to our patients and wending between the somewhat humorless doctors. I do not know where the children are from - somewhere in west Africa - but it matters little. This is not native ground to anyone.

Night falls like a stage curtain, giving only a few moments of orange and pink warning before the sky becomes grey and beckons the proud stars forth. The camp and the rebel contingent at its edge burst into a cacophony of words and melodies. Songs are spelled out in lively howls and heartbreaking whispers. The sensuality of voice, shaking the singers and listeners to their bones, rock me in my boots. Even the musical Jean-Pierre is stunned to silence by the pleading notes strung over each other with a rich warmth. One song says "we have sky above us, ground beneath us, air inside us, and light coming from us. All our troubles can wait."

Later, a Sudanese woman with chronic chest pain began wailing mercilessly during an inspection she had endured several times already. It was in some sort of confusion and desperation, the sound of someone with the feeling of losing herself. Children looked on with fascination while most of the adults tried to ignore it. No one helped to soothe her. No one knew how.

I have been contemplating the value of African rue, a seed that seems to be the only local plant product of value. Its humble bushes dot the scrubby lines of bleached plants that form sandy ridges outside camp. As an Ethiopian man directed, I have been chewing the seeds into a fine meal while relaxing during and after shifts, and I believe it has been loaning me a clean alertness, especially when enclosed by takings of mint tea. It was all I could offer the woman, and have yet to learn if she used it.

The scent of the tea comforts me before I sleep, concealing the scents of death I carry on me. All smells carry in the thin desert air, especially at night. This scent nips at my tongue with a welcome lightness, like the songs of the rebels and the refugees. I know the depression and desperation I felt a few days ago and it melts away. There is no reasonable explanation. I have calm within me. It wraps around me and I can breathe.

That's the view from the ground: Next stop: south of the camp and the first sights of war

Skywalker: The Refugee Camp

2011-08-19T16:15:00.004-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Ras Ajdir, Tunisia

In the above photo, African refugees await processing at the refugee camp on the Tunisian-Libya border.

I heard an aid worker in the camp ask Mark if he was here because of the civil war in Libya. Mark answered that he was here because of the revolution and he would come back next year if he was interested in the civil war. Sardonic wit aside, he has a good point. It can be felt now more than ever that this conflict is not near its end.

We can combine what we have heard with what we see. Refugees at the checkpoint carry stuffed tattered bags or nothing at all. Some even lack shoes. The completely dispossessed tell us that soldiers at checkpoints in Libya - controlled by Ghadafi and the rebels alike - took whatever they wanted from the people as their vehicles and persons were searched. The Tunisian soldiers were not much better but, by then, no one had much left to take.

The front of the war is now crawling over the roads that most of these people took out of Libya, only four miles away. The Libyan side of the border post is unmanned. We can see two columns of smoke rising like devil's horns from the base of the mountains. The west side of the camp has a high cyclone fence around it while the east side faces Libya. No one wants to leave that way. Borders - lines on maps, often invisible - continue to inspire my curiosity.

The ground all around is littered with NGO-labeled food wrappers and spent water bottles. The few working bath tents have plenty of soap wrappers but no soap. A table boasts a line of donated satellite phones, but only two are working and the line to use them wraps twice around the tent they are in. The refugees are mostly black Africans from Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and west Africa; they all sit on the yellow sand or in the sun-cooked tents on cots or blankets. A woman peeled her filthy donated T-shirt off in the heat but an Arab man shoved her and castigated her for baring her breasts.

The cohort seem nonplussed - Peter and Tom are still aglow with excitement - but this is a horrible place. The word "naked" keeps entering my mind. This is a naked place on naked land where naked people have no cover. Even the aid workers, unaided by supplies or relief, are stripped and frantic. For almost everyone here, this is not the first such camp. That fact may be allaying panic or fear, simply out of exhaustion and familiarity with this type of despair.

We tried to put a used cap on the first water filter and the cap broke. The metal on the water pump is too weak to weld. We have a new idea using a rubber ring from a tank hatch, but no one in the army will lend us one. What a strange thing to need in a war zone and not be able to get.

A bus rolled into camp with our two confirmed students, as well as four more. We were supposed to have a total of sixteen. They brought a dozen refugees with them, injured while evacuating through pitched battle. Dr. Hammami set up in the crowded medical center with the troubled European doctors while Peter and I set up triage and minor care. The rest of the cohort and Youssef began classes; our original purpose is finally underway.

Four more men arrived wounded, obviously rebels who left their weapons at the border to get care. The nearest hospital in Libya was too far or there were government checkpoints before it. One of the men had been wounded in the throat and died. We had to treat the others outside the camp to make sure all appears neutral.

Two rebels and two students buried the dead man. They sang a song in lilting Arabic about his departure from the fellowship of men and entry into the grace of Allah. The leader of the service says the man never ate or drank during daylight so he is the purest of the pure in Paradise. We had nearly forgotten about Ramadan. The man then put a handful of rice from the camp on the grave to attract birds. Muslims say that birdsong pleases Allah. No bird here has a pleasant sound to me; they all sound like they are barking. After the funeral was over, the rebels went back to healing and our rebel students went back to class. No more time for mourning until victory.

--- --- ---

I am writing by firelight. I may as well while I am young enough to. I was watching the rebels and some of the Tunisians pray at sundown. They knelt at the edge of a saltwater sump that another man waded greedily into, seeking a cleansing refuge at the end of a cinder-hot day. The wader dropped up to his neck in the steamy water as the rebels rose and fell like pious ripples in the sand. "Allah'ou Akbar," the leader repeated, and then continued in his faith's lyrical praise.

Even though the Qu'ran allows warriors to break the Ramadan fast, these men have not forsaken the holiday they maintained all their lives. I had not allowed myself to rest and relax until these men, with a trouble I could not know, still gave their time to God. I drank a metal cup of mint tea and watched the sun fall from this tableau.

The stars are so clear here that even the bright halo cast by the jeweled moon cannot overwhelm them. They appear clear as lines and letters, showing the directions of lands and time of night, appearing more as a book than the worn tatters that float over cities. Most stars' names are Arabic, made in the time when Arabs founded and perfected our sciences while Europe was naming and numbering its grim Dark Ages. I wonder how much these brave men mark that history, and what they will make of us. Will we be enemies, friends, or the children of God as much as they see themselves?

In this place, it must be easy to believe God has spoken. Everything is expressive. The desert encourages expression and encourages faith. I think I am hearing something as well, from God or myself or the world, someone with something to tell me. I can barely think of how I would feel right now if I were not drinking tea and listening to the music of the rebels and the refugees. There is warmth in this darkness. There is sacred silence between their notes and words. All here have something in common. They know how to treat fear - with joy. It reminds me to take more joy in the things that no one can take away, and in the things I can and will lose. There is no reason, not even in this place, not to be joyful.

Jean-Pierre, one of the European specialists, is playing the guitar and singing discordantly while hovering atop a shipping container. He has learned that lesson. I feel like singing with him. Let it be. Everything's gonna be all right. He plays over and with the tribal beats and chanting as well as the Muslim prayers. It would sound like chaos if this was not the time to forget the greater disorder that day brings.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: the inner camp and the beginnings of clean water

Skywalker: The Road East

2011-08-18T18:22:00.006-04:00

Today's view from the ground: An-Nafatiya, Tunisia

In the above photo, a tribesman in southeast Tunisia crosses a span of the Sahara on a camel.

We finally have an idea on the water purifier - using a manhole cover where the cap should be - but it's overkill and probably too heavy. At least it's somewhere to start. The refugee camp at Ras Ajdir is critically short on water. It seems our first problem just chose us. Youssef has set up a teaching tent nearby and recruited some of the Tunisian soldiers to fill the student ranks. We still have no word on how many Libyans are coming.

A wind kicked up just west of here, filling our bus with coarse red sand. We got reports of sandstorms near the border, slowing the rebel advance to the coast and freezing refugees in place, sometimes in the middle of the fighting. The camp is now ten miles from the front. We can only hope that, in trying to get here, the people won't get into worse trouble than they are already in.

I can see the mountains rise across the border like brown teeth emerging from the sand-gummed jaws of the desert. They make curves that match the line of the nearby Mediterranean. The range is full of rebels ready to sweep down to the sea, claim Tripoli, and win their war. I am afraid for them. I am afraid for what happens next. The air is pregnant with the delay.

We are caught between two battles now - a youth protest in the town behind us and a clash between refugees and the army at the border. The soldiers here don't know which way to go; a lot of them don't seem interested in cracking down on their own people. They are probably more interested in keeping the refugees in the camps. I noticed the beggars in Tataouine did not even bother to ask the soldiers. They wanted to seem invisible. They know they are not welcome. They are used to it.

The land is flat here but it seems to be echoing with shouts and crackles. Darkness has fallen and nothing blocks a full view of the ignited horizons, each erupting at points with their own riots. There are cars flying down the road like fireflies in both directions, and their occupants are probably hoping their fights are decided before they arrive. Peter and Tom want to drive to the border. I am telling the driver to stay here. Arthur is sharing a cigar with me and telling me about his native seaside town in England. He said the skies always seemed so clear and yet still never looked like this. I was thinking the same thing about my home as I lie on the ground with him and peer up into the cold beams of the stars.

That's the (literal) view from the ground. Next stop: Ras Ajdir on the Libyan border

Skywalker: Sfax

2011-08-17T08:09:00.004-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Sfax, Tunisia

In the above photo, a tire fire is reflected in a window over graffiti demanding the death of recently deposed Tunisian president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Sfax last week.

I passed through this small city very quickly and was able to perceive little of its character in 2004. It seemed lively and welcoming, an industrial center and receiving room for tourists by the placid Mediterranean. French and Italian travelers would often recommend Sfax to me and suggest I should have spent more time on its beaches. But even at the height of tourist season, there are almost no foreigners here now. The few I see are hardened and disheveled. Dani, the Israeli instructor in our cohort, looks more nervous than before. And I hoped he'd be used to this sort of thing.

Sfax is scarred, and riddled with open wounds. The protests against Ben Ali injured many here in December and January, when Haiti occupied my mind. The recent unrest regarding the state of emergency lowered a curfew on evening hours. Ramadan evenings are usually lively and safe. There is no safety here. The streets are filled with garbage and wreckage, some walls stained with smoke and blood. Some angry youths shout in the streets; the police arrive and the mob climaxes with a screaming fit and moves on. Both sides of the fight seem weary and weak. Both sides already fought for the soul of their country and feel like they lost.

The few people walking the streets are either cautious or disinterested in an almost humorous way. Some are certainly old enough to have seen the Medical Coup, when Ben Ali seized power in 1987 and created a new class of national holidays and memorials to immortalize it. Some of these people may not care what happens next. It must all seem the same as last time, if not worse.

This is where there is only a thin strip between sea and desert. For the nomads and tribes that plied this route as empires rose and fell, the sea was constant and merely changed from sand to water. Ribbons of defined land like this seem doomed to strife. There is always so little for the many who need it. Even freedom.

I sometimes feel as if the land is crumbling beneath us and there are fewer safe places to seek refuge. It is like watching a cliff retreat against a raging river and more people scramble for safety, but all will be overrun. I have felt that a lot recently. Sfax feels like the edge of the cliff. I feel a primal trepidation about continuing on. My skin burns despite my cover. My steps are unsure. I have not been hungry or thirsty. Perhaps it is the silence I knew in a place as happy and musical. I so rarely get to return to places that I never know how to react when I do. When I get this feeling, I try to remember the miraculous feats of man and nature that keep everything together. I just wish they were more numerous.

The Australians, Peter and Tom, are still overcome with excitement. Peter has seen his share of disasters but not many wars among them. He knows his way around trauma from working in the dangerous outskirts of Sydney, but he may still wait to hear his first gunshot. Tom was a soldier in East Timor. He comes from a beautiful beach town on the east coast and joined the army to see the world, yet still hasn't seen anything as beautiful as his home. He has seen more than many of his countrymen at any age, but there is still a great deal to see.

The British, Arthur and Mark, are about my age and seem sanguine regarding our task. They haven't said much that isn't to the point; that is an agreeable characteristic here and now. Dani is competent but says nothing at all - he only asks questions. An Israeli in an Arab country undergoing a political conflict is a rarity indeed.

So here we are, six white men on the edge. Eyes watch our every move, and as well they should. The wise here know that white men have sought to govern their revolutions for centuries. We are not those men, but we are still guilty of intrusion. White people usually come here to spend money and leave with trinkets and a tan. We look more like invaders; our red crosses do not immunize us. At least we are not carrying weapons.

We still await our Tunisian contingent, which may ease the awkwardness of our presence. With Ramadan quieting the day and a curfew silencing the night - with the exception of the bold angry protestors still trying to seize their future - outsiders are bound to be awkward to Tunisians. We are carpetbaggers to their cause.

Another view from the ground: Tataouine, Tunisia

Southern Tunisia is famous to the world as Tatooine, the home planet of Luke Skywalker, the namesake of our mission. The homes and shops here, carved out of rock and sand shaped into voluptuous walls of red adobe, have the frontier look of that world. Humans and nature meld here in a rare way, partially because there are few other options and not many humans. There is magic to be found here, especially in the air. Many miles from the sea, the air is clear as space and empty of scent, ready to be filled with the perfumes and fires of the town. I could smell Arthur's cigar from a mile away.

Tataouine has certainly not seen this much activity since Star Wars was filmed here. The town and its surroundings are filled with soldiers, relief workers, and the reason they are here: dark-skinned African refugees that began pouring across the border in February and never stopped. There are 75,000 in the country now, but only a handful ply the streets here. They were lucky enough to get through the army's defenses from the camps east of here. They sit in the street or wander among the sun-burnished buildings, lifting their hands laxly to passersby, mumbling the same pleadings over and over like prayers. It is a wretched lot but they still believe life here must be better than in the camps.

We have finally met Youssef and Dr. Hammami from the hospital in Tunis. We are all seven years older, but Youssef embraced me like a brother. I remember writing my first travel articles about his country, using his family as a subject. His wife, Ayesha, is also here. Their son is not, but he is a young adult and I doubt he would remember me, an awkward foreign houseguest in his simple home of childhood. They all have better lives now; Youssef works for the health department and Ayesha is a successful teacher. I feel like I have grown old since we met. They look little different but far happier.

Meeting the men who knew me before has put the cohort more at ease. I have been trying to get Peter to lead, seconding questions to him, but meeting the Tunisian crew made him treat me more like one. Youssef and Dr. Hammami should be leading, as well as those we are going to teach, but we've had rotten luck getting indigenous teams to lead efficiently. Peter doesn't seem too concerned, as this is a sprint, not a marathon.

The ceramic water filters are still intact; still no idea how to make them work. The relief workers tell horror stories of starvation, filthy water, fights between old enemies, and not enough medical care in overcrowded camps. In a few hours, Peter will have to decide which problem to help solve first. A problem may pick us.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: An-Nafatiya on the road to the Libyan border

Skywalker: Return to Tunis

2011-08-16T10:25:00.005-04:00

This blog has been on a ten-week hiatus, as the reading several have noticed. As little of note has been happening to the Hawk, I have taken the time to return home to Pennsylvania, spend some overdue time with my family (no, I am not stepping down as Prime Minister), sort through my remaining possessions, and try to relax.

During a return to Japan last month, I met several medics and emergency management workers who had also responded to the Tohoku earthquake. With the typical lack of attention span we possess, most of us were discussing the unique experiences offered by the Libyan civil war and not about Japan. An Australian disaster relief technician named Peter told me he was working with the French, Italian, and Maltese governments to bring Libyan rebel volunteers to Malta and teach them the basics of emergency medicine. In a war, medics are a requirement, one that most rebel units cannot fulfill. The cost had already been great. I told him that, if the project develops, I would be interested. After he checked on my references in Haiti and Tunisia, he hired me to teach.

The project quickly dissolved. It was impractical for the rebels to fly or sail to Malta, and many would be unwilling to leave their families during Ramadan. We negotiated the use of a school in western Egypt but that nation's own political problems made that impractical and the idea was postponed. In one last effort to use the resources and money dedicated to the project by the European Union and the rebel government, the Transitional National Council (TNC) in Benghazi, we contacted one of my first students, a public health worker in Tunisia named Youssef. He wheeled and dealed for a day, eventually inviting six of us to teach in southeast Tunisia, near a rebel-held safe haven in the Nafusa Mountains of western Libya. The only condition was that I acquire some expensive and rare water purification equipment for the refugee camp we would be staying at. Peter agreed to pay the bill and we continued to prepare.

I liked the idea better than the original plan for a few reasons. Western Libya was becoming the fiercest front of the civil war and bound to inflict casualties and injuries on fighters and civilians beyond even the bitter battles over Brega and Misrata to the east. Also, Benghazi had been unable to properly supply the western mountain rebels because of the hold that Col. Muammar Gadhafi's regime has on the land between them. It seemed a better place to put this small resource we possessed. I had also worked with Youssef and many of his co-workers in 2004 and we trusted each other; he had even named a proving ground in southern Tunisia after a humorous incident in which my ignorance of Arab hand gestures nearly resulted in a Libyan invasion (note to self: a thumbs-up can be a middle finger to some people). As an added bonus, a former colleague at Agence France-Presse, who had been bemoaning the lack of good coverage of the western front to excite news editors with, invited me to add anything useful I learned of incidental things to the wire service.

We named the project Operation Skywalker due to our intended proximity to Tataouine, the Tunisian city that hosted the Star Wars sets for "Tatooine" in 1977 and 1999, giving its name to the Skywalker family's home planet. The money guys in Brussels were unamused but let it go. In the final days of preparation, the plan suffered more setbacks. A key segment of the water filter I had been tasked to acquire would not be allowed on the plane, as it is made out of a composite also used as a stabilizer in bombs. Much of the teaching equipment we were promised by a Norwegian manufacturer had been pre-shipped to Egypt and was not recoverable in time. In what seemed to be a crippling blow, my computer died the day before I left the United States. That meant no teaching modules, no record-keeping, and strangled communications. I flew to Rome and then to Tunis with a heavy heart, limited supplies, and only half of a desperately needed machine. I wanted to turn around.

In the following days, we worked and we taught. With no access to THHL, I took notes in a small pad I bought on Sixth Avenue in New York the day of my departure. Its hundred pages are now full. Because it was the first time I had to keep a written journal in more than a year, I found myself writing at times I would usually try to remember a face, a moment, or a feeling. I do not know if this journey was any different than others I have taken, but as I read my notes, I can feel the moments that made up the operation with a clarity I rarely find even in present events. Despite my cohorts' ranting that I spent so much time writing, I gave myself a great gift of self-discovery in the panicked, interminable summer of Arab Spring.

I now present the notes to the reading several, adding new things I learned since I wrote them. They include the despair and elation at the largest refugee camp in Tunisia, the lives of the men fighting for Libya's future, the labor of foreigners seeking to improve the world, the momentous drama of the imminent fall of Zawiya on the war's road to Tripoli, and the eternal dark magic found where the seas of water and sand meet in harmonious battle. I make no further explanation, as I cannot tell what possessed me at times to observe what I did and ignore the rest. This is what happened. It is still happening.

--- --- ---

Today's view from the ground: Tunis, Tunisia

In the above photo, shopkeepers in Tunis' marketplace watch empty streets in the afternoon.

Tunis was already on the verge of the twenty-first century when I was here before, but that feels like a long time ago. And I'm not alone in that impression. Ben Ali, the recently deposed president of Tunisia, was never as big on idolatry as his predecessor or many other strongmen across Africa, but his absence is noticed indirectly. The geography is the same, as well as the architecture - modern monoliths among sand-worn relics of Arab glory and remains of the French protectorate: tan, crumbling, their ornamental facades flat at the edges. It's a certain look that "Casablanca" romantically captured for Americans but exists only in movies or the few old frontier edges of the desert. It is a feel that says "you are on the brink of a great adventure."

Facebook didn't exist during my last visit. Twitter, texting, none of it. Even cellphones had just arrived. The whole city was antique, still wired. During the brief revolution seven months ago (somewhere between bloodless and glorious), the people of Tunis were joined like a flock of birds by these new technological voices. The place seems quieter now. It has learned the value of whispers. And tweets.

Part of that tranquility is the recent start of Ramadan. The city has never been orthodox to an extreme - thank the French, thank the old president, take a guess. But I remember prayer hours here in the first Arab country I ever landed in, the first time I heard Arabic song through the tinny insistence of speakers on poles and minarets, the same sound that roused me countless times since and became sweet to my ears. Some Tunisines always bowed. Now, the cafes and the marketplace are a little emptier than last time and - probably - last week. My last visit was the same time of year nearly to the day, but Ramadan comes on a different cycle and was still months away then.

I hear the lonely train that slides up the coast to the ruins of magnificent Carthage and beautiful blue Sidi bou Said. But I am bound south this time, far into the tip of desert that Tunisia pushes between Algeria and Libya. It is the territory of many adventures that were notably written for populations craving the solitude and mystery of the desert. Bohemian Europe's "westerns" were set here. The Arabic world had theirs as well: intriguing tales of simple heroism, good facing evil where there was no help, no hope, just the strength of will in a vast lovely tableau with the same contrast as the battle. This was where men were men, women were women, and there was only a moment between love and bloodshed. Those qualities were never Tunis', exactly. Even in those days, the bay rippled with garbage and everything looked as if it had been dropped there. But the revolution has given it a certain glorious glow. And, as news comes in from the rest of the Muslim world, the two million Tunisians here stand proud as the midwives of Arab Spring.

My brief stroll through the marketplace to the mosque and the capitol, joined by my new cohort of instructors, reminded me of the fun we had in the first class I ever taught, in broken French to a band of nurses and orderlies who rarely washed their hands. Their home, the Hopital Aziza Othmana, is in a similar state to the one I departed it in but with a restored arabesque entryway, its clean sloping curves leading up to clear black classical Arabic script. I hope it gives the nurses pride in their work, which has been great and copious recently.

I disembarked at the airport with a pair of ceramic water filters. Each is an eighty-pound cinderblock cylinder. They are sitting there waiting for our extension journey to Tataouine. It was a ridiculous process getting them on and off two planes with care amid the rushed handlers and curious inspectors. When I was delayed in Rome, I wanted to make some comment about Italian brutality in colonial Libya but - fortunately - do not speak Italian. The worst part is we are missing the parts to attach the cylinders to the pump. This may not do any good. I am trying not to think about it until later. Nothing I can do now will help.

The breeze is warm and rich with pollution and perfume. Standing at the east end of the marketplace yields the suggestion of cordial coolness within. The scent combines with specks of water blown on me from a nearby fountain. Lunch is a standing meal of bread, olives, and dates. I ate it as I walked back through the market's mouth, just as I did in 2004. Even with the new technology and the fall of the government under the people's boldness, my strongest memories of Tunis breathe life again with a few coins given to an old, wrinkled street vendor.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: Sfax.

Don't Forget to Remember

2011-05-30T10:26:00.005-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Chalons-sur-Marne, France - 24 October 1921

A lone American soldier stepped into a drafty hotel room, empty except for the remains of four of his brothers. The soldier didn't know their names. He had many brothers -thousands of them. It was the caskets of these four that he was currently occupied with, and his duty was as solemn as any he had ever faced.

Sergeant Edward F. Younger, a young Chicagoan, was no stranger to duty. He had worked his way up from private in the "Great War" and fought back countless enemy advances, wounded twice and decorated for valor. His current task was considered an honor and, like most military honors, the gravity of it weighed on him.

He held a sheaf of white roses, given to him by a former member of the Chalons city council, who had lost two sons in the war. Those sons had been buried and their names recorded. The four men Sgt. Younger faced that day would not receive that dignity, along with the other 1,233 American soldiers who were never identified at the close of World War I.

A French band played a slow hymn in the street below. Sgt. Younger circled the row of caskets three times, his steps a little heavier with each pass. Suddenly, he stopped in front of the third from the left. It was though something had pulled him. A voice seemed to tell him, "this is a pal of yours."

He laid the roses on the third casket, came to attention, faced the body, and saluted. The casket was carried to Le Havre and the waiting cruiser USS Olympia, arriving in Washington on 9 November. The body lay in state for two days in the Capitol Rotunda; an estimated 90,000 people filed silently past it to pay their respects. On 11 November, Armistice Day (now Veterans' Day), the American soldier was formally interred in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was joined later by unidentified American soldiers who fought in World War II and Korea (and Vietnam, until the body was identified) to honor the thousands of Americans who fell at the gates of liberty.

The Unknown Soldier's journey began almost five months before Sgt. Younger was called to select him. He was exhumed from a mass grave on 30 May 1921. At the time, Memorial Day was always 30 May, as it is this year; it was moved to the last Monday in May for convenience's sake in 1968. Many states disliked the change, as state Memorial Days were anytime between late April and the end of May, and it took three years for the change to take effect. There was also objection at the federal level that Memorial Day was not designed to be convenient, as it had not been convenient for American troops to die in their nation's defense. 30 May had also been specifically selected because it was not the anniversary of any major battle U.S. forces had fought in, so it could not be superseded by any other remembrance. For many Americans, it is often superseded by hangovers and frustration at highway traffic.

Memorial Day was always special to me, and not because it started the summer vacation season. My father would always buy me a red cloth poppy from one of the American Legion stands in front of the supermarket. I would attach it to my jacket with one of the pins that Col. Cohen (I wrote about him a few years ago here) had given me, usually the black eagle that had been his final rank insignia. Some men would playfully salute at me when they saw that. My salute was usually more lax and British, but still appreciated.

On the last Memorial Day I spent in Philadelphia, now a decade ago, I visited the USS Olympia. It is a steel-hulled cruiser that had been Commodore George Dewey's flagship during the Philippine Campaign in the Spanish-American War and is the last surviving warship from the 19th century. With its perfect lines and gleaming hull, it sits at Independence Seaport with a certain air of invincibility and grace. I stared at it for an hour, imagining it cutting through the sea, carrying men into battle with assurance and pride. The Olympia's future is still uncertain, as maintaining it is costly, but it appears that it will keep floating for now. I did not know her last mission had been for the Unknown Soldier, but it now seems an apt honor to end her service with.

I have spent a good deal of the last two years creating ways of preventing psychological problems in combat veterans. Last night, I was at a barbecue and someone asked me about the process of approaching soldiers who had undergone traumatic experiences and rectifying the resultant issues. I told her that one of the largest problems I initially had was that self-sacrifice is at the core of the U.S. military ethos, and many troops would not admit they had a problem they needed outside help with until it was too late. Help is something they ask for after the mission is accomplished. Memorial Day is now my reminder that selfless service and other core values of the military can relate to life in many careers, and they deserve to be honored whether or not war is something you honor.

Memorial Day exists to honor the victorious dead. But it is not out of line to honor the victorious living as well. Take a moment to thank someone for the selflessness they offer to this nation (it should be easy for New Yorkers, as Fleet Week is still in full swing). Soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen spend so little time feeling understood by civilians. Gratitude goes a long way.

Sgt. Younger died in 1942 after twenty years of civil service and many speeches on veterans' rights and responsibilities. He did not live to see his beloved nation's final victory over aggression, but I am sure he knew it would happen. A man who could believe he found a buddy in death has a faith only a soldier can trust.

That's the view from the ground.

Good Intentions Up in Smoke

2011-05-25T10:58:00.008-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Central Park, New York, NY - Yesterday

In the above photo, cigarette butts await clearing away in Central Park's Ramble.

The day before yesterday marked two events in Central Park that I am a fan of. First, I finally ran the entire Reservoir Track at top speed without stopping. Second, and more importantly, the city-wide smoking ban in public parks took effect. Maybe "effect" is an overstatement, but one can only hope.

The eradication of smoking has been a very slow siege by those who'd rather not be subjected to someone else's vice for the last fifty years. It used to be inconceivable that smoking in bars and restaurants would be restrained, let alone prohibited. My parents, always sensitive to smoke, would insist on the very distant end of the non-smoking section in restaurants. Sometimes, that wasn't enough not to rankle my father's incredible nose. Now, I haven't been in an American restaurant you could smoke in for almost a decade.

Then it was bars. I was in Pittsburgh in 2003, when the movement to ban smoking in watering holes took hold. Many "yinzers" were quite upset - "First I couldn't smoke when I eat, now I can't smoke when I drink?!" Many people claimed they wanted to smoke most when they ate or drank. In an article I wrote on the phenomenon for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review the following year, I discovered the ban on smoking in restaurants and bars actually got twenty to thirty percent of Pittsburgh smokers to quit.

In an amusing response to this, a man sued the City of Pittsburgh and its mayor, Bob O'Connor, for civil rights violations. His argument was that the government infringed upon his ability to choose to smoke by banning the activity in all the places which he was accustomed to smoking in. Considering that the jerk's life expectancy, as well as that of everyone around him, increased with every day his rights were allegedly infringed upon, one would think he would be grateful. But the suit continued until Mayor O'Connor died tragically of a rare form of cancer in 2006. It appears the plaintiff then lost his resolve, perhaps at seeing how fragile life is.

It seemed absurd to ban smoking anywhere outdoors. The University of Pittsburgh didn't even ban it on the patio of the Cathedral of Learning, which was often littered with butts at every break between classes. It was almost a given that smokers couldn't last long enough to even reach the lawn before having to light up after class. Do we really think they can make it across Central Park without it?

No. For the time being, the City of New York is leaving enforcement of the non-smoking in all of its public parks and recreational spaces to the agency already responsible for everything else in them: the Department of Parks and Recreation. The department is generally effective at its duties, including upkeep of plant life and maintenance of facilities, but they're not cops. In my one encounter with a parks enforcement officer, he accused several dancers and me of organizing an event without a permit. The "event" was me photographing several of them dancing around an otherwise empty field, and the dancers taunted and laughed at him so much that he shook his head and went away. There was also a very kind parks cop who asked me to leave Union Square after midnight, which was fine since I wasn't sure why I was there in the first place.

There aren't many parks enforcement officers, and there may be less. As part of the plan to close the $2.4 billion gap in the city's budget for the next fiscal year (starting in five weeks), the Department of Parks and Recreation can expect a 15% cut in personnel, hiring delays, and other forms of cutbacks. In the last three days, I have spotted at least a dozen smokers in Central Park (one ironically lighting up after a brisk run on the Reservoir Track) and no one got a ticket. The fine is $50 per offense, and the money wouldn't even go into the department's shrinking coffers.

The saddest part is that several smokers who were interviewed by reporters about the ban said they had no intention of abiding by the law. A few notably said that it was worth $50 (about the price of three packs of cigarettes in New York City, as well as groceries for a week or a nice meal for two) to take a drag sometimes. Also, in response to the ban, New York City Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment, acronymed C.L.A.S.H. with a website that reminds me of survivalist groups or doomsday prophets, are planning an organized defiance of the ban later this week. I don't consider it civil disobedience at its finest. The worst part is that C.L.A.S.H. has an anthem written by Tom Petty, but the YouTube link to hear it was broken. And I was looking forward to hearing it.

I tried smoking, and it never captured me. I've also ridden on a motorcycle without a helmet, which is a rather stupid thing to do. My opinion of people who ride motorcycles without helmets is very simple: you don't cause harm to anyone else and, as long as you understand the risks to yourself and are willing to pay for the possible consequences, you can go ahead and cheat the devil. Smoking, however, can be more dangerous to people around it than people who smoke, and that is an actual deprivation of choice, not a fake one like the man in Pittsburgh championed.

According to the New York State Department of Health, being within three feet of a smoker, even on a breezy island such as Manhattan, is health-wise the same as being next to one indoors. Its Pennsylvanian counterpart claims that children who watch their parents smoke, or even smell the residue on their clothes, are five times more likely to smoke in their adulthood than if their parents do not smoke. The American Lung Association says filtered cigarettes can deliver more harmful chemicals to people inhaling secondhand smoke than to people smoking the cigarettes. If you don't believe me, do some research, and make sure your facts were created by scientists and doctors.

People are free to do whatever they want, no matter how harmful it is to them, and people like me will stand ready to help them when they need it. It is not too much to ask that those who choose not to suffer the consequences can walk around the park without a noxious cloud around our heads. I wish it did not take a law to request that, and I wish that the law was not apparently useless to enforce it.

That's the view from the ground.

How the Hawk Got Wings: Part 2

2011-05-15T14:37:00.005-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Camp Garcia, Vieques, Puerto Rico - May 2003

In the above photo, protests hang on the fenceline surrounding Camp Garcia shortly after it closed.

Captain Juan owned a fisherman’s rig. He had a boat, a few dozen traps, and a dock in the town of Esparanza. His income wasn't bad, especially in relation to the rest of the island he lives on. He had not caught a single fish in three years.

Vieques, a small isle off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, had just come out from under the grasp of the U.S. Navy. Manuevers and explosives testing on Camp Garcia, the eastern third of the island, have resulted in obliterating the farming industry on the island almost completely. That left the fishermen.

The marina (U.S. Navy) and their exercises of the coastlines of Vieques took their toll on the fishing industry as well. Traps were destroyed by the propellers on naval destroyers and smaller vessels. According to independent surveys, chemicals from the explosives had seeped into the groundwater, creating fish-deaths and destroying Barracuda Bay’s bioluminescence, a rare and beautiful overpopulation of microorganisms in an enclosed body of sea water. The U.S. government was not allowing Vieques to export seafood other than lobsters to Puerto Rico or anyone else, a restriction that remains today. The Puerto Rico Department of Health claimed a plague is sweeping the waters around the island.

“We thought we were dead,” Franco said. “Many fisherman were ready to sell their boats at the lowest prices. The only thing they seemed good for was bringing tourists around.” That seemed like the unavoidable truth until the marina left.

As Sam and Raf interviewed the local health officials, I drove into the old emplacement with two American expatriates living on Vieques, Brian and Sue. After a night of rain, the sun burned the moisture off the ground as quickly as it arrived. The lands of the camp are some the last undeveloped acres in the Caribbean Sea. There are no high-rise hotels, no resorts, and no tourist attractions.

“That’s the good part about the navy being here,” Brian said. “No one could build anything. The Puerto Ricans sell everything to make it big with hotels.”

Both Brian and Sue, natives of Florida, are glad the viequenses did not get the land of Camp Garcia back immediately. “They would have trashed it in a month,” Brian said.

The lands and beaches of the camp are all open to the public as Interior officials patrolled the land. The eastern tip of the island, still littered with dangerous explosives, is closed. The Patterson’s Jeep pulled up on Blue Beach, a former landing ground of Navy Seal exercises. A tall man with sunglasses and a gold chain stood up from the rocks and waves.

Captain Juan, 41, lifted his sunglasses to see Brian and Sue and then looked back out to sea, where a small boat grew larger as it approached. As I get out of the Jeep, he introduced himself as the “deposed king of the fishers.”

Two women, obviously American, lie topless on the beach next to Juan. They wave lightly and go back to sunbathing.

“What are you doing out here, Juan?” Brian asked.

“Waiting for my boat,” he replied. “I lent it to Fig this time.”

When the boat arrived at the old Blue Beach dock, a man jumped off and embraced Juan. He handed him a small packet and chatted for a few moments with the man. Juan tossed the packet to one of the girls, who opened it eagerly and sniffed the contents. Brian and Sue laughed and deliberately turn away.

The new free enterprise on Vieques is cocaine. The island is directly north of Venezuela and northeast of Colombia, with no islands in between. During naval occupation and widespread attention focused on the island, smuggling by boat was nearly impossible. When the navy left, it became easier for ruined fishermen to make a new start in the trafficking business.

“The trick is to get it into the truck before the damn (Interior officials) get down here,” Juan said. “You hang around enough, you figure out their patrol routes and times, just like the marina.”

Vieques, with a population of 9,000 natives and a few hundred American visitors and expatriates, had an unemployment rate of over 50%. The only outside employer was General Electric, which closed its factory in 2001. The only legitimate business now is tourism. Restaurants, hotels, and hostels had sprung up in the two major towns, Isabel Segunda on the north Atlantic coast and Esperanza on the south Caribbean coast.

“(Cocaine) is damn near 50% profit,” Juan said. “Once you get it here, you’re on American soil.” From Vieques, cocaine could be discreetly transported to Puerto Rico by boat or private plane. It was relatively easy to transport to Miami, New York, and Philadelphia, with no interference from customs or transportation officials.

“I may be Puerto Rican, but I don’t want independence quite yet,” Juan said as he laughed. “As long as we are a commonwealth, there are no boundaries for us.”

Brian laughed and looked at the boat, as Fig and two other men quickly loaded boxes into a truck just off the beach. “God bless America,” he said.

That's the view from the ground.

How the Hawk Got Wings: Part 1

2011-05-13T13:22:00.005-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Isabel Segunda, Vieques, Puerto Rico - May 2003

In the above photo, a tire on the north coast of Vieques is decorated with a message against the U.S. Navy's "occupation" of the island, shortly after it ended in May 2003.

It may surprise the reading several to know that, at one point not too long ago, I was not worldly in any way. In fact, I never left the country in any humanitarian or journalistic function until I was nearly 21. By that time, several of my friends had been to faraway lands on vacation or to study, while others had spent a few years in the armed forces. I was a late bloomer.

But before I technically left the country, I had quite the first trial of my abilities as a humanitarian worker. It all began eight years ago last week on a little-considered sun-soaked isle in the northern Caribbean, where many people are more likely to suffer sunburn than get blown off their feet.

I had been set up with an unpaid internship by my sociology professor, who had noticed my work in the school newspaper and asked if I wanted a chance to do more photography. I jumped at the chance, especially as the internship was offered through the United Nations Development Programme and one of its only U.S. projects at the time. The Millennium Development Goals were still young and their impossible improvements to the world still glinted in the eyes of humanitarian idealists. Of course, they were designed to be impossible, but no one told us that.

My original mission was to take photographs to accompany a report on migrant farm workers in the heart of Puerto Rico, but there had been a change of plan. An historic event was taking place as preparations were being made. Vieques, a small sliver of land off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, became property of the U.S. Navy shortly after World War II. Its residents had been forced to its middle third while the west end housed a naval base and the east end became a test firing area. In the first twenty years of this arrangement, the successful population of sugar cane growers was cut in half and the productivity of the island disappeared. The environment, including a bioluminescent bay, was nearly ruined and the cancer rate of the remaining viequenses (residents of Vieques) became quintuple that of Puerto Rico.

In 1999, a local security guard was killed by a test bomb. A successful campaign of civil disobedience halted naval exercises on and around the island, while several Hispanic celebrities sponsored the cause of shutting the navy down on Vieques. Four years later, we watched on TV as the gates opened and hundreds of elated viequenses stormed past the remaining sailors to begin enjoying the whole island for the first time in three generations. The Department of the Interior got control of the old firing range as a wildlife reserve and a Puerto Rican human rights committee requested an impartial report on the state of the area. So, five days before I was headed to the island, I got a call asking if I would be willing to go to Vieques. None of the other interns said yes.

I flew to San Juan on 5 May 2003. Puerto Rico was the farthest south I had ever been by a thousand miles. I had never seen palm trees or an ocean as seductively blue as the one that stretched north of the island. For that matter, I had not flown over an ocean in ten years. When I landed, the warm damp air settled in my lungs, creating a heaviness that did not subside for days.

I got my backpack and my bicycle off the luggage carousel and walked outside. On the curb, I noticed a few young people looking equally hot and sweaty - most of them better dressed for it than me - surrounding two men in light blue short-sleeve shirts. One was at least six feet tall and the other was my height, a nondescript five-foot-nine. Both were much darker than me, although that is by no means a singular distinction. The tall one was Sam, the senior chief of the operation. Native to San Juan, Sam had by far the most sober disposition and dedication to the work. I would not use the term "sober" to describe the other man, Raf, and knew that by the end of the night. I remember little about any of the other interns, as I never saw them more than once after that.

It was Cinco de Mayo, the national holiday of Mexico, and Raf is Mexican. Most of the other people who had come for the internship were 18 to 20 years old and were more than happy to avail themselves of the opportunity to drink legally in Puerto Rico. Raf was buying the drinks, and his moustache-adorned mouth seemed perpetually curled into a grin for the rest of the evening, often mocking me for bringing a bicycle on a plane. I never drank or had much desire to, but Raf insisted. I remember little more of the evening except that I bet Raf I could bicycle the 40 miles to Playa de Fajardo, the town where the ferry to Vieques terminated, before he had a chance to drive there in the morning. He accepted, and I started off just after midnight.

It was dark. I felt I had to chew the air before inhaling. I did not know the roads or have a map. I could not stop for more than a few seconds or the mosquitoes would eat me alive. In many ways, it is fortunate that I was intoxicated for the first half of the journey, as I am pleased not to remember most of it. But the roads were rather straightforward and well-marked; the route had none of the sharp hills and tight turns that I was used to in Pittsburgh. I landed, heaving and stiff, on the beach at Fajardo just after dawn. I felt like I had been through the National Fitness Exam and finally won the gold patch.

Sam and Raf were nowhere to be seen. The first ferry of the day left. The second ferry of the day left. There was still no sign of the men. Finally, four hours after I arrived, the green jeep driven by Sam and carrying a very hungover Raf pulled into the ferry line. I tossed my bicycle in the back and sat atop it. Sam was laughing heartily and Raf looked on the verge of tears. We had never settled on a pot for the bet; I merely won bragging rights, which I never ceased to use.

We landed in Isabel Segunda, the main town on Vieques, in the middle of the afternoon. It is a picturesque town clinging to the side of a hill rising out of the shimmering blue Atlantic. It made me think of the towns in Italy and Greece that are distinctly Mediterranean in feel and flavor to the sensibilities of Americans. I would not see such places for myself for another year, when I had a chance to correct this impression. Isabel Segunda is a very Caribbean town.

Buildings were topped with wood or corrugated metal, as the climate never changed enough to warrant better roofing. Locals congregated outside, sitting on stumps or boxes or flat on the street, talking and laughing, playing games and puffing clouds of cigarette smoke into the thick air already flavored with soot and flowers. Children were playing soccer in the streets, which cars rarely traversed and certainly not quickly. The whole town could be walked end to end in minutes.

As Sam and Raf set up their office in the hotel, with the Armed Forces TV station's news show blaring in the background, I walked out into the countryside a bit. Isabel Segunda and its environs were peppered with signs of the recently defunct struggle to regain the island for viequenses. The slogan "Vieques Libre" - "Free Vieques" - was painted, plastered, and printed on everything. In one case, it was shaved onto the side of a horse. I went back to the hotel to prepare my camera equipment and tune up the bicycle. The next day was going to be my first day in the field.

To be continued. . .

That's the view from the ground.

In the Garden of Osama - Part 2

2011-05-04T12:07:00.009-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan - March 2009

In the above photo, a man leaves a shop in Mansehra, the town just north of where Osama bin Laden was shot to death.

Day 3:

I slept on a table outside the tent; the scent of sweat and blood was a little too much at night as well as in the day. Asif was dispatching his charges in Peshawar and he had insisted I stay behind. I had no argument. He left in the night while I was asleep.

I believe this encampment is run by Jama’at-ud-Dawa. It seems one radical Islamist regime is driving those who need help into the hands of another Islamist regime. A young imam - or "nayab imam" - in a strangely impeccable white robe was teaching the eight or ten children to speak Urdu and repeat Qu’ranic verses under a beige tarpaulin attached to the abandoned house. I could not tell most of what he was saying, but he was using the upbeat high tone one uses to capture a child’s attention and keep him entertained. My presence was certainly noticed and did not seem to be approved of (the young man’s smiling face fell into the straight mouth and shrunken eyes of disinterest or distrust when he looked up at me), but my intrusiveness seems to be muted by the taqiyah.

A handful of people, mostly women and girls, arrived at the camp in the back of a rattling deuce-and-a-half just after dawn. Two of the women were seriously injured. I saw blood dripping from between the fingers of one woman, holding her hand desperately to the side of her face. She was still calm, although weeping, rushing towards the tent amid the fluid movement of her robe. When she sat down, I tried to pull back her hijab, but was met with her slapping my hand and screaming at me. It was not in Urdu or Arabic; I could not tell what the language was. The other injured woman, limping gracefully under her brown robe, managed to calm her and pulled the hijab back herself to reveal a deep and filthy cut, most likely delivered with the swipe of a knife, traversing her cheek just above her neck. It was matted with smears of blood, darker than her skin in the places where it dried.

I put on gloves and showed her a dental shank (not intended for the purpose of wound cleaning but acceptable for our purposes) in my closed hand, careful not to show her my open palm. She was still weeping but her companion held her still long enough to clean the wound and ready her for stitches. I gestured to her companion to see if she wanted care, but she spoke something inaudible and collapsed into a cot.

The village’s marketplace was curiously devoid of any signs of war. Small wood and metal stalls interspersed with cloth and plastic tarpaulins held the day’s produce and products for residents and travelers to see, just as in any other small town in south Asia may have. The market seems expanded purposefully today, although without the volume of visitors to justify it. More tarpaulins have been erected between young trees and erected poles to house cheap plastic goods laid out on the ground. The village is off the main road linking Pakistan with Kashmir, but the merchants here seemed to be hoping for more traffic.

The few people here are given a lot of opportunity to bargain with merchants, who may have outnumbered patrons at the time. I notice well-dressed yet filthy men and women picking things up, inspecting them carefully, then jovially offering a lower price to the seller. The seller pretends to be offended and the process of give and take continues for an exchange or two. Dirty and torn rupees are being exchanged; there are no dollars here.

Salim, mid-30s, thin, longer black hair, selling clothing and batteries under a plastic blue tarp: “I expected more refugees to come through here. I think most people are staying where they are. They have been moved enough. Where are they going to go? One man told me that the Taliban are up there (in the mountains) shooting people who try to run. No soldiers are here to protect them. They may as well stay.”

Rashid, 30s, painfully thin, messy brown hair and sunken brown eyes, wearing a torn overcoat and blue jeans: “(The Taliban) are the new rulers there. But they are like raiders. They cannot rule Afghanistan now, so they move here to rule us. No one seems to know what they want with us. We have nothing to give them. There are the same police, the same bus drivers, all of the small people are the same. Maybe it will not matter much.”

Just before midday, a man I had seen in the camp drove a jeep to the edge of the market. I remember noticing it briefly, empty. As I was speaking to an Afghan man with little English to converse with, the jeep exploded. The blast knocked several of us down, just as I felt the wave of heat course across my exposed hands and face. As I lay on the ground, I heard people yelling, but the sound was fading. I tried to look up at the sky, but one of my eyes was blocked. I could smell the unmistakable sting of burning hair; it filled my nose, overriding the dust in the air and the remnants of the jeep flaming on the ground. My senses worked only to show me how my body was being picked apart by the heat. I saw my friend getting on the bus to the airport in Dublin, the train slowly chugging away from the platform in Karachi, all the chances I had to be somewhere other than here. Damn it. It's over.

I woke up in the evening, lying in one of the cots next to the silent woman with the injured leg. I heard Qu’ranic chants coming from far away, or perhaps I could not hear very well. My vision was blurry, my left ear only whispered to me and the left side of my body felt as if it had been crumpled while the right side was still shocked by the fall. I reached up to feel pockets in my forehead and cheek, as if parts were missing. One of the medics had taken a blunt instrument and heated it to burn the gashes in my face closed. He is unaware that face injuries bleed a lot and knit quickly. It will end up worse than if he had left me alone.

The hospital tent seemed very different from my position. The color of the canvas appeared darker and my view of others in the tent was distorted to make those in cots seem more like bodies and those standing and walking seem like ghosts. I could clearly smell the clay-filled dust covering the ground, dried blood and sweat from the other patients and whiffs of bodily functions loosed into the air, unwanted. I was a patient. I was wounded. It all seemed wrong, and incredibly frustrating.

After a time, Asif appeared over me. His shirt has flecks of blood and dirt on it. His black hair, usually a sheaf ordered across his head, looked ruffled and disorderly. I tried to speak, but my throat was dry and felt full of dust. He leaned over and said “You have not made friends with Death yet.” For the first time that I remembered, I saw him smile.

Epilogue:

Asif got me to a bus station and I crossed into India two days later. I never saw him again. He died in May 2010 when a Taliban recruit suicide-bombed a mosque in his family's hometown. His wife survived. My friend, Asif's half brother, was being investigated by the U.S. government for links to terrorist organizations; the investigation concluded earlier this year that his remittances to Pakistan were to help his family and he was cleared.

I never suffered any long-term effects from the injuries, although I had some residual eye problems for the next six months. The left side of my face scared some ethnography students at The New School pretty well. I finished my thesis nine months later and presented it at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Melbourne, Australia.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is still a very dangerous place, as evidenced by the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden and four other people. It is difficult to smile at Death in any way, but if there was ever a man who made friends with Death, it was Osama bin Laden. We are gladly rid of him.

In a different story, it is worth memorializing two men who were killed in Misrata, Libya, two weeks ago today. Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, two extraordinary photojournalists covering the ongoing Libyan civil war, were killed in an explosion. The story is here. Mr. Hondros was the friend of a friend (his last work is here), and my heart goes out to the men's friends and relatives, not to mention those who follow the work of people dedicated to the truth and not as lucky as I was to escape it.

That's the view from the ground.

In the Garden of Osama - Part 1

2011-05-02T21:55:00.006-04:00

Today's view from the ground: New York, NY

In the above photo, New York city police officer direct traffic on Church St. as the World Trade Center site (behind them) is crowded by tourists and demonstrators who recently heard of the death of Osama bin Laden earlier today.

I awoke this morning to hear of the death of Osama bin Laden. Thousands of cheering people mobbed the World Trade Center site, Times Square, and other places in New York last night to celebrate the news that an icon of evil is gone. Like many people, I did not know how to react. I do not know how to feel, especially at learning that I was once within view of the place bin Laden met his end.

The following is an excerpt from my field notes from the region in which the world changed last night: Pakistan's infamous Northwest Frontier Province, since renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This volatile region seems to span at once many people who have fought for their lives on it, often to no avail. I went there to write my thesis on the cooperation of different religious communities in new places. In order to continue my work, I had to go where they came from.

In 2009, I worked at a Punjabi restaurant in Brooklyn for a few nights. A man who worked there arranged for me to stay with his half-brother in Karachi. The half-brother, Asif, could take me north for a very reasonable fee and also translate. At the time, my project was dealing with Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan (the War on Terror had little to do with it), but the north of Pakistan had been thrown back into war. Before arriving in Karachi, I spent time with a friend in Ireland, allowing me to interview imams (Muslim religious leaders) in Dublin and Belfast. This reminded me that the war is the same as always; there were just some new flags on the field, especially the United States' and the United Kingdom's.

I finally met Asif at his home in Lyari Town, a small crowded part of Karachi. It took us three days to journey to Mansehra, the town just north of Osama bin Laden's final stand. At the time, there was a large refugee camp supported by the Pakistani government nearby. Asif chose that site for me, and I was there for four days.

Day 1:

Asif deposited me at a refugee encampment constructed around at outlying marketplace. He thought I would be willing to help the medical staff since I was in the area. Before I could forcefully object, he plopped a taqiyah on my head and led me into the tent. The doctors (if they actually are) are dressed more like imams than medical professionals, although the stained white robes and attempt at a sterile appearance is probably superior to my dirty khaki shirt and filthy ripped jeans. They looked at me skeptically until one of them revealed he spoke perfect English: “Have you answered the call to help us?”

I answered that I am trained as a medic and they immediately put me to work sorting medical supplies. I noticed small version of the Qu’ran, written in columns of Arabic and Urdu, looking like the paperback Gideons’ Bibles in hotel rooms, stacked between surgical instruments on a table under the tent. It reminded me of the aid packages handed out by the Southern Baptist Convention in Texas and Louisiana after Hurricane Rita. It is no surprise that a religious organization is at the forefront of aid.

The camp is strategically placed near a junction of Pakistani throughroads and the road to Azad Kashmir, the Pakistan-held part of Kashmir, as well as a road north to the tribal areas. People can easily find it, although it is far from the main targets of the Taliban. The coarse beige tents hold in the scent of dried blood and bile, despite the whipping breezes from the mountains and the wind that whistles through the Khyber. The surfaces of the tables and trays seem greasy, like the kitchen after a large meal and poor cleanup. The silence of the men who work in the tent shows the reverence and fear they feel. It is clear to all of my senses that people have died under this cloth.

Day 2:

I interviewed some of the refugees – hope is dwindling. I originally thought that I am in the wrong place for what I came to learn. Now, I am learning that the divides I hoped would be narrow remain wide and deep. Even the victims of the Taliban’s eastward push seem fed up with Western powers, and see India as their nearest and strongest ally. All neoliberals should come here – it would be like going to a chicken slaughter: you either become more convinced you are right or utterly convinced you are wrong.

Speaking of slaughter, I cannot even begin to describe the madness pouring into this region from Afghanistan and the north. I am trying to bury myself and my sense in the techne of my work. Field notes will have to take the day off if this is to continue with any hope.

To be concluded -

That's the view from the ground.

Whack-a-Mole for Emerging Markets

2011-04-30T19:46:00.003-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Philadelphia, PA

"If we are not careful, we shall leave our children a legacy of billion-dollar roads leading nowhere except to other congested places like those they left behind."
-Gen. Omar Bradley

The reading several recently got a view of my childhood. Every summer between 1989 and 1998, my father and I would camp atop Red Rock Mountain and see natural wonders such as the waterfalls pictured in the last three THHL entries. We didn't have a phone, a fax, a mailbox, or even that big computer Dad would do his taxes on. He bought it in 1996; I'm sure we were the last on the block to get one. Now, I had to think about whether or not to bring my much smaller computer to the mountain, a task both possible and tempting. I wisely decided not to. I also shut off my cell phone (Red Rock is one of the few places left in the eastern United States where they don't work anyway). So the magic of my childhood was unhindered.

Then I returned. It was time to re-enter the American Dream at full speed. I've spent the last two years traveling a lot, an increase on an already considerable amount, and I'd like that to stop. I was back in New York full-time and I couldn't think of what to do first, next, or last. I made breakfast. I read the paper. I got online and caught up on a bunch of TV shows. That was when I noticed something strange. I had no idea what was going on.

In Haiti, I kept up with the news quite well, but I had to dig for it. The news websites were at my command and a copy of a decent paper could occasionally be found at the UN base. Now, I was practically having it shoved down my throat. Libya! Japan! The president's birth certificate! The royal wedding! (Mostly the fourth one.) It was punctuated by ads for computers, air fresheners, and the ability to watch Cougar Town on a PSP. I didn't know what that meant, so I looked it up and remained uninterested. I love the new car insurance commercials, though, mostly because I don't own a car.

A lot of my job is sales and marketing. In Haiti, I had to sell the importance of emergency preparedness in a way that few had previously considered. The concept had to be branded for different audiences and prepared for different media. The people who needed to hear about it were few enough that I could do some real thinking on what they would appreciate and what they would want to see in a project like that. It was elegant.

But the Internet is gorgeous. Not only was I being pandered to, but I was also being asked how effectively I was being pandered to. I got to choose "which ad experience [I] would prefer" and then I was asked if "the ad is relevant to [me]." Consulting firms used to get paid millions to get me to answer these questions. Hooray! I'm an interactive demographic!

I used to find this sort of thing offensive. I don't care about new cars and low-fat versions of snack crackers. They insist on taking time out of The Daily Show to tell me about them, and now they're prolonging it to ask me what I think of it? When did this travesty happen? But I've accepted that it's not HTML or CSS I have to brush up on for a new job. It's the American language of consumption.

Consider Bhutan. If you don't know what it is, begin reading THHL here, or get lazy and Google it. (On that subject, read this about Google's hold on information. Very interesting.) I once had the unenviable task of trying to determine what political experience the Bhutanese would prefer and if the process is relevant to them. The answers were surprising. The country had just begun to emerge from a sleepy medieval state of unmechanized, unelectrified bliss. It was going straight from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy. The Bhutanese didn't have an answer. They didn't understand the question. They never had an option except to take what they were given.

As a result, the nation was bowled over by jumping into the 21st century without a parachute. The Bhutanese never had phones; all of a sudden, they had cell phones. They rarely had sugar; now they had Coke. Many found themselves frozen by choice, and the type of overchoice we see in the United States has yet to descend on them. Their politics had the same problem. The days of the Tibetan monk playing Game Boy have passed. Now all the monks can use Twitter.

In the first few months of this awakening, it was very easy to market anything in Bhutan. There were only a few ways to get word out and everyone who was going to want to hear it had a cell phone. We designed text blasts to get people to start thinking about elections (this favored English speakers, as the Bhutanese language is far too ideographic for texting). However, it didn't take long for things to get mangled. The conventional wisdom - more choices allow people to find a custom product - didn't hold in a place where choice wasn't a familiar concept. Most attempts to market anything in Bhutan, including democracy, failed.

This wasn't a crushing blow to world markets, as Bhutan has a population less than that of New York City and it didn't factor into any established demographics. It was, however, a crushing blow to Bhutanese culture, which got sucked dry of its unique traditions and isolation during the first year of a test-marketing machine. There is no way back from it. Once the Bhutanese saw the outside world for what it is - a wired wilderness whisking along at super speed - they could not crawl back under the rock. They became consumers. The only advantage is to the Bhutanese government, still relatively authoritarian, which profits greatly from the small tourism industry, expected to grow very quickly with Westerners ready to pay big money to see "the last Shangri-La."

The fact that I felt like I was drowning in marketing on my first day back on the Information Superhighway wasn't because I had been inundated. It was because I realized the Internet is the tip of the iceberg. It is where anything can go to get tested before it is released on television, print, or the things that we can barely escape, even during power failures. Marketing has become a machine so efficient that it can overrun a society in a year without even meaning to. I wonder, if I ever return to Bhutan, what I will find that reminds me too much of my walks down Madison Avenue.

This all follows a job interview in Philadelphia, in which I got asked if my experience in world marketing would help me improve the profiles of American clients. I answered "I can sell things in a way that doesn't destroy what was there to create demand." The value of that is perhaps only evident to those who have seen modernity steamroll over a delicate culture in a heartbeat.

That's the view from the ground.

Interlude: Ricketts Glen State Park (Part 3)

2011-04-29T10:44:00.003-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Red Rock, PA

Adams Falls

Adams Falls

A water trench cut through the rock on the Ganoga Glen Trail

A fallen tree in the water below Erie Falls

Rapids in Kitchen Creek

Spring water on Red Rock Mountain

Interlude: Ricketts Glen State Park (Part 2)

2011-04-28T11:12:00.004-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Red Rock, PA

Ganoga Falls

Dead leaves under the moss next to Ganoga Falls

Ganoga Falls

Midway Crevasse

Huron Falls

The above photos are from the Ganoga Glen Trail in Ricketts Glen State Park.

Interlude: Ricketts Glen State Park (Part 1)

2011-04-27T19:56:00.003-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Red Rock, PA

The above photos are from yesterday's hike up Red Rock Mountain, the ancestral home of my connection with nature.

Sendai: Standing at the Threshold of Heaven

2011-04-04T22:13:00.003-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Tokyo, Japan

In the above photo, a health care volunteer in Sendai helps treat a radiation reaction on a woman's face after she was evacuated from the Fukushima area.

I was last in Tokyo's Narita Airport six months ago. If someone had come up to me then and told me what the next half year would be for me and the world, I would have laughed. Now, at the end of it, I must laugh anyway. It is either that or cry.

For one thing, I certainly did not think I would have experience in treating radiation sickness and burns because of a nuclear generating station that is leaking poison into the ocean and the air. Many of the Shirakawa evacuees began showing (or revealing that they had been experiencing) symptoms after they were brought to Sendai through more than ten times an acceptable dose of radiation. The potassium iodide medication had done its job well; in fact, we were treating more patients for side effects of the medication than radiation sickness. But there were several people with skin reactions and vomiting after they stopped taking it. The Pennsylvanians kept looking at each other as they treated patients, saying "Alara" under their breath. It had meant "as low as reasonably achievable." We now used it to mean "at least airborne radiation alights." Unfortunately, radiation was the least of our problems.

Ryan, the critical care fellow who I met at MediShare in Haiti, reminded me of many things I have come to expect in good pediatricians. As I remember from my time at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, the specialty requires patience and fortitude bordering on the infinite, as well as accepting that your best and worst days will be due to work. In short, you need to stare Death in the face and honk his nose.

Hiroko is the pediatrician serving our camp. Her practice was destroyed by the earthquake; she barely escaped the tsunami with her life. She lost many patients and has many more staying with us. Most of them are very well attended to; the children are given first priority by everyone here. Hiroko gets the right of way even when walking to the water tank. She bows and smiles, even to her young charges, and creates explosions of laughter and joy by puffing up her cheeks or grinning intently. She almost never speaks but translates the demands of children into the demands of Japan better than I could ever think to. During a quiet moment, I taught her how to make an origami frog to entertain the children. In return, she showed me a new intubation technique.

I was called to a room in the school for a body removal. When I arrived, Hiroko was standing just inside, speaking softly to a woman brimming over with tears. The woman held a bundle that had been her child a few moments earlier. Hiroko began to cry as well; I assumed she was enacting sumimasen, the art of expressing apology (Miruyama-san had demonstrated it to me once in an exaggerated display when he acted like a minor infraction of his duties as host had brought great dishonor on his family). I waited in the door, hands clasped and head bowed, until Hiroko gestured for me to come in and take the body. I handled it as gently as if it was still alive. I remembered this child. He had been declining in health despite the formula we made out of powdered biscuits and milk. I didn't know why he died.

When I returned to Hiroko, she was still crying. I had no idea what to do. The idea of her actually crying had never crossed my mind. Then I thought of her last three weeks. Her home and practice had fallen into ruins. She nearly died. The children she loved and protected were dead and dying. She was standing between them and Death, and Death won again. It was too much to contemplate. With nothing to offer in comfort, I began crying with her.

One more child died later that morning and six were critically ill with a respiratory ailment that presented as a cold and then grew quickly worse. I was selfishly worried for a time that it was the same thing Masumi and I had been working through. It turned out to be catastrophically simple: pneumonia. It shouldn't have surprised us, with the weather and air the way it is. As soon as Hiroko said it, my heart sank. I wanted to hit myself for taking azithromycin that could have medicated two infants. But it was too late. I used the remainder of my pack to medicate the most critical child and got on the comm system to find more.

An hour later, an infant stopped breathing after he had spent more than an hour wheezing around a lower airway obstruction. I got to show Hiroko a frontier intubation (I did one in Haiti three weeks ago), using a cable inside a nasogastric tube to get past the obstruction. She looked disgusted at the process, but it succeeded in opening the airway and returning some color to the poor boy's face. He still had some fight in him.

The medical kit I had carried in Haiti was with me and it held enough azithromycin powder for oral solution and erythromycin tablets to mount a decent one-day attack on the illness, which had then forced ten people into our makeshift ICU (formerly our office; we moved to a tent outside the school). Masumi and I went farther into Sendai to pick through the remains of a pharmacy that had collapsed and been pushed inland two streets from where it had previously stood. A detachment of Hiroshi's troops came along and began blasting through the wreckage in search of what had been the dispensary. Masumi and I stopped dead as the men shifted a large piece of concrete. A woman lay crushed under it. The troops froze until the master sergeant ordered two men to remove the body and continue on. We never found any usable drugs.

The troops left but Masumi and I continued to the airport. I kept hearing the poetic way that Joel had set the conditions for the evacuation of Shirakawa: "kore ijo kono chi de shinde iru" - "no more dead on this ground." I spoke to a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine 3rd Logistics Group at the small tent base in the airport parking lot. I may suggested that I would be interested in joining the Naval Reserve Healthcare Program if the Marines had the drugs we needed. He looked at me as if Captain Bligh had just landed, haggard and scrawny, at his dock. Then he spoke to a quartermaster and sent me back to the school, saying he would do his best.

Then the waiting began. Any soldier can tell you the wait before a battle is worse than the battle itself. All of your skills are for naught, and you end up playing out in your head all the ways you can fail. Hiroko, Masumi, Gary, Kathy and I all sat in and around the ICU. Occasionally, one of our twenty patients' vital signs would plummet and a couple of us rushed in to stabilize them. The rest of us just sat stunned, waiting to see if it would work. We never felt relieved, but we never felt devastated either.

Hiroshi came in at one point and said he was getting medication sent in from his base on Hokkaido. It was a day away. It would never arrive in time. Joel kept coming by to ask if I had gotten any word, always looking like it was his fault that we hadn't been more prepared. I'm lucky I'm not the leader; anyone would have done the same thing, but he's the one who would have kicked himself for it.

With less than eight hours until we were slated to leave, the U.S. Marines came through, delivering a case of erythromycin and replenishing our stocks of azithromycin, ciprofloxacin and all the other vital antibiotics to fight the major medical ailments our patients were facing. In sixteen hours, we only lost one patient: an 86-year-old asthmatic. All the children were alive, even if three were still critical. Patience had beaten Death.

The Marines also donated three pallets of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat - emergency rations, also known in grunt lingo as "Meals Refused by Ethiopians"). Anything was an improvement after three days on World Health Organization high-energy biscuits. I had almost traded my helmet for a Canadian MRE (salmon!), which would have been quite the sacrifice as the helmet saved my head some trouble during the excavation of the pharmacy. It wasn't ridiculous to wear it after all.

At five in the morning, an Indian emergency response team on an extended mandate from the Japanese Government arrived at the school and reported to Joel. As he explained our situation to their commander and introduced him to Hiroshi and Masumi (our "military liaison" and "local logistics chief"), I helped the rest of the Pennsylvanians pack and clean up. The floor of the ICU had been littered with broken ampules and spent tubing; Hiroko and two volunteers had swept it all up in a minute, as they still had nothing to do but wait.

I paid my respects to one of the best pediatricians I have ever met with a paper frog folded out of our mission plan, as well as a drawn diagram of how to make it. Hiroko bowed to me and held my hand for a moment, saying "watashi tachi wa tengoku no irikuchi ni tatte" - "we stand at the threshold of heaven." It is a reference to an ancient legend about the guards of heaven, who decide whether or not a soul gets in. It is not judgment of quality but judgment of time. One is refused entry if it is not one's time to die. In that dark classroom, we were the guards, and our verdicts were accepted.

Gary and Kathy had the same look that I saw on the faces of departing crews at MediShare in Haiti. They were smiling and laughing with wide eyes and lingering expressions of extremity, barely containing their shock at what they had seen and done. I sat with them for a few moments as the Indians and the Japanese rushed around with new supplies and equipment under the direction of Hiroshi, who had already said his solemn farewell. I traded insignia with the master sergeant; he wore my paramedic patch and I wore his regimental shield. He saw me, pointed to his shoulder and gave me a smile and a thumbs-up. Hiroshi was not pleased but said nothing about it. Oh, well, captain. War is hell.

Masumi was already busy shifting supplies to a central depot, something we never had the time or organization to create. I waved to him and he stopped his truck, got out, came up to me and did the South Philly handshake I taught him. Then, unexpectedly, he gave me a hug. "Uchi," he said - it is the word for insiders. I could not imagine a higher compliment.

We got a flight to Ibaraki Airport and took a bus to Narita Airport, both outside Tokyo. It was the only time any of the Pennsylvanians got to act like tourists. We stopped for photos of the scenery, bought a few souvenirs for people back home and then rushed to the terminal. I left another page of our mission plan, rendered useless in its third day by changes of venue and unending confusion, in the shape of a swan at the small Origami Museum in the terminal. The keystone, a symbol of Pennsylvania, is showing on one of the wings. Let that be our remaining legacy.

I am now sitting at the departure gate, eating sushi from the airport restaurant and wearing fatigues given to me by the Japanese to replace my ruined clothing. I can feel sleep crawling up my body and preparing to take me. In less than a day, I will be home. I hope that, on the way, I dream of things getting better quickly here as this battered country gets the help it needs. I hope that, when I wake up, it is true.

That's the view from the ground.

Sendai: Notes on a Civilization Under Fire

2011-04-02T09:11:00.002-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Sendai, Japan

Sakura float by
The breeze on the lonely stream
The beat my heart skipped
- a haiku on Thursday morning

Old tents on new ground
In scents of fuel and fire
The dead have voices
- a haiku on Friday night

In the above photo, a boy looks at the wreckage of Sendai at sunset yesterday.

The order to evacuate Shirakawa came less than an hour after I was finished writing the last entry on THHL. We had been preparing for more than a week to build the village's ability to respond to radiation problems since a nearby tire plant and computer component factory were both coming back online. Less than two days into the mission, it was cut short and our entire facility was displaced 50 kilometers north. A village that survived flooding, drought, internal unrest and the Allied air raids of World War II was done away with by waves and particles. The worst part is that we still don't know who gave the order to leave.

We hadn't slept since arriving. We hadn't eaten in 24 hours. At 11 PM on Thursday, we packed all of our gear that hadn't been given to the Japanese technicians back on the pallets. We pulled people out of their beds in buildings and tents, folding the cots and bundling the blankets. By the time I called Masumi and told him I needed him to return, he was already twenty minutes away with two trucks and Hiroshi, the commander of a regiment of the 5th Brigade, which owed us 200 gallons of kerosene.

Everything was ready to move by 2 AM. Kathy, one of the Pennsylvanians, was tearing up by the time we got the last of our patients in cars and on trucks, ready to follow us up the highway to Shiroishi, the place we had been told to go. I gave her a hug and told her we'd be able to stop moving soon, hoping that the powers that be wouldn't make a liar of me. During the hasty load-out, I noticed my aging boxer shorts were no longer able to take the fact I'd lost weight for the last month and fell down inside my pants. Since our lack of sleep and high activity level lent themselves to zaniness, I made Kathy and some of the Japanese children laugh by mooning them. Professionalism - in this efficient atmosphere, someone has to forget it.

I looked at the map as Masumi drove through the clear, cold night through the new evacuation zone. The edge of the mandatory evacuation zone, which I had seen the sakura on, is at least five kilometers from Shirakawa. Masumi drew a line with his tattooed finger farther out from the damaged nuclear reactor, cutting Shirakawa in half.

"That is what it should be," he said.

"Who said it should be?" I said.

"Someone who knows."

Upon arriving in Shiroishi, I learned the line originated with the International Atomic Energy Agency, but I could not learn who it had been enforced by as far as Shirakawa goes. Hiroshi used passive voice, nearly impossible in Japanese for such matters, hiding the origin of the orders. "Alara," he said. It's an acronym used in radiation emergencies, meaning "as low as reasonably achievable" - the amount of radiation someone is exposed to. The word has no meaning in Japanese and has been used to describe the effort to clear people away from Fukushima Dai-Ichi. I mentioned to him that Shiroishi was actually closer, even if upwind, to Fukushima Dai-Ichi. In this exchange, I meant to politely convey my frustration by saying I am mad, but I accidentally said "I am madness." This could have inspired laughter, but he seemed bewildered and a little scared. People who know me can understand how he took me seriously.

Hiroshi considered the map for a moment, excused himself for fifteen minutes and returned, ordering us farther north to the outskirts of Sendai, where we had first come from. Again, there was no identity of the person or persons moving us like errant chess pieces through the breezes of the most serious nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. I eased my frustration and attempted to do so for the Pennsylvanians - especially Gary, our senior member - by recalling chinmoku, the Japanese principle of silence having meaning. The Japanese employ silence in many ways and often give more credence to someone of few words than many. But that is not to say there is less information held or even communicated by a silent person. There may be no clear explanation. There may be a known one that should not be shared. I keep watching Hiroshi and Masumi for clues in their eyes and gestures, and I keep restraining my team from asking too much. The Japanese do not speak carelessly: iwanu ga hana - silence is golden.

We finally camped in and around a school south of the city. There was more room than in Shirakawa; we even managed to put crew quarters inside an office instead of an outdoor tent. Masumi stayed with one of the trucks, ordering Koichi and the others back to the airport, where U.S. and Japanese forces are still struggling to restore Sendai's connections to the rest of the world. We had kerosene heaters in the tents outside but only ran them half the time because of fuel shortages, so we encouraged people to keep the flaps closed. Able-bodied people began doing exercises to keep warm.

Several patients who had stubbornly refused special treatment turned for the worse in the cold early morning, as the trip to Sendai had not done them any favors. We brought the two critical ones into our office, only to lose one of them a few minutes later. The Japanese doctor ran the code with mechanical efficiency, and the body was removed within seconds of the declaration of death. No other patients saw the hurried procession. I thought how different it would have been in Haiti, when a body would lie in its bed for more than an hour as patients looked at it in masked horror. Japan has so many walls, even in open spaces.

When I woke up yesterday morning, Gary told me I had been snoring. I never snore. A few minutes later, I began coughing and my head felt the inner pressure it does when I get sick in the winter. The radiation gear had been protecting me, but the constant wet cold combined with the cloud of nastiness left in Sendai by the tsunami got into my lungs after I shed it. I began a course of azithromycin, but I am still sluggish and having trouble breathing on occasion. Joel had me reassigned to logistics so I could stay away from patients, most of whom are battling their own illnesses. That put me with Masumi and Hiroshi again.

Neither of them speak often, and they almost never speak to each other. I have my own theories as to why not, but it none of my business. They are certainly soto (outsiders) to each other and, even in this crisis that is bringing people together, the social norms hold steady. If nothing else, they are what these displaced and confused people are holding onto. There is little left.

One thing both men are doing remarkably well is attending the needs of the dead. In this situation, soshiki (the customs of funerals in Japan) cannot be observed to the letter. The original dead could not be attended by their families (a ceremony known as shini mizu - water of death) and the only fabric shop in Sendai ran out of material for kyokatabiri - the white kimonos that a corpse is dressed in - well before I arrived. All details of the dead have been painstakingly recorded to aid with later ceremonies, unlike after Haiti's earthquake when nameless bodies were thrown over walls into mass graves, and traditions will continue. A mass soretsu (funeral procession) is planned for next week and a shijuku nichi hoyu ceremony will be held forty-nine days after each death. The spirits are not angered; if they are, they have forgotten the ways of life.

I can tell Masumi is also ill; he is utterly silent on emotional matters but he has been gasping and groaning as he lifts and moves things. We are quite the pair. Joel called us "the gambari twins," after the idea of patience and determination in Japan that borders on fanaticism. It is amusing, as we are dressed identically and stand the exact same height. His hair is jet black and his hands are tattooed quite ornately, but otherwise, we could be family.

We ended another day smelling of kerosene and the powder that comes off the high-energy biscuits we brought to feed the camp. A heavy blanket of salt and rotting biotic material hangs in the air over our valley; it is trapped against the mountains by the wind off the cold Pacific. Haikus fly into my mind and I reduce the lines of the landscape through the mist into the same broad strokes I see in Japanese paintings. This place inspires everything I love about Japan. It is all here. I may stand in the dominion of destruction, but the moment inside me is perfect.

That's the view from the ground.

The Hawk flies again: Shirakawa

2011-03-31T09:14:00.003-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Shirakawa, Japan

In the above photo, a technician at Shirakawa General Hospital checks evacuated children for radiation effects yesterday.

When I was in this area of Japan four years ago, it was quiet and dusted with snow. I looked at the barren cherry trees and tried to imagine their branches laden with delicate pink blossoms like they are every March. I vowed that I would return sometime to see that for myself.

I never thought I would fulfill that vow while coated in protective gear, lugging relief supplies across the country and smelling of kerosene. Things don't always go the way we think they will.

Tuesday night never ended; it went straight into Wednesday. The camp that Masumi brought me to was too overwhelmed with needs that we could not provide. Koichi, one of the drivers, offloaded the supplies from Alaska in a lot behind the medical tent in order to use the truck to pick up pallets of food and clothing from Sendai Airport. Two nurses yanked me into service, as the medical tent had expanded outside, despite temperatures hovering above freezing.

I nervously looked at the line of pallets a few meters away as I waltzed between patients, checking vital signs and administering medication. Some people were coughing loudly and we cycled them inside, putting them near the heaters and then replacing them with colder people after two hours. I was sure that would not go over well and also convinced some of our supplies would be gone by dawn.

I underestimated my surroundings. Patients did not complain, although their families occasionally did, when I ordered them out into the cold. They dutifully abandoned the warm beds in deference to those who were coming inside without me so much as asking twice. Also, no one got near our supplies. Koichi returned with food and medicine brought in by the U.S. Air Force, then dutifully reloaded the trucks with the help of the 5th Brigade of the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force.

One thing I had that the soldiers needed was kerosene. I had brought it in to fuel heaters, but Hiroshi, an officer in the 5th Brigade, said they needed it for something else. I asked what. He took me in a truck, along with the kerosene, to another camp south of ours. He showed me to a tent in which at least 200 bodies were stacked neatly in rows. The kerosene was for a funeral pyre; these and many other casualties had not yet been cremated. They were past the point in which the dignified Buddhist cremation ceremony, requiring at least ten gallons of kerosene per corpse, was practical and the priests had given us carte blanche to dispose of bodies as needed in the interest of public health, something that has never been ordered since the end of World War II. With only 200 gallons of kerosene, we did what we had to do.

It was after that unpleasant business that Joel and the rest of Pennsylvanian team arrived. I met them at the medical tent, marked with dirt and stinking of kerosene. Joel said I already looked awful. Hiroshi looked even worse. I didn't want to tell him why.

We drove south towards Shirakawa. No one else was; a mandatory evacuation zone was in force around the damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Generating Station, the reason we were going in. Masumi and Koichi had no reaction as we cleared two checkpoints while blasting The Hives as loud as we could and had a sing-along in the truck. I caught Masumi dancing at one point, which was a relief. I was convinced he was going to go berserk.

Shirakawa is the strangest disaster zone I have ever beheld. There is no sign of danger or discord. The ground is solid, the buildings are sound, the sky is clear and the sakura (cherry blossoms) have exploded on every tree. It is a gorgeous village and there is nothing visibly wrong with it. What is invisibly wrong is too terrifying to contemplate.

Shirakawa General Hospital sits on the edge of the evacuation zone. Tens of thousands of people in the region were rendered homeless by either the earthquake or the nuclear reactor leaking radioactivity into the environment. It's been detected as far away as Iceland, but nearly all of it is concentrating right here. And no one knows how things will look as a result, or when it will even be perceived. For now, all is quiet.

That morning, the news came in that two more workers at the reactor had been burned by radioactive water while they desperately tried to stop the leak from the crippled generating station. No one had much to say about it. Very few people here are visibly ill, and almost none are exhibiting symptoms of radiation sickness. We brought it anti-radiation medications, and we are on it ourselves (I am feeling a little nauseous and I am salivating like a mad dog as a result of them). Everyone takes it and swallows it as if we were handing out samples of a new candy. The calm is eerie.

Shirakawa did have some concrete needs that we attended to. It sounds awful to say that was a relief, but sitting around waiting to see if we were needed would have been too much to bear. We restocked and sorted the pharmacy, set up shelters in two empty buildings with the cots and blankets we brought, resupplied the food depot and sent Masumi's crew back to Sendai where they are more needed. I managed to get four hours' sleep before my shift of attending to evacuees waiting outside. It was quiet; I had fewer patients in eight hours than I did in two hours in Haiti.

Joel assembled the hospital staff to begin their tutorial on the equipment and medication that we had brought. The session lasted an hour, and there were no questions. The Japanese technicians had already been trained on it all; they just didn't have it. Once we were done, they lined up and calmly took everything away as a platoon of Marines would clear a weapons switch. Cool, calm, collected, conditioned. After ten days of anticipation and preparation, we may as well have used FedEx and stayed home. Joel looked at me with an expression that reminded me of my parents' dog when we all leave for a day away from home.

"People are more freaked out in Harrisburg about this than they are here," he said.

Is it because people here know the danger is not high? No. It is high. Is it because people here know the danger and have accepted it? Perhaps. Is it because people here don't know the danger? Closer, in my opinion. But it's not that anyone actually knows the danger and is hiding it. The few radiation-related problems here now may be the tip of the iceberg.

It will be years before the world feels comfortable with food and water from here (a crying shame, as some great food and water comes from northern Japan). Even then, it will be the world's impatience and forgetfulness, not safety and sensibility, that begins to consume something that may be dangerous. But today, in the third week of a nuclear emergency twenty miles away, people in the camps and the hospital calmly eat what remains of the local food supply and drink water trucked in from the south, still tainted with radioactivity.

In a bag of donated clothing from the Salvation Army, I found a large stuffed pink elephant. Its color reminded me of the sakura adding some color to the grey skies as they shook and shivered in the cold breeze. I used the toy to tell a beloved story to several children who seemed just as freaked out as us. The effect was positive on both me and them. Nothing is quite as rewarding as making children laugh in a refugee camp. For the enjoyment of the reading several, the original telling of this classic tale can be found here.

As evening fell, I was not urgently needed, due to the efficiency of the Japanese technicians and the steadfastness of the Pennsylvanian team. I put on sixty pounds by donning all my gear, including the jacket and helmet, and went for a walk with a Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force patrol. Most of the villages are just as Shirakawa is, except for the complete absence of people. How many warning illustrations from the Cold War looked like this: a forlorn breeze wandering down deserted streets, with everything human left bizarrely in place except humans? One table in a ramen bar had a bowl of soup sitting on it, spoon and chopsticks placed carefully by its side. It was all I could do not to run away in a panic.

The sakura are in full bloom, and will remain so for only a week. I felt extraordinarily fortunate to have my dream of seeing fulfilled so perfectly by circumstance. But I could not stop thinking of the giant twisted leaves found near Chernobyl with every glance at a perfect pink flower.

I settled myself with an exercise that I use with Impressionist paintings. I stared intently at one blossom and then backed slowly away, letting it merge into its fellows and become a mountain of color washing over me. I always dreamed that fields of cherry trees would make shapes like summer clouds do. I think the tree pictured below is dancing. Do you see it?

That's the view from the ground.

The Hawk flies again: Sendai

2011-03-29T16:25:00.004-04:00

Today's view from the ground: Sendai, Japan

In the above photo, residents of Sendai survey the wreckage of an area damaged first by the 11 March earthquake and then later that day by the resultant tsunami.

I had been picturing it dark. As I prepared to leave for the last week, I always failed to visualize daylight in Japan. Disaster sites always scare me more in the dark, even New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina despite the lively French Quarter coming back to life. Maybe it was the idea of radiation, an invisible foe, creating perpetual night in Japan. It all seemed dark in my imagination, like the interminable warm triage shifts at MediShare in Haiti. Today's forecast in the radiation zone: sunny and cold.

I got to spend a few days with my parents, starting with my mother's birthday. She is starting a new job in the health care field and I let her practice taking my blood pressure. It is one of those skills that rests more in the hands than in the head; people do it automatically after their hundredth time or so. I told her she needs to do it as often as possible; she'll have it in no time.

My new training seemed a lot more complex. The next day, I was in Harrisburg doing a crash course in detecting and treating radiation-related illness and injury. I met the other seven people I would be going to Japan with, most older than me. None had been there before and none spoke any Japanese except the commander and me. The commander, Joel, worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and has an air of tense control about him. I suppose it is what comes from being the guy in the room saying "What if?" for the last fifteen years.

Dad drove me back to New York and I packed my things, including my new personal protective equipment. I had been issued a Kevlar helmet for the first time, despite the fact that this may be the first mission in which I won't need one. I also have a jacket weighing at least fifteen pounds that is apparently effective against ionizing radiation. Considering all the photos of Japanese aid workers wearing paper suits and face masks, I do not know how much of my cargo will actually need to be used. However, I dutifully packed it all and left for Anchorage.

I planned on returning to Alaska at some point since I first went there seven months ago. I love the place dearly - the land, the animals, the people and the spirit. A friend from high school just moved there (and I met her by chance in Denali National Park) so I had a place to stay. I did not think my next visit would be five hours long and be spent entirely at Ted Stevens Airport.

Once I arrived there, I was met by a smiling airman (actually a woman, but the rank still stands) who escorted me to a giant lot off to the side of the massive field (Anchorage hosts the second-largest cargo airport in the world, behind Memphis with its FedEx hub). A cargo plane stood ready to receive the pallets of supplies that would take up two tractor-trailers upon landing in Japan. As I was the only member of our cadre attending this flight, it was my job to check everything. It reminded me of the many times I fit things into our old Ford F-150 pickup truck: camping supplies, things being moved, just about anything. I was always good at fitting things in. Here, I had a refugee shelter ready to go: blankets, cots, medicine, medical supplies, food, water, high-energy biscuits and clothing. In the end, the airman and I had to pull a pallet of blankets apart and jam the contents between other things, as we had too many for the surface area of the inside of the plane. It's a shame I don't live in Green Bay, because I'm a decent packer. Insert groan here.

Someone must not have cleared me properly, as I got two inquiries from ground crew about what I was doing. The second one was about "what the hell" I was doing. I showed my airport pass, which then had to be checked, costing me half an hour. After that, I put on the Ted Stevens Airport cap I had gotten last year. No one bothered me again. I am not sure whether to be happy that I was unmolested afterward or disturbed that a hat could allay suspicion of a security threat.

The flight bumped inexplicably south towards Japan. The skies were perfectly clear and I even managed to get an hour's sleep. Its landing at Aomori, the northernmost city on the island of Honshu, was one of the roughest I'd ever endured in a large plane. There was no explanation as to why. I admit it shook me up a little, as my nerves were already a bit frayed to be going into a disaster that I was completely unacquainted with.

I know Aomori rather well; I spent some time there in 2007 during my journeys to and from Hokkaido. I had never been to its small airport, where we were met by a pair of forklifts and two trucks. As soon as the plane's gate was down, the Japanese crew went to work unloading. They never stopped and the whole job was done in less than an hour. We were promptly on the road south to Sendai. I never got to see Aomori itself, and Morioka, another place I am fondly familiar with, zipped by in my window.

The head of the crew, Masumi, works for Miruyama-san, the father of my ex-girlfriend and an old-fashioned Japanese businessman. He likes me more than his daughter ever did (she has better taste, of course, but I won't let that bother me) and offered to help me with logistics as soon as I told him I was returning to Japan. He hired the trucks and got Masumi to run the operation. I asked how we could reimburse him for the rentals and he said he didn't know what I was talking about. It seems everyone in Japan is doing their part to get their country through this nightmare.

We had hoped to fly into Sendai, but the airport is still receiving rather heavy traffic in relation to its size and the damage it sustained in the earthquake and the tsunami. A U.S. Air Force unit had managed to get it operational so it could receive aid last week, but I wanted to avoid lousing up its operations (I would not have cared if I had known offloading would only take an hour). The Aomori option made more sense if Miruyama-san was helping. As it turned out, my late departure from Anchorage was saved by flying to Aomori, as the rest of the Pennsylvanian team had not yet arrived in Sendai because of flight delays from Tokyo. I had little to do until the rest of the team and the supplies arrived, so I let Masumi show me his native Sendai for the afternoon. I laughed as he insisted I wear my helmet, but he was dead serious. I obeyed.

Masumi's attitude towards the damaged and destroyed sections of Sendai confused me. He was like a tour guide, showing me the sites of an ancient battle that had long been forgotten. Even as mechanized shovels and the commotion of workers carried on around him, he showed almost no sadness or disappointment in parts of the city he knew so well lying in ruins and being carted away. He told me where things had been but didn't even tell me how long they had been there or if anyone was hurt or killed when buildings had collapsed. When I finally asked, he would say "some people died, but I don't know who." For all I know, his family had been wiped out in one. Masumi's face was stone, even as we spent the night doing checkups in a packed refugee shelter, which housed some of his family, on the outskirts of Sendai.

A friend told me last week that she read about the lack of psychological assistance for people who suffered and lost in the earthquake and the tsunami. I have yet to meet someone who openly needs assistance. As a traumatologist, I can only think that is a very good sign - or a very bad one. One man had been trying to fly a kite in Miyagi Prefecture when the quake hit. There was no breeze, but the plum tree nearby shook and several plums fell out. He took some of them, put them in his bag and went home. His reaction to the earthquake, when he was later asked by a journalist, was to say "daijobu" - it's all right. That man obviously did not live in downtown Sendai. Something in Masumi's eyes tells me his battle is not over.

I am just happy to see the radiation hot zone in daylight, as we will arrive later today and not by night as it appeared in my dreams.

That's the view from the ground.