A busy week. From Jerusalem we went down to Gaza for three days last week. That place always sort of fills you up with a whole range of different emotions, and this time was no different. Like the West Bank, Gaza has been occupied by the Israel’s since 1968. In 2006, the militant group Hamas was elected to rule the strip by Gazanas themselves, and the Israeli’s more or less washed their hands of it and put in place a blockade, with US support – limiting goods like cement and water pipes, and even children’s toys, saying they are a threat to Israeli security. Gazans tunneled into neighboring Egypt to bring in goods, which they are proficient at, but the whole economy is one of stagnation – survival really – and will ultimately remain so until the occupation is finally ended – and there is no likelihood of that any time soon.
What always strikes me when I go there is how generally upbeat the people are, given the incredibly difficult circumstances. Imagine how you would feel if someone occupied your country, dictated everything you could and could not bring in, helped bring about an unemployment rate of more than 60%, and wouldn’t let you leave – ever. That’s what most in Gaza face, yet despite it they get educated, do whatever they can to support their families, and enjoy what few liberties they have – like a day at the nearby beach, albeit one cluttered with trash and impacted by tons of raw sewage dumping into the sea each day from old and broken pipes.
Coming here to Beirut yesterday is like arriving on a different planet. Beirut was once called the Paris of the Middle East. With a mixed society of Muslims and Christians, there is a vibrant night life here, with bars and restaurants and lingerie shops and dance clubs. The women are dressed like they spent 6 hours getting ready to go out, and you can sit down and spend $100 on a meal and couple drinks, easily. I have some old friends here I am eager to catch up with. Busy few days ahead but looking forward to being back in Lebanon.
For those who don’t understand the Middle East crisis, and the causes and realities of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, I will end as I usually end trips to that part of the world, with the call to please find other sources outside of the American press to educate yourself on what is really going on in your country’s name, and with your country’s treasure, in Gaza and the West Bank. I promise you it is not what you have been led to believe by the hijacked American press.
July 22nd, 2010 | by David in Travel
This place always sort of spins your head around – and I’m reminded of that every time I come back. It’s been years now since – 2006 I think was my last trip here – but that feeling of tension I always remember this place by is still there. The details of travel here, how complicated and unpredictable, are too much to get in to. If you are interested to learn just how complicated it can be even to get into the West Bank, you can look up the US State Department site and go to the Jerusalem or West Bank sections, and it’ll give you some idea. Checkpoints into or out of the Occupied Territory, or within it, can be closed at any time, indefinitely, or delays made so long that people can wait hours to make a crossing, or to reach their own neighborhoods. That uncertainty pervades everyday life here, as people going to work in the morning or dropping their kids off at school don’t even know if they’ll be able to come back the same way that evening. It is a frustration that is very difficult for those who have never experienced it to understand.
So far I’ve only seen one day of projects here in the West Bank, working for a group called ANERA – American Near East Refugee Aid. They do a lot of work in this part of teh world – all of their work in fact – from water and education projects to health and agriculture work. Yesterday we saw a school being refurbished, as well as a hospital. ANERA is also building a wholesale market for farmers to use to sell their crops directly to the public. We plan to see more of that over the next few days.
July 14th, 2010 | by David in Travel
Wrapping up this trip now to the Philippines with my last full day in Davao. Off tomorrow evening for Manila and then a brutally early flight out on Wednesday. This week was all about peacebuilding, which is the term aid agencies use for wide variety of projects, all aimed at dialogue, conflict resolution, and human rights work. I have to be honest and say a lot of it works better in theory than in practice. I’m too much a pessimist to believe that as more people inhabit the world, and resources become more and more scarce, that conflict won’t become more common. It’s a scary thought, especially as you see forests disappearing, deserts spreading, and land and water becoming more and more scarce everywhere. I see the impacts of those shortages just about everywhere I go, particularly in Africa and Asia, and I fear that the more environmentally off kilter the earth becomes, the more acute those shortages of resources will become, and the more conflict will subsequently arise.
But the premise of what I saw this week here in Mindanao was dialogue. The central and western regions of this island have been racked by decades of violence between indigenous groups and settlers of different religions. There is widespread mistrust here among all of the players, and that has lead to eruptions of violence in 2003 and again in 2008 that saw as many as a million people displaced. What the work CRS is doing here is designed to do is bring people of different backgrounds together – Christian and Muslim. It sounds easy, but when you look at most communities around the world, including in the US, there are relatively few places where that occurs. When we don’t understand one another, stereotypes and mistrust are the natural byproduct, and I think we’ve seen much of that in the US in the last 10 years. At least if people are talking, there is some hope.
June 20th, 2010 | by David in Travel
Halfway through a trip with CRS here in the Philippines. My first time here, and I’ve wanted to see it for a few years now so glad to make it. Spent last week looking at some agriculture projects, and came down today to the area of Pikit in Mindanao. It’s one of those no-go areas according to the US State Department website, which in case you’re reading mom pretty warns every American in every country in the world to lock themselves in their closets immediately. Lots of Muslim/Christian violence here in recent years in particular, so looking at some protection and peacebuilding projects CRS is supporting. If you can get past the passive voice and aid speak of peacebuilding work (“The creation of Spaces for Peace zones will be facilitated”) the work is actually fairly interesting, as groups affected by the war pretty much told the governmet forces and the rebels they’d had it with all the fighting and created areas, with buy in from both sides, where there would be no fighting. Doesn’t seem likely when two sides are trying hard to kill each other, but it worked.
Here for a few more days then back up to the city of Davao and out early next week on a brutal 6 am departure for the US.
June 16th, 2010 | by David in Travel
I have to admit I brought some rage with me here to New Orleans. It’s been building up watching the news for the last 45 days now, as each night more oil gushes into the Gulf, and a parade of arrogant oil executives marches across the screen promising to clean up a mess that never had to happen, and never should have, here along the Gulf Coast. Working for a client down here, I headed down yesterday to Venice, one of several Ground Zero’s here from which the oil clean up is being staged. I came down earlier in the week with a range of fairly high level local government officials – I’d rather not say who I’m working for here so as not to cause any problems. We headed out to the staging area and found clean up workers, hired by BP, standing in lines to deal with a newly instituted system requiring two forms of picture ID and a BP issued badge to get into the site. Many were grumbling about the delays, and though our group got in, escorted by a Federal health official sent to meet us, my camera attracted immediate attention. Within seconds, a BP official approached and asked who we were with – politely, but firmly. Two more were to make the same approach over the next few minutes, and the first word of caution offered by our host was not to take any photos other than of the two trailers from which they were working themselves, administering health care to workers injured or sickened by the clean up. He didn’t want to see our camera confiscated, he said.
Until that minute I suppose, I hadn’t thought about what was really going on here, and who was really in charge. If you are looking for swarms of volunteers cleaning the beaches and marshes of oil, you won’t find the here in Louisiana. BP hires local fishermen to do the work. That’s as it should be – they are most affected by the disaster here. But what it means is that BP is still deciding who does what, when, where, and with what. They are in charge, and the federal government, along with the state and local law enforcement, works for them. If you needed another example of how Big Oil runs America, the oil spill here will provide it.
In teh afternoon I met up with two photographers who had chartered a small boat. They were heading out into the marsh to get pictures they said, and after some quick negotiation a travel companion and I got on for the ride. The caption – I’ll call him Don - fished for 27 years in these waters as a shrimper, and now as a charter boat captain taking small fishing parties out for speckled trout in the Gulf. He was taking a risk by taking us out, he said. If the police find us, they’ll run us off. It’s still unclear to me why, and under whose authority. We were’t disrupting any clean up – there wasn’t any that I saw. We weren’t destroying the boom left to float along the edges of the saw grass marsh, two-toned from the oil that had already come ashore and found its way in among the stalks.
With the photographers off in the grass, wading through oily water to get their shots, I spoke for awhile with Don. He told me how he used to shrimp but the regulations got too complicated, so after a few years trying unsuccessfully to make some onshore businesses thrive, he turned back to the fishing that he loves. May and June are his busy months, he said, so the oil could not have come onshore at a worse time. All but two of his clients booked for May cancelled. BP pays him $5,000 a month now just to make up for the lost revenue, about a third of what he would have made fishing last month. Still, I thought to myself, pretty good pay. I took out my notebook and asked Don to describe the impact of the oil, fully expecting at least some of the rage I’d brought down with me. But I was surprised by what I heard.
Don’s real worry is not the oil, but the fact that Obama is halting offsea drilling for 6 months. How can you penalize one airline, Don asked by way of example, because a plane belonging to someone else crashed? People here depend on that money, and on that work. Not just the workers themselves but the small mom and pop shops that sell the supplies and the meals and the materials that the men on those rigs need. Aren’t you worried about the marsh, I asked? Won’t this oil kill everything? The oil will eventually clean itself out, he said, and added that BP will bring people in to clean every stalk, literally, with rags “until it shines.” He says he’s seen them do it before.
I have to say it wasn’t what I was expecting. Here’s a man who lost his livelihood to oil, but who was hesitant to blast the company whose oil it was. He’s bothered by it – don’t get me wrong – and offered my favorite quote of the day, delivered with that slow southern drawl that no non-native Orleanean can do justice. “They can put a Tonka toy on the moon and play with it for a year, but they can’t fix this.” But there was no rage.
Apparently it is here, according to others I’ve spoken with. They say if this doesn’t get fixed soon, something will blow. But still – I expected…more. More anger. More frustration. More indignation at the destruction, gallon by gallon, of the Gulf Coast and the way of life of Plaquemines Parish, for one. But somehow the lack of outrage was more disquieting. We outside of Louisiana scream for the blood of BP. They’ll never get away with this, we say. But they will. Because as we’re screaming, we’re driving – guzzling that oil that we in America are all addicted to. And that’s why the oil execs on TV look so smug: they know it. The government knows it, and the fishermen here on the Gulf Coast know it too, even as their livelihood disappears in sludge. BP’s money will buy them a free pass – the money that passes from our hands, past our screaming mouths, and into their pockets.
Maybe, I thought, if Don’s not that bothered by it, I shouldn’t be either. Maybe none of us who don’t live here really understand this. Or maybe a company that made $6 billion in profits for the first quarter of this year can make their own reality, and get away with it, as long as we all keep filling up at the pumps.
Oil coats every stalk of cane grass in the marshes at the edge of the Gulf.
A fisherman examines the damage done to cane grass by oil
Oil coated cane grass
Oil coats a cleanup suit worn by a photographer working in the marsh near Venice, LA
A lone crab clings to an anchor rope as the water around him turns to an oily mess.
Boom offers a thin and imperfect barrier against oil reaching the delicate marsh grass
Boom placed by fishermen employed by BP
Oil is almost as much a way of life as fishing is along Louisiana's Gulf Coast.
A lone fisherman heads out to the Gulf to fish one of the few remaining open areas.
June 4th, 2010 | by David in Travel
Have spent each of the last few days in an area called Shivaji Nagar – a slum area of about 600,000 people in Mumbai city. ICRW is training mentors for young men, many of whom live in this area, to serve as role models for them, and as a resource on issues relating to gender. Here are few pictures of women I met today in the slum.
May 2nd, 2010 | by David in Travel
A few pics from a trip to the sprawling Shivaji Nagar slum yesterday with the International Center for Research on Women…
April 28th, 2010 | by David in Travel
Wrapping up my time with CRS here from New Delhi. Had a few hours before it got dark this evening to duck out from the hotel and take a walk around. Sounds like a simple thing, I suppose, but too often on these trips I’m working 17 hour days so even a simple walk is welcome enough.
You really almost have to experience an Indian city to really get what it looks like, what it sounds like. I grabbed my camera and just stood for awhile on a corner to watch what happened. This city sort of just unleashes a torrent of humanity past you, every second – cars a buses, rickshaws and small motor transports, bikers and walkers of every possible description. It makes me a bit crazy at times – makes me want some quiet corner of Montana to just sit down and look up at the sky and hear nothing. But if it chases your mind to some distant piece of solitude, Delhi – or any city here – is also a reminder of how lucky you are to have what you have, to make your living with your mind and not your body, and to have the option, as I did, for an afternoon’s walk instead of peddling a rickshaw in 100 degree heat, earning for your efforts the equivalent perhaps of a few cents.
Off to Mumbai tomorrow.
April 24th, 2010 | by David in Travel
A quick note from the road. Got to India a few nights ago and made my way out here to Orissa, on the East Coast, doing some work for Catholic Relief Services. If you even wondered what it felt like inside your oven, spend time in eastern India in April. It was 109 degrees the other day – 96 degrees at 8pm when I landed in Delhi Thursday night. Makes for some toasty days out in the field.
Here to see some disaster mitigation projects for CRS. They are what they sound like – projects designed to reduce the impact of disasters like floods and cyclones, which are common occurrences here in India. Today we were in a village called Bhaunreswar where CRS has helped to train 20 local villager sin all manner of disaster preparedness – from first aid and search and rescue to early warning systems. Quite interesting, really, but very much a common sense approach to what has become the all too frequent disaster in this part of the country. The villagers themselves will always be the first responders, so why not train them how to rescue people, and better still, how to warn the community of pending disasters like floods so they can save what property they can and get to high ground. I spent just two days here, then I’m off to two other sites in the country this coming week to see similar projects in other areas. Then, down to Mumbai for two weeks with the International Center for Research on Women to photograph some projects of theirs in and around the city. Right now, enjoying some air conditioning before bed – increasing my own carbon footprint I know…
April 18th, 2010 | by David in Travel
A rare moment to breathe and catch up on things like blogs today. After 6 weeks of 18 hour days, 7 days a week, most aid agency staff seem to be laying low today on a Sunday, trying to catch their breath. I’m with CRS now, still in Port au Prince, and have switched from pics of disease surveillnace as I was taking with the CDC last week to water and sanitation pictures, as CRS gears up for large scale water programming. Visually it may not be that exciting – latrines and water tanks – but the work is vitally important in the camps, which remian crowded. No one is going home yet, and it may be years before some do.
It’s raining here now fairly often – every night, or two of the last three I think now. That makes it hard to camp, as many of us are here, with computer and camera equipment constantly in damp weather. Btu it’s far worse for the people living in the camps, many of them under just thin shelters of plastic tarp, with dirt floors.
Though I used to do emergency work often, it’s been awhile now since I was in one this big. It is a strange and quirky atmosphere, difficult to describe for those who have never been to such a place, at such times. People from all over the world coming together to work on any number of disaster related issues – logistics, communications, security, camp management and HR. They gather at the few hotels available each nigh to drink beer and discuss the day. You can just as easily hear English as French or sometimes Spanish in any given circle at any given time. Many know each other from other disasters from other parts of the world – I’ve met 6 or 8 people here I knew from my days at CRS, some of whom I haven’t seen in many years. Everyone is disheveled – a day spent sweating in 90 degree weather in a warehouse or a displaced camp doesn’t leave you looking fresh and ready for a dinner date. People are sunburned and whiskered and spending inordinate amounts of time on their phones, trying to make plans for the next day or sorting out problems from today. Often things don’t go to plan – I’d be OK saying usually. Trucks break down, partners don’t or can’t do what they promise to do, some staff just drop the ball in the midst of the crazy pass. Beneficiaries in cash for work programs quit, saying they want more money. Sometimes things go really wrong and trucks carrying supplies get looted – spontaneous distributions as they are euphemistically called. Things fall apart for no reason at all sometimes.
But in general, eventually, things get done. Shelter kits get distributed, water trucks arrive, and latrines are built. People eventually recover. Aid workers fly off to France or the US or England and get ready for the next disaster. And today, it is so nice to have a few minutes to catch up to myself. And I have only been here a week.
February 28th, 2010 | by David in Travel
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