Mayan women and girls in Pujujil, Solola:

Teenagers hanging out in Xela’s central park:

The view of Xela from El Baul:

The beach at Champerico:

Beautiful Lake Atitlan, sadly contaminated by cyanobacteria algae:

Xela’s cemetery, with a view of Volcano Santa Maria:

Too bad I was so excited at getting a glimpse of Obama’s handsome face to avoid blurring the following picture. Oh well.

Actually, in the section we were sitting in, the only glimpse of Obama we were supposed to get was through car windows. That’s right, after waiting in the cold for eight hours, the Obamas drove past us slowly in a limo. And we were on the Michelle side.

Frustrated and cold, we immediately started running through the crowds along the side of the parade route. (Amazing we didn’t get shot by the hundreds of snipers on the surrounding rooftops.) We finally ran ahead of the car and found a spot in the front row on the last stretch of the parade route. That’s where he got out of his car.

The famous Rosa Parks bus:

Blocking our view was the Utah highway patrol, the police unit assigned to our section of the parade route. The guys were very friendly, but some didn’t look too please during the inauguration speech.

Our bleacher section was eerily empty. All the other bleachers, and pretty much every single spot in DC that day was chock-full of people. But not ours. Nobody went to sit there, even though it was uncomfortably crowded everywhere else. Strange group-think, perhaps?

I realized that I had not felt so peaceful since being in Sapone, since the nights I’d spend lying on a bench, staring at the stars, and marveling at the quiet. I started to think that I needed to be “away” to find calm. After all, the only similarities between Nalunega and Sapone (asides from the slow pace of village life) is that in both places I was entirely out of my element, almost as if I was totally far away from myself. Maybe this is why I’ve become a bit of a “travel junkie” – I only seem to have any inner peace when I am separated from everything familiar.

I was only on Nalunega for two nights, so I don’t really know about the social fabric of the Kuna, so I don’t want to make any grand, sweeping generalizations. The only real sense that I got was that the people felt intrinsically connected to the islands, and were content and proud of who they were. This is not to say that I didn’t notice hints of problems, especially of gender imbalances and alcohol problems, but I don’t want to comment on something I have no real knowledge of. All I know is that the people on the islands contributed greatly to the peace that I felt.

Panama was lovely, though as predicted it could never capture my heart in the same way as Burkina Faso. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how mellow and easy it can be to travel in Central America. I was not exactly in the “photography mood” that usually characterizes my travels, so I don’t have oodles of pictures that excite and inspire me.

Upon a few occasions, though, I was so caught up in my aesthetic surroundings that I took some lovely shots. The biggest of these occasions was my short stay on the Nalunega in the San Blas islands, part of the semi-autonomous territory of the Kuna people. The beauty of the islands was so overwhelming, so sharp and so surreal that I actually found myself giggling hysterically or wanting to cry at different moments.

To start off, here are a few photographs that show the landscape. I need to actually write about the people which I’ll leave for a later time, but I think that these images speak for themselves.

These three kids might as well be called the Three Stooges. The boy on the left is five-year-old Tidi. The little one in the middle is his three-year-old sister Alindi. They are two of our neighbor Mme Ilboudo’s children. The girl on the right is four-year-old Aleah, the little sister of my friends Ruth and Zaki. Tidi, Alindi and Aleah were always together, getting into trouble. Although all the kids knew that the boss at FDC didn’t let kids on the compound, they would always sneak in anyways. Usually they’d be lingering by the side of our house, and we’d be clued in to their presence from all the giggling.

These kids loved empty water bottles. Well, the kids loved any objects we could give them, because they’d make toys out of anything. But water bottles seemed to be the material of choice, because they could make shovels, wheely-things on sticks, rattles, and more. So when they saw us, they’d usually make the following request: “Nasara, je demande bidon!” (White person, we ask for a water bottle.) One of the few things they could say in French, really.

When I think of kids in Burkina Faso, I will forever think of these three first. Like kids should be, they were cheerful, impish, energetic and friendly. I got so used to walking to the market with their repeated catch phrases “Nasara bon-jou!” (“Hello white people!”) trailing me as I went, that when I left everything felt so quiet.

I’m ashamed to say, I don’t think we ever knew this man’s name, even though we saw him almost ever day. Everyone basically knew him as “le guardien.” Of the three security guards for the FDC compound, he was there most often and definitely the only one who looked like he could really kick ass. During our first week in Sapone, when the other two girls seemed to be going through some substantial culture shock, I was content as could be and not really scared of anything. Except this guy. He terrified me. He had what seemed like big, sharp teeth, and he patrolled the property armed with a slingshot and an intense glare.

Two months later, it made me laugh to remember that I once felt this way. The guard was the father of two adorable children, Leo and Alidi. When we saw him out working the fields on his “days off,” he’d laugh and wave at us with his wife. He didn’t speak a word of French, but would always be happy to listen to us try and speak Moore. When I gave him a photograph of Leo that my mother had printed and mailed me, he was overjoyed and asked me to take this portrait.

This is one of my favourite photographs that I have ever taken. For the first month and a half of the summer, it was still the dry season and all of the other village men were off working in Ouagadougou or Cote d’Ivoire. Until the rain started an farming began, the guard was pretty much the only “local” man we knew. This photograph captures the generalized “essence” of the farming men in the village of Sapone: quiet, strong, somewhat fierce, proud, and gentle.

This is Chantal Ilboudo. She lives with Mme Ilboudo, her aunt. I never did get her complete story, but I surmised that she must be an orphan. Chantal is 10 years old, but looks and acts at least 16, most of the time. She’s older than Mme Ilboudo’s five children, and it seemed that she did all the babysitting. It was a rare sight to see her without the baby Karim. Her hands are huge, covered in rough callouses from all her chores.

Chantal was my introduction to a voiceless group in Burkinabe society – girls who don’t go to school. She will probably never leave Sapone, and will probably never learn French. She will probably get married young, and have five children before the age of twenty-five.

On my last night in Sapone, Chantal and her school-going friend Sidonie came to visit me. Chantal sat beside me, and wrapped her arm around mine. She mumbled something in Moore. “Elle ne veux pas que tu pars,” Sidonie explained.

This is Dorcas, the daughter of Helene, the woman I still write letters to and who lived next door to us. Dorcas’ father is a Protestant minister, and her mother does not work. Her family was visibly better-off than the Ilboudos and their other neighbors. Dorcas and her siblings looked healthy, and her older brother and sister went to high school, which is much more expensive than elementary school.

I often called Dorcas my “favourite kid,” despite the fact that she was quiet and didn’t seem that impressed with us. Sure, she’d come and shake our hands like all the other children. But when the other kids laughed hysterically at our silly white-people antics, she’d just sort of sigh and keep silent. She was so quiet that her mother confided that she was worried that Dorcas would be shy as an adult!

I decided that Dorcas was not actually shy, though, just soft-spoken. In many ways, she was the boldest of the kids. She used to climb the tree next to our house every day, going high enough to spy on us. (In fact, she broke her arm falling out of this tree.) She was always the fastest to run out and greet us, and whenever the older kids asked her, she would sing us an entire song without faltering.

Dorcas started school this year. By the time I hopefully go back next summer, she will be nine years old with two years of French classes behind her. I hope I’ll get to actually talk to her then.

Okay, so I probably would have gotten just as attached to any village in Burkina Faso. But when I blabber on about Burkina Faso, or reminisce about my “time in Africa,” most of my memories center on the village of Sapone, especially the little neighborhood in which we lived. And, for whatever reason, the village does exist in my mind as a “special” place, as ordinary as it may have been for its inhabitants.

I feel horrible. I promised so many people I’d write. But the children barely had real address, and my Moore is worse than their French. Every day passes and I don’t forget anything but I can’t bring myself to write. What would I say? Who would I write to? The only people I’ve kept in touch with are my coworker Adama, and our neighbor Helene, who also happened to be the only French-speaking people that I really connected with. Most of the people that I cared about speak only Moore.

I’m pretty sure I’ll go back next summer. No, I know I’ll go back next summer. I don’t really think I can go much longer than that. But the countryside can be so surprisingly transient… what if one of the families I knew packed up and left for Ouagadougou, or for Cote D’Ivoire? Or, I hate to say it, what if there was a bad bout of malaria?

I should stop, and get on with this. Here are some of the people that populated the little bubble in which I lived for three months.

This is Ruth and Madeleine. Ruth is the younger sister of our friend Zaki. Both girls were outgoing, cheerful and sassy, and spoke moderately good French. They’d come over to our place every so often, to drink tea and play cards. Both girls were a huge inspiration to me; they constantly defied the demure stereotypes that I’d practically taken for granted as the norm for Burkinabe women. I asked Zaki once if she was planning on getting married soon like so many other sixteen year old girls, and she laughed at the prospect. She didn’t want to get married until she was at least twenty-five, she told me. Ruth, who was playing with my camera and giggling hysterically, agreed.

Madeleine was a shyer girl, the fifteen year old daughter of my friend Helene. She is the splitting image of her mother, but much more soft-spoken. I didn’t get to know her that well, because she moved to Ouagadougou for summer vacation to work as a maid for a family in the rich neighborhood of Ouaga 2000. Her mother said she hated it. Right before she left, Ruth, Zaki and Madeleine came visiting us one day, dressed up in their finest and informed us that they wanted a photoshoot. That’s when I captured the photograph above.

This is Mme. Ilboudo (with her baby Karim), who we knew most of the summer as “Tidi and Alindi’s mom.” She’s the mother of Ismael, Michael, Tidi, Alindi and Karim. She also takes care of Chantal, her niece. Her children became some of our favourite friends, all beautiful with big, wide eyes. Mme. Ilboudo didn’t really speak French, so I had to always get Helene whenever I wanted to communicate with her. She was taking a French class for adult women in the village, though, which I thought was really neat. It seemed that almost every day that she was not out in the field she was sitting in her yard at the loom, making cloth. I commissioned her to make me a big striped blanket, which now hangs on my wall in Toronto. It’s too bad that I don’t speak Moore, because I always wished that I could speak to her. She encapsulated the quiet grace of Mossi women, and their generosity. I gave her family most of my things when I left, and I hope that her children are lying under my mosquito net right now.

Ismael is Mme Ilboudo’s oldest child. He’s maybe seven or eight, although we never found out for certain. Ismael is deaf and mute, but contagiously cheerful. Like a lot of the other kids, he used to come for jogs with us, but like me he’d always give up before Linda and the older boys. Every time we’d hide behind a bush, and lie in wait for the others to come jogging back so we could jump out and scare them. And every time, his giggles would give us away and the boys would always spot us. Ismael’s favourite game was “stella ella ola,” which we taught to the kids on our first week. Even though he couldn’t talk, whenever we were sitting in a circle he would grab the hands of those beside him and gesture wildly until we were convinced to play yet again.

I took this roll of B&W (TMAX 100) about a month ago in late May. It was actually the weekend of Toronto Doors Open, so I left the house in the afternoon with a camera in hand, ready to tackle the crowds. But after 10 minutes of standing in line at a house just down the street from my apartment, I decided that I needed a much quieter day. I meandered down Euclid and Manning, snapping at little things along the way.

Right behind the corner of Euclid and College, a collection of sad-looking plants:

Near Manning and Dundas, a creepy lawn full of dandelions:

I have decided that I really enjoy taking photographs of plants in black & white, especially in urban settings. B&W film turns what should be a friendly, warm subject into one that appears creepy and decaying.

I then headed down Queen to meet Magda at work. She seemed less than enthused after a day of greeting people for Doors Open.

Magda:

Our coworker Cailin, modeling for me at the Gladstone (She has such a classic face):

Magda, Jay and I set off on a gastronomic adventure to Little India, a neighborhood much farther east of Yonge than I had ever visited. We were all too hungry to loiter around outside on Gerrard St., so I only really took photographs inside our (ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET!) restaurant. I was particularly happy with the following photo that I took at the entrance: