Swine Flu

Over the next few days I will be blogging occasionally about the Swine Flu outbreak here in Mexico. Currently nobody know what the heck is going on, but what is clear is that the outbreak could potentially be a very very big problem. It is a also a sign of what is to come.

The Mexican government is extremely afraid, and is keeping a lock on all information about the situation. Meanwhile the general population is confused and rapidly losing faith in the government.

To outsiders, 60 dead seem like a pretty small, especially considering that in the last year the Narcos have killed that many people in one day. But in the context of Mexico city, with a densely packed population of 22 million, and weak health care system, the potential for the disease to spread could be great.

Regardless this is an important moment for the world to prepare for similar situations that will inevitably arise in the future. Marc Lacey of the New York Times has a good article on the situation here.

Deadly Swine Flu Outbreak in Mexico City.

The New Blog

This blog will be updated irregularly as I am working on switching over to a new blog: Makhzan Online
Makhzan will be a full featured multimedia magazine to showcase recent work, audio notes, photographs, and blog posts. In the meantime you can check out my new photoblog: photoblog.trevorsnapp.com

Indonesia Images

I just uploaded a gallery of images from my shoot in Indonesia, you can see the work here:
http://www.photoshelter.com/user/trevorsnapp

An enlightened Tibetan in Samye Monastary.

Adios 2008

While the world was focused on Mexico's war against the Narcos, the country was roiled by a struggle for authenticity and legitimate fashion between lower middle class Punks, and the upper middle class Emos. Here, Emos shrug off their mopping stereotype to give the middle finger to a group of Punks during a protest. Thankfully the two groups were held apart by a line of police before things got messy.

Northwest Snow

It snowed in the northwest where I am visiting my family. Days and days of snow, one afternoon of sun. It was pretty and people stayed at home for a week. Now the rain has come back, and things are starting to feel normal. Next week my girlfriend and I head back to the more temparate climes of Mexico. The new year, and lots of work to catch up on.

My Game Face Video

My friend Adam, a photographer, turned me on to this compelling video of well cast kids playing video games. It's amazing. It was filmed on a Red Camera which also produces incredibly high quality stills, and may change the face of photojournalism in 2009 with a more economical DSLR replacement. More info on Red here.
It makes me pretty uncomfortable how fast everything is changing in the technology department, just when you start to care for a camera, there is a new one that you have to have. It can distract me from the the thing that really matters, the story.

Baja: lots of Gringos, but real pretty.

Fixing Nets in Loong Village, Aceh

MANDELA'S SMILE: Notes on South Africa's failed revolution

If you are at all interested in Africa (and imagination and sadness and poetry), please download this Harper's essay, Mandela's smile: Notes of South Africa's failed revolution written by Breyten Breytenbach, an Afrikaner poet who served seven years in South African prisons for his anti-apartheid activities. Thanks to google it is currently available as a free download online here. Harper's charges for many of its articles. I understand their need to do this to turn a profit. But it also frustrates me, as they often publish very important work that deserves the widest syndication possible.

'The Time Has Come to Say These Things'

Click here for an interesting interview in the New York Times Book Review with outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert about peace in Israel. Does this mean Obama and Clinton have a chance....

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss turned 100 this Friday. I am currently reading his book, "Tristes Tropiques" published in 1955. It is a global anthropological romp that is not afraid to make broad and eloquent generalizations. Although full of self-reflexive meditations, the fundamental problems arising from studying ourselves pale next to the wonder of learning about other ways of doing things. I named this blog after a phrase in The Quest for Power, a short section on travel and memory of "Tristes Tropiques". In the second passage Lévi-Strauss says,

Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished.

Like many people who leave where they are from Lévi-Strauss is mortified that the world is not as he dreamed. This is compounded by the insane speed of what we now call globalization.

Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown back into the face of mankind.

Strong stuff. Lévi-Strauss gives us two options to cope,

Either I can be like some traveller of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all of which eluded him, or worse still filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveller, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality. I lose on both counts...

It is his resolution of this dilemma that struck me,

For a long time I was paralyzed by this dilemma, but I have the feeling that the cloudy liquid is now begging to settle. Evanescent forms are becoming clearer, and confusion is being slowly dispelled.
What has happened it that time has passed.

A few years ago, I had the feeling that time was changing from a passive force into an active force. Instead of fearing its ceaseless onslaught, I welcomed it. This is age, I thought. For how else can we cope with the realities of this world and our own lives. With 6 billion of us stuck together on this shrinking planet, time is one of the few things that give us distance. Lévi-Strauss continues with another vague, comforting, and beautifully written statements;

Forgetfulness, by rolling my memories along its tide, has done more than merely wear them down or consign them to oblivion. The profound structure it has created out of the fragments allows me to achieve a more stable equilibrium, and to see a clearer pattern. One order has been replaced by another.

But it gets even better!

Between these two cliffs, which preserve the distance between my gaze and its object, time, the destroyer, has begun to pile up rubble. Sharp edges have been blunted and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places collide, are juxtaposed or are inverted, like strata displaced by the tremors on the crust of an aging planet... Time, in an unexpected way, has extended its isthmus between life and myself; twenty years of forgetfulness were required before I could establish communion with my earlier experience, which I had sought the world over without understanding its significance or appreciating its essence.

So if you are standing around in a used bookstore anytime soon, waiting for your mother, or a friend. I highly recommend picking up this book and reading this section.

The New York Times has an article here on the year long orgy of intellectualism in France that markedLévi-Strauss' b-day party.

New Radio Piece

A radio feature I produced on a Walmart/Mercy Corps development project in Guatemala has just come out at World Vision Report. Listen to it here. If you don't know, World Vision Report is a weekly hour long show featuring excellent radio from around the world.

The butterflys are arriving

Every year a million billion butterflies arrive in the hills northwest of Mexico city. They fly 3000 miles from deep in the US to get here. They cover everything. They darken the sky.

Back in Mexico

A Japanese man has been living at Terminal 1 in the Mexico City Airport for the last 3 months. He won't leave.
See BBC clip here.

Peace in Aceh

I've just returned to Mexico after a couple weeks working on a project about the ongoing peace process in Aceh Indonesia. Above is a portrait of a Politician with Party Aceh, the main party in Aceh. The flags in red and black can be seen everywhere in the the country.
Party Aceh was created after the 2005 peace agreement by GAM the rebel group which has been fighting for independence for over 30 years from the Indonesian government. This spring, for the first time in Aceh's history, local elections will be held allowing the predominantly muslim population to vote freely. However, the region is tense due to inequalities in post-conflict and post-tsunami rebuilding. Jakarta and the GAM leadership struggle to push the elections in one direction or the other. Interests in Jakarta attempt to convince people that Party Aceh will call for a referendum on independence, while Party Aceh attempts to convince people that only they will be able to make Jakarta stick to all the terms in the peace deal. (And only if they win 100% of the vote) Meanwhile the many families living in poverty wonder if any politician will actually do something to improve their lives.
It is incredible to visit a place that was so devastated by war and natural disasters, but now has found peace. The fact that powerful interests are struggling through words and not bullets is a profound step forward for this traumatized region. What was most striking to me was the cheer and hope I found in the younger generation. They want peace, change, and a place in the world. And if Aceh can get through the next year they may get just that.

Salat al-Maghreb

Click here for video on how to pray Maghreb the sunset prayer. Maghreb is the fourth of five mandatory daily prayers (salat), containing three cycles (rakah). In Banda Aceh I generally walked around and bought sweets while I waited for friends and interviewees to pray.

Istanbul Window

Republican National Convention 2004

Girl selling watermelon to Nicaraguan sweatshop workers

Child of a Guatemala ex-guerilla

Obama

Perhaps Obama did not need the youth vote as the post elections pundits said, perhaps he did not need to campaign in Arizona either. But maybe this is about something greater. About real change, not just winning elections. My sister recently wrote me:

I just finished watching Obamas speech that was amazing brought tears to
my eyes. The world feels like a better place now, so much hope. I am
so happy that I was able to vote this year and to have my first vote
go to having a African American President. So amazing and about
fucking time. Anyway I am full of hope and happiness
and hope you have a safe trip.

Young people feel invested in this election. They feel connected, like they have a stake. Nothing is better for a society than this.


In Indonesia people feel nearly as included in the process.



Obama is everywhere here. In the most remote villages, farmers express hope that Obama will fix the palm oil crash which dropped the price per kilo from 2 bucks a kilo to 30 cents a kilo in a month. When I wake up after election day, army officers outside my hotel room discuss the results. All I understand of their Indonesia is McCain and Obama. Of course everybody is for Obama, except for one ex-guerilla who says he supports McCain. He was also the only person I met who had no idea what I was talking when I asked him his opinion on the election. I guess McCain sounded better to him in name. For the last week news papaer hawkers have been waving limp papers in the dull white sun featuring Obamas name in capital letters. TV pundits talk about how Indonesia shouldn’t expect too much, but in a sense it doesn’t matter. The world want’s hope, and Obama gives it. His actions almost don’t matter. Will Obama’s polices really effect that small poor farmer with a half acre plot on the central coast of Sumatra. Who knows, but perhaps it is enough just to give that farmer the opportunity to be excited about a choice that he would have made if he could have voted.

Studs Terkel died on Halloween.

"So that's what it's about. Let's be political for a moment - you can't avoid it. We think of Bertolt Brecht, collaborating with Kurt Weill and writing plays. But he was a poet. In one poem he asks, "Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes?" He says, you know, who did it? Was it kings, queens? If I were to ask people who built the pyramids the immediate reaction would be well, the pharaohs did. The pharaohs didn't lift a finger. Mr. Pharaoh's hands were as immaculately manicured as Elizabeth Taylor's in Cleopatra. "When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch?
When Caesar conquered Gaul, there was not even one cook in the army?" And the big one is when the Spanish Armada sank. I remember the year 1588 as well as I do 1492 and 1776. 'Cause I was told that's when Sir Francis Drake conquered the Spanish Armada. He did? By himself? And so Brecht writes, "When the Armada sank, we read that King Philip of Spain, King Philip wept." Here's the big one: "Were there no other tears?"
Now to me, public radio as well as history should be about those who shed those other tears. And about who makes the wheels go round."

From an interview on the always compelling Transom.org website.

Aceh Rice

I am currently in Indonesia having just finished a job for a a US based NGO. Our path took us through the tsunami devastated coast of the Aceh province in northern Sumatra. The photo shows rice ready to be harvested in a field that was destroyed by the tsunami.



A boy carries a kite in a pasture near the coast. The wave came crashing over the tops of the trees behind him. People in Aceh are moving on, getting married, working, going to school. But the trauma is here to stay. The tragedy is past, locals say, we can forget the tsunami now. But outsiders point to a second tsunami, one of mental and emotional trauma. This wave shows no sign of receding anytime soon.



The tea in Aceh is sweet. So is the juice, and the coffee, and the food. When visiting a person’s home, hospitality dictates you give your guest a drink. Even if it is only water. The most common drink I was served over the last week was a pink sugar water. As the trip progressed my teeth started to hurt. The problem here is that sugar is a gift a host gives to her guest. The sweetness of the drink is literally a measure of how kind a host is to the guest. Even demands for a sugar free drink were seldom met. That would be an insult, so just sneak a spoonful in.

Suncream

This will soon be an often updated photoblog, but first I must get a few things squared away.