Exasperated by the armies of tourists in San Pedro, a friend and I take a short trip around the shores of Lake Atitlán on the back of a pickup. Few tourists dare to try this local form of transportation, since the roads are rumored to be full of bandits. We didn’t see any, and had a wonderful afternoon.

Tired of Washington, D.C.’s middle-class office workers screaming their shopping plans via cell phone to an entire bus, and its rich Georgetown University students name-dropping about their latest “awesome class with Madeleine Albright,” I flew to Guatemala last December, thinking it was far enough off the beaten track to be a natural getaway.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

A single night on the shores of Lake Atitlán left me wondering whether I had left the United States at all. More than 20 English-speaking bars, screening the latest Hollywood blockbusters on portable LCD projectors, long ago transformed the once-traditional village of San Pedro into a winter break party-town filled with fun-craving American students looking for cheap beer and pot, I discovered.

Counting on the fingers of one hand the remaining days of my vacation, I determined to find some isolated, peaceful Mayan village with no tourists, whose traditional heritage was preserved intact; somewhere I could savor the beauty of this foreign land with only the locals to keep me company.

That was my thinking when I decided to head to Todos Santos, a tiny settlement squeezed between the ranges of the Cuchumatanes Mountains in the northwest of the country, five hours by bus from Huehuetenango, the nearest town.

On route to Todos Santos on the “chicken bus” — endearingly known by this name for the passengers’ propensity to use it for carrying chickens, and also ducks, pigs, and other domestic animals.

Village: Under construction

It was only when Todos Santos first appeared in my bus window when we turned a corner that I started wondering if I might have made another mistake. For some reason, the spot so gloriously described in my travel guide as a natural wonder, where tradition has kept the place intact for thousands of years, didn’t quite match the landscape I saw in front of me.

Steel poles protruded from the tops of the many single-storey buildings that made up the town, seemingly waiting for a time when the owners would have the necessary means to add a second floor. Where the houses were finished, their tops were covered with rusting metal roofs placed there three to four years ago, judging from their incipient state of oxidation. The thatched roofs and dilapidated barns of the solitary mountain villages in my native Romania had a more “traditional” air to them than anything I had seen here so far.

As I headed up the village’s main street and past the local market, I spotted yet another couple of American tourists. Even Todos Santos was not free of them. They were wearing lavish, white woolen shepherd’s outfits (undoubtedly stemming from a desire to fit in), laughing over some joke and buying fried chicken.

I gave them the customary American grin as I passed, and took a left at the southern corner of the town center — just as my travel guide indicated — looking for a cheap and hospitable place to stay. A small “hospedaje” sign nailed to the entrance of a house caught my eye. (Many Guatemalan families have turned their homes into backpacker hostels ever since the civil war ended in the late nineties.) I walked into what seemed like a living room opening out onto a central courtyard where a couple of girls were using a machete to cut some vegetables. There were no other guests in sight — and no Americans — and that was reason enough to make me decide to stay.

Although the travel guide wrote an ode to the beauty of Todos Santos, all I could see in the town center when I arrived was another “chicken bus,” a plain-looking church, and a woman returning from shopping with a bag full of vegetables.

When my rooming arrangements were settled, I took a short stroll around town, looking for some form of local entertainment. Not far from the town center, I knew I had found it when I heard music and loud voices coming from inside a small building. I was happy to come across the local pub. At one table people were playing cards; at another a group was laughing heartily while passing around a bottle of rum. There was only one thing wrong with this picture: everybody in the room was wearing a blue uniform. I had entered the police station.

I walked around a little while longer but couldn’t find a bar. Maybe because everyone in Todos Santos preferred the company of their family (or co-workers) when they felt like drinking, I reasoned.

Without much ado, I resigned myself to the idea of spending the rest of the day alone. I had one promising thing to look forward to after all: the sauna I had ordered for the evening when I rented my room.

A new metal roof in the village supposedly unchanged for thousands of years — this roof is still spotless, thus couldn’t have been more than a few months old.

“You’re not going anywhere!”

I headed back to my hostel, invigorated by the thought of my sauna. Behind me, trailed a group of assorted children, shouting “hola” to my back at accurately timed intervals.

But just as I was climbing the steep cobblestone alley back to my hostel I was startled by a burst of shrill wailing and crying, followed by prolonged moans of inconsolable grief. Looking up, I realized that the cries were spilling out from a window just about where my room should be.

Even the children behind me froze in their tracks.

“¿Que paso?” I asked them nervously but they shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment.

With caution, I entered the house, crossing the living room to the inner courtyard, and tiptoed toward the kitchen. The lady of the house — a fast-speaking, no-nonsense woman in her 50s — was busy selecting firewood, pouring water into gigantic pots, and removing corn from the bottom of a sack. I hesitated from interrupting her.

“What happened?” I finally whispered again in Spanish.

She didn’t acknowledge my presence at first. Then suddenly she looked up, as if to ask what I was doing in her kitchen.

“What do you mean, ‘What happened?’” she shouted at high velocity.

Before I could attempt an answer, the cries from somewhere within the house began again. She raised her head to listen for a moment.

“Oh, that,” she said and resumed her housework. “The grandmother just died.”

My eyes bulged. I looked up in the direction of the wailing, wondering what was the appropriate thing to say. I felt genuinely sorry for the woman’s loss, but wasn’t sure what Guatemalan etiquette demanded. Fearing to do the wrong thing, I simply tried looking somber and observed a moment of silence in my head.

I was thinking about why my landlady had used the definite article in Spanish, “la” and not “mi abuela” as if the old woman had been everyone’s grandmother, when it hit me: I would have to spend the night under the same roof — maybe even in the same room — as the corpse. I would be sleeping with a dead body in a remote village in the middle of the mountains! Scenes from Night of the Living Dead and Dracula immediately came to mind and I panicked. (You would too if you had been born in a part of Romania called Transylvania.)

“That means I have to go! I must pack! I must find another hotel room!” I tried explaining in incoherent Spanish.

“What do you mean, find another hotel room?” my hostess thundered. “You are not going anywhere!” She gave me a menacing look. “You already paid for the room. And besides, the sauna is fired up and almost ready to use. What should I do with all the burned wood? Let it go to waste?”

She was right. There was no way I could leave now. It would have been simply rude.

I was still feeling guilty when a brigade of villagers dressed in brown suede jackets and cowboy hats entered the house and began hauling all the living room furniture out into the courtyard.

This was my chance to redeem myself. Without understanding what was going on, I grabbed a piece of furniture too — an armchair — and ran with it into the courtyard.

In 10 minutes, we had emptied the living room of all its contents, leaving only a massive refrigerator of the kind bars keep for storing cold beverages. But a few of us heaving together managed to move even that giant to a new location inside the courtyard.  
As my new workmates pumped my hand after a job well done, I blushed with gringo pride. Just then, another monster — this time of sturdy oak, painted a deep maroon — entered the room we had recently emptied: the coffin.

Now it all became clear: the living room was to be the place where grandma would lie in state for her last face-to-face gathering with the village. Pall bearing looked to be the next outdoor group activity, so I was most relieved when the lady of the house came rushing over to tell me my sauna was finally ready.

I took a trip up the mountain to admire the vista from above. I was a little disappointed when I realized the village was still “under construction.” None of the age patina characteristic of a traditional village — such as we have in Romania — was present here.

Last Rites

Naked except for a towel wrapped around my waist, I was not quite dressed for a wake.

My landlady had led me to a corner of the courtyard, to a bathroom where I had just taken off my clothes. My sauna was supposedly at the opposite end of the courtyard. I would have to walk past the kitchen and the newly assembled crowd to reach it. (By now half the village was chanting hymns in the courtyard.) However, my landlady’s matter-of-factness and the general chaos all around gave me enough courage to brave the crowds. But as I tried to whiz head-bowed through the assembly, the cold mountain air nipping at me, I was accosted by a silent, fast-moving girl of no more than 10 who handed me a thin candle stuck into an empty Coke bottle and motioned to me to follow her.

The structure she led me to resembled nothing so much as a fallout shelter, barely taller than a doghouse and sporting three wooden doors clumsily stacked one upon another as an entrance. I later found out the three doors provided for different levels of ventilation. If you wanted more air, you opened all three; if less, you cracked open just one of them.

I crawled through the entrance on all fours trying to hold on to the towel and my bending candlestick at the same time, while from the doorway, the girl quickly explained in Spanish how everything worked. Before she left, she dropped a molded bar of soap next to the wax-spotted plate on which I laid the candle.

The inside of the sauna smelled of smoke. Next to a smoldering fire in the corner, four copper vessels were arranged in the order of the temperature of the water they contained. My honorary seat was made of five wooden boards placed side by side on top of a drainage hole. Even with my feet folded under me, I could barely sit upright. A little taller and I would have gone through the burned earth ceiling now grazing my head.

With the girl gone, I removed my towel and proceeded to mix the water in the pots with gusto. The faint sounds of chanting trickled in from the cold, and the smoke from the wooden fire tickled my nostrils. I poured a cup of birch-scented water onto my shoulders careful not to hit the ceiling, and let it slide over my skin. As the chanting outside turned into a ritual beat and the water kept falling over me, the experience started to resemble an ancestral Mayan ritual.

As night fell, the cries from the funeral assembly grew louder. I peeked through the cracks of my hideout and saw the grandmother for the first time as she was slowly carried downstairs in her giant maroon coffin. She looked at peace but the women around her were wailing and throwing their hands to the sky. I watched her slowly disappear into the living room, like an apparition from another world.

But I felt her admonishing eyes still on me after she was gone, scolding me for using the firewood she probably chopped herself and brought to the house the day before. What was I doing in the midst of this people whose language I barely spoke and whose customs I didn’t understand, shamelessly pampering myself in the midst of their grief? I felt as fake as the American tourists clad in their shepherd’s coats. A single tear of sorrow and regret, mixed with sweat from my heated forehead, trickled down my face — my small acknowledgement of this old woman I had never known.

A girl was carrying food on her head as I was returning to the village on a rarely traveled footpath. She didn’t see me as I took a picture.

Two’s company

Once I had put my clothes back on, I tried mingling with the crowd but the odds were against me as my Spanish wasn’t good enough to express my condolences. I didn’t even know if condolences were expected of me anymore. The crowd seemed to have shed its earlier forlornness and to the sound of reggaeton music coming from the kitchen, people were loosening up.

Feeling even more out-of-place now, I thoroughly welcomed the arrival of a confused tourist, attracted by the crowds and the flames from the cooking fire that had by now reached camp-site proportions. He was a tad surprised when he learned what the crowds were really about, but since this seemed to be the only spot in town (other than the police station) vaguely resembling a social scene, he chose to stay.

My landlady brought us two beers and, with them in hand, we went to the living room to pay our short respects to the reposing grandmother, and then found a relatively quiet corner to sit and chat.

It felt good to find someone who related to this whole strange affair from the same perspective I did. For once, I was happy to be just another tourist, and to have another one to talk to.

We shared impressions from our respective travels and exchanged itineraries. The 50-something-year-old American was traveling the same route as I was, but pretty much in reverse.

We gave each other tips about places to visit and places to avoid. We even agreed to see each other again a few days later in a bar in Antigua, our joint final destination. Hanging out with an American backpacker didn’t seem like such a terrible ordeal anymore.

I went to bed content, thanks to a few beers, my visit to the sauna, and a good conversation. Having the body of a dead grandmother downstairs in the living room now seemed the most natural thing in the world.

When I was finally ready for bed, I returned to my room on the second floor. Underneath it, people were still paying respects to the grandmother, who was lying in her coffin in the living room.

As expected, I never saw the American tourist again. The next day, as I checked out of the hostel on the way to the bus station, I threw a last look at the coffin, unmoved from its location in the living room. I knew I wasn’t going to see my Mayan grandmother again either.

Bouncing in my bus seat as Todos Santos disappeared behind me, I realized I wasn’t all that different from my fellow tourists. I finally accepted that, like them, all I’d truly wanted from my vacation was a place to relax and unwind. And that’s what my vacation to Guatemala had been, even if I had had to share it with a dead grandmother. The adventure to places where no man had gone before would just have to wait a little longer.

In The Fray Contributor

My uncle’s house in eastern New Orleans on Christmas Eve.

Hundreds of miles from the abandoned neighborhoods and shattered spirit of my hometown, I was able to deny the extent of the devastation Hurricane Katrina caused. For months after the storm, I assured everyone that New Orleans would rebuild bigger and better. That is, until I stood among scattered pieces of what had been knickknacks and decorations among the wood and metal splinters of what had been homes. I used to frequent those neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, and eastern New Orleans. They had been populated with my family and friends who now find themselves scattered throughout several states.

The sights stole the iota of holiday cheer I’d managed to muster. It wasn’t the mile after mile of devastation so much as the fascination of tourists treating catastrophe like carnival and the hubris of unaffected New Orleanians protecting their interests instead of welcoming back devastated brothers and sisters. This wasn’t my friendly city. My city —  as I’ve always known it —  died in Hurricane Katrina. My city’s heart broke with the first levee breech. Whatever New Orleans comes back as, it’ll never be the same. The reality of the tragedy will forever cover the city like red beans over rice.

My New Orleans had always been a welcoming place where jazz and cups of café au lait were as common as suntans in South Florida. My New Orleans was a place where you could buy daiquiris at a drive-thru and sip them on the lakefront, as you watch people mingle and blast their cars’ monster sound systems. My New Orleans was a place where you could smell the pralines cooling and the gumbo simmering before you hit ya mama’s front door.

Poverty is ever-present there, but so is a party. Poor or rich, you could have a good time. I miss the plight and the party when I’m away. My heart yearns as much for Mardi Gras parades as it does for the sight of not-too-talented kids out in the French Quarter tap-dancing to earn tourist change.

But on my first post-Katrina trip home, I see no party, hear no jazz. I just see vultures skulking about, picking at others’ sorrows in areas that look like hybrids of a war zone and a ghost town.

My trip home starts strangely. For one thing, flights to New Orleans have been infrequent and expensive. I land in an airport that could have fit inside Louis Armstrong International five or six times over. There are no jazz murals on the walls, no invitations to Harrah’s Casino.

This is Baton Rouge and, although only 90 minutes away from my city, it might as well be another state. Baton Rouge doesn’t sound the same. It doesn’t have the Superdome to welcome me on my way home. It doesn’t have a “We Never Close” restaurant offering me overstuffed shrimp po’ boys. It lacks daiquiri shops on corners or rows of housing projects referenced by native-born rappers.

But then again, New Orleans doesn’t have some of those things either. Not anymore.

My parents’ kitchen in eastern New Orleans on Christmas Eve.

I spend my first night in a hotel, so aware of my distance from New Orleans and what had been my parents’ home that rest seems unthinkable. I lay awake part of the night thinking about what I won’t see. There won’t be poetry readings every night. There won’t be towering Live Oaks decorated with Christmas lights in City Park. There won’t be shark fin soup dinners at restaurants in Little Vietnam.

My first full day features glimpses of what Katrina left and elected officials neglect —  thousands of cars still sit where the lake’s water left them —   in driveways, on lawns, or in the middle of streets, their frames covered with a thick brown haze. Ghost towns feel livelier than this. There’s no Christmas hustle outside stores, no transit buses running people uptown. I went downtown, passing the Superdome and Convention Center, where media covered Katrina’s aftermath. They appear untouched compared to the broken bricks and hollowed-out homes in my neighborhood. I recall those news broadcasts from the days after the storm, and how I searched for a glimpse of my neighborhood. The story and scenes, however, remain unchanged: poor blacks abandoned and suffering.

I cursed everyone who judged and opined but wouldn’t condescend to go there, get dirty, and help. I cussed out Kanye West, the Congressional Black Caucus, and especially FEMA and President Bush, but none of them could hear me. Bloated bodies floated for days in murky water or lay slumped aside Interstate shoulders. I’d thought about driving there to help, but I knew my Corolla couldn’t get me through the damage in Mississippi and Alabama.

And I don’t know what I could have done if I did go. I felt helpless. I felt alone. I didn’t have friends from New Orleans living near me in Florida, so the hugs and assurances of others could only help so much. They couldn’t understand the pain of knowing that almost everything you’ve known as home —  every house, church, school, and store —  was saturated in murky, oily water. The pain hadn’t lessened with time, but I’d hoped my visit for Christmas would find progress and cause for encouragement. But seeing home after home tagged with spray paint helped little. Red paint meant it would be torn down, orange meant it might be salvageable.

I’d always thought of New Orleans as a small town passing for a big city. But driving through abandoned neighborhood after neighborhood, I’m struck at how big it seems, how vast the damage has been. The Catholic Church where I had my first communion is now an empty brick building with only stained glass windows for decoration. Lakefront Arena where I’d attended concerts and basketball games is stripped and shattered.

These three homes in the Carrollton section of New Orleans, as seen the day after Christmas, burned down when water pumps and electricity failed days after Hurricane Katrina struck.

I walk through the shell that had been home since I was 12 and saw water marks on the walls that stood far above my five feet. The turkey platter we usually used at Christmas still sits in a broken cabinet in the kitchen, covered in dirt. My mom refuses to save it. “How could I eat turkey on that and not see all that filthy water it sat in?” she asks. Our family dog, a ceramic Dalmatian we named Albert after my dad, is destroyed. He’d been the closest thing to a pet my dad would allow. “He just started falling apart when we picked him up,” my mom tells me.

Even my family feels different. Our Christmas dinner morphs into a three-day journey to the temporary homes of relatives who’d once lived minutes away. Conversations at these gatherings range from talk about the latest Ray Naginism to recollections of 40-year-old yearbooks that floodwater turned into mashed potato-like mush.

My mom and her sister talk about choir robes they’d saved from churches and gospel music conventions more than 20 years ago. They talk about new appliances and apparel they’d bought — all of which met the same flooded fate. Bibles were lost, they say. Baby toys, school memorabilia, all gone.

“All those things kids gave me over the years,” my mother recalls. After 30 years of teaching in New Orleans, she’d amassed bookshelves full of gifts from former and current students. Katrina claimed them all.

As sad as it is, at least we are able to celebrate somewhere near the city. So many people from my middle class neighborhood, my high school, and the churches I attended, find themselves spread across the country, thinning out the city’s soul across state lines and time zones.

Those who remain in New Orleans, the people lucky enough to have undamaged homes, seem disinterested in the plight of people like my family and friends. They’ve been hesitant to temporarily give up their green space to accommodate trailers for displaced neighbors. Newspaper reports quote their selfish reluctance to bring down their suburbs by accepting returning residents. Their behavior seems strange, since most of the people I know who want to return want to be near their homes and rebuild their hometown.

The mother of a childhood friend summed it up in an email forwarded to me. In it she said, “We’ve found the people who are least supportive, least understanding, least willing to share that part of New Orleans that belongs to all of us, are those who did not lose their homes. We’ve learned that, in New Orleans, charity does not begin at home.” Such messages coupled with the throngs of visitors laughing and snapping photos of fallen homes enrage me.

So, as I stand in the Lower Ninth Ward watching a tour bus roll by after a Lexus SUV, I finally reach my limit of sorrow. At that moment, I find myself no longer a writer or professional, but a grieving child. I am a child of New Orleans, realizing the city that raised me will never be again.

Are you amused?” I start yelling as the tourists snap pictures. “People died here. It’s not fucking Disneyworld!”

I turn to a friend and ask him where I am. He doesn’t really have an answer. We both know then that this isn’t my New Orleans. It never will be again.

Judith Malveaux

A Brahmin priest presides over the fire with offerings of coconut and turmeric, flowers and fruit.

The temperature is a sultry 97 degrees when the Air India flight touches down at 2:14 a.m. in Chennai, the city formerly known as Madras. My brother and I have just come from New York City to visit our parents, who are living in India for the year. My American mother is settling easily into retirement in this country she has previously experienced only as a visitor. My Indian father is hard at work back in the land of his birth after 46 years in the United States.

We have also come for my cousin’s wedding. Four hours after we land, the festivities begin on my uncle’s rooftop under a temporary thatched structure that provides a refuge from the strong morning sun. From this roof a good arm could toss a hefty stone and hit the beach where the tsunami’s wave struck in 2004, but today the sea is calm. This morning it is just our side of the family — aunts, uncles, cousins and their kids and one beloved grandmother Paathi — along with a handful of priests, half-naked men with cell phones tucked into their dhotis. All the elements of any Hindu religious function are there: a small fire fueled by dried cow dung and ghee; silver platters filled with gifts and offerings, such as silk fabrics, fresh turmeric, bananas, and gold jewelry; and an abundance of fragrant flowers.

My cousin is 31, the youngest of three brothers but the first to get married. This has been more than a minor point of contention. As a general rule of matrimony, sons should be married off by, say, 30, in a logical descending fashion from eldest to youngest. Daughters start “ getting introduced” in their early 20s. With each trip to India, my unmarried status seems to become more and more of a pressing issue. Paathi repeatedly asks when I’m getting married. “Apparam, apparam,” I answer evasively. “Later, later,” although at 35, I’m already a decade behind the coupling and copulation curve. “Can we find you a boy? We can find one here. We can find one in America. Will you marry an American?” Anyone, she implores. Just get married. The obsession wears thin on my hopelessly romantic self, and Dr. Seuss rhymes float through my head. “I will not marry him, Sam-I-Am, I will not marry your choice of a man.”

Most of my cousins’ marriages are arranged. Resumes are exchanged that include educational and employment standings, the marital status of siblings, specifications of caste and subcaste, and declarations of lineage. Attractiveness and height-weight proportions also are matched appropriately. It’s a market thing really, where one advantage can help offset a less favorable characteristic. Maybe it’s not red, but it has a really nice stereo system and power steering. Astrological signs also play a major role, but ultimately the match is a practical one. We romantics do the exact same thing on many levels, but somehow it feels less official. There’s more time for mulling.

The groom leads his new wife across the stage by the big toe.

My cousin is marrying a woman he has known for six weeks. They met over dinner — with both their families present — and agreed to spend the rest of their lives together. Between the meeting and the wedding they hardly saw each other. He didn’t want her to discover that he drinks and smokes, and I imagine she had her private habits as well. When he later found out that she has terrible vision and wears contacts, he felt betrayed. I don’t know what she thought the first time she saw him smoking with a beer in his hand, but perhaps it was close to the same.

The wedding begins early the next morning, and my cousin’s house is chaos. It’s still dark outside, as I sit in the main room, wrapped up in 18 feet of shimmering green silk trimmed with gold thread. I savor my tumbler of Indian-style coffee, with its hint of chicory, loads of sugar, and sweet creamy water buffalo milk. I feel like the eye of a storm, trying to stay out of the way. The groom pulls freshly laundered underwear off the drying rack. An aunt pulls a plastic comb through her long hair and then distractedly weaves it into a braid. The sound of my uncle’s morning puja prayers drifts from the corner, where he prostrates himself in front of the large wooden wardrobe filled with burning oil lamps and pictures of deities. I send his wife off to finish getting dressed and take over the task of cutting to length the intoxicating fresh strands of jasmine blossoms that the women wedding guests will tuck into the long braids that travel down their backs. There is a rush to leave the door by 5 a.m., an auspicious time on this auspicious day to begin new endeavors, according to the Hindu calendar. When we leave, the clock reads 5:10, and I wonder if anything that may go wrong in their lives could be traced back to this very moment, when we couldn’t quite get it together and walked out the door 10 minutes late.

In the stifling mandapam, or wedding hall, none of the 300 guests pays much attention to the activity on the dais. Instead they visit with each other or roam about, trying to find a breeze or an effective ceiling fan. Every time I’m about to complain about the heat, I need only look up on stage, where the couple is planted on the floor, dripping with sweat, in front of a smoky fire. The 26-year-old bride sits stiffly in her nine-yard sari and heavy gold jewelry. My brother and I bring water to our cousin, whispering promises of an ice-cold Kingfisher Lager as soon as possible.

I have yet to see the bride and groom look at each other.

The rest of the morning is a Sanskrit litany performed by the priests. They pour ghee onto the small fire that burns at the center of the ceremony, as gifts are exchanged, fruit blessed, and children and fertility prayed for. Neither bride nor groom seems to have a clue what to do. My cousin has not been a practicing Hindu, and his bride works in a call center answering our 1-800 help calls during our QuickBooks crises. They lean their bodies toward the priests, listening carefully to their instructions and following their directions.

At certain moments, the lights for the video camera illuminate the stage, refracting off the smoke, and we all focus our attention on the couple. My cousin leads his bride across the stage by the big toe of her intricately henna-decorated foot. They walk around the fire seven times, making a promise with each round: to cherish one another, to be lifelong friends, to provide for their children. After another female cousin and I help the groom fasten a string around the bride’s neck, they have officially “tied the knot,” but the ceremony continues for another two hours. We the guests drift upstairs for lunch.

After an afternoon siesta, we return to the mandapam to eat again, an evening meal made up of no fewer than 24 separate dishes, an onslaught of tastes and textures, including rice and curries, sambar and rasam, pappadams and pooris, chutneys and pickles. Men ladle hefty portions from stainless steel buckets onto fresh green banana leaves, and we eat, scooping up the feast with our fingers. The sounds from the traditional musical performance drown out our attempts at conversation, and cousins wait impatiently for it to end so they can put on Tamil and Hindi film music. Once the musical coup is complete, we all dance in a bouncing clump of sweaty bodies, silk saris saturated, shirts stuck to men’s torsos like wet paper. Every part of my body is sweating, my eyelids, my ears, my fingernails.

My other cousins call on me to use my authority as an elder female cousin to drag our new family member onto the dance floor, but the bride begs me, “Please, Meera. Nooooo.” I am torn between respecting her self-consciousness and wanting her to feel welcome among these strangers. Earlier in the day, she sat on her father’s lap and relinquished her family’s lineage to become the 83rd immediate family member of my grandfather’s clan. There is no turning back. Tonight she will sleep in my cousin’s bed, under the same roof as his parents and grandmother, a stone’s throw from the sea. It is the start of a new life. I pull her into the circle, and we dance.

In The Fray Contributor

(Rich Tenorio)

Three barricades of riot police secure Barrio Avellaneda, forming three concentric rings over several square blocks. Wearing helmets, hard black boots, full-body bulletproof armor, and armed with shields, shotguns, and bludgeons, they wait on foot, on horseback, on motorcycle. Formidable and expressionless they pose, as area locals sit idly by stoops and storefronts, joking, smoking, drinking away a warm Sunday afternoon in the barrio.

The fanáticos are coming. They come from Núñez, Belgrano, La Boca, running headlong through streets dotted with oil drum fires, punching air, waving flags, chanting to the cadence of fight songs. But the noise they bring is a whisper against the thundering cacophony erupting from within the innermost ring of the police brigade, an Argentine Vesuvius spewing bedlam over a 10-block radius and laying to waste all other priorities for the day. It billows through the neighborhood without mercy, asphyxiating the air and overwhelming the streets, whipping up and down alleyways and in and out of windows. It swells, it charges, it rules: FUTBOL.

They are possessed from the moment they step off the colectivo, for it is Sunday, a day of worship, and they will perform their godly duties at the shrine of El Cilindro, the home stadium of Racing Club soccer team.

Three police checkpoints frisk them, but this is a token gesture at best. A shiv strapped to a shin or a pair of brass knuckles tucked inside underwear can easily pass undetected. Police don’t check these hiding places because they know what everyone else knows: such “minor” weapons are a better form of defense than having nothing at all. The stadium has no security of its own and police refuse to maintain order within its confines as rival fans’ hatred for cops surpasses even their hatred for each other.

A different sort of “frisking” ensues at the stadium gates. Too many people cram into six queues separated by tall metal barriers that lead the fans, like rats in a maze, to the turnstiles. The crowd crushes into the queues while everyone picks everyone else’s pockets, waistbands, and backsides.

Through the turnstiles, up the stairs and into the first level, directly behind the visiting team’s goal stand supporters of River Plate Soccer Club in la tribuna — the cheap seats. There are no actual “seats,” of course; just rows and rows of wide concrete steps upon which to stand, contained on either side by high barbed-wire fences followed by an empty buffer section separating la tribuna from the rest of the stadium.

The game is sold out but this has no meaning here. The stadium claims a capacity of 50,000 but this too is meaningless. Where there is room for one, there is room for 10 — a standard unwritten rule across Latin America. Bodies are packed so tightly that only two positions exist for one’s arms: at one’s side or above one’s head. When newcomers emerge from the stairs to squeeze into the section, when someone attempts to relocate from one spot to another, when someone coughs, sneezes or belches, physical space shifts and the crowd of fans sways accordingly to adjust for the displacement. Nevertheless, there is somehow still enough room to joke, laugh, sing, shout, shove, kick, scream, chant, punch, spit, swear, fight, mob, maim, destroy … 30 minutes to show time, and it’s impossible to move.

Only the strong

La Barra Brava — this is what locals call them. From Argentine slang, the rough translation is “the tough group” or “the strong group.” The colloquial translation is, simply, “hooligans.”

Every team, whether it wants one or not, has a network spanning hundreds, if not thousands, of hooligans, well organized and in contact with one another both inside and outside the stadium. Boca Juniors — Diego Maradona’s old team — supposedly has the worst. But pit any heated rivals against one another, in any divisional playoff, in a country where soccer is religion and both Barras will rise to the occasion.

A part-mafia-part-guerrilla disposition governs their behavior and operations — rumor has it that Racing Club’s Barra chief has a day job as a policeman. They pressure team management not just for free or discounted tickets to games, but exclusive rights to bring normally banned items into the stadium to show support for the team: fireworks, 100-foot banners spanning the upper and lower tiers, flags attached to long blunt objects. Every team’s management knows as well as La Barra Brava that failure to comply with the hooligans’ demands results at the very least in destruction of stadium property. If other teams concede, management certainly cannot afford to be shown up by the opposition, particularly when it comes to fan support.

Today, River Plate hooligans move about la tribuna with a sense of purpose, clearing pathways and readying props like stagehands before opening night.

A squat man is too slow to move out of a tall man’s path and is promptly punched in the face.

An old man leans anxiously against the railing at the stairway exit, deferring to anyone appearing younger and more able. Which means everyone.

A lanky man hobbles in on yellow metal crutches, stops, stands perfectly upright, and removes the rubber caps from the bottoms of his crutches. From within his apparently hollowed-out crutches an arsenal of flare sticks tumbles onto the ground.

Assembly lines of men coalesce spontaneously around him to distribute the flares in classic hub-and-spoke formation.

There isn’t a woman in sight.

A man with a lean and hungry look taps my roommate Josh on the shoulder and says something to him in Spanish. Josh and I had come to the game at the suggestion of our hostel owner, who told us if there was a match to see in Argentina, this was it. Right here is when I understood exactly what our hostel owner meant. Josh leans in and beckons the man to repeat what he said. The man repeats himself. Josh’s Spanish isn’t so great. Josh looks out over the crowd into the next section. Josh’s head whips back as he gets sucker punched.

His assailant leans over him, shouting, gesticulating wildly while Josh crouches, covering his eye. As with any outbreak of violence here, a space opens up for the boys to let off some steam and I immediately step between the two.

“Tranquilo,” I say, extending open hands to both of them, making no moves at retaliation and keeping my guard clearly down. “¿Cálma-te…si?”

I look down to check on Josh and then my jaw takes the sucker punch, then one from behind, another to my jaw, then my head — Is that three or four people punching me? My mouth fills with blood as a large man grabs me by the collar and drags me down the steps, his friend meanwhile attempting to kick me in the ribs. My feet stumble to regain footing as the acute sting of a just-opened wound shoots out like a spider web across my jaw while my tongue probes the broken flesh of my inner cheek. Other fists, kicks, and sticks strike my back, shoulders, and head. I don’t know who, where, or how many, and I’m really not paying attention anymore — I’m just looking for any way out of this before serious problems begin. Someone throws me against the barrier behind the goal. I spring up as fast as I can and haul ass out of there, crashing, thrashing, lurching my way into the next section. Nobody chases me. I climb up the rows amid concerned stares and two guys stop me.

“¿Todo bien?” they ask, one of them putting his hand lightly on my shoulder.

Right — let’s check the damage. Besides the cut in my mouth, my right kneecap feels off. My jeans are torn halfway down my leg and red splotches stain my shins. I run my hand over the golf-ball-sized swelling on the left side of my forehead. My nose and teeth are intact and my wallet is still in my pocket. My eyeglasses have somehow remained on my face. I wipe some more blood from my mouth and sweep my tongue around the piece of flesh that used to be part of my right inner cheek now flapping about inside my mouth. I try biting down — no problems there.

“Si,” I reply, “Bien.”

Stay in this section, they say, it’s safer —“Es más seguro.”

The game has yet to begin and I stand four rows down and 20 feet over from the nearest stadium exit. This is actually quite close, but with hundreds of rabid fans filling the space between me and freedom, I’m as good as lying in a mass grave. Even if I were able to make an escape, the police have locked the stadium gates — not so much an effort to keep us in, but to keep out the ticketless anarchists still in the streets.

I have no choice but to stay.

I stand with my feet at shoulder width, bordered on all sides of my body by other bodies. I consider striking up a conversation with my immediate inmates to gain some allies should any more “disagreements” erupt. But the noise from the shouting and singing is so painfully deafening that any conversation, even with a floating head one foot away from mine, is futile.

The players finally enter the arena. Smoke from the fireworks blankets the field like a fog.

Everyone in my section supports the same team, but this is hardly a reason to not fight with each other. Bursts of flying fists become as distracting as a light drizzle or an uninterested mosquito. As the fighters are separated, they kick, they flail, they spit on each other, they spit on the rest of us, and they talk trash, saying just as much with their postures, for body language among men at sporting events is truly international: “¡La concha tuya, cabrón! Pedazo de pelotudo …¡Te voy a romper el orto! Hijo de puta …”

During the next 30 to 40 minutes I witness five such exchanges. Then I stop counting.

We shall overcome

In grade school and high school, I played American football, and in college I played rugby. I still remember what it feels like to tackle and be tackled, with and without padding, to be sprawled beneath a human body or two or three or four, to feel a cleated foot kick my forearm that shields my face as I am stuck beneath a ruck. But those situations were child’s play. The pile-ups rarely exceeded six people and my fall was always cushioned by grass and mud.

In la tribuna, when someone falls, they fall on wide steps of cold concrete dirtied with blood, phlegm, beer, urine, cigarette butts, roaches (both the creature as well as the marijuana variety), lone shoes, burnt-out flares, and lost keys. Though I have yet to see it, I’m sure at some point these hallowed stands have also been graced with feces, semen, vomit, and entrails. For we are the visiting team’s supporters. We are not people; we are animals. And like all animals, when we get excited, we lose order.

The ball moves into scoring territory and the overanxious fanatics up behind you want a closer look. One leans on another who leans on another and before you can say, “avalanche,” the leaning turns into pushing, which turns into falling. The only warning you ever get is a split-second recognition of footsteps thundering down the sloping concrete behind you.

This warning comes too late.

By the time the alarm signal saunters across the appropriate synapses of the nervous system, there is already the cumulative momentum of hands, feet, faces, forearms, shoulders, elbows, and knees of not one, two, three, or four, but 70, 80, 90, 100 human dominoes on your back, neck, shoulders, waist, and legs as everybody topples together down the stands toward the goalposts. It becomes a human wave that goes not from side to side but from top to bottom, swelling, cresting, curling, and crashing down onto filthy concrete. This is not college rugby — the best defense here is to go with the riptide while quickly angling toward the sides. Fighting against the flow only achieves the same result as fighting a rip: total submersion.

I maneuver as best I can toward the top of the pile-on but I still have the collective weight of tens, if not hundreds, of people slowly bearing down on my left leg that is somehow tangled with someone’s arm and someone else’s neck. And because there was only a fraction of a second to prepare for this, my left leg will now bend in a way it was not meant to if I do not adjust it promptly. This requires me to remove my right knee from someone’s armpit that is wedged shut, and shove it directly into someone else’s face, while my butt wedges between a spine and an ankle, my elbow into a crotch. Some men moan and shout in pain while muffled cries for help rise up from bodies below.

From this jigsaw puzzle of body parts no one emerges without the help of others. As we pick ourselves up, winces and grimaces flash across our faces. The rest of the body parts are recovered and helping hands and shoulders are lent to those trapped at the bottom. An unfortunate few can no longer walk and are carried toward the stairs, their arms draped across the backs of others. I turn to a couple of people with whom I had been entangled.

“Todo bien?” I ask.

We take turns exchanging uneasy handshakes. One of them makes the rounds embracing each of us, as if in Catholic Mass, wishing peace be with us:

“Bien,” we all assure each other, nodding with forced smiles, “Todo bien.”

Postscript: Quite a few people who have read this story have asked me whatever happened to Josh. Fortunately, he made it out safely and we met up back at our youth hostel after the game. I’ve also been asked to add something about the hooligan situation in Argentina in the four years since this event took place. I haven’t followed it closely but I do know that an initiative began in 2003 to appease hooligan mayhem and to simultaneously promote Argentina’s struggling writers: small booklets featuring poetry, essays, and short stories were for a time handed out free at soccer matches to give fans something else to do during pre-game festivities and halftime. The effort seemed to work temporarily according to reports immediately after its introduction, but more recent accounts suggest that things may have returned to the ways of old.

Ulysses de la Torre

I’ve always had a thing for wings. Dragonflies, birds, planes, butterflies — if it flaps or soars, I’m interested. But while flight represents freedom and forward motion to me, many others equate it with running away.

Americans are socialized to believe that fleeing a difficult situation is the coward’s way out. We view flight as an escape from something one should face head-on, as the weaker side of the natural “fight or flight” dichotomy. We are taught that winners never quit, and quitters never win.

But when is “flight” actually a form of “fight”?

Escape from slavery is the most illustrative example of “flight as fight.” For a slave walking out of the South into the unknown territory of the North, freedom was a mystery. Imagine what it was like to flee from the only home — albeit an oppressive one — that one has ever known. And toward what? Conventional wisdom of the day dictated that blacks belonged in slavery. Imagine summoning up the courage to flout the status quo and venture out alone.  

We do not view the slaves’ flight as cowardly, but it is difficult for us to comprehend the depth of courage it took to seek freedom. Two centuries of hindsight enable us to see the value of their choice. At the time, escape constituted a life-altering plunge into the profound and intangible unknown.

Society has similar responses toward survivors of domestic violence. A friend of mine once confided in me about problems with her husband, as their marriage of several years was nearing its end. From the outside looking in, I immediately recognized the signs of physical and emotional abuse and, as gently as I could, told her my impressions. Just as gently, she demurred, declaring their mutual love and commitment.

Weeks later, after a particularly troubling episode at home, she came to me again. We walked through a park together. I listened as she cried, and beyond my distress over her situation, I felt lucky that I had nothing to tie me down, that I had never relied on another person to keep my life in line.

For the longest time, she could not see how to leave him. How easy it seemed to accept her life as it was, even a life so fraught with pain and fears, because that pain and those fears were familiar. She was afraid of her husband — but more afraid of herself. She knew he would hurt her. But she did not know whether the world might further hurt her without him.

It’s impossible to explain freedom to someone who has never experienced it. Concepts of independence, self-direction, and discovery fell on a blank slate. I felt as if I were pushing buttons on a cash register, and no numbers were coming up. For my friend, embracing independence required a leap of faith the distance of which I could not fully comprehend. The day she decided to leave her husband, her eyes radiated fear. She trembled, her body suffused with a terror so strong she wept in my arms from the pain of it.

But then, she lifted her head, dried her eyes, and went on. She gritted her teeth, dug through the uncertainty, fear, and loneliness, until one day she said, “My life is my own. I made it that way, and no one can hurt me again.”

Socially, it has become easier for people to leave abusive partners. We now recognize that staying married for marriage’s sake is not always best. And with that shift in thinking, we’ve adopted the perception that walking away from abuse is the right thing, the logical thing to do.

What is our common reaction to abuse survivors? Pity, perhaps. We feel sorry for the difficult experiences that bring them to places so low. We look at them and see fragility and sorrow. But while we may see crumpled wings, we must also recognize the cocoon and the shape of something being built, something beautiful and stronger than before — a being with dreams and distance to travel. Strength exists in uprooting the status quo, in finding the courage to stand alone.

On my own personal level, the choice between “fight” and “flight” arose in a decision to change my career path and escape what I call the “professional treadmill.”  

American society glorifies law and medicine as the epitome of success, the end result of a long road of study and hard work. But we often forget how prescribed that journey can be for the person who, at age 16 or 17, decides how the rest of his or her life will play out, with little room for variation. Science classes in high school lead to science classes in college, which lead to med school, rotations, internship, residency, and ultimately, work as a physician. I deeply admire the dedication it takes to complete that path; our society admires it also. But for me to have stayed on that path would have been dedication without courage.

The day I chose to stop pre-med classes was one of my highest points of courage. I did not feel like a quitter as the world would have had me believe. I felt free. I was not walking away from a fight. Rather, I felt myself gearing up for the greatest struggles I expect to face in my life: learning who I am, deciding what I will be, and how to make my contribution to this world before my life runs out.

Few things are scarier than stepping off that treadmill onto the regular sidewalk, where you have to choose your own way and get there under your own power. It’s terrifying to step out of the known into the unknown, to lift your feet off the ground and hope your wings have what it takes to go the distance. At those moments, only faith and courage are with you.

And yet stepping off, for me, was to experience texture — the rocks and sand and grass beneath my feet. It meant traveling in my own direction, not in a straight line, and it has led me to places the nervous high school junior who marked “pre-medicine” on her college applications never could have predicted or imagined.

In big and small ways we each have the power to forge new paths for ourselves, and we mustn’t let others think us cowards for defying expectations. We do have to fight many internal — and external — battles to escape, to remove ourselves from negative equations, to cancel out the things that drag us down.

Changing trajectories when our current paths are failing us is not weakness. It is decisive action. Slaves who ran for freedom knew that somewhere in the unknown was a better place for them, despite the world telling them “stay in your place.” Abuse survivors who find the courage to discover their independence do so only by leaping into uncertainty. Such actions must be taken, for to exist solely within prescribed boundaries is to risk never knowing our truths and our potential. By leaping, we learn to fly.

In The Fray Contributor

Perhaps the Grand Old Party (GOP) should change its name to the Party of Galatians (POG). After all, verses in that book of the Bible outline the crux of the modern day Republican ethos: “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would” (Galatians 5:16-17).

The Christian Right, the Bush administration, and its acolytes have been trying to fight sins of the flesh for decades. Under Dubya, today’s Republicans have successfully defined morality solely in terms of sexual attitudes. As the movement continues to splinter over issues like uncontrolled spending and the legality of wiretapping Americans, one reliable bugaboo never fails to galvanize the right: Lust, defined as “unlawful craving for pleasures of the body.”

A controversial speaker at an event for Texas Governor Rick Perry caught the attention of The New York Times. Columbus, Ohio senior pastor and “Silent No More” author Rod Parsley said that Christians would not cave to requests for legalization of gay marriage because “we are not to sacrifice our children on the altar of sexual lust of a few.”

Similarly, Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, said that New Orleans — the City of Sin — was rightfully in the Lord’s crosshairs for a hurricane disaster because of its libertine mores. “This is one wicked city, okay? It’s known for Mardi Gras. It’s known for sex perversion,” Franklin Graham said. His rant also included references to the Big Easy’s “Satan worship” (aka Santeria) and laissez-faire attitude toward drug use.

Whether it’s the recent Senate porn hearings held by Kansas Republican Sam Brownback or the reliably loopy Senator Rick Santorum’s equating same-sex marriage with dog-shagging, calls to action taken under the aegis of Christian values have meant calls to thwart non-Church-sanctioned petits morts.

In pursuing sins of the flesh with such a vengeance, the modern GOP-Christian Right amalgam has taken on just one-seventh of the biblical battle against sin. Lust prevention occupies much of the Right’s time and efforts, often trumping niggling questions of health policy and common sense. Last year, conservatives stated their intention to block mandatory vaccinations of young girls against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that can lead to the development of cervical cancer. Why? They feared that newly protected girls may (as a spokeswoman for the Family Research Council said) “see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.” For all the fervor surrounding Lust, the GOP seems downright lackadaisical when it comes to curtailing the remaining deadly sins: Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Wrath, and Pride.

As one of its calling cards, Republicans.org touts Proverbs 14:34: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” Perhaps it’s time to take a close look at the other six sins. Scattered throughout the book of Proverbs, the seven deadly sins have evolved into shorthand for the basic tenets of Christian thought. The big guns of Christian theology — Pope Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Milton, Dante — have referenced them for centuries. When he first cobbled together the sin scorecard, Gregory himself deemed Lust the least serious of the transgressions.

Avarice

Ranked as a sin more grave than Lust, Pope Gregory’s list named Avarice — the insatiable desire for wealth. The greedy have been called upon to answer for their lapses, thanks most recently to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Christian Coalition founder and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Ralph Reed’s ambitions have been thwarted by his Abramoff ties, with a Christian Coalition member telling The Washington Post, “it became pretty obvious [Reed] was putting money before God.” Concurrently, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s probe into Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s stock sales, Tom DeLay’s charges of money laundering and conspiracy, or California Republican Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s tearful apology for his long-running bribery scheme, demonstrate the need to tend to this particular sin. But while the investigations into these Republican Party members continue, so does a party-wide commission of what beliefnet.org’s Phyllis Tickle called “The Mother of All Sins.”

Quoting former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Tickle said that to blame “infectious greed” for the rash of corporate scandals associated with Enron and Tyco “feels a bit like a betrayal. We’d been told all along that greed — well harnessed and regulated — was good, not only for corporations, but society as a whole, even the poor.” Indeed, the Bush administration takes that tack when promoting the elimination of the estate tax, higher standards for filing bankruptcy, and tax cuts for Americans in the top 1 percent income bracket. Nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina, Gordon Gekko’s Wall Street mantra “Greed is good” isn’t as popular as it once was.  

Sloth

Affected residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast were not just victims of great rains, but of another Republican sin — Sloth. This sin might appear to be the biggest anathema to today’s GOP members, who have long prided themselves on the “hand up, not hand out” meme and who extol the virtues of hard work and entrepreneurship. They seemed to follow the advice found in Romans: “Never flag in zeal, be aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord.” Then came a certain former commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, and their sin was revealed.

Few would argue that saving the residents of New Orleans from the storm would qualify as God’s work, and Michael Brown’s less-than-zealous attitude toward his job as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) became apparent within hours of the hurricane’s deadly landing in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Brown, a Bush crony with questionable emergency management qualifications when appointed to the post, penned some telling emails while the storm was at its height. According to CNN, some of those missives included, “Can I quit now? Can I come home?” the morning of the hurricane, as well as questions to his aide about what to wear when appearing on television. “Tie or not for tonight? Button-down blue shirt?” he asked. The reply was “Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt, all shirts. Even the president rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow. In this [crisis] and on TV you just need to look more hard-working.”

Gluttony

FEMA’s inability to get food and water to Katrina victims puts the Republicans at risk of committing yet another transgression — Gluttony. Withholding food from the needy, after all, is part and parcel of the sin, which refers specifically to overindulgence of food and drink, and, more generally, to consuming more than one needs. In the realm of resources — oil, money, and the like — modern Republicans are hoarders of the first order. In Congress, Alaska Republican Don Young showed himself a glutton for federal dollars (and punishment) when he insisted on using $200 million in federal spending on his “bridge to nowhere,” connecting two communities with a combined population of only about 14,550. Despite entreaties from his fellow Congress members, and even some of his own constituents, Young would not relent when asked to forgo his project in favor of allocating the funds to hurricane victims. Today’s economic policies (see Avarice above) seem geared to keeping resources concentrated within a small group of … Republicans.

Envy

A while back, some characterized the Republican hatred of former President Bill Clinton as stemming from an obsession with the 40th president’s lifestyle. With his supposed in-your-face sexuality, his recreational drugs, his rock and/or roll, Clinton exemplified the longhaired hipitude that the Republicans despised precisely because they wished they had his job. The result of this GOP envy was a two-year, $40 million investigation and a Starr-penned book that, one could argue, read like the same soft-core porn the Republicans were trying to eradicate (see Lust).

Wrath

The doggedness involved in toppling Clinton was part of a phenomenon that’s grown exponentially since the days of impeachment — Republican anger. One sees it in the face of the aforementioned O’Reilly whenever he’s confronted with Mexican undocumented immigrants, or Bob Novak when he’s about to be asked about his role in the Valerie Plame case. Fox News traffics in a type of anger that is both frightening and, if they weren’t being paid quite so much, quite hilarious.  

On the topic of trying to get at the root of Islamic terrorism, Ann Coulter famously wrote:

“They hate us? We hate them. Americans don’t want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There’s nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics. So sorry they’re angry — wait until they see American anger.”

Her response probably wouldn’t have sat too well with the apostle James who advised that “everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires.”

Pride

Listening is not chief among current Republican priorities. The president’s inability to hear any voice other than his own has contributed to his commission of the sin of Pride. Most recently, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh has documented that the president’s current policy in Iraq is being guided not by information from his generals on the sandy ground, but by the belief that in five or 10 or 20 years, his mission into the desert will be deemed an unparalleled success, catapulting him into the annals of history as one of the nation’s greatest commanders-in-chief. “Mission Accomplished” was a boast (also a no-no according to Corinthians) that, ultimately, could not be backed up. And yet, here is America in the middle of an intractable war, which originated with a deadly presidential sin.

So, is Lust (Gregory’s least concern) the sin which has gotten the Republicans and America into its current state of disarray, or do the six other transgressions really deserve a closer look? The fourth book of James hints at an answer:

“What causes wars, and what causes fighting among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.”

In The Fray Contributor

During my first year in Cancún, there were times I forgot I was in Mexico. I’d be working on an article — conducting interviews in English, reading and writing in English, discussing the story with my husband, Kinich, in English — and would step outside for a break and be momentarily startled to feel the blazing sun on my face and catch sight of the little store sign across the street that reads Nuevo Paraíso, New Paradise.

Angela, who owns the Nuevo Paraíso corner store, waited until I had been patronizing her business for months before she asked me, “¿De dónde eres?” Where are you from?

“New York,” I answered.

As I turned to leave, I overheard Angela tell another customer that perhaps she would ask me for English classes. Shy person that I am, I continued walking out of the store instead of swinging around and telling her I’d be happy to teach her my native language.

Angela never did ask me for English lessons. And the rest of my neighbors were equally distant. I exchanged no more than a few words here and there, a smile, buenas tardes, with a couple of them when we passed each other coming or going. I told myself that they were busy with their lives and I with mine. But I still felt a twinge of loneliness when I saw them gather together on Friday nights: members of an inner circle of which I would never be a part.

My Mexican husband’s parents and sister, her boyfriend and two children, warmly welcomed me as a new addition to their family. With them, I found a sense of belonging. But all I felt for Paraíso, a residential neighborhood 20 minutes and worlds away from Cancún’s hotel zone and the place I had chosen to call home, was a sense of disconnect. A year after coming here, I was still the outsider, la gringa.

That is, until this October, when Hurricane Wilma came rattling into town.

A flooded parking lot in the recently constructed shopping
center known as Hollywood Plaza, which is located in one
of Cancún’s residential neighborhoods. Some businesses here
have yet to re-open. (Kinich Ramirez)

Preparing for the worst

Initially listed as nothing more than a “tropical storm,” Wilma barely caught my eye at first.

But once I read reports of preparations in Florida, I began to worry. And by Wednesday afternoon, as the weather updates became increasingly ominous, I headed to the supermarket to load up on food and other necessities. The next day, Kinich and I hurriedly organized ourselves in anticipation of the hurricane. Not wanting to face the hordes that had descended upon the supermarket, I decided to buy extra water and other odds and ends from Angela’s corner store.

It was frenzied madness at Angela’s as well. Customer after customer came in, searching for flashlight batteries or tape for their windows. Most seemed panicked now that it looked like the storm would bear down right on us. It had been nearly 20 years since a storm of similar magnitude — 1988’s Hurricane Gilbert — wreaked havoc on the area, and many people had grown complacent during the intervening years.

On Thursday evening, Kinich’s parents, sister, and her children arrived. We had arranged that they would ride out the storm with us, and their arrival brought an almost festive air to our apartment.

But where was Morocco, the family dog?

Apparently, there had not been enough room for him in the car, so my mother-in-law and I drove back to get him. On the open road, we felt the full brunt of the rising wind as it swooped down from a foreboding gray sky, shaking the tree branches forcefully. A stoplight swung violently back and forth in the wind, looking like it could snap off its pole at any moment.  

Morocco seemed filled with nervous energy on the car ride back. Jerking his head from window to window, he could barely keep his balance as we zigzagged through the streets, trying to avoid other drivers who seemed too preoccupied with getting home to pay attention to the road. It was a relief to pull into my apartment lot at last.

The apartment was a flurry of activity. My father-in-law and husband were nailing up wood outside to protect the apartment. My mother-in-law began putting away the extra food that the family had brought with them. And my sister-in-law, niece, and I set to work covering the windows with tape.

Our movements carried a sense of urgency, as the shrieking wind and sporadic rain reminded us that we did not have much time to get things in order before the storm descended upon us.

Neighbors from Cancun’s Paraiso neighborhood
form a conga line at an impromptu street party held
after Hurricane Wilma passed. (Kinich Ramirez)

Nature’s fury

That night, we ate dinner and watched television, trying to behave as if it were just another family gathering. But despite our best efforts, there was a palpable tension inside the apartment as we heard the wind growing ever fiercer outside.

My niece and nephew fed off our nervous energy, jumping about and refusing to sleep when my sister-in-law called them to bed. Finally, close to 10 p.m., we all settled down to our respective rooms: My sister-in-law and her two children in the guestroom-cum-office, my in-laws in the master bedroom, and my husband and I in the living room.

I couldn’t sleep, kept awake thinking about what Wilma had in store for us. Around midnight, a loud noise sounded in the distance, jerking Kinich out of his sleep. “What was that?” I whispered to him.

“One of the transformers just blew,” he replied.

Right then, we heard another explosion: the second transformer.

Later in the night, the third and final transformer died, and with that, we lost our electricity.

By Friday morning, the wind had died down somewhat, but conditions were still miserable enough to keep us trapped inside the apartment. When I peered out one of the few windows we had not boarded up, I saw that the steady rain had shrouded our neighborhood in a murky darkness. It was difficult to make out much else. I turned away from the depressing scene outside the window and focused my energy on helping with the kids and catching up on sleep for the rest of the day.  

That evening, the battering of our city reached full force. By this time, we had all moved into the guestroom because water had begun to seep into the living room and master bedroom. It was like a family sleepover, complete with joking and play-fighting amongst all of us, as we tried to keep our spirits up.

But by about 7 p.m., the amount of rain cascading into the master bedroom had become a serious matter. One side of it looked like a wall of water. With the bedroom windows rattling so hard they were on the point of shattering, we all took turns mopping up the deluge with towels, until Kinich devised a barricade to route the rapidly rising water into our bathroom. Utterly exhausted, we turned in to sleep at 9:30 p.m.

Once again, I was too nervous to sleep, imagining that every clatter and boom I heard was something crashing into our windows. The gales of wind had reached such a crescendo that I was sure the roof was going to be torn right off our third-story building. The force of the wind was so strong that at one point, the building began swaying. In the wee hours of the morning, my father-in-law and I rose to check on the water level in the master bedroom. We spent an hour mopping and then went back to bed.

On Saturday, we woke to a subdued weather situation. Since the only radio station broadcasting news about the storm had abruptly gone off the air, we began making calls to friends and family in other parts of the world, in the hope that they could give us any information about the storm. I finally got through to a friend in Texas, who told me that Cancun was now in the eye of the hurricane.

So, despite the eerie calm outside, the storm had not yet passed.

We shared the news with our next-door neighbors, the Guzmán Martinez family, and then decided to reinforce some of the front windows, as the wind was slated to change direction once the eye of the storm passed over us.

My father-in-law and I went out on the front terrace to nail an air mattress up over the wood, but a gust of wind lifted him right off his feet. He managed to regain his balance by bracing himself against the wall and, together with Kinich, we hurriedly finished securing the air mattress before rushing back into the safety of the apartment.  

Finally, on Sunday morning, after hours of being shut up inside, we woke to the news that Hurricane Wilma had moved on, heading for other unlucky destinations.

My three-year-old niece, overwhelmed with giddy happiness, began singing a song she composed on the spot that translated into something like, “The sun is shining and now we can play. The hurricane is gone!”

An overturned phone booth overlooks a
deserted beach in Cancun’s hotel zone, a week after
Hurriance Wilma wreaked havoc on the area. (Erin Cassin)

It takes a village

By a minor miracle, our apartment had remained completely intact through the hurricane. The only damage sustained were the holes in the walls where we had nailed up wooden planks for protection against the wind. There was also mold growth in nearly every room.

I compared notes with Doña Ramona from next door. Their apartment had lost some of its windows and water was still leaking into every room. My problems were minimal in comparison.

Yet, our next-door neighbors took care of us those first days after the storm passed.  Ramona gave us fish, chicken, and barbecued meat, from her seemingly endless supply of food. Her husband bestowed a couple of cold beers upon us, a luxury since no home had refrigeration capability due to the loss of electricity and the city had forbidden the sale of alcohol.

That first night after the storm, my husband, his sister, her boyfriend Javier, and I sat down for a meal of steaming hot fish soup and a couple of chilled beers while the children slept. Javier had been the first to check on us, stopping by briefly during the eye of the storm and returning once again after the hurricane passed.

We were chatting after the meal when we were interrupted by the sound of a drum and then cheers from the street below. From our balcony, we saw that a group of neighbors had gathered in the darkness of the street and were dancing to the beats of a skilled drum player. My husband grabbed his camera and practically flew down the stairs, with me clumsily stumbling behind him. Soon, we were in the midst of an impromptu street party.

Other drummers arrived and one neighbor, who I had never seen before, began honking her car horn in time with the percussion music. Another neighbor gestured at me to dance in the middle of the circle. People had been showing off their skills one by one, but I shook my head. She pulled me into the middle of the circle anyway and I performed my usual routine of snapping my fingers for two beats before heading back to the anonymity offered by the circle’s outer fringe.

My neighbor Angela was in the crowd and we greeted each other with hugs and talked about how liberating it felt to be out of the house after so many days of being trapped inside.

Soon, we had formed a conga line and started doing the limbo. Then, someone pulled his car up and started blasting music. Various couples paired up to show off their intricate moves. My husband and I twirled about, making up for our lack of skills with plenty of laughter. After about 40 minutes, we headed back to the apartment with the sound of the music following us.

Ceiba del Mar Spa Resort stands forlornly on
the shores of Puerto Morelos, which neighbors Cancun
to the south. The ravaged spa will be closed for at
least six months due to the damage caused by
Hurricane Wilma. (Erin Cassin)

Paradise lost and found

The following week was a busy one, as we cleaned up our apartment and organized night watches with neighbors. The lack of electricity that first week drew people out of their apartments, onto their balconies and into the street. Without computers or television, many of us re-learned the old-fashioned art of neighborly conversation to occupy our time.

When I went to hang up laundry on the roof of our building, I ran into the neighbor who had pulled me into the dance circle. We started talking and Lupe told me that she was from Mexico City but had moved to Cancun to give her children a more peaceful life. We spent a good half hour up on the roof chatting and I left feeling like I had made a friend.  

And for the first time, I hung out inside Doña Ramona’s apartment, when I stopped by to present her with gifts of candles and hand sanitizer that I had picked up at the only open supermarket in the vicinity.

Ramona has lived in Paraíso for 15 years. She tells me that it doesn’t look like the same neighborhood anymore after Wilma. She was accustomed to looking out her window and seeing the vibrant green of our street’s vegetation. It pains her to see a wasteland of dead trees instead.

It has been heart-wrenching to see the damage in and around Cancun. The storm has left a maze of destruction in its wake, as the city’s resplendent foliage has been replaced by rotting stumps and withered branches. Much of the beachfront’s glistening white sand has been supplanted by menacing-looking rocks, and the hypnotizing turquoise of the sea has been churned into a dark grey froth. Nature will restore herself eventually, but for now, my oasis has been shred to tatters.

I am saddened by the destruction but it is heartening to see the rapid pace of the recovery efforts and the ingenuity of everyone working to return the neighborhood to normalcy.

And for once, I truly feel part of the community. While looting and chaos broke out in other parts of the city, my neighbors, my family, and I were dedicated to protecting all of us on this street from any further misfortune.          

This sense of community has remained with me, even now, a month after the hurricane hit.

Doña Ramona and I spend more time talking on our shared terrace than we ever did in the year leading up to the storm. She is busy now that she’s returned to her regular routine, but I’ve made her promise to come over for coffee once her schedule calms down a bit.

As for Lupe, I bumped into her in the corner store last week and she hugged me like an old friend. She told Angela to make sure to include me the next time they plan a night out with the other women of the neighborhood. Angela agreed, saying it would be a good way to “integrate” me.

It looks like there is place in that inner circle for me after all. It just took a hurricane for me to realize it.  

The author browses through a rack in front of
a closed shop on Avenida Tulum, the main
street in downtown Cancun. Various vendors flocked to
this area in the week following Hurricane Wilma, as
many of the usual marketplaces were not open for business. (Kinich Ramirez)

In The Fray Contributor

We don’t chat in living rooms filled with cherrywood furniture or sip tea in gold-trimmed china cups.

No, there is no small talk, no family gossip, no storytelling between us.

Instead, Grandpa and I bond each summer when I sit down cross-legged on the floor beside his La-Z-Boy recliner. His feet are both propped up, which is especially good for his left foot, the one pierced by World War II shrapnel. The jagged piece of metal has lodged inside his ankle bone since World War II.

Grandpa and baby Rhian share a moment together.

Side by side we watch old Japanese warrior films that I cannot understand. But the movies are secondary, because I am busy learning about Grandpa by osmosis. I study his facial expressions for reaction to the plot. When does he lean closer to the screen? Or twitch with empathy for the characters? At what moment does he lose interest and shift his weight back into his favorite chair?

During commercial breaks I prepare a hot water foot massage bath and add Hawaiian rock salt to help draw the yellowish pus from his foot. I then help my mom cut Grandpa’s toenails and disinfect his wounds with a Q-tip saturated in iodine. We place bandages on his sores.

He nods, smiles, and softly says Thank you” before absentmindedly scratching the dressings off, as he watches the TV screen.

Grandpa is the only man I would ever think of learning to cook for. I want to cook tofu just right — golden on both sides. I sprinkle furikake seasonings over white sticky rice and slice omelets diagonally so they resemble floating buoys on top of steaming miso soup. And I serve it to him right before Wheel of Fortune.  

As Vanna White reveals the letters on screen, I can tell when Grandpa knows the answer: His eyes bulge forward slightly, and he chews a little faster.

My father wonders how my Grandpa and I fill the silent spaces, how we can build love from a relationship with no words.

My grandfather and I never speak.

At least not on a level where people can hear us.
“

In The Fray Contributor

Both of the pieces I have written for InTheFray are about the unexpectedly positive experiences I had in what are often considered scary places: Colombia and Afghanistan. In the case of Colombia, I am still really interested in the tension between the country’s horrible reputation and the comparatively pleasant reality of daily life in Bogota. The challenge for me was to explore what was nice about Colombia (and my rather limited experience of it) without denying the horrible problems the country faces. To anyone who has visited or lived in a place like Colombia — or, Israel, for instance — my point might have been annoyingly obvious: a country can be host to a lot of nasty events, but that doesn’t mean it’s a uniformly horrific or dangerous place for visitors. Although obvious perhaps, I did not gain this perspective until I moved to Bogota.

My piece was also something of a penance. While I was living in Colombia, I edited a documentary called La Sierra, which tells the story of a small Medellin neighborhood ruled by a paramilitary street gang. Editing this film was a strange experience. Outside the studio, I spent my time enjoying all that was colorful, educational, and cosmopolitan about Bogota, the very things that challenge the Colombian stereotype. But my afternoons were spent editing a harrowing story about poverty, drugs, and violence. Although it is a true story, and an important one to be told, the film does nothing but reinforce the country’s bad image. In writing “Fear(less) in Bogota” for InTheFray, I was seizing an opportunity to tell another side of the conversation.

In the year since I returned to the United States, I have continued to fight both sides, when it comes to Colombia’s reputation. In my continuing work on La Sierra, I have consciously taken advantage of the “scary Colombia” vibe to promote the film. This doesn’t take much effort, since Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez (the film’s directors) needed serious guts just to take on and complete the project. Their protagonist was shot to death during the film’s production, and Dalton himself had to dodge sniper fire while filming. Facts like these are invaluable in the selling of such a film, which undeniably benefits from the stereotypes I tried to challenge when I wrote “Fear(less) in Bogota”. But I don’t think we’re guilty of sensationalism or of the creation of another Clear and Present Danger.

I think La Sierra is an honest film that vividly evokes Colombia’s various aspects. For me, the fact that the residents of La Sierra — the film’s participants being among them — are by all accounts satisfied with the film’s portrayal of their community validates the film’s merits.

So I am eating my cake and having it, too, using the Colombian stereotype in my work even as I challenge it in my writing and among friends. And being pro-Colombia has its benefits. I seem to run into Colombians everywhere (particularly in New York, where I live), and you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to break the ice by sharing happy memories of their much-feared home country. Even among Colombians, a Colombia-booster’s work is never done. Once or twice I have found myself trying to dispel the doubts of a Colombian expatriate who after years in the United States has been infected by North American fears. It is irresistible to cajole them just a bit. After all, here we have a gringo trying to convince Colombians to visit their own country.

I miss Bogota. I want to visit again and explore more of the country. I am also going to write more travel pieces.

I want to create the possibility that readers will visit such a place, to point out that you don’t have to be a combat photographer to enjoy a city like Bogota.

After all, there should be at least some travel writing that opens doors we thought were closed.

Andrew Blackwell

“Te enseño una playa nudista cuando vienes.” (I’ll show you a nude beach when you come.) “I’ve never seen so many penises in my life.”

And with that, my friend Beth, a fellow Torontonian, signed off on yet another email to me. She was living in Cádiz, a port city in the southern Andalucía region of Spain where some of the country’s most beautiful beaches are located, and I was going to visit her in two weeks. I had just learned that a nude beach was on the itinerary.  

Going nude was not an option for me.

My friend Joe tried to convince me otherwise over drinks in Toronto one afternoon before I left. “No one knows you there anyway, so what difference does it make?” Yet to me, it made all the difference.

I have always equated nudity with intimacy. Being naked with someone makes me – especially as a woman – feel vulnerable to that person. When we’re nude, we reveal ourselves in a profound way where nothing is hidden. The mere thought of being nude in front of people I didn’t know made me cringe.

But I didn’t rule out making a visit to a nude beach. Curiosity, and that sense of adventure that takes hold of me as soon as I board a plane, got the better of me.

This beach is too permissive …

And so, a day after arriving in Cádiz, I found myself — a tall, slender 25-year-old woman — lying rigidly on a beach towel under the searing sun at Caños de Meca, a nude beach 45 minutes from the city centre.

No, I wasn’t nude. I was wearing a low-cut, black designer bikini with ivory-hued straps. The loose ends on each side of the bottoms tied right at my hips. Top and bottom fit perfectly, and flattered my hourglass figure. (Not that I was showing off, lying prone on my towel.)

From that awkward position, I began to take in the sights. This was my first trip to a real, functioning beach. Born and raised in Toronto, Lake Ontario never looked very clean to me, despite those safe-for-swimming “Blue Flags” awarded to the beaches once certain environmental criteria were met. City Hall must have shared my doubts because they strategically placed a public swimming pool directly in front of one of the beaches.

The beach at Cádiz was stunning. Hidden beneath a hilly terrain, we had had to hike down to reach its shores. Golden sand glistened beneath the sun and gentle waves whistled a soothing melody in our ears.

Eventually I mustered up enough courage to check out my fellow beach bums at Caños de Meca. What I saw were far too many harried potbellies, dangling private parts of the young and old, sagging breasts flopping about, and yes, bouncing bums. I saw pierced nipples being erotically rubbed; people sensually lathering sun block on their partners’ most private parts; nude families building sandcastles as they shared refrescos (cold drinks) with each other. Dozens of random strangers willingly sharing their bodies with me.

And there I was: A subdued, self-conscious Canadian in a bikini who, rather than feeling covered up in the midst of all these naked people, was feeling rather naked herself.

I found it difficult to believe that so many people could be comfortably naked in front of each other. But that’s what my eyes were telling me. People frolicked about playing Frisbee, the girth of their bellies visible to everyone in their midst. Lumps, bumps, stretch marks, and all that cellulite we normally try so hard to hide, on public display.

I felt like a criminal, surreptitiously stealing glances at the women around me, comparing the size of my waist, hips, thighs, and breasts, with theirs. When naked men walked by and smiled at me, I couldn’t look. Perhaps it was my conservative Palestinian background, but I felt I shouldn’t look. That I would be invading people’s privacy if I did.

Carlos, a Spanish friend and regular nudist, playing the guitar at Caños de Meca.

And this beach is too restrictive …

My only other memories of being at a beach are from ten years ago when I last visited family in the Gaza Strip. I was 15 and I remember the sense of peace I felt while I was there. At Gaza of all places, it was easy to forget your worries while staring into the vastness of the Mediterranean and listening to the lapping of its calm waves. Everything — from the laughter of the children bathing in the sea to the sight of ladies from the local refugee camp carrying pots and pans back and forth to be washed at the shore — remains etched in my memory.

I wanted to swim in those salty waters so badly.

But I knew that I would have drawn a lot of unwanted attention to myself if I dared take the plunge. We were in a predominately Muslim area and, only in the still of night, when the lurking eyes of men were fast asleep, did a few intrepid women slip off their sandals and lift up their long flowing gowns for a quick wade in the calm waters. I spent my time sitting in a hut drinking diet Pepsi, chatting with my brother, or adding to our growing collection of seashells.

Fast forward 10 years. Here I was on another beach and not much had changed.

For the most part, I had overcome the self-consciousness about my body that plagues most young women my age. But I still wasn’t home free. Even in my bikini, it took me a long while to muster up the courage to get up off my beach towel and take a dip in the Spanish waters, or walk along the shore with Beth. Even clothed, I felt that all eyes were upon me.

I wasn’t brave enough to break local customs in Gaza, and I wasn’t brave enough to follow them in Cádiz. Where did I fit in?

As my friends and I stood up to leave, a middle-aged man with piercing blue eyes made eye contact. Keeping his intense gaze fixed on me, he began stroking his penis. It was definitely time to leave. I lowered my head as I quickly stuffed my belongings into my beach bag and scooted off.

As I walked back up the hill to my friend’s car, I made a mental note to myself to give one of Toronto’s staid beaches a try when I returned to Canada. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Maybe that beach would be just right, for me.

In The Fray Contributor

Students at Frank Holele Preschool and their families create paintings of the South African flag during a parents’ day event in October 2004 at the educational facility in Bendel, South Africa.

It’s sometimes difficult to really understand why I’m here.

I get up every morning, take a bucket bath with two scoops of water, gather my daily teaching materials, and trudge to school through two miles of thick sand.

Through the peak of the mid-morning heat, I move from classroom to classroom, hoping to catch teachers on their breaks, trying to convince them, indirectly, that they have an impact on the lives of children. I cringe as a teacher strolls into the room after her tea break and pinches a misbehaving child in the arm. She repeatedly insults him for being noisy while she was out of the room. He squeezes his eyes shut to hold back tears, wondering why the other children didn’t get equal punishment. Historically, wrong answers have been met with physical and emotional punishment, so I try to work with teachers on methods of discipline and praise.

I encourage them to allow conversation in the classroom, and show them that peer teaching and learning are important ways for children to gain the critical thinking skills necessary for participation in a changing society. Living with their uneducated grandmothers after being orphaned by AIDS, many of these children are responsible for chores that leave them little time for schoolwork. Many have fathers who work for the mines, live far from home, drink irresponsibly, and cannot put food on the table.

Often, teachers become the mothers and fathers to these children who lack responsible, loving, supportive figures in their lives. While I encourage them to praise and support their students, their confused faces remind me that providing for their own families is the real reason they are working, the reason they trudge through those mounds of thick sand. Many of them will not hesitate to tell me that they wish they could go home, and some days, in frustration, I wish they would. But before I lose hope, I must remind myself that the people I work with have lived a history of hearing that they are worthless. They have been handed scraps from the white man’s table, causing a work ethic of “the minimum is enough.” The legacy of apartheid has destroyed the spirits of the people, discouraged them from working to improve their lives because of an ingrown belief that they are unable to do so.

It is 2004, and I am witnessing South Africa as it marks 10 years of democracy.

In 1982, when my friend Isaac was 17 years old, he worked as a gardener in a suburb of Pretoria. After working many hours to create a manicured lawn with vibrant colors — a lawn he knew he would never have — the mistress would call him for lunch, holding out two dirty dishes filled with cold food scraped from the bottom of a pot. She placed one dish in Isaac’s hands and the other on the ground for the eager and drooling guard dog. With his head bent in respect, Isaac was obliged by law to say, Thank you, Madam” in Afrikaans, even though his own language was Setswana.

Once she was satisfied that he had taken his first bite of food, the mistress walked back inside, shutting the wooden door in front of him. Isaac quietly dumped the remains of his food into the hungry dog’s dish and glanced at the sky. The sun indicated that he had two more hours of the workday left, and he picked up his pruning shears. When the sun finally reached the horizon, Isaac closed the gate behind him, and breathed a sigh of relief to be returning to Soshanguve township, to his family. Fellow workers quietly greet on another on the street, falling into their comfortable lilting language and stride, leaving their day of work behind. Occasionally, Isaac speaks of his mistress, and how he wishes that a humble request for a different dish would not get him fired. Most often, beneath their hunger pangs, they proudly discuss their families, their friends, and the best place to spend their daily wages on vegetables for the family dinner.  

In 2004, I went on vacation with my co-worker and friend Salome, spending four days in the township of Mahwelereng in Limpopo Province. Previously, I would have been breaking the law by setting foot in the township, but for 10 years the democratic constitution has granted individuals of all skin colors the right to move freely around the country, to live where they choose, and to vote for the country’s president.

In Mahwelereng, Salome introduces me to her friends, and as one of the first white faces to spend a night in the township, I am greeted with smiles, waves, generosity, and kindness. I spent an evening with her in the local tavern, sitting with friends in a circle of dirty chairs. The run-down building had cracking wall paint, and when the wind blew, a smell of stale urine emanated from its side. In spite of the surroundings, everyone was smiling, with teeth glowing in the dingy lights. One person was dancing to the crackling stereo in a torn Target polo shirt, and others were leaning against the wall telling jokes and holding their stomachs in laughter.

At first, my skin color brought glances of surprise and hesitation, but as I continued to chat in Setswana and reached out to slap the hands of friends, more people began to approach me to shake my hand. As I grasped the soft vaselined hands of the young, and the rough, callused hands of the old, I asked myself, “Why am I greeted with such warmth?”

Even though I am American, and not South African, I share the skin color of the oppressor. Because of a past where skin color alone determined one’s place in society, South Africa’s black citizens have every reason and right to be angry at people like me. Instead, these people accepted me as one of their own. In admiration of their acceptance and their ability to forgive, I asked many of them the same question: “Why?” One man with deep wrinkles at the corner of his eyes grabbed my hands and squeezed them tightly. He held his chin high, as he looked deeply into my eyes and said in Setswana, “Kate, by seeing you here, I think I know what democracy really feels like.”

After that night, I pondered that answer, and that man who lived through many years of apartheid and 10 years of freedom. What should democracy “feel” like? Policy states that Isaac, Salome, and the residents of Mahwelereng deserve to be treated as equals. This equality must mean that Isaac should have just as much right as his former employer to own a manicured garden, to use the same toilet as she does. Isaac’s children have the right to a quality education — equal to that of their white peers — and his family deserves access to running water.

If the people of South Africa live in a democracy, why does Salome live only feet from her neighbor, while lush gated compounds exist right across the street? When she visits a gas station equipped with a porcelain toilet, she is pointed to a fly-infested latrine — the “non-whites only” label peeling conveniently from the rotting wood door. Isaac’s children attend a school where they must share textbooks and climb over each others’ desks as the teacher struggles to locate a stub of chalk. His oldest boy is discouraged from looking for a job, because his family needs him to harness the donkeys to the cart every day in order to fetch water from the village tap.

Policy states that the country is a democracy, freed from the terror of apartheid. In response, the world smiles and congratulates. But when will this democracy begin to offer basic human rights to all of its people?

These citizens of South Africa want to be heard, to feel human in the eyes of their government and fellow citizens. Until their human rights are met, the policies of democracy will only succeed on paper. The children of South Africa must be taught that equality can be achieved. They must be taught critical thinking skills that will give them the ability to overcome a fate that was pre-determined by the color of their skin. In a country with a history of fierce discrimination, the only way to achieve true democracy is to embrace the fact that we are all people, and to recognize that each person deserves basic human rights. In South Africa I was reminded that equality and freedom must never be taken for granted. Our blood is all red, we all laugh in happiness, we all cry in sadness, and we all dream.”

In The Fray Contributor

Could anyone wearing a Thomas the Tank Engine backpack want to blow up a train station?

The pale blue pages of my passport are littered with visa stamps, a testament to my many globetrotting adventures over the years. There are shiny silver holograms from the European Union, a red-white-and-blue U.S. visa, red-and-purple stickers from Malaysia, green ones from Turkey, Cambodia, and Chile, beige from Brazil, and orange from Australia.

I’ve always told myself that having a passport chockfull of weird and wonderful visa stamps is the upside of holding Indian citizenship.

The downside, of course, is the process of applying for those stamps.

The interminable queuing outside the consulate during predawn hours, the photocopying (in triplicate always for some reason) of bank statements, plane tickets, and hotel reservations as supporting documents for my application, the posing for unflattering passport photographs, and the not-always-polite questioning from consul staff convinced that I am either a potential illegal immigrant or an asylum seeker: They are part-and-parcel of what it means to be a citizen of a developing nation.

But I’ve never had a visa application rejected, and once I arrived in whichever country I was visiting, I always felt welcome. Complete strangers would tell me that I was the spitting image of Aishwarya Rai, India’s most famous model/actress and the 1994 Miss World, even though I don’t look anything like her. I was considered exotic or worldly, either of which I saw as a compliment, though of the two I preferred “worldly.”

But when I arrived in London a couple of months ago, I was also considered a potential terrorist suspect.

Mind the gap

I lived in Scotland for three years as a young child and I’ve visited the United Kingdom more than once since. And like most Indians, I have an inner Anglophile that peeps out whenever I’m in the British Isles rubbing shoulders with my colonial ex-masters. But as I wheeled my suitcase out of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Three this July after flying in from New York City, I felt foreign for the first time.

On either side of me, at the customs checkpoints, I passed South Asian families who had been politely pulled aside by uniformed customs officers and asked to open their suitcases. All the families having their suitcases searched were Muslim. The skullcaps on the heads of the doddering old men, and the hijabs covering the heads of the young girls and their mothers, were a dead giveaway. They screamed MUSLIM from 10 meters away. In the same way that my outfit — a long-sleeved black t-shirt from the Gap, khaki capris from French Connection, and my hair uncovered and tied up in a sensible ponytail — screamed WORLDLY, I suppose. In any case, no customs officer asked me to step aside, and I left Heathrow as quickly as possible.

I suppose I should have been relieved that there was such heavy security at the airport. It was July 17 — just 10 days after the first round of terrorist attacks on the city — and it was clear that all possible measures were being taken to ensure the safety of residents.

But rather than feel safe, all I felt was fear. Not fear of being blown up by an Islamic fundamentalist, but of being questioned, harassed, and discriminated against by Londoners who might think I was one, simply because I was dark-skinned and carrying a backpack as I traversed the city streets, map and camera in hand.

Not just at the airport, but at tube and rail stations, in shopping centers, at London’s newest business district Canary Wharf, and at all the major tourist destinations, an overt police presence stood guard. I avoided them as far as possible, trying to act natural (whatever that means) whenever I saw them in the distance giving me the once-over. I would go through my tourist routine, taking photographs and stopping passersby (and on one occasion, a policeman) to ask for directions to the next nearest sightseeing attraction. I tried never to run, instead walking at a steady pace. (I would later learn in the aftermath of the shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes at London’s Stockwell tube station that even steady walking can get you shot eight times.) In the crowded corridors of an underground shopping mall, I came across a couple of young Muslim women being questioned by some British bobbies, an alarm ringing in the background. I scurried out of the place as quickly as I could.

In this way I managed to maintain a low profile for four days, but my luck finally ran out on July 21, when I arrived at London’s Stansted airport to fly to Porto in Portugal. I checked in for my flight and proceeded to the airport’s security checkpoint where I joined a long curving line of departing passengers — Irish football fans, young honeymooning couples, solo business travelers, and holidaying families — moving forward reasonably quickly. After a few minutes wait, it was my turn to place my backpack on the x-ray machine’s conveyor belt, and walk through the metal detector. No beeps or alarms sounded but the blond female security officer standing by the machine still blocked my path and asked me to raise my arms so she could pat me down — arms, torso, and legs.

“Just a random search, madam,” she told me, and then indicated that I show her the soles of my sneakers.

Random my foot, as they say in Britain. When I — the sole South Asian in the line — am stopped and searched, while all the white passengers in front of and behind me are allowed to step through without any obstacles, “random” has nothing to do with it.

If you see something, say something

The BBC reports that hate crimes against Muslims, South Asians, and Arabs in the United Kingdom increased by more than 600 percent in the immediate aftermath of July 7.

Your average jingoistic British street thug is not going to stop to ask if you’re Pakistani, or if that turban you wear means you’re Muslim, or if you have a bomb in your backpack before he calls you a “Paki” and tries to bash your head in.

That’s what happened to two South Asian men who were sitting in a parked car and minding their own business in Leith in Scotland in the middle of the day this August. Out of nowhere, a gang of youths surrounded the car and started kicking it, then threw a hammer right at the front windshield, injuring one of the men. Another South Asian man had his turban ripped off during an attack by two white teenagers in the middle of Edinburgh in late August.

I don’t expect any better from street thugs. But I did expect more from British civil servants.

I’m not trying to pretend that the men who orchestrated the July 7 and 21 attacks were not mainly of Pakistani origin, or that all of them weren’t Muslim. But allowing the actions of a dozen or so men to justify racial and religious discrimination — and that’s what profiling is — against the approximately 1.5 million Muslims living in the United Kingdom is just plain wrong, not to mention stupid.

Upon arriving in Porto, after waiting in another long line of arriving passengers, the immigration officer-in-charge asked me to show him my letter of invitation from my European hosts, documents certifying my student status in the United States, and the reservations for my return flight out of Portugal. My many visas did not impress him; he just wanted to know why I happened to be flying out of the United Kingdom the day there were four attempted bombings in Central London.

While being frisked in London by the blonde officer, I had been swallowed up by a silent, burning fury directed toward that particular representative of British airport security (and by extension, the British government itself) who saw me as a potential threat to their country’s safety for no other apparent reason than the color of my skin. But standing in the airport at Porto, when everyone else who had been on the plane with me had already been cleared and gone on to claim their bags and I was the only one still stuck at immigration, all I wanted to do was cry.

For the next 10 days, in Portugal and in Spain, I was treated with exceeding kindness and warmth by everyone I met. I was called ‘exotic’ all over again. One woman likened me to a young Sophia Loren. But the compliments didn’t make me feel as good as they used to.

“Quit focusing on the color of my skin and the shape of my eyes,” I wanted to tell them, thinking of Edward Said and his writings on how the West created the notion of Orientalism. In their own way, these good people were profiling, too. In their minds, BROWN SKIN = EXOTIC, and somehow that label now seemed to me almost as bad as BROWN SKIN = POTENTIAL TERRORIST.

The New York Metropolitan Transport Authority has launched a safety campaign with the tagline If You See Something, Say Something, encouraging commuters in subways and buses to report suspicious-looking behavior or unattended bags they notice. In the wake of the London bombings, an employee of one of the open-top double-decker tourist buses that ply New York City called the police about a group of South Asian men with British accents and backpacks on his bus. The bus was stopped in the middle of Times Square and the men were handcuffed, then made to kneel in the gutter while their bags were searched. Nothing suspicious was found in the backpacks and the men were released shortly afterwards. Once again, you can see those racial formulae at work: BROWN SKIN + BACKPACK = DEFINITE TERRORIST.

Until things start to improve, I’m using an over-the-shoulder messenger bag whenever I take the subway in New York. I am also relinquishing my quasi-Brit status; I have lost the desire to continue visiting the country of my colonial ex-masters. And the next time anyone calls me “exotic,” I’m going to tell her that if she has to label me, I prefer to be considered “worldly.”

Anju Mary Paul