Stories of Conflict and Love

Zadie Smith, you speak straight to my heart.

2012-01-20T22:29:00.000+02:00

One of my least favorite conversation starters is "I have to tell you something, but I can't right now, so it has to wait." Or: "We need to talk. Come by at 5." I will spend the time between now and 5 worrying about the something, the talk.

I have lots of somethings to tell you, but they have to wait and it breaks my heart.

While my own stories are brewing quietly, please read the words of Zadie Smith. They travel with me, stirring me every once in a while, reminding me of why it is that I love the craft of storytelling. In the January 2012 issue of Guernica, she discusses her desire for a different type of storytelling in international development. In her words:

This is no special flaw in the world of development—every large organization has its technocratic lingo and unreadable reports. But it seemed to me a shame that between the highly technical, acronym-heavy documents written within the world of development and the often saccharine self-descriptions of the church workers, there were so few people writing development stories from a human perspective. Stories that were not especially concerned with a man’s eternal soul or his statistical representation, but with his life.

The words jumped out of the page because those are the stories I aspire to tell.

She goes on to discuss "Writers Bloc", an Open Society-funded initiative that endeavored to send fiction and non-fiction writers to find such stories. Smith argues: "A writer hopes to make connections where the lazy eye sees only a chasm of difference." The task of these writers was to do just that, to return from the four corners of the world with "reporting without the wonk."

And so Aleksandar Hemon took to Bosnia, Chimamanda Ngosi Adichie to Nigeria, Rachel Holmes to Palestine. Start with Zadie Smith's reflections on the need for this kind of storytelling and click on to the bottom of the piece for the writers' accounts from Pakistan to Haiti and Bangladesh to South Africa.

I have been thinking about the place for feelings in my work, both as a storyteller and as a conflict specialist. I seem to have gathered a lot of feelings along the journey and to have even made my peace with having them. A friend likened this internal peace-making process to "melting icebergs." My melted-in-a-puddle self is particularly exhilarated to read the following in Zadie Smith's piece:

But it is also natural, upon entering the gap between first world and the third, to feel something, to be moved, and to have opinions, to express anger.

Some of you will take issue with the terminology "first and third world" and you will be right. But I will also join you in taking issue with the absence of feelings... with the type of storytelling, work and personal investment in highly vulnerable communities that makes no room for being moved.

Transition smells like roses.

2012-01-11T01:00:00.002+02:00

Day 7 of my 365 photo project: Three generations of my family did their homework at the big table. This children's tea set for two still sits at the edge of it, waiting for my childhood self to come to tea.

Conveniently, Donald Miller expresses the following thoughts (emphasis mine) about writing in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years:

A lot of people think a writer has to live in order to write, has to meet people and have a rich series of experiences or his work will become dull. But that is drivel. It's an excuse a writer uses to take the day off, or the week or the month off for that matter. The thinking is, if we go play Frisbee in the park, we're going to have a thousand words busting out of us when we get back to the house. We're going to write all kinds of beautiful prose about playing Frisbee. It's never worked for me. Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer while still in her mother's womb, wrote one of her books in a concrete cell. She says most of what a writer needs to really live they can find in a book. People who live good stories are too busy to write about them. Nobody ever strapped a typewriter to the back of an elephant and wrote a novel while hunting wild game. Nobody except for Hemmingway. But let's not talk about Hemmingway.

Well, then. If Miller is right about this, I should be a champion writer by now because I am embarrassed to tell you when the last time I left the house was.

When I wrote about "love, worry and everything in between" last week, I did not expect the "in between" to govern my 2012 so far. Yet, here I am, sitting, waiting, wishing for the visas, and paperwork and permits and boatloads of hope that will bring me to my next project. If you were a college student in the early 2000s, you know there is a Jack Johnson reference in the previous sentence. I have not left the house in long enough to allow Jack Johnson references to ferment. #pleasesendhelp

***

One of the open tabs on this browser contains an article that tells me how to apply face serum. I need instructions for that, yes. And I have apparently become the kind of restless that is motivated to examine her facial pores and commit herself to their clearing, in an attempt to clear anything, to make space. During the time I spent in northern Uganda, I learned about "boda glow", a different type of face and body treatment. A boda glow is what you acquired after a day of riding motorcycle taxis (boda-bodas) to the Internally Displaced Person camps. The heat, sweat and red dust clung to you, bathing you in an orange glow. My formerly boda-aglowing self is laughing at the face in the mirror that smells like serum and roses.

***

Rosy faces free of blackheads need to see the light of day sometimes. My blood has lost the tolerance to New England cold it once had. The transition from the Middle Eastern side of the Mediterranean to the Greek coast and its near-zero temperatures has meant I look like I am about to go caroling every time I endeavor to leave the house, in the hope that I can "strap a typewriter to the back of a wide elephant", find a story, write about it and prove Donald Miller wrong. I arm myself with the red mittens Katie knit for me and the hat that makes me look like a smurf and that blanket-like scarf Tais bought for Antarctica, but I had been wearing in the Middle East since November nonetheless.

The taxi driver asks where I'm going and I give him the address.

"Where are you going in life, I mean!", he protests. I could write a book about conversations with taxi drivers around the world.

I tell him about the conflict and post-conflict zones I shuttle between. I tell him about the bureaucracy of waiting for approval, for the stamp that will let you in somewhere and that same stamp that can get you barred from somewhere else. I tell him that tonight, I am going to park myself at a tavern, eat fried zucchini and creamed eggplant, listen to Greek favorites with my favorite Greek women, and wait out the "in-betweenness" with a glass of hmiglyko.

"They should not send women to war zones," he says when he exhales cigarette smoke into the taxi with the NO SMOKING sign. "The people there... They are brutes."

I am exhausted from arguing. I always argue, with the taxi driver, with the third great aunt twice removed, with People On The Internet Who Think Things Like That. Today, as we drive by the outdated Santas, I have no stamina. I have no fire for the struggle. I stay silent. He continues to smoke, and the guilt eats me up.

***

E's mother has always said that "everything happens for a reason." As someone who loved Immanuel Kant in college ("can anyone really love Kant, Roxanne?", Sahil had asked then), I initially found resignation to the decisions of the universe difficult to embrace. Over time, I have realized it is not resignation -- it is trust. Perhaps early January was meant to be the time I learned to apply serum to my face and cared enough (/was restless enough) to do it. Or the time I learned to pick my battles and live with those decisions. Or the time I let go of what I do not control, toss the worry in the letting go pile as well, and just wait, exhaling.

It is possible that if the visa and permits come through and I am delivered to my project, and to fulfillment, I will not remember early January. Between powerful experiences, serum that smells like roses and taxis that smell like smoke may not make the cut. But right now, I am still in between. I am still learning to trust, to sleep at night without tossing and turning, to wake up the next day with faith that I can still find life without leaving the house -- with the faith that I can maybe even write about it.

Love, worry and everything in between

2012-01-06T12:09:00.002+02:00

Blush twinkling lights of my childhood
bedroom reflected in a mirror.

J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons.

In 2011, I measured out my life in plane tickets (32) ...
... in camera clicks (13,302)
... in words written (over 100,000)
... in worry, endless worry.
... in mornings I woke up next to him -- too few, but priceless (hello, Mastercard commercial).

In 2012, I will measure out my life in photographs. One for every day - some taken with Instagram, some with my favorite camera, some sloppy and some dear to the heart. Beth Nicholls once asked me why I photograph. I told her that photography makes me more mindful because it reminds me to really look... to search for beauty (or for surprise, incongruence, contradiction and conflict). That is the purpose of this new project, whose home is at Measuring Life in Photographs. I hope you will join me for the journey.

***

Some housekeeping notes: The back-end of this website is horribly broken at the moment. Thank you for your patience while I bring the Reading & Listening page back to life. Same goes for the social sharing links that have disappeared from the sidebar. In the meantime:

You can follow this website, Stories of Conflict and Love, via RSS here. Some of you are still subscribed to my old domain (Έτσι μιλώ για σένα και για μένα), so for better functionality, I'd suggest adding the updated feed to your Reader.
You can also subscribe via email by using the form in the sidebar, right beneath the archives if you wish to receive new posts in your inbox.
You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter too.
You can subscribe to my new photo project by adding http://measuringlifeinphotographs.tumblr.com/ to your Google Reader or feed aggregator. If you're embarking on your own 366-day photography project, please leave a link in the comments -- I'd love to follow along!

When I created this space early in 2011, I never could have imagined the love, inspiration and community that it invited into my life. I am looking forward to a 2012 of deep breaths and deep exhales, new flights, new heights, and old loves. I am most grateful to be sharing this journey with you.

The scent of memories

2011-12-29T14:34:00.002+02:00

It was the day after Christmas and proof of my yellow fever vaccination was nowhere to be found.

I have never been a scrapbooker, but trinkets have always traveled with me. Boarding passes, receipts from excellent meals, pieces of paper that speak to me and tell me I should hold on to them. I pulled out the blue envelope that contained the mementos of that year. The paper inside still smells like Guatemala.

I found the first love note he wrote me. For "the girl out there with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair."

I found the luggage tags from the trip that brought me to Cairo on the day we met.

I found a first draft of the curriculum I designed for the post-conflict reintegration of ex-combatants into peacetime communities (complete with spelling errors in Spanish and not a single accent in the right place).

I found a farewell note Karen wrote me, complete with references to the musical Rent we were all listening to when we were frantically trying to pack my bags.

I found bank notes from places that have re-plunged themselves into conflict.

I found the side effects of malaria pills, right next to a to-do list with a quote at the top.

I found a poem my mother had sent me, in a moment of lucidity and affection. Ρω is short for Ρωξάνη, my name in Greek. The poem is called "τα Ρω του Έρωτα", the Ro's in eros. My mother's note read "I looked through Elytis' words for the lines he probably wrote about you."

More farewell cards. A photo signed by the ex-combatants who participated in my first workshop in Spanish. Another hospital check-out form, this time for dengue fever. A hotel room keycard from the first shared vacation. Another boarding pass that served as a bookmark.

I found 2009 and 2010. Clumsy beginnings, shy flutterings, recovery. I found the scent of hurricanes. I did not find the vaccination card. But, amidst the papers whose edges were curled by rain, I found the company of my younger self and the gift of beautiful life the road had given her.

Celebrating light

2011-12-23T06:00:00.000+02:00

I arrived in Jerusalem like a doe-eyed lover in a budding relationship: I wanted to be swept off my feet. I wrote then:

"They" say that "of the 10 portions of beauty that came down to the world, 9 went to Jerusalem and one to the rest of the world." The next verse reads "of the 10 portions of suffering that came down to the world, 9 went to Jerusalem and one to the rest of the world."

I wished then: "For today, though, world -- please, let me just savor the beautiful light."

The world has been generous with me. In December, when natural light hides early, the holidays gift us with an extra glimmer. I have always been attached to holidays, all the holidays, regardless of whether I observe them. Ramadan, Yom Kippur, Christmas, Holi -- sign me up for all of them. This week, Jerusalem is aglow with the light of Hanukkah. In the candlelight, when I squint, I feel like I can see all portions of beauty that have made it into this world.

Hanukkah candles on the second day of the holiday in the Old City of Jerusalem

A hint of Christmas

Reflection of a candle and blue Hanukkah lights on a cafe table

A hip menorah in an art gallery of West Jerusalem

A little bit of bargaining later, these became our Hanukkah candle-holders.

Our lit candles and their reflection on the windows

Crumbs of home

2011-12-21T08:00:00.000+02:00

It was about a year ago that he came home with that lamp. The bed was my domain at the time in the home that was never really home. I woke up every day, willing my ribs to heal from the accident, willing for some beautiful light to surprise me through the window. I spent most of my time in that home resisting permanence, fearing that if I exhaled, unpacked and owned anything, I would be tied to that life, the pain of recovery, and the desperate stagnation of immobility. I frowned when he brought the lamp, resenting it and its little blue hat for anchoring me.

A year later. The body is healed and longing for permanence. There is a home -- home home. Glorious light filters in through the gauze curtains every morning. "Oh my gosh, would you look at this light!" he says in his best imitation-of-Roxanne voice, but I know he is in awe of it too. We have bought plates - 18 of them. We barely have 18 friends here, or the ability to cook a three-course-meal for six people on two slow-as-molasses electric burners, so we use our 18 plates to egg each other on by seeing how many we can pile in the sink at any one time. We have bought a coffee-maker, a little moka pot whose purchase I did not resist because it was tiny enough to travel and home enough to long for. Clearly, that was before we came to own 18 plates.

My life still fits in two suitcases, with the most important components of it being too outsized and too unpackable. You cannot pack love; I have tried. I cannot pack couches either. He has never met anyone who loves sitting on the floor as much as I do. We each have our corner. He is in a chair that is so orange I am convinced it was born to offend my taste; I on the floor cushions, back against the wall, little blue lamp next to me. He likes the window seat too. It's where he does all his browsing. When I pull him away from his TED talks and vertical farming campaigns to go for a walk, he whines: "Fine, I won't learn today. It's OK. I can interrupt my learning time" -- but we both know he loves learning outside, holding hands.

We live in a home with a loud door. For someone with my harpaxophobia (that's a real thing, I swear), that is a blessing. I hear the steel whining against the Jerusalem stone, and that is the sound of home now. The steps that lead to the door are treacherous and I always look like a penguin descending them. He has an ease in floating in and out of this apartment. Right outside, there is always a man who sits at the bench. "Tell me a story," he prompts us sometimes and I feel the universe winking.

When the time came to buy a space heater, I balked again. Like love, it is unpackable. Two weeks of shivering in our hats and coats in the living room catapulted us to the Old City. In a tiny store cluttered with hair straighteners and blenders, we found a space heater that would have failed every security regulation in the United States. It looks more like a grill than a heater and the first two weeks of owning it left me interacting with it like a child with its first pet: shyly, from a distance, afraid it would bite. The heater was clearly meant to be the Ugly Chair's cousin, as it emits warm, orange light. When I squint at it, especially this season, it feels a little like Christmas.

A week after we succumbed to the space heater, we discovered The Fruit Crumble at the Jerusalem Cinematheque restaurant. We have succumbed to the cranberries and apples and crumble topped with vanilla ice cream week after week. We had the first one on the day of the first rain. The next one when I submitted my applications to graduate school. The next one when "I just want a fruit crumble!" was the only way to make his day better. The one after that when we watched the kind of traumatic and jarring documentary that makes me feel that my love for this place is irreconcilable with my helpless outrage at the injustices that unfold a mere 3 kilometers from the site of The Fruit Crumble. The crumble has become a no-special-occasion treat, one of the few ones we will allow ourselves, one of the ones that make us feel at home.

At the exact same time every day, a woman stands outside and bellows for Roni. The first time it happened, Elijah and I wondered if Roni is a wandering child or a husband who took too long to come home. The second time, I remembered the scene from La vita e bella in which Roberto Begnini notices a man yells "Maria! The key!" every day. "Roooooooni!" is the Maria-the-key of our lives here. By now, 67 days in, we have established Roni is a dog.

On Christmas Day, on the fifth day of Hanukkah, too few sleeps away from now, I am off again. The lamp and the space heater and the winter coats are deliberately staying behind, as though my return is accountable to them. He is staying here as well, and he has promised to mind The Fruit Crumble. For the next month, I will be in East Africa, doing what I love, getting bitten by the mosquitoes that love me, filling the harpaxophobia container that has been running delightfully empty. I will be back for the coats and the crumble and the love, the unpackable, outsized love, although part of me is terrified of what will happen if one of "those really bad things" that conflict professionals talk about vaguely and in a cavalier way stands in the way of my reunion with the blue lamp and noisy door.

When I think about packing life up again, my heart misses the Roni it has never seen.

The darker corners of storytelling

2011-12-14T00:04:00.000+02:00

This post is part of the Books Well-Loved series, in which I share quotes, impressions and insights from the books that have touched me.

Book and author: The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli
Where I read it: I wish I could tell you. On a terrace somewhere, accompanied by papas bravas; in bed, to chase away the nightmares.
Soundtrack: Both the book and my thoughts about it flow better to the sound of this.
Favorite phrase: "...but for her, the value of the picture was that it returned her purpose -- to find small glimmers of humanity."

"There is a very real chance we will spend the rest of our lives in prison," I said to her.
"Well, then we will have plenty of time for you to teach me Spanish," she joked with a nonchalance that made me hate her and promptly love her.

We were both out of our depth. Conflict, development, social change, photography, documentation, storytelling, journalism -- these words and their variants were fluently part of our professional lexicon. They were also on the 'dirty word' list, only to be uttered in whispers and among trusted ones in a community that lived under repression. Forced disappearances, detentions, interrogations, shadows on the wall walking in parallel to your own step... that was the governing lexicon. It was like learning how to swim again, as an uncoordinated twenty-something who knows she could drown with weights on her feet.

She had brought The Lotus Eaters with her. I am embarrassed to tell you with which book I had armed myself in preparation for this project [but I will say, I did load 17 other books into my Kindle because "should we indeed end up in political prison, we'll need something to read for the rest of our lives." Do not ask why in my imagination prison guards would indulge a Kindle and free speech.] In the afternoons, when both our heartbeats neared normal again, we would share a portion of spicy baked potatoes. She is one of those women who can unironically pull off a straw hat. She'd sit across from me in it, with Tatjana Soli's words, occasionally reading them outloud to me. One of her favorite passages:

In terms of the present moment, they were despicable to the soldiers, the victims, to even themselves. In the face of real tragedy, they were unreal, vultures; they were all about getting product. [...] The moment ended, about to be lost, but the one who captured it on film gave both subject and photographer a kind of disposable immortality.

The Lotus Eaters is a novel about the lives of photojournalists covering the Vietnam war, packed with insight on photography and the perils of documentation, life and work in conflict zones, and the tug of war between chauvinism and feminism in those settings. There is a pinch of love -- there has to be. These novels would be lodged in our esophagus without the love. We would never wash them down. When I put the tinsel of the love story aside, The Lotus Eaters became uncomfortable. I felt like I was reading about the darker corners of conflict work, storytelling, and photography. The novel lost the comfortable veneer of fiction and tangoed with my life.

The journalists were in a questionable fraternity while out in the field, squabbling and arguing among themselves, each sensing the unease of the situation. No getting around the ghoulishness of pouncing on tragedy with hungry eyes, snatching it away, glorying in its taking, even among the most sympathetic: "I got an incredible shot of a dead woman/soldier/child. A real tearjerker." Afterward, film shot, they sat on the returning plane with a kind of postcoital shame, turning away from each other.

How do we document cruelty? Are we still performing a service by capturing this moment in time and resharing it with those who were not there to bear witness or are we giving in to voyeurism and losing our own humanity? Why, why, why do we put ourselves in the line of fire like that? Do we still feel anything after some time? This is what Helen, the protagonist, had to offer in an early chapter:

She would continue till the end, though she had lost faith in the power of pictures, because that work had been an end in itself, untethered to results or outcomes.

Helen may as well have been articulating my nightmare. I am tied to my work and service in conflict and post-conflict zones by love and conviction. When either wears off, I would like to move on to a new type of service that grips my imagination. But do we ever know that it is time to go? Or do we slowly become jaded, cynical and detached, going through the motions of the old service that no longer feels right?

Where does the question of a calling come in? What feeds the conviction? In the novel, Helen returns to the US briefly between two stints of covering the Vietnam war. She experiences the reverse culture shock and disorientation that are so familiar by now that these sentiments themselves feel like home. Every time I leave a conflict zone, wrap myself in a blanket filled with memories, and guzzle a chai latte, I say "Mmm... I think I could do this for a while, you know." Elijah is usually there to ask: "Could you though? Really?" Sure enough, two weeks of chai lattes and blankets later, my heart is ready to return to the service that it calls home. For Helen in the Lotus Eaters, home meant a lot of baking. This is a conversation that was triggered by her return:

"So, why aren't you working at a newspaper? Or covering another war? Isn't that what you're supposed to do?

"I just went there as a lark. It turned into something else. What do you do, if you have a hazardous talent, like riding over waterfalls in a barrel? A talent dangerous to your health?" After the question came out of her mouth, she felt embarrassed. He stopped and took a sip. "I don't know. If I was that good at something, I know it'd be hard to stop. Baking... shit."

The Lotus Eaters came into my life when it could enlighten and haunt, and the novel did both of those. It is Soli's debut book and reading about her painstakingly long process of research and immersion made me appreciate her approach to writing as a craft. This is another book well-loved by its author -- and loved by me, but not because it made me smile, swoon or nod; rather, because in that thoroughly unsubtle way that books have with these things, it made me gasp.

Hello, again.

2011-12-05T21:29:00.001+02:00

A year ago, I participated in Reverb10, a community project to collectively reflect on 2010. Writers from around the world answered daily prompts on the highlights of the year about to come to an end and their hopes for the year to come. The project brought kindred spirits into my life and redefined the way I think about the digital world, community, writing and love. When I created Stories of Conflict and Love, I had a list of topics I was adamant I would never write about. Luckily for all of us, I have violated every condition on that list. Reverb10 came into my life at a critical juncture in my work in conflict and post-conflict zones, as it reminded me that in life and in work, in writing and in love, the world needs to see a little bit of your soul.

As part of Reverb11, Diana Prichard asked: "Who are you?" I answer in video form, with a compilation of photos, stories, and words from the year past, and with a heart exploding with gratitude for kinship, shared growth and the most benevolent 'invisible readers' I could have ever dreamed of.

* Note: If the embedded link does not work for you, click here. The instrumental cover of Bon Iver's Skinny Love is courtesy of Pedro Rovisco. All photos were taken by me in 2011, except the last three images, captured lovingly by Dani Trujillo and Noam Cochin. If you are curious about where a particular photo was taken, or would like to guess, leave a note in the comments!

Field of mines [or: Choked]

2011-12-02T21:28:00.001+02:00

"I think we may be spending the night in a minefield."

I have slept at some strange places. There was the middle of the Black-and-White Desert in the Sahara, when I woke up to find that a fox had eaten my breakfast. Or the middle of a wheat field, where I woke up to find that I had accidentally pooped on the hiking trail. Let's not forget about the Amazon jungle during a monsoon. A minefield, however, would be a first.

***

Tuscany in Israel, indeed

A sign informed us that we were in the "Tuscany of Israel." The light was warm, the hills were rolling as they do, and I even got a mosquito bite on the eve of December. The rental car with the sunroof was a far cry from its cousin that broke down on the Damascus-Baghdad highway a few warm-lit falls ago. The souvenirs of that drive, though, soon converged with this journey. Radio Lebanon overpowered the newscast in Hebrew. The hills became rocky and populated with signs 'strongly discouraging' us from getting off the road. "Caution: Live fire zone!" "Caution: Military road only!"

"Warning: This road leads to a border."

It does, indeed. The border is hugged by the "Good Fence" (sic), barbed wire, electric barbed wire and a painted tank facing the other way. The homes in this part of the country are eerily colorful, in that way that places that have experienced conflict often are in order to offset the trauma.

Stories offset trauma for me. It is through human stories that I find hope and through the act of storytelling that I seek to kindle it in myself and others. On this journey, humans were missing from the Tuscan-emulating landscape. It is as though the town evacuated itself and the FedEx truck ahead of us simply had not heard yet.

"If FedEx comes here, so can we!" he said, with sunniness.

Maps reach the limit of their use near borders. The ones that come with rental cars do not tell you about the fences and minefields and the roads not meant for car wheels. It was the postmen who led the way. We followed the FedEx postman to the Lebanese border. The waterfall on the other side of the fence was accessible only by camera lens.

A painted tank, a border fence and Lebanon in the background

The camera went where I did not.

***

A different postman this time. "Excuse me, are we on the right road to Majdal Shams?" He seems bemused and instructs us to follow him. The village outside which we are stopped is a border of its own. An invisible line bisects it. The southern part is home to Israelis, the northern part to Lebanese and some combination of UN forces, armies and checkpoints attempts to keep it from imploding. The village has been the site of threatened kidnappings and rocket attacks. Today, for us, it is another place to look at the map and ask for help. The postman hurries us out and on to Majdal Shams.

Majdal Shams is a Druze village in the northern Golan Heights, a few breaths away from Syria. Druze people reside primarily in Syria, Lebanon and Israel, but they constitute an independent ethnicity and do not ethnically identify outside their own group. On Fridays, they gather on the Shouting Hill of Majdal Shams and use megaphones to shout their news to their families living on the Syrian side of the border. On a Tuesday, we are greeted by signs in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. "Eyebrow tweezing: A touch of beauty," suggested one. "Drive cleanly," instructed another. We wait as a shepherd and his goats cross the road. He sees us smiling, nods and waves.

The Druze town of Majdal Shams

***

We are stuck in the middle of a convoy of Humvees. "Let them pass us, please," I say and he mocks my nervousness. On the roof of the military vehicle in front of us, there is a gun swinging left and right. On the left, there are bunkers, many of them remnants of the 1967 and 1973 wars. On the right, tanks are performing an exercise. Straight ahead, the sunset. The Humvees pass us and we are soon driving behind a truck carrying a giant coffeemaker. In Greek, we call it a 'briki'; in Turkey, 'cezve'; in Egypt, 'kanaka.' By the time we have finished our roadside early dinner, the giant coffeemaker has been installed on the town square of another Druze village by the Syrian border. Children clad in Barcelona soccer jerseys are admiring it and, among them, I feel at home.

***

"This cannot be right", he mutters. We have taken the instructed turn and are sitting on a dirt road thoroughly encircled by demarcated minefields. The eight homes in this community appear abandoned. "I think we may be spending the night in a minefield", he says. Later we find that this was one of the first settlements built in the Golan and that it has now been largely abandoned for more hospitable land, where a playground does not have to be built next to the multi-lingual "caution: minefield!" signs. Our turn, the correct turn, was just a few meters down the road. The owner of the room does not ask for passports, names, identification, or even a credit card. He speaks in rapid Hebrew and all I get is "if you hear boom boom, it's just the army base next door." Boom boom, it seems, translates universally.

There is a jacuzzi in the room, and a wooden loft, and a microwave -- none of which are features to which I am accustomed. Grey's Anatomy is on TV. When we step outside a bit later, we are greeted by a vast night sky and the sound of a tank rolling in the distance.

Sunset reflected on the hood of the car

***

I am not a novice to walls, fences, barbed wire, boom boom or "no entry" signs, but the more of them I bump up against, the more they choke me. I tell him: "If I were a hippie, this is when I would wish we lived in a borderless world." I still wish that, but the scholar of conflict in me acknowledges the necessity of boundaries. I find myself in a country that can look like Tuscany and a conflict zone within 25 kilometers and am grateful every day for all the people and stories that it has crowded within its pinched borders. Yet, right up against the borders, I am suffocated. Drive too far north, east, or southwest and you will not be able to drive anymore. This country can be an island and it chokes me like Cuba did.

We never drank the wine, used the jacuzzi, or read on the wooden loft that night.

We drove 750 kilometers in two days, all within the airtight borders, like hamsters on a wheel. On the way back, as we circumnavigate the sea of Galilee, I remark on the vivacity of the fruit groves. "They are so much more comforting than minefields!", I mumble to fulfill my Captain Obvious requirement of the day. "Life over death," he says.

Violence backfires

2011-11-30T21:41:00.001+02:00

This is Part II of a series of reflections on non-violent conflict, spurred by my participation at FSI 2011. For Part I, click here.

On February 2, 2011, thugs armed with clubs and machetes rode into Tahrir Square on camels and began to attack protesters. Until the arrival of the thugs, journalists cited Tahrir Square as having been peaceful and filled with acts of non-violent protest, even in the face of tear gas and police brutality. Discipline is critical for the success of a non-violent movement or any act of civil resistance: The movement needs to protect its own non-violent character, or risk alienating individuals who ideologically agree with the cause but would not engage in or support violent acts. Egyptians had taken it upon themselves to maintain the non-violent character of their protests; Anna Therese day reported that protesters discouraged fellow Egyptians from marring the peaceful nature of their collective struggle.

Following the thugs' attack on the peaceful protesters, something began to shift: Journalists used stronger language in calling for Mubarak's resignation and foreign leaders followed. Reflecting on the attacks in Tahrir Square, Nicholas Kristof wrote:

"It should be increasingly evident that Mr. Mubarak is not the remedy for the instability in Egypt; he is its cause. The road to stability in Egypt requires Mr. Mubarak's departure, immediately. But for me, when I remember this sickening and bloody day, I'll conjure not only the brutality that Mr. Mubarak seems to have sponsored but also the courage and grace of those Egyptians who risked their lives as they sought to reclaim their country. And incredibly, the democracy protesters held their ground all day at Tahrir Square despite this armed onslaught."

What happened that day in Tahrir square is an example of the backfire effect. Brian Martin defines it as follows:

An attack can be said to backfire when it creates more support for or attention to whatever is attacked. Any injustice or norm violation can backfire on the perpetrator.

Among the conditions for backfire, according to Martin, are the action "being perceived as unjust, unfair, excessive or disproportional" and "information about the action can be communicated to relevant audiences."

Another instance of backfire was the Libyan government's attempt to stop Eman al-Obeidy from telling journalists in Libya that she was assaulted and raped by pro-Qaddafi forces. Most recently, when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces detained and assaulted journalist Mona Eltahawy, the conversation began once again about how regimes' attempts to violently repress peaceful protesters or those telling the protests' story only serves to expose the brutal means regimes will embrace to cling on to control.

Violence does not only backfire for the regime or leaders in power, but also for those engaged in acts of civil resistance. Cynthia Boaz, one of the leading voices in the conversation about effective and non-violent resistance, cautioned at FSI 2011 that protesters beware of agent provocateurs, who may instigate acts that are not in the spirit of the movement in order to discredit it. Movements are responsible for the individuals who participate in them and it may be harder to discern the lines of accountability within a fluid, ever-changing system, particularly when the hierarchy is fuzzy or non-existent. For that reason, a personal commitment to non-violence and protection of the non-violent nature of protest is essential for the success of a non-violent movement.

As a Greek, I have been put off by the burning of banks, destruction of property and violence that has sometimes defined the protests and riots in my home country. I often agree with the message and goals of the protesters, but I do not agree with espousing violence as a means to accomplishing them. Some will say "but people are angry!" or "we have no time for non-violence." To that, I respond - inspired by the instructors at FSI - that there are so many ways to wage non-violent action (198, in fact, according to Gene Sharp) that until all of those have been attempted and failed, protesters cannot truly claim that they have exhausted the non-violent means available to them. Change need not be quick to be effective and if a movement sacrifices non-violence for the sake of speed, it will lose me and the hearts and minds of many who would support it.

For more: Daryn Cambridge curated the main points of Lee Smithey and James Greene's presentation on the backfire effect at FSI 2011. Cynthia Boaz pointed us to Brian Martin's resources on the backfire effect. Follow Cynthia at @cynthiaboaz on Twitter. She will blow your mind.

Thankful for all I miss

2011-11-23T19:08:00.000+02:00

Fifteen years ago this time of year, I could reliably be found reading Enid Blyton books by the fireplace while eating sunflower seeds. It was not unusual for one of my cheeks to turn bright red from the heat and my lips to taste salty for hours because of the sunflower seeds. Although the spirit of gratitude is universal, the rituals of Thanksgiving are thoroughly American, so they did not come into my life until college. As I sit in Jerusalem, virtually hugging the space heater whose orange glow and ability to make one cheek blush remind me of the Enid Blyton fireplace of my childhood, I look back on the Thanksgivings that have shaped my life.

The first one

The first 'adult' post-graduate Thanksgiving [photo by Allie, a brave guest]

There is a lot of posturing during the first year after college graduation. It felt like we were "playing adult", not much unlike the way we used to put on our mothers' shoes and jewelry when we were nine. Part of playing adult for me involved offering to host my very first Thanksgiving. A Swiss, an Israeli, a Hong Konger and a Greek gathered in my DC kitchen. That sounds like the beginning of a joke -- and it was. It is no secret that cooking is not my forte, but I was not about to serve cereal and popcorn to my guests. So we peeled garlic for two hours, then peeled potatoes, then chopped, marinaded, basted and roasted until I ran out of culinary verbs I knew how to use. We drowned everything in wine and candlelight, loaded the dishwasher, danced in the kitchen, clogged the toilet, YouTubed "how to plunge a toilet", plunged, and fell asleep knowing that we all ate some garlic peels and a few undercooked potatoes and we were all the happier for it.

Our first one

It was not as strange for us as it was for our Jewish friend who had celebrated Yom Kippur in Cairo earlier that year, but it was strange nonetheless. Dahab is a former Bedouin fishing village on the Sinai peninsula and current haven for hippies and divers. Most everyone I came to call family in Egypt descended on Dahab to celebrate Thanksgiving that year. It was my last day in the country and, having completed my very first placement with the UN, I was on my way to Uganda. Dahab became the unlikely site of firsts and lasts: After months of a modest romance in the streets of Cairo, Elijah and I kissed in public on the streets of Dahab. In the sea of women in bikinis, Bob Marley lovers and Indian food, our affection was not incongruent or taboo, and we welcomed the change.

Those were to be the last kisses for a while, as conflict zones would continue to swallow me over the next year. And so we kicked our flippers in the waters of the Red Sea, kicking extra hard to make memories, as though that would soothe the pain of missing one another that was to come. I saw my first coral reefs and lion fish. I saw the coast of Saudi Arabia across the water. And I became a sight to behold as well: On my way out of the water, my flipper got trapped in the wooden platform and I fell forward in my pale pink bikini with bows. Splat! Face down. Egyptian men and diving instructors were some combination of bemused and aghast as I, the human iteration of a beached whale, crawled out of the water and onto the dry land of mortification. By dinner, the power had gone out in Dahab, so we all found ourselves at an Indian restaurant by the sea, eating naan cooked in a wood stone oven. Thanksgiving that year tasted like curry and nostalgia.

Last night in Egypt - A low-light, no electricity, fishy, Thanksgiving in Dahab

The last one?

I seem to have returned to the Thanksgivings of cereal and popcorn. Our home in Jerusalem has no oven, toaster oven, gas stove, microwave or any cooking appliance other than two electric burners. Thanksgiving is likely to taste like falafel, like that Christmas in Bethlehem a couple of years ago. My gratitude is impatient this year -- impatient to return to the United States, to an academic study of conflict, to the communities for whch my heart longs. I have a stretchy heart these days; I miss everywhere. I miss Colombian Creole potatoes and think of how wonderful an addition they would be to any Thanksgiving dinner. I miss the beachy and fishy Thanksgiving. I miss the toilet-plunging Thanksgiving. I miss the fireplace in Greece and the best friends in America. Secretly, I hope that this is the last Thanksgiving I spend outside the US for some time, as I dream about wearing layer after layer of wool sweaters on a New England campus and debating my selection of holiday pie.

Thank you, world, for giving me so much to love and so much to miss. For giving me love and memories from sea to sea.

Reflections on non-violent conflict, Part I

2011-11-21T20:20:00.001+02:00

A lot of my life's work in gender-related development unfolds in conflict and post-conflict zones. Sometimes the conflict is cultural or religious; in other cases, the conflict refers to civil war, violent insurrection, or genocide. I lead a life saturated with conflict and I regularly think about the concepts and applications of dispute resolution and post-conflict reintegration of ex-combatants into peacetime communities.

Witnessing the effects of violence has made me abhor it as a means of social change, even for causes I support and struggles with which I identify. Learning more about non-violent conflict and civil resistance at Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Non-Violent Conflict has convinced me not only of the value, but also of the effectiveness of non-violent change. This week, many months after attending FSI and in light of developments from Cairo to Oakland, I will be writing about some of the key lessons I derived from my participation at FSI. I am sharing these kernels not as a transcript of the course, but as a record of what fascinated me and surprised me, with the hope that it can be relevant to the conversation on civil resistance movements gaining momentum worldwide today.

What is non-violent conflict?
According to the International Center on Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC), the term refers to "a conflict in which at least one party uses nonviolent action as its means to wage the conflict." This is significant because peaceful protesters' actions can still classify as non-violent, even if they are met with a violent response from a government, the police, the army or another authority. And what is non-violent action, according to ICNC? "A general technique of conducting nonviolent protest, resistance and intervention without physical violence."

Relationships of power
Power and authority involve questions of consent. When people deprive a leader (or oppressor) of their consent, it reduces his or her legitimacy. Frederick Douglas expressed this dynamic as "power concedes nothing. [...] The limits of tyrants are prescribed the endurance of those whom they oppress." When discussing this concept, Jack DuVall, the co-author of A Force More Powerful and President of ICNC, clarified that once civil resistance takes the pretense of consent away, the truth about oppression surfaces, thus driving up the cost of oppression.

Room for persuasion
One cannot force participation in a non-violent resistance movement. Leaders and members of a movement need to reason with others and persuade them, rather than coerce them, to join. DuVall emphasized the point that civil resistance efforts are not efforts to stage a coup; they are attempts to change a society, not a regime. What movements seek to accomplish, said DuVall, is to change people in ways that make authoritarianism impossible later. It is not atypical for competition to exist in the early stage of movement formation. Different groups may want to engage in civil resistance towards the same cause, but they have competing visions and agendas. According to DuVall, while civil resistance is highly strategic and tactical, we cannot presume that "action requires protected space." Some movements started with little political, civic or social space for disagreement. The question to ask is: "Where is there opportunity for independent (inter)action?"

Notes on effectiveness
A 2005 study found that "nonviolent civic action was a key factor in driving 50 of the 67 transitions from authoritarianism between 1972 and 2005." A 2008 study by Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth compared 323 violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006. Among the findings was that "major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns." However, it is important to note that strategy is significant for nonviolent campaigns: Resistance efforts cannot succeed only on the ground that they are nonviolent and it is strategy that sets the more successful movements apart.

This is the most persuasive argument I find in favor of non-violent civil resistance: It works. If practiced correctly, it fulfills the goals of a movement without some of the horrifying consequences of violence. In the next installment of this series, I will summarize responses to common critiques of non-violent action and briefly look at the elements of successful non-violent campaigns.

Additional resources: Daryn Cambridge has thoroughly documented the proceedings of FSI 2011 here. The ICNC website has a phenomenal FAQ and Resource Library on non-violent conflict. Some of my favorite books on this topic are:

A Force More Powerful: A century of nonviolent conflict, Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall
Nonviolent social movements: A geographical perspective, Stephen Zunes, Lester R. Kurtz, Sarah Beth Asher
Why Civil Resistance Works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan

Guest post: Life's work

2011-11-18T14:00:00.000+02:00

Christine Mason Miller has been an inspiration in my journey through storytelling, creativity, and service. A few months ago, I wrote about books well-loved and the impact Christine and her writing have had on my life. Today, on the eve of her launching her new book Desire to Inspire: Using Creative Passion to Transform the World, it is my pleasure to host Christine on Stories of Conflict and Love.

***

That's me on the far left in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1976, during one of my extended visits with my grandparents. Remember Slip & Slide? Well, instead of buying one, my grandparents let me create one with a few of their vinyl table cloths and a hose. Can't find what we want? No problem -- let's just make it ourselves.

When I asked Roxanne if she would do me the honor of sharing a guest blog post on Stories of Conflict and Love as part of my virtual book tour for Desire to Inspire, she not only gave me an enthusiastic “Yes!”, she also asked if I could discuss a specific topic related to the subject of creating a meaningful life. This is what she shared with me:

There is a question I think you'd be best poised to answer: How did you know that being an artist was it? How did you know that the creative life was your life, your work, that it was YOU? A lot of the strength I have found in your book and writing has been in the way you OWN yourself, your art, your creativity, and your place in the world. I'd love to post your thoughts on how you came to claim this role, how you came to be comfortable in it. How did your 25-year-old self know? How did she choose this? What has the creative life come to mean to you?

I wish I had a neatly wrapped anecdote of an experience when the clouds parted and the knowledge of what I was supposed to do with my life came shimmering down into my soul, but there was never a “magic moment” when I discovered my true calling. Instead, it has revealed itself to me in large and small ways for as in alone-ness - to the notion of being a solitary warrior on the quest to make my life what I wanted. However one might judge its potency, it was a philosophy that came to me, stayed with me, and has played a role in my life ever since. And it has always been an empowering thought – if there is something I want, if there is a way I want to live my life, then I need to do the work to make it happen. That is nobody’s job but mine. It then follows that if it is up to me to create the life I want, then there isn’t much use in doubting my dreams, my passions, my self. (Not that I don’t have my moments of panic and fear and “Who do I think I am?”-ness, but for the most part, self-doubt is a fairly weak link in my DNA chain.)

The idea behind Desire to Inspire is that the world is best served, lifted, and – that helped that strong, adventurous side of me flourish. And somewhere in the midst of climbing trees, crossing creeks, digging up worms, and making mud pies a thought struck me: “Whatever it is that you want in life, you’re going to have to create it yourself.”

I realize that on the surface, this seems a bit intense for a girl whose age hadn’t yet hit the double digits. It speaks to a certa talking about creativity – which is a fundamental element of our very humanity - and about all the ways our innate creative passions, energies, and ideas shape our day-to-day lives and, in turn, impact the world around us.

I happen to be an artist, but this particular job title rests on a deeper foundation, which has to do with inspiration. It has to do with making those around me feel good about themselves; it has to do with recognizing the incredible light in someone’s eyes when they laugh, when they are treated kindly, when they are acknowledged, included, applauded, adored, and encouraged. My life’s work began when I started to recognize the impact of kindness, respect, and creative passion – towards others and ourselves - and the positive waves of inspiration that are manifested when we do transformed when we follow our creative passions and build a meaningful life for ourselves. I use the phrase “creative passion” because I believe we are all – every single one of us – creative beings, and we use our creative muscles every single day. I know there are plenty of you out there who would disagree with me, but these disagreements are usually thrust at me on the premise that creativity must = artistic talent. But I’m not talking about anything as specific as that. I amessons and examples that came to me from that day forward, which is what makes it, in a very literal way, my life’s work. In doing the work I’ve done to create a life I am passionate about, I understand on a visceral level the power of such an existence – power as in light, as in energy, as in a shiny example of all that is possible. My work is to be of service to the world, and that work starts within. This is what my younger self taught me. This is the work that she chose.

Christine Mason Miller is a Santaboth.

Perhaps the work I have been doing all these years has been in honor of my younger self, who discovered at a very young age a source of strength that was impossible to turn away from, deny, or doubt, and maybe my sense of alone-ness as a little girl is what sparked my desire to inspire in the first place. Once the spark was lit, it was simply a matter of learning how to do that, and being open to all the lessons and examples that came to me from that day forward, which is what makes it, in a very literal way, my life’s work. In doing the work I’ve done to create a life I am passionate about, I understand on a visceral level the power of such an existence – power as in light, as in energy, as in a shiny example of all that is possible. My work is to be of service to the world, and that work starts within. This is what my younger self taught me. This is the work that she chose.

Christine Mason Miller is a Santa Monica-based artist, writer, and explorer. Her next book – Desire to Inspire: Using Creative Passion to Transform the World – is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. Follow her adventures at www.christinemasonmiller.com.

November 17

2011-11-17T17:03:00.002+02:00

[inspired by Kim, Dominique, and my father, always.]

Decades ago

"We are not armed. We are not armed. We are not armed. [...] Brothers, brothers, brothers-soldiers, you will not raise your guns. You will not shoot to kill your brothers. [audible tanks rolling up to the gate] Brothers soldiers, brothers soldiers, how is this possible! How is it possible that you would shoot your brothers! How would you allow Greek blood to be spilled. [begins to recite Greek national anthem]"

In the beginning of November 1973, a civil resistance movement gained momentum against the military junta that had ruled Greece since 1967. On November 14, 1973, students locked themselves in the Polytechnic University of Athens to protest against the censorship and restrictions of freedom and civil liberties that had occurred during the dictatorship. The students set up an independent radio station and began to broadcast non-violent messages of civil resistance. The clip translated above was the last broadcast before this happened:

In the clip of the student begging soldiers not to fire, one can hear tanks rolling on the streets around the university. In the clip above, on November 17, 1973, a tank demolished the university gate and the government violently quashed the civil resistance movement. It is unclear how many died between November 14 - November 17, 1973. Numbers range from 18 to 73 and, as is the case in all movements, there are skeptics, conspiracy theorists and agent provocateurs who claim that all this was a figment of political imagination. The junta did not immediately collapse, but its blatant violence against unarmed, peaceful fellow Greeks was the beginning of the end of its rule.

Historical memory becomes political with the passage of time, for reminiscence is partial and partisan. Yet, as a Greek who has grown up among violent protests, Molotov cocktails being thrown at banks, deadly clashes between youth and the police, I cannot help but wish that we could form a non-violent movement of civil resistance that commits itself to persistent, meaningful change. In a presentation at Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Non-Violent Conflict, a leading scholar of civil resistance joked: "When I say 'nonviolence', people think I have fallen off the deep end." The misunderstandings and connotations of nonviolence are endless: hippies, idealists, romantics, ineffective resisters, lazy people. Yet, in a phenomenal talk, Dr. Erica Chenoweth debunked six myths about insurgency, nonviolence and civil resistance. The myths, as paraphrased by Daryn Cambridge and myself, were:

Violent insurgency is effective.
Insurgents use violence because they have to.
All insurgencies begin non-violently and adopt violence when non-violent resistance fails.
Resistance movements have to adopt violence to take on brutal regimes.
Societies need quick and decisive victories to be stable enough for democracy to thrive.
All insurgents can be persuaded to substitute non-violence for violent resistance.

Egyptian woman protester kissing riot police officer
(via the Atlantic)

Greece has been in turmoil and, occasionally, in flames this year. As I look back at both the Polytechnic university anniversary and the lessons of FSI 2011, I realize it is easy to say "it does not work for us." It is easy to reject non-violence as "suitable for other places, but not for Greece/Palestine/wherever you live." It is easy to want a quick victory or to cite outrage as a justification of the use of violence. But movements do not just happen -- they are studied, created painstakingly, slowly, strategically. And there is hope for everywhere, from Cairo to Athens.

Love in the time of protests - Vancouver, Canada (via Of Animals and Spirits) Note: I had originally misattributed this photo to Athens, Greece. Thank you to commenter Christine for helping me correct this.

Years ago

He passed quickly and painlessly, in a few breaths. He knew he was going to go, but none of the rest of us did. There was no time to think that we might lose him, even though his years of smoking five packs of cigarettes a day should have prepared us. I was a world away when he took his last breath. For years, I have tried to remember what our last conversation was. All I can remember was that I had called, he picked up the phone, and said "κορίτσι μου!" "My girl!", with that unique excitement that a father can muster for his daughter. The day of the funeral was the crisp, brilliantly blue November glory that only Thessalonik can offer. I had developed an eye twitch, so I looked like a pirate. This morning, I woke up, searching for grief inside myself, like a soldier who has been shot and is feeling around for the wounds. After all these years, all the remembrance, all the love, there is no wound, no blood. Yet, twistedly and miraculously enough, my right eye is bloodshot, painful, throbbing. "My little pirate," Elijah said this morning. I smiled, acknowledging that once more, the universe was winking at me.

Land, abandoned

2011-11-16T14:33:00.001+02:00

Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west,
Latin writing, from west to east.
Languages are like cats:
You must not stroke their hair the wrong way.
The clouds come from the sea, the hot wind from the desert,
The trees bend in the wind,
And stones fly from all four winds,
into all four winds. They throw stones,
Throw this land, one at the other,

But the land always falls back to the land.

- An excerpt from Yehuda Amichai's "Temporary Poem of My Time"

You cannot live in Jerusalem without being saturated with talk of land. You hear about settlement building. Land swaps. The wall between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. People take care to ensure that after their passing, their home will not "switch sides." The obsession with land made Daniel Gordis wonder in If A Place Can Make You Cry:

Can a land emit a poison, a toxin that confuses, that obfuscates, that virtually guarantees that we become something other than what we want to be? Is there something about this land, or our passion for it, that blurs the vision?

Land in Jerusalem rarely remains unclaimed or vacant for very long. That is what makes Lifta so unique: it is the only depopulated Palestinian Arab village in Israel that has not been repopulated or completely demolished. A soup of adjectives on this land can often be a euphemism, but in this case, the story is straight-forward: The Palestinian residents of the town fled during the 1948 war. They never returned and were never replaced. As such, their empty homes are tucked into a valley between two of Jerusalem's steep hills.

There is a spring of rushing water and an olive press. There is an old school and a shrine. The village of Lifta was once famous for its embroiderers and the elaborate wedding dresses they produced. Nowadays, it is an occasional home to squatting hippies and anarchists alike - as the anarchist symbol and dove of peace co-exist on the graffitied walls. Young Israelis descend into Lifta to enjoy the natural spring and the echo of the empty homes.

A friend asked me if Lifta is a sad place. A narrative of abandonment, emptiness and depopulation is hardly one of vivacity and mirth. There is a sadness to the decay of Lifta, with candy wrappers scattered among the cacti and plans to build a hotel and luxury homes in the place of this community. Yet, I derive hope from how contemporary people, who differ from the previous occupants of a space, can make their own memories there.

It has been a couple of months since I have taken a wide-angle photograph. The panoramas of this land do not feel new to me any more, even though they still astonish me with their beauty. I seem reluctant to zoom out, to engage in a process that requires making sense of a general picture. Instead, I'm drawn to focusing, to digging deeper into the individual stories and stringing them together to allow whatever larger story binds them to float to the top. So, I bring to you the stories of Lifta in the details, with the lens right up against the warm stone wall of the homes on a Jerusalem late afternoon.

Palestine, scribbled on a rock in Arabic

Standing on the only balcony tiles left

A mural of feeding camels and a heart

The anarchists were here too.

Parallel narratives of grief

2011-11-12T20:10:00.001+02:00

I have been thinking about grief and, this time, I cannot credit Joan Didion.

Believe me, I have tried to celebrate beautiful fall light and the exquisiteness of gummy candy in Jerusalem's markets. I have tried to take a momentary breathing break from thinking about the paradoxes. I live above Burgers Bar and embrace privileged-world-problems like "my apartment smells like hamburgers." I read New York Times articles like this, which epitomize privileged-world-problems, and then ponder the closest location of macarons or cupcakes. In the airiness of macarons, I find a bubble. A woman who has lived in the Middle East for a while told me that without the bubble, I will not survive.

And yet, I cannot evade the big questions and it seems Jerusalem asks them continuously. I arrived here to find the country wrapped up in the story of Gilad Shalit. Shalit was taken hostage by Hamas militants when he was serving as an Israeli Defense Forces combat soldier in 2006. In October, Israel released 1,027 Palestinian prisoner in exchange for Shalit's return. The questions began. Slate asked, almost cynically: "Israel traded 1,000 Palestinians for one soldier. Is that the going rate?" This week's NYT Magazine examines the negotiations and hurdles behind the exchange. It is this constant weighing that weighs on me: the value of one life relative to another.

When NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner sought to decipher why Israel would exchange 1,027 Palestinians for Gilad Shalit, he shed light on a particular aspect of Israeli psyche: "When Israelis say they view the sieged soldier, Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, as their own son, they mean it," he writes. He speaks of a "melding of private and public spheres." Public opinion analyst Dahlia Sheindlin echoes this sentiment in +972, as she reflects on Shalit's transition from an IDF soldier to a captive, and back to his military uniform after his release: "I felt a painful irony: For over five years, Noam and Aviva Shalit made him [Gilad] into everyone's son and that's how they got him released; then the state made him back into a soldier -- which is how he got captured."

One May morning during my senior year at Harvard, my friends and I decided to take a walk through Mount Auburn cemetery, America's first garden, landscaped cemetery. Someone suggested that we picnic there, only to face the question: Is this really a suitable place for that? A friend ventured: "There is something very soothing about being in the presence of these people, even after they have passed away."

A few weeks ago, shorly after Shalit's release, I was standing at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Mount Herzl, also known as Mount of Remembrance, is the national cemetery of Israel and the burial site for the war dead. Despite the red roses in bloom and the soft light through the trees, there was nothing soothing about this remembrance. The head stones reminded me that the majority of the war dead were younger than me: 19 years old, died in combat during the Lebanon war. 20 years old, died during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

There is a Jewish tradition of leaving stones on graves to signify that remembrance is a process and that building monuments for the deceased is not a finished product. On some graves, families have planted cotton. On others, an American flag or a red British phone booth suggest that the deceased was an immigrant who died in battle. There are letters, poems, messages scribbled or painted on rocks. Parents, friends and current soldiers stop at the graves of people they may have never known. Mt. Herzl is a solemn place, a living warning against the consequences of war, but also a national monument: Remembrance, here, is a collective act.

My own heart is extending empathy in contradictory directions. When I shared how somber and moving my experience at Mt. Herzl had been, a former colleague chastised me: "These soldiers killed people too!" The political message of memorials, monuments and processes of remembrance -- from the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, DC to Holocaust memorials worldwide -- does not evade me. I had not left Mt. Herzl without thinking of the Palestinian grief narrative. There is something tiring, maddening and ludicrous about having to constantly offset emotions here. As a conflict professional, writer and photographer, balance is important, as is consciousness of one's own biases. Does that mean I need to deny my grief in the moment? My joy at Shalit's mother welcoming her son home? And does my empathy for the mothers of fallen soldiers and delight for the mother of a returned captive need to cancel out my grief for the mothers of the 19, and 20 and 22-year-olds who will never come home again? I do not want to hear the political "but..." this time - my heart simply needs to sit with the grief and tragedy of the human story, regardless of which side of the security barrier it is coming from.

Feminists often say the personal is political. In the Middle East, I am learning that the political is personal too. I am not moved by Gilad, by the mothers, and by the graves because I do not understand the politics or because I ignore them. I am moved because I refuse to separate the human story from the politics. That is where 'extending empathy in contradictory directions' comes in: Human stories of injustice unfold side by side here. This land harbors parallel narratives of pain. In a beautiful reflection on gender roles in the Middle East, a friend recently wrote about what she insightfully dubbed "the obnoxious truth of "it's complicated."

Luckily, unlike the policy-making, empathy can afford to be contradictory, as can compassion. I can continue to unearth life stories, and I can embrace being mesmerized, appalled, and hopeful in the same day. Compassion does not need to choose a side.

Age 18: a grave for a fallen soldier on Mt. Herzl

Prayers, flags, and messages on stones at the fallen soldiers cemetery on Mt. Herzl

The heart reads "our dear Roni." The bigger stone contains a psalm of remembrance for a fallen soldier.

Cotton growing on a grave on Mt. Herzl

A red phone booth sits on the grave of a British-Israeli fallen soldier.

A sign in East Jerusalem celebrates the release of a Palestinian who had been been serving a life sentence in prison. He was released as part of the Gilad Shalit exchange deal.

A sticker in West Jerusalem celebrates that Gilad Shalit is alive.

Journeys of magical thinking

2011-11-01T15:18:00.000+02:00

My father died quickly in the middle of the day. Mona Simpson, Steve Jobs' sister, said in her eulogy of him that his last words were "oh wow. oh wow. oh wow." My mother told me that my father's last words were "κορίτσια μου...". In my native Greek, that means "my girls..."

For some time after his death, words escaped me. He had had a lot of faith in my words, in my ability to make magic with them, even if I could not quite grasp what that meant at the age of 11. He read every word I ever produced, from history papers on Otto von Bismarck to letters that I wrote home from camp. After glaucoma deprived him of his sight, my mother and I read my words to him and he made suggestions -- sometimes gentle ones, sometimes proclamations that "this is crap!" and I needed to start over. My sense of faith in myself was tied to his vote of confidence in me. His loss rendered me mute.

With the brains of a very young woman, I thought I could hide from grief. I packed the memories of the early days of mourning and sealed them, hoping that if I did not cross their path again, I could escape a confrontation with grief. Many years later, it was Joan Didion who caused my unraveling.

Click here to read the rest of this post on love, loss, and Joan Didion over at Gypsy Girls Guide.

Portions of beauty and suffering

2011-10-28T18:12:00.002+02:00

"They" say a lot of things. "They" say we should drink 8 glasses of water a day. Or not. "They" say finding a geico in your home is good luck. We rarely know who they are and sometimes we acknowledge that "they" often stands for popular wisdom or an unverified statistic that we still seek to quote because it brings us comfort.

Well, "they" say that "of the 10 portions of beauty that came down to the world, 9 went to Jerusalem and one to the rest of the world." The next verse reads "of the 10 portions of suffering that came down to the world, 9 went to Jerusalem and one to the rest of the world." The 'they' in this case would be Talmud scholars.

I find myself in Jerusalem and my heart has no room for suffering this week. And so, on my first walk, I photograph what is beautiful, what is curious, what is giving me hope. If "they" are right about this city, the beauty and the suffering walk hand-in-hand and cannot be divorced from one another.

For today, though, world -- please, let me just savor the beautiful light.

Only in Jerusalem: a sheesha in front of an icon of Mary (for sale, both of them).

A city wrapped in nargileh - sheesha smoke

I asked the man who runs the pita stand if I can take a photo of the bread. He said "sure!" Two minutes later, he put his arm around me, cut up some pita, scooped up some of his lunch and shoved it in my mouth. Jerusalem and Greece -- not entirely dissimilar.

Challah for Shabbat and thorny bread in the background

Friday afternoon light in St. Andrew's Scottish Church

Smiling love on the Via Dolorosa

A war memorial reflects the sky

When I was a baby, my father called these flowers "τα ματάκια της Ρω." "Roxanne's eyes" and I meet again in Jerusalem.

I have just created a Facebook page for Stories of Conflict and Love, where I will post updates on my life and work, as well as links related to storytelling, creativity, photography, writing, conflict, international development, gender and travel. You can also see more photographs there if you "Like" the page. If Facebook is not your cup of tea -- worry not. This will remain my beloved online home and it is a privilege to share it with you.

Taking a cue from Joan Didion

2011-10-23T23:07:00.001+02:00

In Blue Nights, her most recent memoir about the death of her daughter 18 months after the passing of her husband, Joan Didion writes:

"What if I can never again locate the words that work?"

In "One Art", Elizabeth Bishop writes that the art of losing isn't hard to master. But the art of losing gracefully, or even of losing all grace in grief, the art of unravelling in grief to reveal beauty and insight alongside the pain -- that art is a hard one to master and Didion has perfected it. She has lent her voice to grief. A friend cheekily remarked recently that Joan Didion can embody the dictum "my grief is more articulate than yours." I doubt anyone begins her life by wishing to become a Universal Spokesperson for Grief, Pain, and All Things Tear-Worthy. Yet, in writing through her grief, Joan Didion made magic for many by revealing that, in the case of grief, the magic lies in putting words to pain, in sitting with it and through it. Didion wrote her way through sadness - perhaps back to happiness, perhaps simply back to a new, different place of softness, vulnerability, honesty and, why not, love and joy.

These days, Joan Didion's words ring more true than ever: "What if I can never again find the words that work?"

I need to answer a series of why's. Why am I the best candidate for this graduate program? Why am I best prepared for this degree? Why am I a good match? The biggest challenge through this process has been placing myself at the centre of my own narrative.

There is an online portal called Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. The gist of it is that we are all carbon copies of one another: individuals with a knights-in-shining-armor complex who helicopter into conflict-ridden places to save ourselves from ourselves. What we like, according to this portal, are acronyms and aid jargon, "trainings of trainers", airport horror stories, untreated PTSD, talking about poop, having had malaria, finding ourselves, describing ourselves as nomads, and Randomized Control Trials.

Oops.

I see myself in those stories.

I have lived those stories too.

I have tweeted about the quintessential Friday night dilemma in a Middle Eastern conflict zone: Is it fireworks or gunshots? Ironically, I have written about the need for conflict professionals and storytellers to carve out some room for themselves in their stories. There is a certain kind of hyper-awareness that makes me hit the brakes before submitting to an admissions committee a collection of acronyms and jargon as the story of myself. My story cannot be a Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like blog post. My biggest hesitation with the portal is that it prizes cynicism; indeed, cynicism is listed among Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. Maybe, rather than rewarding it, the portal merely reflects the existence of cynicism in this field. There is a jadedness to the narrative about aid and development, a mechanical tone: wash, rinse, repeat, pause to laugh at yourself, wash, rinse, repeat.

I have been warned about jadedness; I have been cautioned that distance and even cynicism may be central to one's professional and emotional survival. I have been told, by colleagues and bosses and fellow writers, that one day I will not be so "green behind the ears" -- although I must admit that as an English as a Second Language speaker, I had to--with some horror--look up what that meant. I am not there yet, though. I am still an optimist and an idealist. I look for the magic, believe in it, and write about it. It is the magic that keeps me doing the work that I do.

Why did I apply for the fellowship that took me out of my scholarly and professional pursuits in the United States and put me in the middle of conflict and post-conflict zones for the first time? Because I desperately wanted to be moved by the world. I desperately needed to be shaken by the shoulders, to feel alive. I had been a scholar of conflict starting with my fascination with Otto von Bismarck and the wars of the German Unification at the age of 16 and culminating in my thesis on the topic of visual representations of leadership in film and photography of the Second Reich. That very first step 'in the field' was motivated as much by a desire to serve as by a personal need to experience conflict more immediately -- to demystify it. That first step was about me in many senses, about my feelings, about my need to zero the distance between scholarly narratives about war and the realities of conflict. Some may say that was selfish, quintessentially "save myself from myself", and they would not be wrong.

Why have I stayed? Because of the magical thinking. Because somewhere between the acronyms and the jargon, between "writing a curriculum for the training of Egyptian women parliamentarians in negotiation and public speaking" and "training trainers in the implementation of a post-conflict reintegration workshop for female ex-combatants in Colombia", I learned about compassion and empathy. Because I have experienced kindness in its purest form and believed in it as a way to lead life. Because between the hurricanes and the shoveling of mud, between the grief and anger and gross injustice, I encountered people whose resilience, determination and spirit inspire me to the core.

I have stayed because I have found a way to serve that feels true to the person I am now.
I have stayed because this is the work that makes me come alive. I have stayed because I am shaken by the shoulders to the point that the world spins like a washing machine on its last rinse. I have stayed because, though disoriented and tired and whiny sometimes, I still savor the spinning.
I have stayed because I wake up in the morning with two new questions for every question I think I have answered.
I have stayed because the stories of the people I have met along the way, be they participants in a program, local partners, community leaders or colleagues, fuel my faith in humanity.

There is a danger to believing your own story when you are in a service-oriented field. You can become bigger than the story, bigger than the service itself... and then priorities and perspective and all the different actors at play become warped and you end up jaded or self-involved or self-deprecating or just utterly lost, recently broken up with, and full of malarial parasites in East Africa. How do you stop that from happening? In my mind, by asking the questions. To me, it is important that I be part of something bigger than myself - it is important that I continue to find this work dwarfing, and humbling and inspiring, even if that sometimes comes with an off-tune dose of self-aggrandizement or a touch of jadedness that creeps up even on Eternal Optimists.

"What if I can never again find the words that work?", Joan Didion asks. I write one sentence in my application essays, I erase two. I dislike the girl in them who is a collection of I-Did-This and I-Went-There. I also dislike the girl in them who may be "showing, not telling", but the showing still feels like incongruous bragging about acts of service. I also dislike the navel-gazing that is inherent in this exercise and that imbues this very post. It becomes very difficult to find the words that work when the process of assembling them sketches a portrait of yourself you either do not recognize or do not love.

I recognize myself these days when I am vulnerable, when I uncover the soft places that do not often see the light. Yet, I feel like it is taboo to write a story of myself that is so full of feelings. Feelings are not the currency of applications and achievements and admissions. Where do feelings fit in the narrative of law, diplomacy, conflict management, conflict resolution and post-conflict development? "What are you going to write your essays about? Mush?," a friend asked. Even Elijah, the biggest Proponent of Feelings and my own teacher in them, said "Darling, you need to assume that Danielle Steel won't be on that committee reading your essays."

These questions of feelings and words and application packaging would not have concerned me years ago. When I set out to start my first field work assignment, I had the emotional maturity of a coffee table. Grief and self-sheltering had rendered me a fairly emotionally stunted human being. The past couple of years have thawed me, shaken me and breathed life back into me. As I result, I have shattered and reassembled my own mold as many times as I have used an acronym. I am struggling to find the words that work for the mold of applications -- and that work for me, for all of me, for my feelings, for the person I am now: for the woman who is proud to have feelings and to write about them.

I want to argue with myself here. I want to make it my business to carve out space for the softness, for the emotional and the unquantifiable in the academic study and professional pursuit of conflict-oriented service. My goal is to study international negotiation, conflict resolution and diplomacy -- and I want to make room for empathy and compassion as instruments in the process. I want to continue my exploration of the intersection of gender and conflict and I wish to bring my passion for stories into this journey. I wish to academically explore storytelling as a vehicle of peace-making and conflict resolution. And for me to get there, perhaps I need to churn out a final draft of an application essay that has not been robbed of its every "I feel."

Quiet

2011-10-18T19:31:00.000+02:00

Season's first pomegranate - captured with Instagram

I am at a place where I cannot string together more than two sentences about my life.

The pomegranates have returned, as has the fear. I heard a noise the other night. "Armed burglars! Hide!," I was mocked. "Nah, I'm not worried. There is an armed soldier with an M-16 standing outside a few steps down the block." That was my response. Since when do I find normalcy, nonchalance and even comfort in armed soldiers and M-16s?

Brrrrr, in Arabic

I live in a house that has no two walls at a perfect right angle with each other. I find comfort in the patterned floors, in the way the light filters in through the gauzy white curtain, in the crackling sound the seeds of the pomegranate make when they separate from the peel.

I know how to say cockroach in Arabic and Hebrew now. Sarsoor, the Arabic word, sounds like an onomatopoeia, as though the word is imitating the insect's shuffling. The latest word I can read in Arabic is "brrrrrr!", a lesson courtesy of a Coca-Cola can that seems to suggest that no matter where you are in the world, "this beverage is best enjoyed cold."

I am observing, gliding quietly through my days, attempting to carve a place for myself. Thank you for being patient with me while I look for my words.

The Gender Effect

2011-10-08T12:29:00.000+02:00

In which I ask: Where are the men in gender advocacy campaigns? Is gender diversity significant for the success of gender advocacy campaigns? And if so, how do we engage with people of all genders to promote the message? Click on to my PolicyMic piece to find out. You may comment by signing in with Facebook or by creating a free, quick and easy PolicyMic account of your own.

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The Girl Effect Blogging Campaign is still unfolding. Reading reflections from nearly 500 writers and activists around the world has been eye-opening, touching and enlightening. Have you added your own?

iLove

2011-10-06T09:51:00.001+02:00

If you've ever waited for a dial-up modem to connect, you understand anticipation.

When I was 12, my father declared one day that "we need to get Roxanne on the internet." In Greece at the time, that involved a lot of clunkiness: A computer monitor the size of a coffee table, a noisy and tortuously slow dial-up connection, WordPad documents. Neither my mother nor I quite understood what I was meant to do with a computer and "the internet", so I spent a lot of time becoming very, very good at minesweeper and browsing Encarta, the online MSN encyclopedia. There was an Encarta game in which I excelled: figuring out which of the multiple choices that showed up on my screen was not a dog name. I was 12, English was my second language, I did not understand the colloquial expression "to chill", but I knew dog breeds.

I got my first email account to keep in touch with my friends from camp. Inna signed me up for Hotmail. We ended our every email with two emoticons of girls wearing the same pink dress.The icons may have looked a little like bathroom signs, but it was our way of indicating we were still there for one another, even from afar.

That Hotmail account still houses the emails from my first love. He had asked for my debate partner's email address so they could keep in touch at the end of an international debating competition and I scribbled mine on the same napkin because I was a bolder teenager then than young adult now. He lived on the other side of the world from Greece and we wrote each other nearly every night, so that we would both have something to wake up to in the morning or come home to after school. It feels like the dial-up is taking extra long to connect, just to annoy you, when you are a 16-year-old in love.

When I got admitted to Harvard, I received a welcome packet that included cookie dough and a Harvard cookie cutter to make H-shaped cookies. More usefully, the welcome packet suggested that students would really benefit from the use of a laptop. I arrived in Cambridge, MA by myself, with two suitcases, and a laptop that weighed nearly as much as I did.

I did not have a bag big enough to carry that first laptop to class, so I took notes by hand, a habit I maintained even after being clued in to the Apple revolution. That freshman spring, white laptops with apples on the cover populated Harvard classrooms. There was even a promotional offer: buy one with a student discount and get one of those first early iPods for free. The little white iBook, my silver iPod and I went to class every day. I started using Mac Mail and raving about iCal. I became one of those iPeople. Because a romantic still lived inside me, I did not delete the Hotmail account. When I felt bold, I still sent an email or two from it.

My other-side-of-the-world friend turned into a full-fledged Apple aficionado that year. He kept a sparse, sharply-designed blog, white as an iBook in the era before they released the black ones. Every time Steve Jobs made a public statement, he would quote from it and comment "Amazing." A new product is released? "Genius." He would queue up for the new products like people do outside stores on Thanksgiving to buy a microwave on sale, but there was something more mystical and devotional about the Apple products than there ever will be about microwaves. A lot made my friend dream, and Steve Jobs was certainly one of the factors that had that effect on him.

He was my first friend to own an iPhone. I used to dislike receiving emails from it. "Sent from my iPhone" to me felt like code for "I am not making writing to you a mindful and thoughtful practice." It felt quick and easy. It felt like something you could multi-task, in the way those Hotmail emails did not. I was too hip to lament that technology eroded romance, but I was too romantic for "Sent from my iPhone" emails.

In the years that passed, the romance faded, the iPhone emails won, and I got asked out on a date by one of the technicians at the Apple store whose job was to resuscitate my laptop. I always found it a little curious, a touch arrogant, that they called the repair shop a "genius bar", but I was thankful for the genius at work. I graduated from college, graduated to a silver Mac, graduated to life outside America. In Egypt, my colleagues would ask me about my laptop and I'd say, as though I knew what that really meant, that "it was cut from one brick of aluminum."

Mac Mail open in the background of one of my workshops in Colombia

Many of the aid workers had Mac laptops, but I somehow felt self-conscious about it, the same way I felt uncomfortable listening to my iPod in a too-crowded and not-safe-enough bus in East Africa. It felt incongruous in a conflict zone. In Northern Uganda, the keyboard turned bright red from the dust. In Colombia, one of the women participating in the post-conflict reintegration initiative I was leading cautioned her son not to break my laptop: "It's expensive. It has a fruit on the cover!" The computer with the fruit on the cover died during Hurricane Agatha in Guatemala when water rushed into my bedroom from the roof. Ironically, the only thing insurance did not cover was... water damage. Many people died in that hurricane, some of them in horrific mudslides, so it felt inappropriate to mourn a laptop.

Another computer in the mud in Guatemala after Hurricane Agatha

Last week, the NYT published a much-criticized piece titled "You Love Your iPhone, Literally." The article cited neuroimaging research that suggested the relationship between people and their iDevices resembled the chemical reactions of a brain in love. I facetiously forwarded the link to my friend on the other side of the world. He commented that he was concerned at the number of people who forwarded the same link to him, and made an astute remark: Your cortex is not responding to your iPhone or Nokia or device -- it is responding to the email you get, the communication with someone or something you care about.

Steve Jobs did not invent the internet. He did not create email. But he imagined technology in a way that was beautiful. He made technology that could inspire dreams. He inspired the kind of following that would have men on the other side of the world proclaim "genius" and "amazing" at his every statement and creation. He created the kind of technology that can inspire love.

Girls, boys and dignity

2011-10-04T10:15:00.000+02:00

Today marks the beginning of the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign 2011. There are at least twelve tabs open on my browser, as I browse the thoughts of writers and activists on the importance of focusing on girls as a development strategy. This week, I will be contributing to this debate by asking two sets of questions:

How do we talk about the plight, needs and challenges women and girls face while preserving their dignity?

And is the inclusion of people of all genders in the advocacy of gender campaigns central to these campaigns' success?

Click here for the first set of my answers.

***

To read other posts that are part of the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign, click here. You can still write your own post; the incredibly inspiring Tara Mohr has lined up resources to help you do that. Join the conversation.

If a place can make you cry

2011-10-02T11:23:00.005+02:00

Book and author: If a place can make you cry: Dispatches from an anxious state, by Daniel Gordis
When I read it: Spring 2011, in an anxious state
Where I read it: In Jerusalem, fittingly.
Favorite phrase: "For after all, if there's a place in this world that can make you cry, isn't that where you ought to be?"

Barbed wire sunsets, here I come again.

Daniel Gordis writes: "After all, if you focused on every victim these days, you'd never be able to get out of bed in the morning. You survive only because you can forget."

It is the eve of my return to the Middle East, my return to the places where you survive only because you can forget. Gordis rightfully reminds me of the centrality of forgetting for my own survival, but I have so far led a life of remembrance. I like to catalogue, to scribble notes on unlined pages by which to mark the days, to photograph, to document, to tell. My stomach is clenched today. My beloved friend Erin had asked a while ago how I know I am truly passionate about something. I told her there is a certain kind of nausea associated with passion for me - it is as though my stomach knows I am about to dive into my element. The clenched stomach today suggests not only the exhilaration of returning to work I feel passionately about, but also the fear, hesitation, reluctance and trauma associated with the next steps of the journey.

Right before the second Intifada broke out, Daniel Gordis and his family moved to Jerusalem. He, too, felt the desire to catalogue and remember:

So, as we lived through that year, I instinctively chronicled many of our experiences in e-mails to friends, some letters to my family, and many other little vignettes that I didn't actually send anywhere, but just wrote for the sake of making some sense of everything I was seeing and feeling.

This pastiche, which mirrors some of the reasons I write as well, became the book If A Place Can Make You Cry. Gordis and I have experienced Jerusalem, Israel and the Middle East in different capacities and with different loyalties and attachments, thus naturally yielding distinct, often conflicting, narratives. There is one assessment of his with which I agree whole-heartedly:

This just isn't a normal place. To live here is not to tell a story, but to live one. Living here, you become the story, and it takes over. There's no avoiding, there's no escaping. There's no way not to repeat it. The story is here to stay, and we're part of it, like it or not.

That is what I have found inspiring and suffocating about life and work in the Middle East: It is so much bigger than you and me. It feels entrenched. Having lived there long enough, it is hard to escape the feeling of resignation and helplessness as your faith in humanity is fueled and challenged on the same day.

How does Gordis cope? In his own words: "I flip on the cruise control -- the ultimate statement that life is predictable, even, calm." I have been there. I have focused my energies on picking the perfect lamp for the tiny, sand-filled bedroom, as though the country's survival depends on the glow of the just right light. But cruise control is not a good mode for me. It fundamentally requires forfeiting some part of being alive. When I set out on my professional journey in conflict and post-conflict zones, I was craving being moved. I wanted to feel deeply alive, and I have. But what do you do with the places that are so vibrant, so alive, so full of their own story that they swallow you up and the only way you can survive is by forgetting and by turning on the cruise control?

For one, you turn to beauty. "You probably don't move to a place just because it's beautiful, but the beauty certainly adds a layer to the love that both of us [Gordis and his wife] feel for Israel." I am on a quest for beauty, and the quest sustains me. From the obvious beauty of a Jerusalem sunset to the more complex, hidden beauty in the darkest places, I seek to embrace all of it. Once I believe in a place's sadness and despair, it claws me in and spits me out in a million pieces. Survival does not hinge on forgetting for me; it, instead, requires - as Arundhati Roy would have it - "pursuing beauty to its lair."

I am apprehensive about returning. I am afraid that, even if I am armed with beauty and hope and a desire to "seek joy in the saddest places", as Arundhati Roy would also have it, it will not be enough and I will end up on the bottom of a well of injustice and personal despair. When violence erupted in Jerusalem during the second Intifada, Gordis wrote:

Sometimes, these days, I wonder what's happening to us. Can a land emit a poison, a toxin that confuses, that obfuscates, that virtually guarantees that we become something other than what we want to be? Is there something about this land, or our passion for it, that blurs the vision? What is it about this land that blinds us to the very real and often devastating cost of our love for it, that leads us to ignore the horrific and repeated story of death for the sake of keeping it, a death that often inexplicably robs us of our children, and our children of their lives?

If Gordis is full of questions, I cannot purport to have the answers myself. A question I wish to live in is one Al Giordano posed at the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study on Non-Violent Conflict: "Where is the ray of hope in your stories?" He urged journalists, conflict professionals and activists alike to not tell stories that are entirely void of hope -- to keep digging until they find it.

It is time to dig anew.

Living better stories

2011-09-27T11:31:00.000+03:00

This post is part of a new series on Stories of Conflict and Love called Books Well-Loved. In it, I will share quotes, impressions, and insights from the books that have touched me.

Book and Author: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Don Miller

When I read it: On the first week of January 2011

Where I read it: Next to a sleeping Elijah, in Be'er Sheva, Israel

Favorite phrase: "the emotional inheritance of stories"

One way I will remember 2011 is as the year when I acknowledged my fervent belief in the power of storytelling. I still struggle with the labels: Writer feels too big, blogger feels too writing-from-grandma's-basement-in-my-pyjamas-about-what-I-had-for-lunch. Photographer feels too big, essayist too unearned with a pinch of pretentious. Storyteller, though, with all its intentional ambiguity, all its room for growth, all its invitations for multiple media and their-crossover, and all its magic -- storyteller fits.

Fittingly, then, the first book I read in 2011 was Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Miller earned a spot on the NYT Best-Selling Author when he published Blue Like Jazz in 2003. Following the success of that book, a production company approached him about turning the collection of essays into a film. That is where A Million Miles in a Thousand Years begins. After some fairly blunt feedback from the screenwriting and film team, Miller realizes that to tell a better, more compelling story, he needs to live a better story as well.

That articulation has been perspective-shifting for me because it implies bi-directional forces in storytelling. We, readers of books and viewers of photographs and films and dance performances, the quintessential story consumers, know that storytelling can shape the life of the reader or the viewer, but we do not often think about how telling our own story shapes us. We often think that we have to live, LIVE, REALLY LIVE to have some full story wells to draw from, but we rarely think of our stories themselves as instruments and vehicles to better lives. That is exactly what Don Miller did in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: He tied living and storytelling, and committed himself to improving both, side-by-side, with a keen and open eye for the way in which the two influenced one another.

One of Miller's starting premises is loud - and comforting to those of us who have put boarding passes aside for a while and are indeed writing in a basement in our pyjamas:

A lot of people think a writer has to live in order to write, has to meet people and have a rich series of experiences or his work will become dull. But that is drivel. It's an excuse a writer uses to take the day off, or the week or the month off for that matter. The thinking is, if we go play Frisbee in the park, we're going to have a thousand words busting out of us when we get back to the house. We're going to write all kinds of beautiful prose about playing Frisbee. It's never worked for me. Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer while still in her mother's womb, wrote one of her books in a concrete cell. She says most of what a writer needs to really live they can find in a book. People who live good stories are too busy to write about them. Nobody ever strapped a typewriter to the back of an elephant and wrote a novel while hunting wild game. Nobody except for Hemmingway. But let's not talk about Hemmingway.

I want to argue with that -- after all, it is harder to write about the ceiling tiles of the basement than wild game hunting -- but the image of the strapped typewriter on the back of an elephant disarmed me. That paragraph does not serve to tell writers to be complacent or to turn off the ignition; rather, it is a wake-up call to be alert, and to remember that the world of imagination is always alive. Rather than encouraging his readers to not go search for the elephants and the wild games and the thrills, Miller does quite the opposite -- he empties comfort of its appeal:

Humans are designed to seek comfort and order, and so if they have comfort and order, they tend to plant themselves, even if their comfort isn't all that comfortable. And even if they secretly want for something better.

And to dissuade us from experiencing the disappointment of going, going, going without a question that we want to live in, Miller offers this:

It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.

I have found joy in not knowing what I want from a place, an opportunity, a door in life... I think there is a real value to not knowing, and to embracing the (dis)comfort of that. Embracing that brings with it an openness to the stories that may present ourselves along the way, to the stories that we wish to weave out of unfamiliar paths.

There can be a discomfort to storytelling, for the writer, the photographer, the subject, the reader, for whole communities at once. My favorite genre of writing, the personal essay, often feels like navel-gazing, like a guilty indulgence in the admission that my personal life's story may be of interest to someone outside myself. Miller, with a few best-sellers under his belt, has the following to say about this sentiment:

You get tired of thinking about yourself all the time when you're a writer. Or at least when you write the kinds of books I write. It gets wearisome, all the bellyaching and feeling and thinking about the world and how you interact with it. Everything's a mirror when you're a writer; the computer monitor is a mirror. Who thinks they are so important they need to write books about themselves? Who are these people who write about themselves, and how did I become one of them?

That is what Miller does beautifully in this book: He asks questions of himself and his reader, and then experiments with the answers in a way that prompts you to get off the couch and join him. He spares no words when describing the magic of storytelling, the beautiful simplicity of love on some days, or the attributes of a good storyteller. And for those of us who may be tempted to take our bubbling youth and cram it with as many life experiences as humanly possible in an attempt to make sense of the world, to build a story, Miller says this, gently:

I don't think memorable scenes help a story make sense. Other principles accomplish that. What memorable scenes do is punctuate the existing rise and fall of a narrative.

I am still on the hunt for all of that: looking for sense, building the narrative, collecting the memorable scenes, spinning the yarn of all of it together. If you are too, Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is a good companion on your journey.

What gets you excited?

2011-09-22T09:54:00.004+03:00

I have been thinking about passions, about the dedication to causes and people that sustain us. I was incredibly touched by Akhila Kolisetty's post about what gets her excited, what drives her and moves her. She was inspired by Diana Kimball's insightful musings on this issue, who in turn was inspired by Anthony Volodkin (of Hype Machine fame) asking how he gets excited about new ideas and companies. One of the ways I get excited is by reading stories. Hearing what makes other people come alive plants seeds in my head and moves me to action, while also prompting me to ask the questions.

Summer 2010: Roxanne and Meghan on a ferry to Marmaras in Halkidiki, Greece

Introducing Meghan Johnson
And so, with thanks to Akhila and Diana and Anthony Volodkin for the idea and inspiration behind this format, I am introducing you to a woman whose life story fuels my faith in humanity. We met on the first day of our first year at Harvard. Both pint-sized women, we were sharing a bedroom so tiny that it was fit to be a dollhouse more than a dorm room: if we reached our arms out when we were lying in our separate (tiny) beds, we could hold hands. Even though years have passed since those freshman days, we continue to walk by each other's side in life, holding hands, supporting one another as we unravel our stories. Meghan embodies the delicate combination of brilliant and compassionate, funny and sensitive, giving through both her acts of service and the contagious power of her energy. Until recently, she worked in the financial sector and has now opted to take at least one year off to engage in service-based travel around the world. Her first stop is Peru. In her own words, this is her story.

What gets me excited, by Meghan Johnson

I get excited about travel.

Shocking, I know. I’ve been reading a lot about the philosophy of travel as my departure for Peru approaches, which actually breaks my cardinal rule to not over-analyze things that bring me great pleasure. There are books and essays galore out there, full of tips and warnings: At all costs do not behave like a tourist, but do not embarrass yourself by thinking you can be a local. Do not wear Tommy Bahama t-shirts, but do not stop bathing either. Do not restrict yourself to the beaten path, but don’t you dare venture off your porch without traveler’s insurance and these eighteen nifty gadgets!

As if the gravity of quitting my job to travel wasn’t reason enough, all of this nomad-philosophizing has caused me to reexamine my own motivations for traveling. I don’t think I am traveling to “find myself”, which a few people have jokingly asked me. I don’t need to see every country in the world. It’s not a new desire or a last-ditch effort. It’s the fulfillment of a dream. My younger self pored over encyclopedia articles and travel books, wondering what it might be like if I were a 12-year old girl in Cairo rather than New Jersey. For me, traveling is akin to stepping through the wardrobe into a favorite book and meeting beloved characters in person. It’s about making sure not to disappoint that 12-year old girl and the promises she once made to herself.

I get excited about my body (and yours).

That’s right. You heard me. I’m a big fan of it. It hasn’t earned me a bedroom in the Playboy mansion, but it has carried me a long way, and I owe it a big thank you. I spent a lot of years complaining about it in high school and college. I still slip into that mentality occasionally, but now I’m mostly in awe of everything that it can do. It has hiked small mountains, run a full marathon, twisted into pretzels in yoga class, danced through the night, and healed itself innumerable times. I take on physical challenges because I can; I am young and I have two legs that work, and for that I am supremely lucky. So I will keep running, twisting, dancing and playing to the best of my ability to keep this incredible machine conditioned for as long as I can. Health is a gift I refuse to waste.

I get excited when I find that I can respond in a foreign language without having to over-think it.

Languages delight me. Just ask Roxanne how many times I’ve tipsily begged her to teach me Greek words that I’ll probably never have to use. I love trying to pronounce new words, the way they roll around on my tongue, how nervous and proud I feel when I finally let them leap out and greet the world. And when words turn to sentences and then to conversations, well that's just magic. I would happily replace Julia Roberts steeping in the bathtub with an Italian-English dictionary in Eat, Pray, Love (preferably without the depression or divorce). In my own travel tale, language, rather than food, would be the first tasty indulgence I’d seek abroad… followed by a few madeleines and macarons to round out my pronunciation, of course.

I get excited about art and the creative process.
"I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the middle of distraction." - Saul Bellow

Bellow's definition doesn't exactly specify whether it's the consumption of art or its creation that achieves this stillness. Personally, it's both. Art brings me back down to the ground when I'm panicky or overwhelmed. Creating art, even more so than viewing it, settles my mind and draws out a silent prayer.

That’s not to say I’ve mastered the process. I’m usually petrified by it. Years have gone by without producing a single work. On my desk sits a charcoal and pencil portrait that I drew on a whim four years ago. It took me eight hours of very-much-arrested attention, during which I toiled and huffed and scribbled and scratched, and ultimately loved every painstaking second. I keep it close by because the memory of the process brings me pride, despite the fact that it earned me a whopping zero dollars and few accolades. It brings me back to the state of devout focus required to bring it to life. It gives me faith that I can do it again.

By Meghan Johnson

I get excited about people who get excited about things.

I firmly believe that excitement and passion are contagious, as are apathy and lethargy. I love being around people who are engaged and inspired. I don’t care if your passion is makeup application, horseback riding, or jazz flute. As long as it is doesn’t hurt anybody, own it. Share it. Sing it from the mountain tops. Let your freak flag fly. We need people who get excited about life and live it boldly, in their own way. By sharing your excitement with people around you, you’ll infect them with curiosity and energy (and maybe annoy them a little bit by being so darn happy). Whatever it is that makes your soul shine, pursue it and inspire others in the process.

***

Meghan is chronicling her journey at Soulshine Traveler. Now, do tell us, what gets you excited?

Reflections from a country on the verge

2011-09-18T11:42:00.002+03:00

I do not eat fish.
Or Kalamata olives.
I call pouring milk into cereal or seasoning pop corn "cooking."

In some senses, I am a fraud of a Greek. If passports were earned on the basis of national stereotypes, my Greek one would have been revoked by now. And if not on the basis of disappointing foreigners by not wearing a toga and sandals every day, then certainly on the basis of my having whined all over the internet about how I am struggling to call my birthplace a home.

I do not watch TV here any more because real-life news resembles the most imaginary 'reality shows' in America. The whole country is on sale - if you were waiting for the right moment to buy the Port of Thessaloniki or some archaeological spaces or an island or two, this is your time. Inquire within.

There is a default watch, a ceaseless and invisible countdown clock that measures time until the country falls apart. Nobody is quite sure what that would look like, but we all know to be on the look-out nonetheless. Some think it will look like Argentina in the 1990s. Others think we will have to establish communes with shared responsibilities of cooking and living off the land to survive. Yet others, from the union of taxi drivers to the fans of a Thessaloniki soccer team, are taking to the streets to protest. What are they protesting? Anything from standardized cab fare to unfair soccer match refereeing to social injustice at large.

Like with any crime, everyone is wondering who "did it." Who brought us to the point at which corruption, bribery, bureaucracy and raging, blind taxation have won over meritocracy, the creation of opportunity, the fostering of innovation and the encouragement of effort? My generation of twenty-somethings, most of whom have not had a job in Greece and many of whom are still waiting for the universities to open or books to be printed in order to formally obtain their degrees, blame the generations above them. "We have been on this planet too little to have had time to mess it up."

I do not participate in the displays of public anger, not because I am not civic-minded or enraged about the social injustices here, but because I have come to firmly believe in non-violence. Earlier this summer, I found myself studying non-violent conflict and civil resistance. One of the points that recurred in the discussions was that when movements become violent, they often alienate individuals who would have affiliated with them on ideological grounds. Right now, I am that individual. I refuse to pluck sidewalk tiles off their place so I can throw them during a protest march. Another recurring point in my summer-time study was that when fractions of a movement become violent, they mar the message for the rest of the movement. Indeed, that is the case again: Students in my city have protested non-violently and yet, most protests now bear connotations of angry people, water hoses, and tear gas, overshadowing both the message and the means of those resisting peacefully.

I was on my way to a concert last night - a concert that featured bouzouki and baglamas and the sounds of growing up in Thessaloniki. The five women with whom I attended realized the leader of the opposition is speaking near the concert venue. "I hope we do not get tear gassed," said one of them and proceeded to continue getting excited about the vocal attributes of the lead female vocalist.

Through studies of history and social anthropology, I have often encountered the view that 'children' growing up in a recession, Depression or other hardship often become cynical parents. One of my greatest fears is becoming the parent who says no to a reasonable request from her child because "when I was growing up, did you know what we had to face?!" The self-righteousness of I-have-less-tender-memories-than-you-and-you-will-have-to-suffer-the-consequences makes me cringe. I asked one of my friends here if she thinks people are becoming cynical. Her name means Joy. In our group, we also have Zwi, which means Life, and our fair share of Maria's and Eleni's to still be Greek. Even my name is incongruent here; one of the women with whom I shared wine and music last night noted that I should start my own home-made handbag line with a name like that.

My friend thought about whether living here during this time is making her cynical and she said: "Look, Roxanne. If anything, I think it is making me more of a romantic. I think about the things nobody can take away from us. I think about love and affection and friendship and sharing wine, whether it's at a tavern or from the grocery store, or whether there's no wine at all and we're sitting at the benches with our friends. There are some things nobody can take away from you, no government, no economic crisis, no austerity measures - and you remember these things right now."

It is these women's beliefs in romance that makes me believe. It is their commitment to finding and creating joy and laughter even while the invisible clock of default is ticking in the background that feeds my faith in humanity. It is their kindness, their curiosity about the world beyond, their desire to get up and fight for themselves every day that replenishes my hope. I got to know these women as my cousin's classmates and everybody's cousin is a cousin of yours here too. They have embraced me with warmth and with their lack of cynicism. They have counseled me to turn off the TV, put on music, pour a glass of wine, and breathe into a paper bag when it all gets too much. They sang next to me while Yiota Nega crooned Eleftheria Arvanitaki's song, Edw na meineis: "You should stay here." I may not eat Kalamata olives or fish, but I have found the little slice of Greece that is still resonant with my memories, I have found the Joy and Life and Elenis and Nikoletas and Ioannas who will keep me coming back. Now the trick is to stop ourselves from imagining what the country will look like next time I get off the plane.

Enough with the fashionable gender stereotypes

2011-09-16T09:16:00.003+03:00

“Who has time to do homework when there is a new Justin Bieber album out?” That was JCPenney’s product description of a shirt for girls aged 7-16. The shirt read: “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me.”

Then Forever 21 created a shirt for young girls that read “Allergic to Algebra.”

Both shirts have been withdrawn from the market, following public outcry. In the Feministing community blog today, I write about gender stereotypes, fashion and education. I would love to know what you think! The tag line is broken on Feministing, so I currently appear as Ms. First Name Last Name, but rest assured that these words are coming from me about an issue I care a lot about. Also, if you do not have an account at Feministing and wish to comment, you may either sign up for one or share your thoughts on the subject here.

***

Updated: The winner of the Ordinary Sparkling Moments give-away is Mary Leach. Mary, congratulations - please send me your mailing address! And thank you all for sharing your moments of joy, for they made me joyous. Have a beautiful weekend!

Books well-loved

2011-09-13T08:40:00.001+03:00

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, via Snarkmarket

Emerson has marked my life. On a tender afternoon in Cairo years ago, between hugs and giggles, I started bringing up one of Emerson's passages on happiness in Self-Reliance. "Emerson once said...", I began and Elijah stopped me with a kiss and some indignation. "Emerson once said?! Emerson? Really? Now?" A few months later, I received a hand-made card, whose pages consisted of sheet music. On one page, the following words were scribbled:

Emerson once said... I love you...

I now know that when Emerson resurfaces in my life, I need to pay attention. And in the quote Snarkmarket selected above, Emerson perfectly describes the process of nodding enthusiastically while reading familiar truths expressed masterfully by a stranger and a kindred spirit at once. Emerson came back to me when I read Christine Mason Miller's Ordinary Sparkling Moments: Reflections on success and contentment.

My most beloved books are life stories: personal essays, memoirs, biographies that pierce the veil of "I shouldn't write about this" and talk to the reader as though she were sitting across the writer at a coffee table. We sit with Christine through this book as she speaks of kindness, to self and to others, of entrepreneurship and success, of ideas and creativity, of friendship and loneliness and fear and companionship and love. She does all this with words like these:

Or these:

What most moved me about Christine's book is that it is a book well-loved. Christine made every page. Not 'wrote', not 'typed'. She created all of it: the background, the handwriting, the collages, the details behind every collage. Every mark on the page, from the illustrations to the layout to her actual handwriting, came from her. In this post on her website, she even discusses observing the printing press churn out her creation. And then after she made them, she sent them out into the world lovingly with her 100 Books Project, planting copies around the world for strangers to discover and chronicling this process of sharing a work of love.

In short, she made magic.

Every page made me want to linger a little more: First I took in the words, then I poked at the background, then I tried to identify all the layers of paint, of color, of materials, of meaning. This book made me want to love and reminded me of truths I thought I knew and lived by, but had never quite articulated myself -- indeed, as Emerson said, "great works of art [...] teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side."

On a recent trip to Cuba, a beloved friend and colleague and I were talking about what our 'one word' would be. You know, the word that permeates and imbues all we do and all we are and all we hope to be. Hers was 'create', an honest reflection of her spirit, her drive, her idea-filled soul, her desire to leave something in this world. She looked at me, smiled, and said "yours is 'love', isn't it?" Our words -- create, love, learn and all the other words Cuba and that conversation had room for -- co-exist harmoniously in Christine's book and they find company among other words: fear, inspiration, desire, friendship, beauty.

This book made me want to return to what is true, to what I know, to what I want to learn. It made me want to make a well-loved book of my own. When the still pages of a book come alive and stir in you a longing to experience the sheer joy of creation, when they motivate you to leap and to love, then you know that you have not simply finished a book. You have made a life companion.

***

So, tell me: In which ordinary moments do you find joy?

Leave a comment and I will draw one reader at random to win a copy of

Ordinary Sparkling Moments: Reflections on Success and Contentment. [also available here]

You may also visit Christine at her site: http://christinemasonmiller.com/

The give-away will close on Friday, September 16th at 5 PM EST.

The summer school of life

2011-09-08T23:42:00.001+03:00

"Do you always have to learn something?", a friend asked on a walk around the Guatemalan town of Antigua.

"Well... no. If I do not learn something, I need to be moved though. Shaken in some way. Affected."

That was my response -- a true and honest answer, stemming from a place of shame. Part of the hope of my journey in international development, conflict management and a life on the road was that I'd be able to unlearn some habits. I had deeply hoped that I'd make a new friend somewhere down the line who wouldn't be able to guess that, at an earlier point on the same line, I had been the kind of goal-driven, lesson-driven, achievement-driven person who would likely get an ulcer by age 30. My walking companion in Guatemala met the girl who would climb a volcano on six hours notice, but saw straight through her and discerned the girl who always needed to learn something along the way too.

Two summers have passed since that conversation. The changing seasons brought a certain clarity to my response during that walk. I have realized that I learn most vigorously when I am moved. Being shaken, affected, and moved are not alternatives to the lack of a lesson for me -- they are the best way for the world to teach me and for me to pay attention.

I have returned "home" to Greece and have been thinking about what "home" means, home in quotation marks. I woke up two days ago to glistening red roofs, a purple sky, and a shy sun. The fall looks good on Thessaloniki. With the glistens and the purples, it also a brought a sense of urgency to capture the learnings and unlearnings of this summer so that the magic of being moved does not wash off with the first rain.

This summer, I danced salsa in a square in the middle of a city and drew joy from the giggles after stepping on your loved one's foot. [He should have worn close-toed shoes, that's-my-story-and-I'm-sticking-to-it.] I drew joy from the way a coral dress fluttered with every sway of the hips.

I learned a thing or two about loyalties, in sides of armed conflict or in families.

I realized that time silences soreness and saturates fondness. No memories of self-suppression float to the surface when a glorious Harvard Square morning greets me any more. The glory fully registers now and with it, it brings relief.

This summer, I went to my first Sam's Club... and my first Lowe's... and my first CostCo. I spent 6.5 hours at IKEA in a day. For someone who is not attached to stuff or purchasing, that is a personal best (worst?).
This was the summer I fell in love with Kroger and its maple walnut ice cream.

I fell in love with August moons rising out of the Ohio river, Kentucky storms and United Dairy Farmers milkshakes.
I defended vanilla as a milkshake flavor and as an occasional life-style choice. Not everything needs to be triple-chocolate-hazelnut-with-extra-pink-and-dotted-sprinkles.

I pet my first shark (and found out what kind of shark I would be at my weight if I were a shark at all.)

This was the summer I was driven to the airport by a clan of people who would serenade me with a Brandi Carlile sing-along as I walked away. This was the summer I'd baffle a TSA hand luggage screener with the tupperware of muffins squeezed in there. This was the summer I marveled at how the families you find along the journey of life can supplant the memories of the families you were born into or those you lost.

Whom am I kidding -- this was the summer of Brandi Carlile.

And of Chihuly. Glass miracles.

I remembered confidence: You know some things. You have come to deeply know them, through trial and error, and effort, and sleepless nights and just plain intuition. Listen to what you know and lead with it.

I remembered optimism. Thank you, Tali Sharot, for your "tour of the irrationally positive brain." I remembered that I am at my most optimistic when I am surrounded by the comfort of books and the igniting spark of ideas.

I drank bubble tea till it came out my nose. And gorged on cupcakes and burritos and everything else on my Food to Eat in America list. And I already miss the cilantro and the frosting.

I comforted a crying child, and sometimes became the crying child too.

Children are rib-achingly funny. I became grateful to the ones who taught me something I really should have learned earlier in life.

I was deeply scared and deeply scarred by the realities of the work that we do and the stories that haunt us even after we board the flight "home." I have never been more scar(r)ed in my life. Part of me is still scared.

I met strangers on planes and buses and dove hungrily into their loveliness.

I worked on perhaps the hardest project of my life so far, and am still sworn to secrecy about it. I unlearned everything I thought I knew about international development and learned a thing or two about reliance: about leaning on those on whose life boat you are a guest, and about leading with love.

I tried 'writer', 'photographer' and 'storyteller' on for size, and decided to keep them all.

I thought about behavioral neuroscience, empathy, and compassion. Alone, and in relation to each other.

I experienced the sheer joy of being in JFK Park in Harvard Square and exhaling because your body, your mind, your community and your hopes are sharing a zip code -- even for a bit.

I got sick of life in a carry-on bag, and of the clothes in it.

I watched friends buy homes, make homes, nest in homes -- and I wanted that. I wanted the putting in of the drywall and the venting about how the roofers are late again. I wanted it for more than a minute.

I sat at the "fun table" at the closing of an academic/professional seminar. I wondered where I was for all the other fun tables of my life, and promised to seek them out with fervor in the future. The clinking of the glasses still echoes in my ears.

I learned about non-violence, civil resistance, and movement formation and allowed that to nuance my understanding of conflict. I had to reteach myself how to learn in a classroom, squinting at Powerpoints, turning off the urge to do 17 things a minute and just paying attention. Beautiful things happen when you pay attention.

I met some of my "blogging friends", as Elijah calls them, as though they were imaginary. And what do you know, they are not only real, but also present, engaging, and full of life and love.

I missed and I missed and I missed, to the point of frustration. I missed him, and then we were back. Sitting at the same breakfast table, my heart returned to its rightful place. Now I miss him and I miss him and I miss him again, but the breakfast tables of the fall are giving me hope.

I shed skin next to old and loved friends, making room for all of us to grow together, and allow one another to grow into different women than the girls we were when we met. I danced in their living rooms with them, ate ice cream on the steps of libraries, and drew with crayons on brunch tablecloths. [Paper tablecloths, people. We are not in the vandalism business here.]

I sat at a table with a trusted mentor and friend. I felt my heart explode with gratitude. I love moments when you can feel the mind stretching, the heart muscle growing a little bit bigger to accommodate the bliss.

I asked the hard questions, sometimes too urgently, sometimes too circuitously, sometimes in that deep voice that comes from a soft and vulnerable place inside.
I walked and I hugged and I kissed my way to some answers.
I had to reteach myself to let some questions hang.

Storytelling through staring

2011-09-04T12:54:00.001+03:00

A tuk-tuk driver, whose vehicle is decorated with a heart, glares at me in Agra, India.

The theme of photographer Ed Kashi's latest exhibit "Eye to Eye" is eye contact. Kashi sorted through his old photographs and deliberately selected images in which individuals were looking directly at the camera. James Estrin of the NYT Lens Blog asked Kashi: "Why is it so upsetting when someone is looking at us?" Kashi responded:

I think it is because we do not want to exist in our pictures. After 30 years of being a photographer, I don't know if it is a conceit. I don't know if it's self-delusion. But there is this idea that if somebody is looking into the camera, then somehow it's inauthentic or it's not a genuine moment. We don't want anyone to think we were there.

When Estrin prompted Kashi to explain why, he responded: "Because it breaks the fictional notion that it's a candid moment; it's a human document; it's real."

Kashi had many more beautiful words in this interview about 'candid intimacy' and "the pure, pure joy in being engaged in the craftsmanship of photography. In a recent conversation with Kate, a dear friend and constant source of inspiration, we both expressed fascination with the idea of the invisible photographer. There has recently been a lot of conversation about the invisible storyteller at large -- the need for the storyteller's "I" to melt away in order for the subject to come to the forefront.

But can it ever? Is there value in pretending the photographer wasn't there? That the subject did not see the camera? That the writer did not feel anything when she heard the story and was a mere cataloguer of one reality as it was told to her?

The stories that shake me to my core, be they visual or written or musical, make room for all the people whose lives were woven into them: photographers, subjects, writers, interviewees and all their feelings too. I find distance far more fictional than the reality of someone looking at the camera. For me, the 'candid intimacy' of which Kashi speaks lies in acknowledging that as storytellers, we are affected by the stories we tell and that, committed to lack of bias and accuracy as we may be, we bring our lenses into our stories. That does not render the story impure in my eyes; it gives it a pulse, a soul and a life.

A visible photographer, a visibly excited subject: Christmas Eve 2010, Thessaloniki, Greece (photo by Elijah)
***

This week, I reveled in the delight of many storytelling resources. How Matters interviewed Marc Maxson of the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project (part I and part II). Kurt Vonnegut talked about the shapes of stories. And Lens Blog linked to Ed Kashi's marvelous photographs of individuals staring straight into the camera.

Enjoy... and tell me: where are you in your stories?

From Libya to Midnight in Paris and Bon Iver to Hillary

2011-08-26T00:32:00.002+03:00

I have loved Alan Taylor's work from the Boston Globe's "Big Picture" to the Atlantic's "In Focus." In this striking photoessay, he chronicles the first six months of the conflict in Libya. Images #7 and #17 are blowing my mind.

On the subject of Libya, Erica Chenoweth asks "Did the Libyan uprising have to be violent?" I heard her speak at Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of NonViolent Conflict and she truly inspired me with her research on conflict and non-violence. She recently wrote a Foreign Policy article dispelling myths on nonviolence and a follow-up about the relationship between pacifism, conflict and nonviolence.

Partners in Help: Paul Farmer discusses the concept of accompaniment in development. One of the best development reads of the year.

PolicyMic is hosting a Women in Journalism series. Sara Jerving reported on peace-building and corruption from Kenya and I discussed the challenges of sharing women's stories without falling into the same stereotypes we seek to combat. I am very grateful for the discussion and am looking forward to reading Anna's article tomorrow in the same space.

"For every story of tragedy there are 10 stories of courage and inspiration." - Hillary Clinton, on how she does not get overwhelmed by suffering. Excellent insights on women in politics in the same interview.

Join the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign. I know I will.

On adulthood: the rosy take and the more cynical take.

The Deep Old Desk is one of my favorite spaces on the internet. Kim painted love on her walls (yes, literally -- and be sure to click on the song that accompanies the post), and Heather had this to say:

"Scott always asks why I deliberately drown myself in heartbreaking movies, songs and literature and I always turn to the same answer: because a good heart-bleeding must be shared so that we are reminded just how similiar we all are."

A beautiful take on empathy.

David Grossman and Nicole Krauss are in conversation, and I am in love.

A quote from Midnight in Paris, my favorite film in a while: "All men fear death. It's a natural fear that consumes us all because we feel that we haven't loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same." And this as well: "Hmph, you'll never write well if you fear dying... do you?"

Recently read: She walks in beauty: A woman's journey through poems by Caroline Kennedy. Beautiful, from cover to cover. Some of my favorite words from it, by Antonio Machado in "Poem 41":

Don't try to rush things:

For the cup to run over,

It must first be filled.

Holding dear- "Late Fragment", by Raymond Carver:

Did you get what you wanted

from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on this earth.

Now reading: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (I know, I know, I'm late to the party) and Ordinary Sparkling Moments by Christine Mason Miller, the latter of which was waiting for me on the kitchen counter when I flew home to Greece. Christine Mason Miller creates beauty wherever she goes and shares the beauty of Hafiz too.

Now listening - and viewing. Viewing this (Icelandic) beauty is mandatory:

What made you think, laugh or love this week? Have a magical weekend!

Why Mary Oliver and I wake early

2011-08-22T05:39:00.002+03:00

Mary Oliver named a collection of poems "Why I Wake Early." Her words and the beauty of early morning walks are traveling with me through the change of seasons and through life transitions.

I am participating in August Break, a month-long break from words and experiment in expressing life through photography. Join in.

Gender is a lens, not a conclusion

2011-08-19T21:00:00.001+03:00

People ask why I return to conflict and post-conflict zones to work on project after project. The truth is that I feel like I am bound to the people there by the power of stories. Stories of resilience and perseverance, of courage and optimism in the face of adversity, inspire me to the core. As a gender-related development specialist, writer, and photographer, I have been called to document these stories in the Middle East, Latin America, East Africa and the Balkans. Whether in Cuba or Colombia, Egypt or Israel, Uganda or Jordan, I have consistently asked myself the same question about gender and storytelling: How do we share stories of women without falling into the same gender stereotypes we seek to combat?

***

PolicyMic is hosting me this Friday as part of their Women in Journalism series. You can read the rest of my thoughts and chime in on gender, storytelling and conflict here. Have a wonderful weekend!

When conflict becomes personal

2011-08-15T20:47:00.000+03:00

A street sign at my birthplace: Thessaloniki, Greece, August 2010

Buttons. Mpoumpou. Little Miss Sunshine.

Those have been my nicknames through different eras of life. By far my favorite, though, is Dorkosaurus Rox.

My dorky days can be traced back to high school in Greece. I wore an unfathomable amount of pink and was the Captain of the Greek National Debate Team at the World Schools Debating Championships. That mouthful, right there, is indicative of a Dorkosaurus in the making.

At the World Schools Debating Championships, I learned about that "every new argument must have a good topic sentence" and that kissing debaters on the Argentine National Debate team in piano bars in Stuttgart will teach you more about romance than any Rachel McAdams movie ever will. Perhaps the most valuable lesson of all was this: You can never win an argument against your own mother. "Save those eloquent words for the World Championships, young lady," will silence any argument, no matter how good its topic sentence may have been.

Many years and Dorkosaurus-worthy endeavors later (Secretary-General of Harvard National Model United Nations, anyone?), I am revisiting the crossover between argument and life - between work as a conflict management professional and conflict in that professional's own life. When I share my blob of a title with people, I hear a lot about the conflict plaguing their lives: sibling rivalry, marital spats, boyfriend tiffs. When I told a new friend what I do, he said: "Like in war zones and shit? Or like...couples counselling?"

Though not quite in that articulation, the former is a more accurate reflection of my professional life -- but, the truth is that the tools for the prevention, management and resolution of conflict are universally applicable. To resolve conflict, in Colombia or at home in Greece, we return to the basics of humanity: active listening, empathy and compassion, honest and open questions and patience with the answers. And, much like my pink-wearing debating 16-year-old self learned, I am finding it much harder to apply conflict management principles to my own life than to teach the same concepts in a workshop in a village in rural Guatemala.

There is a particular tenet of negotiation that is especially relevant to my life right now and which I find challenging to embrace: "When you do not feel like you can have the conversation as your most effective self, step away from the (negotiating) table."

I lead a life that does not enable me and my loved one to "sit at the table" together very often. In the past three months alone, I have boarded over 30 flights, attended a conference on nonviolence, co-led a photography and storytelling initiative in a country that broke my heart and broke me open, studied for the GRE and prepared to apply to graduate school, danced with old and loved friends to old and loved tunes in the living rooms of their grown-up apartments and drunk so much bubble tea that I am starting to grow tapioca pearls in my stomach. [I have also become the person-who-tells-you-everything-she-did-woe-is-her, which is one step before the-person-who-photographs-everything-she-had-for-breakfast-lunch-and-dinner-and-then-blogs-about-it. May a higher power help us all.]

All of this while being away from my anchor -- my anchor of love.

We said goodbye at an airport at the end of spring and, by the end of summer, life has spat us out in different places.

Tell me how to step away from the table. How to shy away from the big questions when we have been longing for the shared zip code that will allow us to tackle them together, holding hands.

Tell me, rather, how to have the conversation without the "fierce urgency of now." Tell me that now we can exhale because our hearts have returned to their rightful places. Tell me that we can hold hands all the way till we find our answers without the plane ticket that will whisk me across the world in 7 days casting everything in a harsher, emergency light.

In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer writes:

I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth cannot tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take all the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.

I am caught between that end of missing someone, the urgency of 'what's next', the uncertainty of which life decisions will enable me to live the story I wish to be living, and the longing of wanting to share with my anchor not only the reunion tears of relief, but also the minutia of daily life that make the shared life delicious.

Tell me, as Rilke would want you to in Letters to a Young Poet, to

be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you win then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Tell me, as Joan Didion would whisper to me, to "go with the change."

And let me tell you one thing I do know. If Colombia and Egypt and Uganda and Israel and Palestine and Jordan and Guatemala and Greece and Boston and conferences and plane tickets and workshops have taught me anything, it is to love. It is that only through kindness and love can we arrive at the answers -- or the answers I would want to embrace, anyway. As Mitch Albom and Tuesdays with Morrie have taught me, "love wins. Love always wins."

The person who named me Dorkosaurus Rox taught me that love wins. August, for me, is for sitting at the table, over and over again, patiently and kindly. For knowing when to step away from the table, and return to it with the patience and kindness replenished. August is for learning to love the questions themselves, for embracing the uncertainty, for leading - through conflict - with love.

Telling stories about storytelling

2011-08-09T17:51:00.003+03:00

The lovely Beth Nicholls of Do What You Love interviewed me as part of Photography Fortnight. A glimpse into the interview:

Beth Nicholls: How differently do you see the world through the lens of a camera?

Roxanne: In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton discusses the process of drawing while traveling. He remarks that drawing enables the traveler to see: to squint, to scrutinize, to look in a way that transcends the fleeting glimpse. Photography plays a similarly enabling role in my own life, even though it is more instantaneous than the process of drawing. I look through the viewfinder searching for beauty… or for surprise, incongruence, contradiction, conflict. The camera reminds me to look — to really look.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Until the hyperlinks appear properly in the interview text, here are some of the sources of inspiration I reference:

Marianne Elliott's post on the Girl Effect and radical self-care. Marianne herself moves me, inspires me, and makes me think with her every post and project. In addition to her site, she can be found at @zenpeacekeeper on Twitter.
The Rumpus article on fake memoirs and the stories we wish to tell.
An Acumen Fund blog post by Blair Miller on the next phase of storytelling
Jina Moore's guidelines for trauma journalism and meaningful consent
Don Miller's book on living and writing a better story.

What are some of your favorite resources -- books, blogs, articles, etc. -- on storytelling, photography and the creative life?

Re-learning fractions

2011-08-08T20:37:00.003+03:00

I am participating in August Break, a month-long break from words and experiment in expressing life through photography. Join in.

There was a time when I owned flashcards that read "A calf is a baby cow." You see, for a Greek, 'anthropomorphism' was not a hard word on the SAT. But ask that same little Greek what you call an animal's young or a group of doves or a female horse or the name of a tool that we use for a particular action and she'll draw a blank.

The flashcards are back, this time for the GRE standardized test and in light of a hopeful return to the academic community in a new capacity. Alacrity, perfidy, prattle, fulminate. Rules of exponents. Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally and the order of mathematical operations. Bear with me as I re-learn how to count.

Flash cards

by Rita Dove

In math I was the whiz kid, keeper

of oranges and apples. What you don’t understand,
master, my father said; the faster
I answered, the faster they came.

I could see one bud on the teacher’s geranium,
one clear bee sputtering at the wet pane.
The tulip tree always dragged after heavy rain
so I tucked my head as my boots slapped home.

My father put up his feet after work
and relaxed with a highball and The Life of Lincoln.
After supper we drilled and I climbed the dark

before sleep, before a thin voice hissed
numbers as I spun on a wheel. I had to guess.
Ten, I kept saying, I’m only ten.

When stories cross paths

2011-08-04T15:57:00.001+03:00

Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland went to Haiti on assignment and wrote an article called "Aftershocks: Welcome to Haiti's Reconstruction Hell." A few months later, for GOOD Magazine, McClelland recounted her experience with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in an article titled "How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD." I balked when I first read the title, but I became even more uncomfortable with some of the comments following the publication of the piece.

Critical Peace kindly hosted me this week to talk about storytelling in conflict zones. Springing from the controversy surrounding Mac McClelland's GOOD article, I ask what happens when stories cross paths: when the stories McClelland witnessed during that first trip in Haiti affect her own life story. Click here to read the full piece.

Whimsical at Harvard

2011-08-01T00:03:00.002+03:00

In a chapter of A Million Miles in A Thousand Years, Donald Miller's book about living and writing better stories, the narrator converses with a character who "didn't think we should be afraid to embrace whimsy. I asked him what he meant by whimsy, and he struggled to define it. He said it's that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks."

When I was an undergraduate student at Harvard University, whimsy evaded me. So did bushy tails: I graduated without having taken a single photograph of the squirrels in Harvard Yard. I have now returned. And I brought my whimsy with me.

Sever Hall on a summer afternoon

Widener Library reflected in a puddle

Harvard Square cobblestone after a sunset rain

Harvard Square after a sunset rain II

Scraps of paper on a student bulletin board

A leaf is caught in a spiderweb in Harvard Yard.

Spider plant in Harvard Yard

Redeeming myself: Photographing squirrels - Part I

Redeeming myself - Part II

Redeeming myself - Part III

The Harvard motto: Veritas

A sticker on the back of a STOP sign in Harvard Square instructs us to "Stay Cute."

Found in the dressing room of a shop in Harvard Square

For the month of August, I am participating in August Break: taking a break from words and, instead, sharing photos and the stories that come with them. Join in.

Through the glass

2011-07-22T03:29:00.001+03:00

I had never watched American Beauty until my sophomore year of college. Sure, I remember the posters outside the movie theater in Greece. A rose petal, a belly button, a big bold R rating to indicate that rose petals and belly buttons were not the stuff of 13-year-old Greek girls. At the time, the suggestiveness evaded me. I simply thought rose petals looked right on girls' bellies in the same way that linen pants look right on summer nights.

October of sophomore year of college found me on a friend's couch. It was one of those couches that belonged to a friend of my friend's and to that friend's older brother and to his girlfriend - one of those couches that have gone to college with everyone and on which you sit with the acknowledgement that you will absorb some of the odor of sweat, beer and love. American Beauty seemed a little extra seedy in that setting.

Years later, the perversion of the movie and the odor of the couch have both faded. There is one line from it that has not. Lester Burnham muses:

It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday.

There was nothing soothing about American Beauty other than that disclaimer. Years later, I'm starting to get an idea of what Lester Burnham was talking about.

A boat of glass, with a heart on the left

Boat reflection

A glass ceiling I do not protest

The beams that hold up the ceiling

Glass sculpture close-up

Raining glass

Glass garden

The glass garden has roots.

Mixed materials

A glass venus fly trap

I do not know if it is possible to be around these creations by Dale Chihuly and not be mindful of one's own fragility. I have been thinking about the life steps I am trembling too much to embrace securely. This glass is alive and speaks to me in a way that inspires leaps of faith, as did the kindred spirit whose heart skipped next to mine at the sight of all the wonder. My friend and I glided through the rest of the museum, with the other exhibits being secondary characters to the fairy tale in which we were floating. We talked about photography and art and poetry and writing and sharing and other stuff as dreams are made on. We talked about processing and choosing and deciding, we laughed, we reminisced. We talked about the trauma of conflict, of loss and of heartbreak. We reveled in unbridled joy. There was no room for groundedness last night. She and I needed to float. As Lester Burnham would have it, our hearts filled up like balloons that were about to burst.

There was no bursting or breaking last night. We simply walked along one another and let the vulnerability flow through the cracks.

Anchors of love

2011-07-05T08:54:00.000+03:00

Mary Oliver has written one of my favorite lines in poetry: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” There is a lot of advice for international development workers and conflict specialists and nomads and travelers and ‘women on the road.’ I have been told not to get attached. To live fully and to experience everything and to not linger or get caught up in people, in stories, in places or in circumstances. I have been told this is no way for a love to grow and thrive; I have been told to settle down and I have been told to choose.

Mary Oliver still wins in my heart. There is a love somewhere across the ocean, in our former dusty home whose living room is probably unswept right now, and that love fuels me. It grounds me, it energizes me, it slows me down. It helps me process. It makes me look forward and it makes me reminisce. When I was a more emotionally stunted college student with 643 too many inhibitions, I never dreamed I would live like this. Writing about love on the internet — about my love no less! — violated every New England sensibility that had seeped into my Greek blood. Since then, I have lived in a dozen conflict and post-conflict zones, I have been terrified and drunk off life, I have unlearned a lot of ingrained habit, and I have let Mary Oliver teach me.

This is an excerpt from my latest column at Gypsy Girls Guide. To read more about what Mary Oliver has taught me about distance, life, love, and loneliness, click here.

Postcards from a USA misfit

2011-07-02T19:13:00.000+03:00

Location: Felipe's Taqueria, Mt. Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA

There was a period in my life when pico de gallo and a quesadilla were the key to happiness. In fact, it may still be that period. I revisited the site of my college late-night (and early afternoon and mid-day) eating to find out if the magic of Felipe's quesadillas permeates time.

I did not have my first burrito until I was a 17-year-old freshman in college. Burritos have not caught on as quickly in Greece as tequila has. When I tried to explain to my Greek extended family what those burritos I was eating "in America" were, one of my uncles said: "Ahh, I see now. It's Mexican souvlaki!"

Six years after that first burrito, in Colombia, I was told I "eat like a gringa." After watching me navigate a Colombian burrito, my colleague suggested (in mild mortification): "You need to take bigger bites. Eat faster, do not let it all unwrap itself by the time you get to the end. Bite in the middle of it, not delicately around the edges. Do not let the rice drop and do not squeeze too hard because all the sour cream comes out on the other end and you make a mess of yourself. Put extra cilantro between every bite; it makes the rice taste fuller."

At Felipe's in June 2011, I am willing to give all this another try.

"Quisiera un burrito, por favor. Sin queso, sin frijoles. Con arroz, salsa, carnitas. Sin maiz."

The man behind the counter looks up at me in recognition. He is one of the men who wrapped my first burritos seven years ago. I knew it was him when I walk through the door and he knew it was me when I ordered because, really, how many people order burritos without beans, without cheese, without without without?

The magic of Felipe's

"Aprendiste Espanol!", he tells me in amazement of my actually speaking Spanish.

I do not tell him that I was learning Spanish then too, but I had been too shy to ever open my mouth in imperfection. He asks if I am studying here again, I respond that I am a tourist. I almost said "just a tourist", but there is nothing "just" or "merely" about a return to Harvard Square laden with memories.

I eat on the steps of Widener library, watching parents pushing strollers through Harvard Yard, some of them inevitably entertaining the possibility that their child may one day walk through here "with purpose", like those people in Crimson sweaters do. Not a single drop of rice escapes from the burrito. Not a leaf of cilantro hits the ground.

Location: A coffeeshop in Davis Square
"I'd like a coffee, please."
"Right away. What kind of coffee would you like?"
"A sweet coffee."
"You mean, with sugar?"
"Yes, exactly!"
"Cream or milk with that?"
"Yes! Milk. The frothy kind. Oh... non-fat, too. Or maybe soy! Do you have soy?"
"We do have soy! ...The frothy kind? Do you want a latte? A soy latte?"
"A soy latte sounds perfect."
"What size? 24, 32 or 36 ounces?"

In the land of brick-colored memories

Tell me who needs 36 ounces of coffee. I did the math in my head, converting ounces to units of measurement I understand, thinking I may be wrong, thinking that it has to be less than a bucket of coffee the size of my head. If I ever need 36 ounces of coffee, please tell me to forget about (organic) (fair-trade) (from Rwanda!) coffee beans and go back to bed.

The barista who rang up my order was very patient with me, but she could not help but display the "oh, girl-whose-first-time-it-is-ordering-a-coffee-beverage-do-you-know-commuters-are-glaring-at-you" look on her face. There were days in the field with rockets exploding or gunshots in the distance or someone following my every step when I thought that every problem in life could be fixed by a milk frother. You know, that tool that makes milk magical.

Away from the surveillance shadows and the rockets and the gunshots, I have forgotten how to function in America. I have forgotten about choice and abundance and the fact that caffeinated beverages with frothy milk are called lattes and they come in different flavors and sizes and that I used to order them, oh, daily when I lived 'here' full-time. I am that person at the Metro who gets the growls of everyone behind her because she needs to swipe her Metrocard twice. It took me twenty minutes to figure out how to adjust a thermostat, and figuring it out involved an epiphany about opening a window instead. I learned that such a thing as "frosting shots" exists, for those people who buy cupcakes just for the buttercream on top. I am mesmerized by TVs in taxis (worry not, though, I have been warned not to touch the screen without bathing in Purell. I still know some things.)

Sitting in Havana, Cuba, and drinking a cafecito, I was reading Onward, the book by Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz. I like to think that I fully appreciated the irony of reading about tall, half-caf, soy lattes with sprinkles and a dash of whipped cream in one of the places least reminiscent of America. Four weeks later, hours after the soy latte incident, I touched the hardcover edition in one of the Harvard Square Starbucks, remembering what a print book in English feels like, and slowly recovering the memories of how to function when surrounded by frosting shots and tall vanilla soy lattes.

Location: A generic Starbucks, NYC
I have successfully ordered coffee without exceeding my allocated 12 seconds in line or using the word "frothy." I am seated next to a mother and her five-year-old son, who is taking sips out of a cup that may not hold 36 ounces of liquid, but is certainly bigger than his head. She is encouraging him to write in his summer journal.

"What can I write about?" he asks.
"Anything, sweetie. You can write about anything you want."
"Can I write about sitting here with you right now?"
"Yes, of course you can."
"Why do I need to write about right now in my summer journal?" This kid is twenty years younger than I am and he articulates all my anxiety surrounding the relevance of writing about one's life better than I do.
"Because it's practice. You are a very good writer, a great writer! But you avoid writing. Don't be scared. Write your heart out."

Advice someone heard at five, and I need to hear at two decades older than that. Thank you, Starbucks, New York, and five-year-old writers with doubts.

Faces of Cuba, identities of Boston

2011-06-26T17:15:00.003+03:00

If your picture is not good enough, you are not close enough.

This was Robert Capa's advice to photographers.

Cuba is uncomfortable with earnest proximity. On one level, notions of intimacy and privacy bear different connotations on this island. Displays of affection are all public, rendering the phrase "public displays of affection" irrelevant. It is merely affection, of the only kind there is. Cuba can be all public all the time.

On another level, Cuba retreats into herself. Her texture and layers are accessible only to those born into this exclusive club. To some, the exclusivity is a privilege; to others, a damnation. Some spend their whole lives trying to leave; others strive to burrow their way back in.

The intimacy that Capa encourages is not reserved for outsiders. "Get closer" is a dangerous proposition. A few hundred miles north of Havana, in Boston, MA, I have spent the week around individuals engaged in non-violent civil resistance from Azerbaijan to Madagascar and Bulgaria to Mexico. These people humble and inspire me, not only with their life stories, but also with the unabashed way in which they "get closer." On the first day, I heard them all claim the identities I have been too scared to articulate while working in conflict and post-conflict zones. "I am an activist," says one. "I am a writer," says another. "I am a feminist." "I am a photographer." "I am a journalist." "I am a human rights defender."

Cuba blurs one's vision - and does so in a way that feels deliberate. I have returned from there in a fog, with a hampered ability to "name parts," as the Henry Reed poem would have it. Watching identities be claimed with pride, resilience and fearlessness all around me is clearing the clouds.

Outside Hotel Ambos Mundos

Cinderella in Havana

A Wednesday night cigar near the Plaza de Armas

The woman and the doll, Havana Vieja

Flowers near the Capitolio

In Plaza Vieja

Singing Mariachi songs. In the background: "Everything because I love you."

Explaining the game in Central Havana

Shitrless dominos

Fish on wheels

Watching an Afro-Cuban dance performance in the street

No comment

Central Havana

Yellow-shirted love on the Malecon, Part I

Love on the Malecon, Part II

Solitude on the Malecon

Peace and motorcycles

The bubble says "Te quiero."

The places that make your heart crack

2011-06-18T20:03:00.004+03:00

Tatjana Soli's debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, chronicles the lives of photojournalists covering the Vietnam War. It is -- inevitably -- a tale of conflict, photography, love and the paradoxes the interweaving of the above brings to one's life. At a certain point, the narrator characterizes the lead character, Helen Adams, as such: "The pain of being in the war with Linh and the pain of being away from him were equal, were driving her mad. She had broken, become something else. She didn't know what yet."

The way Helen felt about Linh, another main character, is how I feel as my plane lifts off into the sky above Cuba.

Cuba broke me open. At various times in my life, I have declared my relentless need to be "shaken by the shoulders", to be moved by the world. When the fire of feeling alive is not burning brightly in my life, I wither. Cuba brought me back to life and shook me, stirred me and - yes - broke me in ways I have not fully processed in seat 31A of yet another airplane.

I cannot know anything after Cuba.

I do not know who is earnestly happy there, who is only happy because sunniness is the best coping mechanism in the face of adversity, or who says they are living in "the best country in the world" only because s/he is not allowed to leave it and find out otherwise.

I do not remember what I look like without a glowing face of sweat and pink, without a pool of perspiration in my bra, without dust marks on all my pants to remind me of the places I sat to catch my breath.

I do not understand. I fluctuate between hope and despair, endearment and anger, guilty oversatiation and constant hunger. I see a Cuba of affection, of love, of calling women "beauties" and "princesas" and "amorcitas". Amorcitas are my favorite. Next to it, I see a world of completely avoidable decay and resignation. I see and hear the Havana of reggaeton and salsa and bright yellow pants. I also see the ghost town of Havana, with the ever-present police officers interrupting the shadows of the night.

I woke up every morning and applied blush to my cheeks. This took place in the full knowledge that upon stepping out the door, I would surrender to the Cuban heat and humidity and my cheeks would take care of the blushing all on their own. There was enough heat for me to look bronzed in my sleep. And yet, there was something comforting about the affection of a brush on a cheek, about the notion of "putting on my face" to face the world out there. I felt that Havana required of me that I put on my face.

I am still processing Cuba. I feel the need for a verdict, even if I am underqualified to offer one. One cannot pass through Cuba without digging for a conclusion, without needing the closure and the cozy feeling of having decided something about it. This is where my not knowing comes in: Cuba will not let you decide easily. She, like me, will put on her face every morning. But while my face will remain glowingly pink throughout the day, Cuba's face will change in the afternoon, and at night, and the next morning, until you are so confused that you are ready to give up. Cuba will keep spinning like this until you subscribe to viewing her as magical or enchanting or scarred or scarring or a point in the sliding spectrum of it all.

A kiss in Plaza de la Catedral

Wednesday afternoon in Vedado

End of the school day in Plaza Vieja

A trail of cigar smoke

Domino in Plaza del Cristo

Rollerblades on the Prado

Love, everywhere.

Dear conflicted land

2011-06-07T13:26:00.002+03:00

Dear conflicted land,

You are so small that one can drive through you listening to just one radio station. You have not been the homiest of homes to me, but here I am, having left you after 9 months, and listening to Galgalatz FM through the internet, hoping to still feel connected to you through the sound of familiar commercials.

As you are reading this, I am away from internet, Israel, Greece, and most everyone I love. Before leaving for my next journey, I penned a letter to the land I called home for the past year. If you wish to read the rest of it in my column at Gypsy Girls Guide, click here. In the meantime, know that I miss your readership and companionship and, as e.e. cummings would have it, i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart.)

Walking across a land, in words and in photos

2011-06-03T09:10:00.003+03:00

Because walking is the way I understand places, the way they frustrate, confuse, and disorient me. Walking is the way I fall in love.

The story
The Time We Walked to the Sea
The Day We Failed to Walk
The Day Storks Changed My Mind
The Day Messi Rode Past Us
The Day of Wheat and Worry
The Day We Found the Sea

The world in his eyes

A mosque has been built in front of the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth

Flight of the storks

Storks in the sky

A snail on wheat

Cana entrepreneurs harness the marketing potential of their city's Biblical significance.

Sunrise viewed from inside the tent

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and we always picked the wrong one.

Wheat, right before the harvest

Walking on the side of the wheat fields near Kibbutz Lavi

A droplet in the making at Kibbutz Lavi

My favorite plant of the hike

The Horns of Hattin viewed at sunset from a distance

Camping in a wheat field

Wheat field sunset

Condensation forms on the tent flap at sunrise.

Bokeh condensation

Tent condensation at sunrise

View of the Sea of Galilee and surrounding towns from one of the highest lookout points

The town of Tiberias, right by the sea of Galilee

A tree grows in Tiberias

The time we reached the sea

Birds of the Galilee

On the last day of the endeavor

Go in peace.

The day we found the sea

2011-06-02T17:43:00.001+03:00

[This is the last in a series of posts chronicling a walk across Israel. For previous parts of the story, click here. For the how's and why's, read The Time We Walked to the Sea.]

Proof: The day we found the sea (of Galilee)

Twenty toes are dipped in the Sea of Galilee. In the distance, a party boat is playing music which I can safely assume came from The Greatest Hits of Euro-Pop circa 1999. A lifeguard is looking idly in our direction, but he knows he is not needed. In the tiny portion of this beach reserved for swimming, the water is barely forming a ring around our ankles.

"So, we made it." Elijah remarks. Israel is a narrow country; one could walk across it in under a week. Having completed such a journey, touching the water seems less ceremonial than either of us had hoped.

"Oh look! Sea glass!" On New Year's Eve 2010, sitting at a beach on a different side of the Mediterranean, Elijah and I were collecting sea glass. The bright green findings still sit on my desk now.

"Look, Elijah! Sea glass! Remember New Year's?" I run out of the water towards the sparkling pieces of glass.

"Actually, never mind. It's just a crushed Heinekken bottle in the sand."

***

Last you heard from me, I was worrying and pooping in the wrong place and worrying some more. Since then, we walked 35 kilometers, not because we needed to, not because the map told us to, but because we had to take it upon ourselves on the last day of the hike to get lost. The romantic idealist in me believes it was all just a ploy to keep ourselves out there, on the trail, off the trail, in the Galilee. To never go home.

We started those last 35 kilometers by accidentally walking through a farm for 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes of wondering why we keep stepping on so much poop. That same romantic idealist in me thinks the universe was just making sure we had just one more good "poop story" on the last day. In reality, it took our coming face-to-face with cows to realize this was not the trail. A jump over a barbed wire fence and then another and then an hour of walking and we finally reached the Horns of Hattin.

The Horns derive their name from their shape: two steep rocky hills in the middle of farmland, resembling an animal's horns. In 1184, at the Horns of Hattin, Saladin's armies defeated the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. In 2011, the Horns of Hattin taught me something about animal horns too.

While standing at the bottom of the rocky, steep hills, I spotted a bull.

"Elijah! Run!", I screamed as I took towards the first hill, leaving pebbles rolling behind me.

"Moooooo!," Elijah said in the direction of the animal.

I kept running up the hill, clumsily, like a madwoman. "Don't you understand? Run! There's a bull... and you have a red backpack." This is what Conan O'Brien once called an "and you went to Harvard?" moment.

Elijah's laughter bounced off the first hill and then back at me and across the valley. "Honey, that's a cow, not a bull. Cows can have horns too. And don't even get me started on the red backpack point."

***

I almost overnighted at said Horns of Hattin. The descent involved climbing down an unsteady, barely existent path of rocks. With shaky knees, I declared I was not going anywhere.

"Darling, please, follow my step," Elijah tried to reason with me.

"No, I cannot. I will fall and die. I have weak knees; they are not made for this."

Once again on this trip, Elijah promised I would not die. He took my backpack off my back and essentially ran down the rocky structure, carrying both our luggage. "Here. Let me set all this stuff down and I will come get you."

Desperate as I may have been, I was not any less stubborn. "No, wait down there for me. I will get there on my own." I sat down on my hot pink shorts and climbed down the hill, boulder by boulder and rock by rock, almost entirely on my butt. The entire time I mumbled about snakes and scorpions and "they really should not be letting people take paths like these - they are treacherous!" and "I would not have had such weak knees had I not been a gymnast, you know. Gymnastics crushes those knees."

When I got to the bottom, Elijah greeted me with this: "You know, right around where you said you would not keep descending, when I was walking a couple of steps ahead of you, I saw the largest snake I have seen in recent years."

I was indignant. "How could you let me climb down a mountain on my butt when you saw a snake!"

"If I had told you, we would still be up there, negotiating."

He was right. If he had told me about the snake, the guidebooks for this trail could add a new permanent attraction to that spot: The girl who would not come off the mountain.

***

The girl came off the mountain -- eventually. I am sitting in my brother's living room in Athens, with Moira the dog alternating between licking my feet and taking naps with her butt on my keyboard. My suitcase is in the hallway. The seafoam camping pads went to Be'er Sheva with Elijah. I could tell you about the last few kilometers of our hike, or the beer we shared when it was all over, or what getting lost is like in the last two kilometers. But here's the thing: In my mind, I am still there, on the mountain, with my love.

I left Israel two weeks ago and am embarking on a new journey. After touching the sea of Galilee, I wanted to drink in every sea. The road makes you greedy like that. For now, though, I will need to return to a life that requires my heart to beat in two places at once. I am getting ready to return to Latin America, and alternating between listening to Colombian salsa and the online radio broadcast of Galgalatz FM in Israel. My life is an eternal declination of the verb "volver": to return. I am speaking Spanish and still hearing Elijah greet people in the villages we passed with "Mahraba." My heart is trained to do that; successive goodbyes condition one to live a present, if split, life even if it kills her.

Moira is licking my feet as I type. Her name, appropriately, means Destiny. My mind is still up there in Hattin, surrounded by prickly plants, walking with Elijah by my side, looking for the next trail marker.

The day of wheat and worry

2011-05-25T20:20:00.005+03:00

[This is part of a series of posts chronicling a walk across Israel. For previous parts of this story, click here. For the how's and why's, read The Time We Walked to the Sea.]

Everything is wet. Having stayed up all night, I am photographing dew on flowers. A voice bellows from inside the tent and interrupts the daybreak.

"I hate camping!"

The night after Elijah and I met, we were sitting in a group of soon-to-be friends and talking about the types of things expats talk about when they gather in groups outside their home country. You know: food, travel bragging, poop, etc. We got to the subject of sleep and Elijah was sharing that he is a very particular sleeper. "I need to lie in a particular position, completely still, in complete silence."

None of this was unreasonable. Considering, however, that this conversation was taking place in Cairo, Elijah's preferences meant that he spent most of the nights in the next few months watching me sleep. It was neither the flies alone nor the heat that kept him up; neither the car horns nor the flutterings of the heart. It was just, well, Egypt and particularness. The latter is what is keeping him up this morning, in our little tent, outside Cana, Israel.

"This tent sucks..."
"These sleeping bags suck!"
"Everything sucks. I hate camping..."

I crawl back into the tent and observe its moisture drying slowly in the early morning sun. Elijah closes his eyes and I smile. In the past few weeks, he has been remarking on the fact that I have a loud smile. You can hear my lips turning upward.

"No", he protests to the sound of upturned lips.

Through our open tent flap, I see a bird fly by. In Greek, it is called "karakaxa". Who doesn't love a funny-sounding bird?

"You know what this bird is called in Greek?", I ask too cheerfully.
"Go awaaaay."

***

Ms. Freckles (captured with Instagram)

A few hours later, between Golani Junction and Kibbutz Lavi, I am the cranky one. We are lost. We are not really lost, but we are off the trail and for someone who was formerly (?) neurotic, "off the beaten path" is best embraced metaphorically. Walking off the trail meant we walked on the highway, with buses and cars wheezing by and every step feeling heavier because it was a step taken on tar. We have also walked through wheat fields. It is just before the harvest, so everything around us is golden and swooshing in unison. I am tired and prickly plants are making my legs itch and the pack feels heavy on my back and I am too consumed in myself to acknowledge the beauty.

Elijah takes his pack off and sets it on what I am pretty sure was manure.

"Hi, Freckles." He smiles.
"Freckles? Me? I have freckles? On my face? Where?"
"Yes, you. Hi, Freckles."
I squint.
"You know, in America, we think freckles are cute." Elijah smiles again.

He kisses the freckles under my right eye, we put our packs back on, and continue walking through the wheat fields.

***

I worry. I worry professionally and thoroughly. I worry about people and places. I worry about the familiar and the unknown, I worry about loved ones and I worry about those I have never met.

The sun is going down and we are pitching our tent near Kibbutz Lavi. In the distance, we can see the Horns of Hattin, where an important battle took place during the Crusades. The rocky hills forming the Horns are purple at sunset and do not look nearly as intimidating as they would the next morning, when we would have to climb them. Gusts of wind are forming and the wheat dance near us becomes loud.

We pitch the tent together and feel its resistance in the wind. "Do you think a Crusader died right here?", Elijah asks.

I spot one mosquito, then another.

"Let's get in the tent," I suggest to Elijah. Mosquitoes love me nearly as much as he does and I do not take my chances.

Then the worrying kicks in. It's not the harpaxophobia I have experienced in conflict zones before. It's an all-encompassing worry that stemmed from nowhere. Some would say it was panic, and they would probably be right.

"Do you think we are safe here? In the middle of a field? In the middle of nowhere? What if something happens to us?"
"Darling, we are very safe. We have not seen a single person in hours." Elijah tries to comfort me.
"That's my point! What if something happens to us? We are so vulnerable out here. Nobody could help us."

Nothing would happen to us, but I kept on worrying.

I hear a sharp sound in the distance. Before I say anything, Elijah says "someone is shoveling cow poop." I make a mental note to write Kentucky a thank you note for instilling this knowledge in him and continue to worry.

"What if a tractor comes early in the morning, ready to harvest the wheat and runs us over?"
"Are there wild animals here? What about snakes? All that wheat and high grass! Of course there are snakes!"
"Do you think this tent fabric is thin enough for a snake to bite us through it?"

Elijah pulls me closer. At this point, I am wearing nearly all the layers I have brought on this trip. It is cold and windy and I am shivering with irrationality. All our clothes smell like backpack. He puts his arm around me, which also smells like backpack, and does not let go.

"White chocolate and hazelnut cake. Why don't I get you some of that? You love that cake." Elijah's suggestion works.

He tries to open the tent flap and we hear a siren-like sound. Or a wail. Maybe the wind?

"NOT THE WIND!", Elijah says as he hurriedly closes the flap before he can get to the cake. "What you heard out there was the sound of at least 250 mosquitoes dancing outside our tent."

In the moments the wind dies down, we hear them. We can see their bodies sticking to the outside of the tent. When the wind picks up, the mosquito sirens are silenced. Somewhere between wondering whether a Crusader had died at our camping spot and worrying about getting run over by a tractor, we neglected to check whether we had camped right on top of a water pipe.

What do you know, we had.

***

"I feel a little better." I announce to Elijah after forever. "I think I might have to use the bathroom though."
"Go ahead, I do not hear the mosquitoes anymore. I will hold the flashlight for you from inside the tent," he says.

So I go ahead. There I am, pants dropped, amidst the thistle and the prickly plants and the wheat and under an enormous night sky. Elijah and I bicker about which way he is shining the light and I insist that he keep his eyes closed (even though the tent flap is closed too). There is only so much poop a relationship can survive.

We make fun, we laugh, we are all alone in a valley. Once Elijah's flashlight-holding duties are done, he steps out and joins me under the stars. We look behind us, towards the Horns of Hattin and survey tomorrow's path. In the thistle and the wheat and the darkness, it is hard to make a trail out.

"Hey darling? I think you may have just pooped on the trail." Elijah informs me and we go to sleep.

Next: The day we made it to the sea

The day Messi rode past us

2011-05-24T10:59:00.000+03:00

[This is part of a series of posts chronicling a walk across Israel. For the how's and why's, you can read The Time We Walked to the Sea. For the first segment of the hike, read The Day We Failed to Walk and for the second, The Day Storks Changed My Mind.]

Shadows of sunrise, viewed from inside our tent in the valley past Cana

One of the unexpected joys of being a perpetual expat is seeing something written in your own language. When your language is Greek and is spoken in few corners of the world, the joy doubles. Cana greeted us in Greek:

Αγοράστε εδώ το κρασί του γάμου!

Christians believe Jesus performed his first miracle at the wedding of Cana, where he transformed water into wine. Entrepreneurial souls in modern-day Cana beckon to religious pilgrims and romantics alike to renew their wedding vows, or - like the Greek sign requested of us - to buy some Cana wedding wine.

Elijah and I were more interested in the water part of the miracle. Having walked thirteen and a half kilometers that day, we needed to refuel and be on our way. A butcher shop was the only open establishment and Elijah stood by a slaughtered cow as he refilled our water, fully aware that this drink may have been E.coli's free ride into our bodies.

For some people, hiking is effortless. They casually trot to the top of a mountain, shake the dust off their aerodynamic jacket or other Necessary Hiking Gadget and express their amazement that they are here "already." I am not one of those people. I look like my effort, beet red and hunched over. A man drives past us in a pick-up truck. He whistles, honks, winks. I roll my eyes.

Two steps later, Elijah and I stop at a fruit stand. We buy apples for the road and Elijah asks the owner how much they cost. The owner says something, Elijah asks how much they cost again, in Arabic. The owner repeats, slowly, "Free. They are free for you." They continue to chat and I do not understand their conversation, so I prefer to lean against the stand and catch my breath in the company of strawberries and pears.

"The apples are free because you are so pretty," Elijah says, planting a kiss on my cheek and inviting looks from the boys dragging a horse up the hill. I attribute the gift to the strain on our faces and packs on our backs. Just as I am about to argue, the man in the pick-up truck drives past us one more time. He whistles, honks, winks and gives Elijah a thumbs-up.

Even though I am walking behind him, Elijah knows I am rolling my eyes. "You really need to learn how to take a compliment."

***

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

A sound comes from behind us. "Tooth extraction," Elijah decides. "Definitely a tooth extraction without anesthesia."

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!," again.

The sound grows closer and a young boy on a bike overtakes us. He is wearing a Barcelona soccer jersey and turns around to look at us. We attract a lot of attention on the road. Among the hijabed women, my auburn hair, sleeveless shirt and leggings stand out. The backpacks, tents and sleeping bags are not the typical fare of Cana. There is a particular demographic with which we are popular: The Barcelona fans.

Soon, we meet the 'tooth extraction' screamer too. He is wearing a jersey with Messi's name on the back. Pique, Iniesta, and David Villa join him. Five boys on bikes, five Barcelona jerseys. Half a soccer team is towing us. I have cheered on Barcelona in four continents. I have shared Messi's delight in a dusty Be'er Sheva bar and wished for Iniesta to be playing in the Champions League final in a Cuban restaurant. The New York Times recently profiled Lionel Messi, but in Cana, away from digital subscriptions and the sports section, he already has his junior fan club.

The Barcelona Bicycle Gang follows us all the way until the entrance to the forest. That would sound ominous had they not all been twelve years old. Elijah greets each of them in Arabic, using the names on the back of their jerseys.

"Marhaba, Messi!"

At the edge of the trail, "Messi" is spotted by a screaming parent. He instantly becomes Ahmed, turns around, and speeds home with the rest of the Barcelona Bicycle Gang.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!", we hear in the distance.

***

Elijah had pitched a tent in the living room in four minutes and forty-eight seconds. It took only a touch more than that to set it up on twigs instead of living room tiles. Our temporary home seems to be pitched in the social crossroads of the youth of Cana and the surrounding villages. In the rocks above the trail, we find a lone shisha coal and bottles - the remains of a good night. Two women pass by and greet us, saying that they drink their coffee daily at 'our spot'. We eat a dinner of white chocolate macadamia cake and salami and throw night essentials into the tent: toilet paper, flashlight, rolled up sweaters.

The sun has barely set, but Elijah and I are fading. In the distance, there are sounds of celebration: music, fireworks, a gunshot here or there. I quietly worry about the forest burning down because of the fireworks. I worry about a bullet piercing the paper-thin tent.

Elijah does not worry. He puts his arm around me and, in the blue glow of our tent in the twilight, he falls asleep.

I stay up all night. At 4.15 AM, the call to prayer echoes across the valley. No sound except that, and the crackle of a loudspeaker. This hike was not a Christian, Jewish or Muslim religious pilgrimage for us, nor a way to make a point about co-existence. Yet, at 4.15 AM, camped safely between Arab towns in the heart of Israel, I cannot sleep because my heart swells with the beauty of it all.

I make fun of my own corniness, letting out a chuckle that startles the insects on the tent tarp. Beauty beats cynicism or fear any day. I succumb to it all and wait for the sunrise.

Next: "Do you think a Crusader died right here?"

On talking about sexual assault and Dominique Strauss-Kahn

2011-05-20T20:24:00.001+03:00

In a Greece that is crumbling under the recession, people are, perhaps understandably, looking to place blame. The IMF has been the recipient of lots of Greek anger and the recent sexual assault and attempted rape allegations against former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn have prompted a conversation on not only finances and management, but also on victimization and personal integrity.

I am a Greek, a feminist, a specialist in gender-related development in conflict zones, a writer on "women's issues". But mostly, today, I am angry. Regardless of whether Strauss-Kahn is innocent or guilty, I am frustrated by the way the conversation on sexual assault has been unfolding.

In a conversation with a Greek woman yesterday, I heard that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is "simply too intelligent to have sexually assaulted a maid." The allegation that sexual assault correlates with intelligence and only those who are perceived to be less intelligent commit such acts grants unwarranted reprieve on those who are perceived to be smart. Attempting to determine our own intelligence, let alone that of others, is a nightmare. Now try to think about doing that in order to gage the inclination towards sexual assault.

Many are arguing that the incident was a set-up to destroy Mr. Strauss-Kahn's political life. If that is the case, then I am ashamed for how this degrades the gravity of sexual assault and the pain that victims carry with them. This is too serious an issue to pin on someone as another move in the political chess board. However, I am equally bothered by the fact that some automatically assume that politics can be the only motivation for this scandal, that the woman's story cannot hold truth on its own, as she told it.

A corollary of this is the too-old "blame the victim" approach. It infuriated me when this reaction surfaced in response to the news of Lara Logan's sexual assault in Egypt and it infuriates me now. Ben Stein argued that he has had some maids who have been "complete lunatics", thus calling into question the mental soundness of the woman who pressed charges. Jon Stewart and MenSpeakUp have issued responses to Ben Stein on this matter. Whether we are talking about Strauss-Kahn or a case of sexual assault that will never receive this magnitude of press attention, starting with the assumption that the person who pressed charges is not credible, or - worse - that she or he invited or deserved the assault is not the way to do anyone justice.

Finally, a note on justice. Last night there was a poll on a Greek prime-time news program: "Did Strauss-Kahn do it or not?" It is problematic that we are attempting to adjudicate a sexual assault case from our armchair. Strauss-Kahn deserves the presumed innocence that governs court cases, just as the woman who pressed charges against him deserves for those charges to be treated seriously and investigated with dignity. Ultimately, only those with access to testimonies and evidence are equipped to make a decision on Strauss-Kahn's innocence. The rest of us are merely extrapolating from assertions on the two parties' characters to adjudicate an issue we do not have the information or the mandate to determine. In doing so, we are undermining the process of justice, the defendant's right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and the gravity of the issue of sexual assault and attempted rape.

Ultimately, I cannot know if Strauss-Kahn "did it", though 79% of my compatriots who answered the aforementioned poll think he is innocent. I cannot know if the charges are fictitious. I cannot know the motives. But I can know that the immediate assertions that are popping up in the discourse about this topic, from "intelligent men do not rape" to "the woman made it up" to "he is a womanizer, therefore, he definitely did it", are dangerous and harmful to women, men, sexual assault victims and the justice process alike.

The day storks changed my mind

2011-05-19T23:14:00.001+03:00

[This is part of a series of posts chronicling a walk across Israel. For the how's and why's, you can read The Time We Walked to the Sea and for the first segment, The Day We Failed to Walk.]

Flight of the storks

Since the accident that left the upper half of my body resembling braised ribs, the most strenuous exercise I had indulged in involved wiggling my toes or swimming in the Dead Sea. When one cites floating in a body of water so salty that it is impossible to sink (or swim, for that matter) as 'exercise', walking across a country is only possible if she employs two significant weapons: Humor and Denial.

"You know, if I pull this off, it will sort of be my own Forrest Gump journey," I quipped to Elijah. "I, too, can say one day I walked out of bed and walked 60+ kilometers."

On Day 1 of the hike, this Forrest Gump could barely get out of Nazareth.

Now, in my defense, getting out of Nazareth involved climbing 250 wide stone steps. "Oh dear Jesus," I muttered to myself approximately 80 meters into our walk, only for Elijah to point out the irony in the timing of my blasphemy.

On one of my breathing breaks, we met the only other person those days who had thought it was possible to walk across the country. Two million Israelis went hiking on the weekend we started our walk - Vince from California was the only one to select that path. I came to find beauty in the solitude of our trail, but had you told me that only three people had thought this was a good idea during that breathing break, I would have given up and now I'd be writing about the medieval church bells of Nazareth instead.

Vince came and went, and I was still negotiating with my heart to slow down its beat.

"Honey? We cannot let a 60-something man kick our a$$es this badly," Elijah said.

Oh but we could, and he did. And though Elijah may have joked about our snail-like starting pace, he followed it up with a "We Are Young And Can Do This" comment of his own:

"I have to say -- Vince is not carrying as much weight as we are. No tent, no sleeping bag. Just a tiny rucksack."

Hiking can be a competitive sport, in that subtle "Oh, haha, how curious! You got altitude sickness climbing Kilimanjaro? I didn't feel a thing!" sort of way. Vince got a smile out of sailing past the panting twenty-somethings and we found solace in our load of salami, sleeping bags and socks slowing us down.

"One kilometer down," Elijah proclaimed, and we kept on walking.

***

We sit in a bus stop to eat some of that salami. The location of our snack break bruises my ego a little. I want the world to know I am walking and I will not be mistaken for a bus rider. Not today. Cars start to pull over right by our bus stop and, just as I wonder if bladders in Northern Israel are on a coordinated schedule, a siren sounds.

This is not the two-tone wailing that has sent us diving into bomb shelters before. It is a high-pitched drone and, once a year, it sounds across the entirety of Israel at the same time to commemorate fallen soldiers.

Everything stops. Truck drivers stand at attention. Drivers exit their vehicles right where they are, without pulling over or parking. Elijah and I are the only pedestrians. I am holding the salami that is missing a bite at the top and, though I have not lost anyone in this conflict, I am contemplating the solemnity of coordinated collective grief.

Two minutes later, the siren goes quiet, the buzz of car radios returns, and we leave the bus stop and concrete behind to take to the fields.

***

I had never been a bird lover. Perhaps it was because they have a knack for identifying my head as the perfect place to defecate. Or maybe it was the way Alfred Hitchcock's bird thriller eerily replicated itself in a friend's apartment. From now on, I will forever be thankful to the fields between Nazareth and Cana for changing my mind on winged creatures.

We saw the orange beaks first. Then the black and white body, the golden red feet.

I spot the first one, Elijah findss the next. "Herons?", he wonders. "Maybe pelicans?"

"No -- storks," I reply, shocking both of us with my first ever correct bird identification.

We turn the next corner and the two storks become dozens. One stork prepares for flight and, not unlike a plane, she takes off by running first, then leaping, then opening her wings wide and giving in to the wind.

The storks gain height by soaring in circles, higher and higher, until they are almost out of sight. Black dots in the sky.

"They are big birds!", Elijah remarks. "I wouldn't want to be pooped on by them..."

Sure enough, a bird obliges within minutes. She was kind with him, though, leaving only a small white token on his cheek.

Next: The Barcelona Bicycle Gang of Cana

The day we failed to walk

2011-05-17T18:53:00.003+03:00

[This is part of a series of posts chronicling a walk across Israel. For the how's and why's, start here.]

"Four minutes and forty-eight seconds!", Elijah declares.

There is a tent pitched in our living room. Bolstered by his record-setting tent setup time, Elijah suggests I take a break from ziplocking socks and granola bars and get in the tent. We lie in it together, backs pressed against the floor of our apartment. Through the skylight, we can see the glow of our fluorescent bathroom lights.

***

To walk across Israel on our chosen trails, we first have to get from the deserts of the South to the mountains of the North. The bus to Nazareth is one of those demographic experiences one can have in few places outside the Middle East: Men in kippot, women in hijabs, Christian pilgrims retracing the footsteps of Jesus, and backpackers in sleeveless shirts share the journey northward. We drive along the wall between Israel and the West Bank. The politically-correct term for this structure is "security barrier", but really -- 'wall' will do. Sometimes it cuts straight through fields; other times, past the watchtowers and barbed wire, we catch a glimpse of mosque minarets poking the sky.

Nazareth boasts the largest Arab population of Israeli cities and we arrive to its main square to be greeted by a mosque. It has been erected directly in front of the Church of the Annunciation, where Christians believe Mary learned she would be the mother of Jesus. A sign on the mosque reads, in both English and Arabic: "And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers."

We quickly learn that Nazareth does not mince her words.

A mosque and the Church of the Annunciation share space in the center of Nazareth.

Now if you are looking for a tale of pre-hiking stretches and camping stores, I will disappoint you. We did not go to Nazareth to look at North Face jackets, unfurl our tents and pretend to understand the thermal prescriptions of long underwear. We went there looking for the trailmarker that would signal the start of this journey. We stayed because, instead, we found the sunset, arak, and apple-flavored smoke.

***

Elijah would have to wait one more night before applying his miraculous tent-pitching skills outdoors. Having arrived in Nazareth past sunset, we make our way to a hostel and are greeted by the smell of Taybeh. The aroma of this Palestinian beer transports me to the Christmas Eve of 2009. Chock full of malarial parasites (courtesy of northern Uganda), I found myself outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Whatever sanctity was transpiring within its walls did not drift outside, where a Samoan singer took a break from her Reggaeton performance to inform the crowd of mostly Palestinians and maybe ten North Americans that she is African, just like the rest of us. "The rest of us" washed down this surreal Christmas Eve with shewarma and Taybeh. It seems that, a year and a half later in a hostel in Nazareth, Taybeh is back and its scent will soak my sleep.

Tonight, however, is not for Taybeh - it is a night for arak. The Greeks, the Turks, the Syrians, the Palestinians all love it and all call it different names. Our enthusiastic server informs us that it is the Arak Festival. I mumble something about hiking and hydration and rest. Elijah asks for the arak menu. Once he makes his selection, the server assuredly disagrees. "No", she says, shaking her head. "This one", she counter-proposes, pointing her finger to another option. "Oh! Wonderful. Is this local arak?", Elijah asks to understand our server's insistence in changing the order. "It is from... here.", she says after thinking about it for a moment.

The arak comes - and it comes from Ramallah, Palestine. In this corner of the world, "here" is a normative term.

***

The arak from here is delicious, so is the bread, and the the labneh and everything else we consume before our server agrees to let us out of our seats. On the walk back, three young boys spot us. "You speak English?", they ask, and Elijah answers affirmatively for both of us. "F*ck me, f*ck, f*ck, f*ck you" is the response shouted in my direction. When I first encountered this behavior in Egypt, I did not know if I should attribute it to limited English or to limited respect for women, especially foreign women. Two years later, I am still struggling with the answer. Two years later, in Nazareth, Elijah and I keep walking, quietly, side by side.

***

Back at the hostel, Elijah and I share a shisha. Much like arak, there are many names for this water pipe: shisha, hookah, nargileh. In the background, the hostel owner is screening a soccer game. Earlier in the day, the Greek team I was raised to love, Panathinaikos, was playing for the European Basketball Championship title against-coincidentally-the Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv. We ask the hostel owner if he knows who won that game. "I do not show Israeli basketball. Sorry.", he says emphatically.

Not too long after that, the hostel owner and his friends walk out the door towards a sleepy Nazareth. They leave behind the shisha coals, kegs of Taybeh, and Elijah and me, puffing nostalgically. We met in Cairo, where public displays of affection are frowned upon. Unable to navigate a budding romance in public, we fell in the way some people choose to retire: We played domino, drank overly sweet tea and fresh strawberry juice, walked by the Nile, and smoked shisha.

Two hundred and sixty miles away from Cairo, in a different Mediterranean country, we find ourselves once again enveloped in the sound of the last call to prayer of the evening. Holding hands in an empty courtyard, we greet midnight with breaths of apple-flavored smoke.

The time we walked to the sea

2011-05-15T20:17:00.002+03:00

Drops of mist on the walls of our tent at sunrise.

Many have asked why I rarely write about my work experiences in conflict zones. It is a question I revisit often, puzzled by my inability to tell development stories in the way my fellow professionals do. Sometimes, the conflict mutes me with its contradictions and complexities. Other times, the confidentiality of the work and the protection of the stories and identities of everyone involved are more important than my desire to tell a story. This week I distilled another truth: Life outside the 'conflict trail' is just as precious to me. The stories with which it feeds me and the beauty it infuses in my days fuel me with inspiration and the desire to continue doing my work with women affected by conflict worldwide.

In the winter of 2010, I found a companion in storytelling outside the conflict trail. Martin Fletcher was the NBC Middle East Correspondent and Tel Aviv Bureau Chief. In the book Walking Israel, he committed himself to telling the stories he unearthed during his walk from the border with Lebanon to the border with Gaza along the Israeli coast, avoiding the regions of tension and conflict that he had covered as a journalist in the region. Inevitably, conflict still seeped into that trail, but war was not the lens through which he approached this particular story. When I finished the book, I gave it to Elijah who, upon finishing it, drew the only conclusion one could:

We, too, must walk.

And walk we did across this land, on a combination of trails, paths and barely-roads that would not meet the dictionary definition. We walked on the sea-to-sea trail, from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee. The Jesus Trail (no, I am not making this up) took us through places of Biblical significance, such as Nazareth and Cana. The Israel National Trail brought us up hills that necessitated I later descend them on my rear end. We also walked on the special Roxanne-and-Elijah trail, which mostly involved finding the wheat field with the most thistle to prickle our legs or getting fenced into a cattle farm and trudging through poop to a chorus of moos.

We walked through a kibbutz and slept in a valley between Arab towns. We heard both the Muslim call to prayer echoing across a mountain at 4 AM and the sirens marking Israeli Independence Day. Even if this walk was not about The Conflict, the stories, plights, frustrations and sources of hope of Jews and Muslims alike wove themselves into our trail.

Some may ask "why walk?" I fall in love by walking. Cambridge, Massachusetts became my home once I spent consecutive mornings looping around the Charles River, avoiding patches of ice and goose poop in equal measure. I walked through Cairo during Ramadan nights. I walked through the Zona Cafetera of Colombia, soaking in the aroma of coffee beans and sight of waxed palm trees.

I make sense of the world by walking through it, piece by piece, village by village, drinking from the fountains along the way.

The tent, and our memories, are still drying out. Stories from this walk are forthcoming.
Until then, thank you for traveling by my side.

Mama, you've been on my mind

2011-05-06T14:46:00.001+03:00

My mother was 40 years old when she had me. This was in the periphery of Greece in the 1980s, before Madonna was conceiving children in her mid-40s, before Barbie turned 40 herself, before pre-natal screening reached that corner of the world. On my father's side, there had been no daughters born for generations. When I came into the world and received my grandmother's name, I came into a family of love.

As the first decade of my life drew to a close, loved ones grew old. Some of them became sick, some passed away. I experienced grief and loss and the injustice of feeling alone at a young age. It was not in moments of sadness that I missed my family the most, but in moments of joy. Graduations, handing in my thesis, receiving a fellowship to do the work I love, meeting a person who has changed my life on my first day in Egypt -- those were the times I felt the universe smile on me and I wanted to share the utterances of joy with those who loved me so dearly when I was a chubby little girl.

A couple of years ago, my friend Liz and I were having brunch at Aquitaine, my favorite sunny pocket of Boston. It was Father's Day and the hostess asked if our fathers would be joining us. My father had passed away and Liz was a child of divorce. That could have been a sad and uncomfortable moment at the doorstep of Aquitaine, but it was not. Over the years, in Liz, in Elijah, in Emily, in Tara, in Meghan, in Cooper, in Tais, in everyone who has loved me, I have found family. And so on Mothers Day and Fathers Day and Fifth-Cousin-Thirteen-Times-Removed Day, I now see the opportunity to celebrate a family just as intertwined, dysfunctional and and loving as the one I was born into.

Marianne Elliott acknowledges that there is room for more than our biological family on Mothers Day by teaming up with Epic Change to launch the To Mama With Love campaign. This campaign invites us to, as Marianne put it, "celebrate our love for anyone who has been part of the great chain of mothering that has kept us afloat." Marianne celebrates Suraya Pakzad, the founder and director of Voice for Women in Afghanistan. Suraya has committed herself to serving and supporting Afghan women through initiatives that range from literacy and education to shelters that enable women to leave violent homes or forced marriages. You can read more about Suraya and ways to support her here.

I am too far from all those who have loved me and supported me in becoming the woman I am growing to be to send flowers and baskets. Instead of those gifts, I will be donating to the To Mama With Love campaign to support Suraya and her initiatives for Afghan women.

My writing and financial contribution are in the name of Rebecca, Elijah's mother, who wraps up every phone call to us with "give each other a hug and a kiss from me." We do, every time, and we feel wrapped up in her love. Rebecca's food has nourished my soul. Her laughter makes the dogs bark and my heart smile. Her loving example gives me faith and hope.

I am also supporting Suraya in the name of Enid, who mothered me as I embarked on my very first field projects in conflict zones. She emailed to remind me to eat and sleep and that life is short and I should be living every minute of it. She emailed to remind me I am loved.

I am supporting Suraya in the name of Sophia, the mother who brought me into the world. In Greece, we celebrate name days. Most first names correspond to a day in the year that bears a special significance. My mother's name day is September 17th, which is the day we celebrate Sophia, Pisth, Elpida and Agaph -- Wisdom, Faith, Hope, and Love. I am thankful to my Sophia for having endowed my life with these very gifts.

How do you record your memories?

2011-05-02T18:35:00.000+03:00

Some people scrapbook; others journal. Or they make playlists. Yet others create digital photo albums.

I am irreparably attached to notebooks. Unlined, ivory pages, stitched together. A colorful cover. Inside, you will find everything from travel reflections and lists of favorite songs to quotes that leaped off the page and grabbed my attention while reading.

Today, in my column at Gypsy Girls Guide, I am letting my notebooks tell their story. Please stop by, turn the pages, and share your own favorite way of recording your journeys.

Many years, and countries, worth of memories

My bubble

2011-04-29T02:36:00.000+03:00

In red ink, my father marked a sentence in The Early Asimov, Volume I

About a year ago, I climbed an active volcano. A week later, it erupted. What felt like two days after that, a hurricane hit that very spot. Calamity follows in my wake and coincidences like these that have prompted many a friend to suggest a bubble wrap bodysuit would be an appropriate birthday present for me.

Lately, I have learned to revel in a different kind of bubble wrap. It is a bubble that forms at night, in the absence of conflict, fear or worry. It is a bubble of joy and it tastes like scrambled eggs.

It usually starts with leggings. When I was living in the United States, websites instructed women that, in so many words, "leggings are not pants, please cover your rear end." In my bubble, away from sartorially-trained eyes, leggings are pants enough.

My bubble involves pages of Zadie Smith and Mary Oliver, read on the couch, in leggings, while waving away mosquitoes with the hand that is not holding the book.

I interrupt Elijah's reading to point out we have only each had cereal for dinner. The cereal was packaged in Greece, rendering it the only item in the grocery store I can read with utter certainty. Somehow, that made it tastier. No matter where cereal was packaged, it will never count as enough dinner in Elijah's eyes. This is a recurrent theme: When I am wrapped up in work, or writing, or Zadie Smith's words, my stomach does not grumble. The rest of the world melts away and hunger does not register. And when it does, cereal or celery sticks or popcorn will do. There was one summer during my college years when I lived in a room with no air-conditioning or kitchen. I credit that summer for my tolerance of heat and blame it for instilling in me the skewed sense that baby carrots and canned baby corn count as dinner.

After too much time in opposite corners of the world, and after I got hit by a truck, Elijah and I found ourselves sharing a closet, a kitchen and a life this fall. Elijah was repeatedly exasperated with my inability to ask for help while I recovered form my injuries, while I slowly found glimmers of joy in lying in bed in my nightgown at two in the afternoon, eating the omelets Elijah made for me. And the pasta. And the schnitzel. And, and, and. Elijah's food became part of my bubble.

My ribcage is no longer shattered, but Elijah remains the cook between us. Culinary talent somehow did not squeeze into my Greek chromosomes. I make tasty coffee, and cereal, and popcorn, and I can put cilantro on almost anything and call it "flavor". So when I asked Elijah tonight if he'd like some scrambled eggs, he put his book down and earnestly asked,"you can make scrambled eggs...yes?"

Luckily for both of us, I do. My bubble today involved scrambled eggs consumed in bed at midnight, with some sauteed onions, garlic and mushrooms... and a dash of cilantro. You know, for flavor.

My bubble involves comfort, and laughter, and love, and a pinch of nostalgia. Elijah is reading a book he picked up at the house in which I grew up. The Early Asimov: Volume I belonged to my father. My father was a chemical engineer, a lover of astronomy and the cosmos and science fiction; naturally, Asimov was his guilty pleasure. The book was purchased in the 1970s in Kozani, in the periphery of Greece. Reading it in Beer Shevah in 2011, Elijah found a mark on page 112. The phrase my father had underlined read: "nothing is so weak that it cannot be strengthened."

The scrambled eggs in bed at midnight, the can-do optimism of the sentence in the Asimov book, the remembrance of my father and the recognition that of all sentences, that would be the one that stayed with him -- that is the stuff of love and comfort and nostalgia that makes up my bubble today.