I had thought Burning Man would be a nonstop hedonistic party. But when I arrived at the arts festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert last summer, I realized it was really about building a community—one art installation, and one person, at a time.
Story by Hannah Albarazi Photos by Sari Blum
As I approached the gate to Black Rock City, a young man came up to my car and greeted me with a warm “Welcome Home.” I had arrived at Burning Man: a week-long arts festival in the Nevada desert held annually since 1986.
Before I became a “Burner”—what the festival calls its attendees, almost 70,000 strong this year—I had dismissed it as a drugged-up, hippie rave in the desert. Months later, certain images of the festival’s spectacle have stayed with me: the skydivers falling onto the sand dunes, the parade of hundreds of topless women on bicycles, the square-rigged pirate ship sailing across the desert on wheels, the skateboard park shaped like a heart. But what stands out to me most about my first visit there is something else: the real and vital community I was surprised to find among the festival’s motley crowd of academics and soldiers, financial advisors and college students, Silicon Valley techies and artists.
At the Burning Man festival at the end of last summer (captured in the accompanying photos by Sari Blum), I came across men and women like Raymond Raven, who was volunteering as a medic. Burning Man does not allow any monetary exchanges except for buying ice and coffee. Instead, attendees swap goods and services, or just offer them for free. Raven, a forty-two-year-old hand and upper extremity surgeon from Burbank, California, didn’t mind that his physician skills weren’t being compensated with dollars. The informal nature of his dealings with other Burners meant that there was no insurance and legal paperwork to process, and it gave Raven the chance to put into practice his conviction that health care is a “right and not a privilege.”
More importantly, it connected Raven with the people he treated in a way he couldn’t at his day job. “Hugs and gifts are by far the best payment I have ever received,” Raven says. The festival, he adds, encourages people to remember “just how connected we are to one another.” (It also helps that there is very limited Internet and cell phone service, keeping Burners focused on each other, not their LCD screens.)
Gift-giving is a crucial part of building community in Black Rock City. Gifts often come in the form of jewelry, massages, advice, or just a swig of water. Your food may be a gift as well—from the woman who chased you down at sunrise to offer a hot breakfast from her tiny cart.
Sometimes the gifts take more elaborate forms. The city—built anew with every festival, only to be torn down at the event’s end—consists of a main camping area, formed by a series of concentric and radial streets, and an area reserved for art installations. There, the enormous wolf you can climb inside of is not just an object of art, but a gift to the Burners from the artists among them. At night, colorful lasers shoot across the night sky, and atop an art installation you can see a sea of neon lights spread out across the desert. When you walk through a tunnel made of plastic and emerge into a giant dome for a communal shower with about a hundred naked people and a DJ spinning—that experience is also a gift, and, potentially, the only time you might bathe that week.
Gillian Grogan, an MIT student and musician, says the gift-giving is contagious, making her want to reciprocate in kind. People in the outside world, she says, “have forgotten how to accept and give anything, either material or immaterial.” Feeling that warmth of giving and receiving without the intent to profit encourages Burners to see each other in a different light—as if they are truly at home, among friends. Grogan says she hopes that the altruism she experienced in Black Rock City will continue to “rub off” in her life beyond its gates.
Artists watch the sunrise from the hood of their “art car.”
Sociologist Katherine K. Chen has written (in this magazine as well) about the unconventional and intense ways that Burning Man gets ordinary people involved in what amounts to an international social movement. (A quarter of festival-goers come to the event from overseas, according to a 2012 census conducted by the event’s organizers.) Volunteers devote months of planning and preparation to building a community from the ground up and making it function—and inspire—as an idealistic, alternative vision of life beyond the outside culture of consumption and status-seeking.
That alternative, DIY ethos is at the heart of the festival. Across the “playa”—what festival-goers call the dry lakebed in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where Burners gather every year—the thumping electronic dance music reminded me of other large festivals, such as Coachella in California and Ultra in Miami. But those events are sponsored by corporations like Heineken and Red Bull, while the elaborate stages and massive art installations at Burning Man are all constructed by the festival-goers themselves.
As Chen writes, Burning Man breaks down the divide that separates formally trained artists and professional managers from everyone else, letting people find their own ways, however large or small, to be creative and contribute—whether that means assembling a stage or art installation, building one of the altered “mutant” vehicles that traverse the playa, performing dance or music, or volunteering the many other skills they use, or don’t use, in the outside world.
Of course, there are also plenty of drugs and exhibitionists at Black Rock City, true to the outside stereotype. But that’s not what I, or many other festival-goers, really got out of our Burning Man experience. Mickey Larsen, seventy-two, a retired high school teacher from Santa Cruz, California, was “dragged” to this year’s festival by his son and friends. Before he arrived in Black Rock City for the first time, Larsen had assumed the event would consist of “loud music, drugs, and pseudo-mystic gatherings.” But there was much more to it than that, he says. He describes the festival as an “intellectual and spiritual playground,” a coming together of immense amounts of energy and creativity to create and nurture an “authentic cooperative community.”
That’s what stayed with me, too, when I returned to “the default”—a term Burners use to describe life outside Black Rock City. Burning Man was less about the partying and more about creating a strong and open community, one without judgment, where radical self-expression is not just accepted, but encouraged as an end in itself.
That spirit carried on to the fiery end of the festival. Of the dozens of art installations assembled in Black Rock City every year, the highlights are two towering wooden structures, the Temple and the Man. In the Temple, Burners leave notes throughout the week that describe the suffering they are dealing with. The Man is seen as a symbol of conformity and oppression.
On the festival’s final weekend, both structures were burned to the ground. The next day, the temporary community of Black Rock City folded up its tents, and the people left the desert, taking their possessions with them and, perhaps, something more.
Hannah Albarazi is a journalist currently based in San Francisco, where she covers breaking news. Sari Blum is a freelance photographer also based in the San Francisco area.
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Young college-educated workers have struggled to find jobs in the wake of a devastating global recession. In Greece, the European epicenter of the economic crisis, the hardship is on a whole different level: college graduates are giving up on the careers they planned and heading home — to work on the family farm.
Photos from the farmers’ market in the Greek coastal city of Kalamata, where veteran farmers sell vegetables alongside college graduates. Young Greeks like Demetra Psonis (above left) had no luck finding jobs after the country’s economy collapsed. Photos courtesy of Eleftheria
In the last several years, stories have abounded in the American press about the struggles of recent college graduates. Unable to find jobs, overeducated young workers end up waiting tables, brewing espressos, and living with their parents. In Europe, the joblessness of the young — long an issue throughout the continent — has become desperate: Spain, for example, now has a youth unemployment rate of 56 percent, 17 percentage points higher than its rate four years ago, with no relief in sight.
And yet Greece — the country worst hit by the recession in Europe — offers a new twist on this woeful tale of well-educated but luckless youth. With no good job prospects, some college grads there are turning to one of the world’s oldest professions: farming.
Foteini Kollias is one of them. Now twenty-five-years old, she graduated with a degree in physical education from the National University of Athens around the time Greece’s economy collapsed five years ago. Unable to get a full-time job in her field, she eventually turned to growing fruit in Nafplio, a seaport town to the southwest of Athens.
Once a week, Kollias makes the hour-and-a-half trip to Athens to sell her fruit in the city’s central market. Over four years of farming, the hard labor has taken a toll on Kollias’s health, leaving her with a meniscus tear in her right knee that gives her constant pain. “Imagine lifting a box loaded with forty-five kilos of cucumbers every day while weighing no more than fifty kilos [110 pounds] yourself,” she says.
It is a grim outcome for a young woman who had been on track to get a well-paid government job before the economic crisis hit. “Torturing my body for so little money and no future prospects really depresses me,” she says.
Of course, youth unemployment is not just a problem for people in rich countries. The global recession has damaged the prospects of young workers throughout the world, and even as economies have recovered, the jobs have not come back. The problem is much worse for those without college educations.
Yet facts like these provide little consolation to young, educated workers like Kollias, whose careers have been permanently scarred by the country’s deep recession, which began in 2008 and has yet to end. Last year, the economy shrank by 6.4 percent. The nation’s unemployment rate currently stands at 27.6 percent, more than twice the average rate in the Eurozone and more than three times what it was when the crisis struck in October 2008. Other countries in Europe have also been beset by severe economic problems in recent years, but Greece has been hit the hardest, becoming the focus of international efforts to stop the spread of its economic ailments throughout the continent’s interconnected market.
There are many reasons given for the collapse of Greece’s economy and the massive unemployment it unleashed. One school of thought argues that huge budget deficits and expensive government benefits — in Greece, excessively generous worker pay and pensions — were at the heart of a crisis accelerated by the global recession. Other economists point to evidence that the economic collapse had more to do with the destabilizing rush of foreign dollars into those rapidly growing economies. Regardless of why it happened, the damage is clear: In 2004, Greece’s national debt was 99 percent of its GDP. Last year, it was 157 percent.
In Greece itself, much attention has been focused on political mismanagement. According to one popular account, one-party governments led alternately by the center-right New Democracy party and the center-left PASOK spread a pandemic of corruption and incompetence within a nepotism-plagued public sector, which had been growing unsustainably up until the crisis. Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs helped the government to fudge statistics and conceal its rising debt levels from European regulators. Meanwhile, the allure of fast money had eroded ethical standards in the country to the point that tax evasion became rampant.
Amid the country’s recent decline, it is difficult to remember the Greece of the fifties, sixties, and seventies — a period called the “Greek economic miracle” — when the country’s economy was roaring. Occupied during World War II and devastated by the civil war that followed, Greece began its rebuilding in the fifties with an ambitious campaign to “urbanize” its rural communities. En masse, Greeks living in the countryside moved to the expanding concrete landscape of the cities, rapidly expanding the workforces and consumer markets to be found there. The Greek “miracle” ended in the seventies, but healthy economic growth continued over the next few decades — until 2008.
Vassilis Psonis sells vegetables that he and his sister grow on their family’s farm. After he graduated from a cosmetology school, Vassilis couldn’t find work and didn’t have the funds to start his own business. Stav Dimitrοpoulos
Now the same process seems to be happening in the other direction, as young urbanites dash back to the fields. According to a survey conducted for the country’s Ministry of Rural Development in the populous counties of Attica and Thessaloniki, 68 percent of respondents — representing over one million Greeks, in a country of just ten million — are considering leaving the city. Two-thirds of them are college graduates, and a majority of them under the age of forty. Nineteen percent of those surveyed said they have already initiated their moves.
The Greek press likes to call the country’s legions of unemployed young workers its “Lost Generation” — a term also used in the US and UK, among other countries, to identify their own struggling youth. It may be hard to compare their experience to that of the iconic Lost Generation of young men and women traumatized by the bloodbath of World War I. That said, these young Greeks have been traumatized by a cataclysm of an economic kind: a massive contraction of the nation’s economy on the order of 20 percent over five years. Their job prospects remain bleak even as the global economy has recovered: youth unemployment — for workers aged twenty-four and under — now stands at 64.9 percent, triple the rate five years ago. (Among those aged twenty-five to thirty-four, the rate is 38 percent, but for those thirty-five to forty-four, it is much smaller — 25 percent — proving that unemployment is wasted on the young.)
Greece, once one of Europe’s rising stars, now looks to be headed in the same direction as Japan during its “Lost Decade” of the nineties — into an age of diminished expectations, with swelling ranks of unemployed youth, and no simple way out of its economic malaise.
In the elegant coastal city of Kalamata, sister and brother Demetra and Vassilis Psonis tend to a stall in the farmers’ market, where their many wares are on display: chestnuts, peaches, tangerines, cherries, onions, cabbages, corn, and a variety of greens. When the recession struck five years ago, Demetra was just beginning her studies at the Technological Institute of Crete, where she majored in accounting. Up until the country’s crisis, Demetra had been confident that she would land a job in a field that — back then — was highly paid and secure. “Trying to find decent employment in the recession turned out to be a wild goose chase,” says Demetra, twenty-three. “I soon ended up working in a cafeteria.”
At the time, Demetra considered moving to a wealthier country in northern Europe to seek out better employment opportunities. But she had no idea about what city to move to, much less how to transplant herself there — even within the borderless European Union, labor is not as mobile as capital. “Going abroad? Where and with whom?” she asks. “I didn’t have to dwell a lot on the decision.” So Demetra ended up returning to her family’s farm in Kalamata. She knew the work well; she had been growing vegetables there ever since she was ten years old.
Her brother soon joined her. Vassilis, twenty-five, had trained to be a hairdresser. But when he graduated from school, he couldn’t find a job, and he lacked the capital to open his own business. Even if he did have a salon, he says, it was obvious then that few people would be paying good money for haircuts in that economic climate.
Like his sister, Vassilis worked the fields of his family’s farm as a child. “I always felt I had an alternative in case things didn’t go as planned,” he says. “I like it. I like everything that involves my hands. I tell myself I hold the hoe instead of the brush.”
Oddly enough, when the siblings decided to return to Kalamata, the people most opposed were their parents. Farmers for life, they and their generation had suffered through the misery of hard manual labor. They had cheered Greek’s meteoric ascent to economic power. They had dreamed of raising future academics, lawyers, and scientists who would lodge their families — and the children and grandchildren to come — within the well-paid professional classes.
“They sacrificed their lives to offer us a good education,” Vassilis says. But when the economy fell apart, those newly minted educations became worthless. And Vassilis, Demetra, and many of their peers headed for the fields — the familiar trend of urbanization played in reverse.
Siblings Demetra and Vassilis Psonis inspect the onions they are selling at the farmers’ market in Kalamata. Stav Dimitrοpoulos
The ancient Greek playwrights, who developed the concept of irony, would find much to write about concerning modern Greece’s travails. Older generations of farmers who once exhorted their children to seek out more and more education now find themselves advising the same kids — off the record — to take up farming again to “fill their stomachs.”
And yet Tassos Papaphilis, a thirty-four-year-old farmer, is reluctant to advise anyone, however desperate, to follow his path. Tassos grows crops in Corinth, an hour’s drive west of Athens. He is somewhat of a celebrity in the Athenian market where he sells his fruit, a long-haired jokester who teases and compliments passersby as he implores them — sometimes aggressively — to smell the sweet fragrance of his oranges.
A trade-school graduate, Tassos used to work as an estate agent for a large Corinthian firm, but he lost his job five years ago when the recession annihilated the country’s real-estate markets overnight. Unwilling to leave his birthplace, he decided to take up his father’s profession of farming. These days, he grows oranges, tangerines, and zucchini, and rears hens to sell their eggs.
His father died around the same time that Tassos lost his job. Farming became a way of coping — more than just financially. When plowing the soil, Tassos says, he feels an intimate connection to his dead father.
But his decision to go into farming has not yet paid off with a stable income, in spite of how hard Tassos works his fields. Taking over the family farm was “the biggest self-entrapment of my life,” he insists. Early on, Tassos received a European Union farm loan of 35,000 euros to enhance his business. But the country’s consumers cut back on their spending much more than expected, and with the markets so sluggish, his plans to expand his farming business came to naught. He has yet to repay the loan, and with his payments on it now exceeding his profits, he is doubtful that his crops will ever bring in enough money to do so.
In fact, Tassos is still dependent on his grandmother’s pension to make ends meet. In this regard, he is like a growing number of young Greeks, who, unable to keep up with their monthly rent and bills, have retreated to the family nest, living off the incomes of more secure parents and grandparents.
Now well into his thirties, Tassos knows he cannot start a family when he can barely feed himself. And there is no telling if and when the troika of European and international lenders who now prop up Greece’s economy with loans will decide to pull back, leaving Greece to implode. “The worst is yet to come,” Tassos warns.
Even though his farm is doing poorly, even though he has lost his business career, Tassos the farmer keeps greeting his customers in the market with a smile and a joke. “People are grumpy and sober nowadays,” he says. “Making others laugh is an antidote to depression that comes free of charge.”
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed that unemployment in the days before industrialization was unheard of: “In traditional agriculture it did not exist; there was always work to do on the farms and in the supporting rural services.” During the Depression, he added, “farm employment or farm existence of a sort was the resort of some millions of urban workers in the United States.”
The Great Depression may offer this and other practical lessons for those struggling through the Great Recession. And yet it is also true that farming has become a less reliable last resort for families, with less bread to go around to their many breadwinners.
The rise of huge corporations has transformed the practice of agriculture and drastically lowered prices — and profits. It has become abundantly clear to Kollias, the farmer from Nafplio, how much things have changed. Her parents are both well educated: her mother studied medicine and her father is a mechanical engineer. In their thirties, they chose to become farmers because they valued their freedom, Kollias says. A family farm, back then, could actually support a family. “They worked hard, but their profit was in proportion to their labor hours,” she says. “If you had been eager to devote your body and soul to the land, you could have made good money in the past.”
Not anymore. Kollias puts it bluntly: “My brother, father, mother, and four workers live in the same house and struggle to scrape together a living,” There are no more “happy farmers,” she says — nothing like the yeomen farmers of Romantic poetry and Thomas Jefferson’s writings, tilling the soil and communing with nature — just jaded, overeducated young workers like her, anxious about their unsold merchandise and demoralized about their futures.
In between her trips to the farmers’ market in Athens, Kollias works occasionally as a lifeguard and gym instructor. The jobs pay little, but they help her retain the skills she learned studying physical education in college. When she was a student, she planned to take the civil-service exams and get a government job in her field. But when the crisis hit, the exams were called off. They have yet to be unfrozen. With no one willing to hire her, Kollias continues to grow her fruit.
With the years they spent in college amounting to nothing, and their work in the fields offering diminishing returns, the talents of Greece’s younger generation are being squandered. Who is to blame for the country’s modern tragedy? Kollias is unsure. She believes everybody shares some of the fault, even if she singles out Greece’s politicians for special scorn. “Still,” she adds, “we eat what we sow.”
Stav Dimitrοpoulos would like to thank Eleftheria for the newspaper’s help in finding interviewees and photographs for this story.
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
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In The Graphic Canon, comic artists reimagine dozens of classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion. The result, says creator Russ Kick, is like The Norton Anthology with pictures, drawn by an army of emerging artists who provide their personal — and sometimes unexpected — gloss on the world's great books.
The Graphic Canon (Vols. 1–3) By Russ Kick
Seven Stories Press. 1,600 pages.
More than a decade before Julian Assange and Edward Snowden became poster boys for information freedom, Russ Kick was a pioneer of using the Internet to heighten government accountability. If you’ve seen the video of then president George W. Bush reading “The Pet Goat” with a second-grade class in Sarasota, Florida, as terrorist attacks were underway on September 11, 2001, you can thank Kick for posting an uncut version of the footage on the web.
While he was an editor at the Disinformation Company, an online publisher of “the most shocking, unusual, and quirkiest news articles, podcasts, and videos,” Kick produced a number of anthologies that exposed untruths and challenged conventional wisdom. His most popular collections are Everything You Know Is Wrong and You Are Being Lied To. When a decade of media-based, information-freedom advocacy began to take its toll on his well-being, Kick knew it was time for him to switch gears.
While visiting a bookstore in Tucson, Arizona, Kick’s chance encounter with a graphic novel sparked a new direction. For the last three and a half years, he has been working with comic artists to reimagine classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion for a three-volume collection called The Graphic Canon. This summer, the final volume was released (the first and second volumes were released last year), and the trilogy will be available as a box set in October.
I spoke with Kick about how going in a new direction can be both daunting and gratifying, and why his current project adapting children’s stories is unsuitable for kids.
Part of what makes The Graphic Canon intriguing is that it does two things at once: elevates comic art while making classic literature more accessible to contemporary audiences. What led you to take on this ambitious project?
It was so depressing to produce these sociopolitical books, but I knew I wanted to keep writing and editing anthologies. So, I returned to some of my other lifelong interests: literature and art. One day I was in was in the graphic-novel section of a bookstore in Tucson and found a full-length, graphic adaptation of The Trial by Kafka. It struck me that there should be an anthology of graphic adaptations of classic works of literature. I thought it should be like The Norton Anthology I had dragged around in college. That was the moment the idea was born, and it seemed so obvious to me once I had it.
When did you become interested in graphic novels?
I’ve read comics all my life. Once I signed the contract with Seven Stories Press, I started approaching my favorite artists to ask them to be a part of this project. Then I branched out from there. One of the most fun parts of working on The Graphic Canon was discovering new talent. It is unbelievable how many talented illustrators and comic artists are out there. It was great to find people who are essentially unknown and give them the opportunity to be part of this collection.
Animal Farm as reimagined by Laura Plansker.
Reinterpreting iconic works of literature must be intimidating, and some of the chapters are closer renderings than others. Did you feel a responsibility to maintain these works’ original forms?
Because this is an art project, I started out by making the decision not to place limits on what the artist could do. I wanted the result to be a real collaboration between the original writer, their work, and the artist. By giving talented artists the greatest source material possible, I knew the result would be amazing.
A part of editing an anthology is learning to let go of control. It’s a process of chance and synchronicity. Some things you want at the start never materialize, and you end up with other things you’d never even considered that are just brilliant. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope; what you see is always unpredictable yet interesting.
The Graphic Canon isn’t just works of literature. You also include philosophical writings from people like Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche and excerpts from religious texts. How did you decide what to include as “the canon?”
I started with a list of what I considered to be the most critical works of literature. These were stories that would leave a noticeable gap if they weren’t included, like The Iliad, The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Tale of Genji. But I also wanted to go beyond what was predictable and bring in unexpected things. That’s why I included the Incan play Apu Ollantay.
I also had a wish list of things I wanted to see adapted because I thought the story would work really well visually. Some of the artists I worked with told me they’d always wanted to adapt a certain work, but they never had a reason to do it. That’s what happened with Rebecca Dart and Paradise Lost, which are these stunning full-page illustrations and beautiful hand-lettering. It also happened with Rick Geary and the book of Revelation. Being a part of this project gave those artists the excuse they needed.
“Jabberwocky,” as reimagined by Eran Cantrell.
There’s a lot of diversity in the collection, stylistically and in how the artist approached the material. Some adaptations are straightforward and use the original text, while others are more abstract interpretations of a partial or whole work. What does this diversity bring to the collection as a whole?
People have told me they were pleasantly surprised with The Graphic Canon because it is so multilayered and features so many different artistic styles. A few times while I was editing, I was surprised when an artist brought something out of a story that I’d never noticed before. Even though some of these works are hundreds of years old, they still have really relevant things to say. The themes are so timeless and universal, and the artwork helps to get that across.
Every chapter begins with an introduction you penned that serves to contextualize the work and familiarize the reader with the comic artist. What did you learn by writing those introductions?
Too many amazing writers and poets died in total poverty, and only gained recognition for their work posthumously. In the chapter introductions, I talk about why the work is important and give some interesting facts about the writer or poet and the history of the work, to humanize it. A lot of times the backstory of a writer’s life and career is as interesting as the work itself. There are a lot of fascinating stories about pieces that were either completely ignored during a writer’s lifetime or torn to pieces by critics when it was published. I almost got tired of having to write that again and again. But it did teach me to never give up hope.
You mention the possibility of a fourth volume a couple of times in The Graphic Canon. Is that something you have in the works?
I am working on another anthology right now, but it won’t be a fourth volume. It will be graphic adaptations of children’s literature. Originally, the publisher and I thought this would be a book for children and adults, but now that the artwork has started coming in, I realize the book isn’t going to be appropriate for kids. It’s well known that a lot of what we consider to be children’s stories are really dark and violent, so you can imagine how the artwork might be disturbing. The artists and I won’t be watering these stories down like they do at Disney.
Best of In The Fray 2013. Raised in small-town Minnesota, college student Shelby Wolfe traveled to Ethiopia to shoot images for a documentary about poverty. There she met Rahel, a fourteen-year-old girl orphaned by AIDS.
By Scott Winter Photos by Shelby Wolfe
She was shy, and that’s what drew aspiring photojournalist Shelby Wolfe to her. Her name was Rahel Nunu. Fourteen years old and hidden beneath a green scarf and brown skirt, she lived in a compound in Addis Ababa for Ethiopian children turned into orphans by the AIDS pandemic. Living HIV positive in a country where the disease is so stigmatized had taught Rahel the value of discretion. It was May, the hottest month in the Horn of Africa, but she insisted on covering her arms with the scarf: her skin had erupted with rashes and sores, side effects of the powerful antiviral medications she took. Today she’d also skipped school, not wanting to take the risk of her condition being scrutinized by her classmates, who didn’t know her secret.
Inside the AHOPE compound for HIV/AIDS orphans in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Shelby, a college freshman from small-town Minnesota, was visiting the compound as part of a photojournalism fellowship. She gravitated toward Rahel the moment she met her. The quietest girl in the orphanage, Rahel was an observer when alone or in groups, keeping her distance from the other children as they crowded around the compound’s TV to watch soccer matches and American music videos. Shelby was quiet herself, and she could relate to Rahel.
Sitting down next to Rahel, Shelby pulled out two sketchbooks and a pile of pencils she’d bought on the street. Shelby knew Rahel could draw. She had recently done well in a local art competition. With pencils or crayons or paint, she would draw the other girls—her sisters, as they called each other—or the beautiful women she saw on TV.
Shelby hoped the sketchbooks might get her to start talking about herself. Without speaking, Rahel drew a mother with the willowy look of a model.
Shelby drew an elephant. “Does my elephant need anything else?” Shelby asked.
Rahel took the sketchbook and added a baby elephant next to Shelby’s elephant, making it a mother.
Rahel Nunu in front of a painting she made on one of the orphanage’s walls.
Shelby was one of ten students from the University of Nebraska who were visiting Ethiopia on a three-week fellowship. For the past few years, donors had covered the overseas travel costs for a group of the university’s student photojournalists and videographers and a few of their professors (disclosure: I was one of the professors on Shelby’s trip). There were two conditions. First was that the students use the opportunity to capture Ethiopia’s stories of poverty and help bring about change there. Second was that they show their fellow Americans a new Ethiopia, a different kind of country than the one that Sally Struthers and company had brought to public attention in the 1980s with horrifying television images of famine victims.
Shelby had just twenty-one days to finish her assignment: shoot a batch of photos and videos that would impress her professors and wind up in a documentary and related blog the class was making about poverty in Ethiopia. Shelby needed a subject, and Rahel was the girl she chose. But Shelby didn’t have the reporting experience to get Rahel to open up to her. Shelby’s past work at her college newspaper was something altogether different from documenting a life-and-death issue like HIV/AIDS in Africa—and truth be told, Shelby had struggled to pass her reporting class that spring, right before she left for Ethiopia. She had never done anything like this before.
And then there was the heartbreak of the orphanage. She saw kids curled up on bunks, clutching their stomachs; the toxic medication they took seemed to make them as sick as the disease it was meant to fight. She saw babies, too, sleeping in rows of cribs, as nurses shuttled about the room caring for them. (“They’re our children,” one nurse told her.) For Shelby, the wild swings in emotion were difficult to take. One moment, she was watching kids playing ping-pong and twirling on a tire swing in front of walls painted with Dora the Explorer and Dr. Seuss characters—one of them drawn by Rahel. Another moment, Shelby found herself in the dark office of the orphanage’s assistant director, listening to Addis Bogale’s sobs as she described the most recent death of a child. “You don’t forget them,” Bogale said.
Shelby was overwhelmed by it all. She worried about whether she could handle three weeks in such grim surroundings. And yet she also knew that Rahel, and all her orphan brothers and sisters, didn’t get to leave.
Shelby slid the sketchbooks over to Rahel.
“You can keep those,” Shelby said.
Outside the compound, located near the Vatican Embassy in a residential area on the city’s west side.
Shelby Wolfe grew up in Minnesota. Her hometown, Owatonna, population 25,000, is the kind of heartland community that urges citizens on its Facebook page to make flag-themed fruit dips—strawberries, bananas, and blueberries—for the Fourth of July holiday. Her family lived an hour’s drive away from the Mall of America, one of the world’s largest shopping centers. As a kid, Shelby danced at an upscale studio. She had the same boyfriend for three years in high school. But she also loved Vietnamese food, especially a dish of grilled pork over vermicelli, and liked going to shows at First Avenue, a music venue where Prince used to play. Inspired by her globe-trotting older sister, she had hiked the Rocky Mountains and backpacked through Germany.
Shelby went off to college at the University of Nebraska. Away from home, Shelby pierced her nose. She started hanging out in coffeeshops. She became obsessed with her photojournalism class, to the point her other grades dropped and she had to do some explaining to her parents.
But that passion for photography also brought her to Ethiopia. The orphanage is funded by AHOPE for Children, a nonprofit based in Virginia. On her first day there, Shelby and her professor met with assistant director Bogale, who walked them through the part of the compound for younger children and then to a nearby group home. Bogale’s creation, the group home was a new project to integrate the children into the community so that AHOPE could get rid of the orphanage altogether. But that dream was a generation in the making.
Then Bogale brought them to another part of the compound, where Shelby met the teenage orphans. Sitting alone in one corner, watching the other girls watch music videos on the TV, was Rahel.
Rahel watches other children play basketball.
Addis Ababa is a modern city, only a century old. The capital of Ethiopia, it houses the headquarters of the African Union and is also known for being the home of beloved twentieth-century emperor Haile Selassie, known as Ras Tafari, who became the muse for the reggae movement half a world away.
Shelby saw little of the city. She spent each day at the compound. Nights, she met up with the other nine student photographers and three instructors, and together they critiqued the day’s photos. Those sessions were often as stressful for Shelby and her fellow students as the orphanage itself.
The group looked over the photos on Shelby’s laptop of Rahel sitting on her bed, watching TV, and showing off her artwork. It was clear to everyone that Shelby had some good shots, but she didn’t have a story.
Shelby was growing anxious. She didn’t have many days left. Her professors told her to keep shooting photos. Keep changing perspective. Keep asking questions. Shelby threw herself into the work, getting absorbed by the technical aspects of her craft. She kept telling herself that the story wasn’t about her. She should quit focusing on her own fears. What were they compared to Rahel’s? This girl wasn’t with her family—though she had one out there somewhere, unlike many of the girls in the compound. Not even the teachers at her school knew about her HIV. Being an orphan was enough of a stigma; she didn’t need the kids to know the rest.
Rahel and her AHOPE sisters walk to school, where only one teacher knows that the children are HIV positive.
One morning, Shelby followed Rahel to her school, where the staff put Shelby in front of all the kids and gave her a microphone to explain who she was and why she was there. The students lined up to meet her one by one. Then they lined up again to give her pink, orange, and white flowers. “Miss, I love you,” one girl said to her with a smile. The students giggled and begged Shelby to take their photos.
No, she could not fail at this.
One day at the orphanage, Shelby sat on the ground while Rahel rocked in a swing. Names of the world’s cities, countries, and landmarks were written in chalk on the walls of the compound. Rahel asked Shelby about the Coliseum in Rome. Shelby’s sister had been to India, and Rahel asked about how beautiful the country was. Rahel said she’d seen New York in a movie and wanted to see it for real.
Shelby asked her if she knew anyone who had visited other countries. Rahel said some of the other children had been adopted by families in the United States.
“Does that make you sad?” Shelby asked.
“Yes, but other children come.”
Rahel had been in the orphanage since she was five. Every child there, she told Shelby, was part of her family. “All I know is here,” she said.
Rahel and her friends laugh after making fun of some boys.
“I realized this is their life and these kids are making the best of it,” Shelby told me later. “I couldn’t imagine not having a family. But at the same time it was really touching that they are each other’s family.”
Her time with Rahel made Shelby think about how fortunate she was. Shelby is close to her older sister, who is always up for going with her to concerts and hikes and bonfires. She has a dad who is a periodontist and a mom who works at a pharmacy, and they lovingly take care of all her needs—from the Ford Focus she drives, to her out-of-state college tuition, to all the dance costumes in her closet.
Rahel had none of that. She could only rely on her “family” at the compound—assuming her sister-friends didn’t leave for a home of their own. When she prayed, Rahel said, she prayed for everyone at the orphanage. She prayed for the many mentally ill among the city’s street people.
“What do you pray for yourself?” Shelby asked.
Rahel said she’d ask God to help her help others. She’d ask to go to a better place, somewhere with a family that would make her their own. God can do anything, she said.
Rahel and her AHOPE sisters on the van taking them to field day at the Worldwide Orphans Complex.
Near the end of Shelby’s time in Ethiopia, Rahel and her classmates went on a trip. AHOPE and some of the other local orphanages had organized a soccer tournament, and the girls were set to play matches against the other orphanage teams—some with HIV and non-HIV kids, some with no HIV kids. As they rode to the soccer field in a red passenger van, the girls were noticeably giddy, happy to leave the compound for something other than school. In her field notes, Shelby described what happened next:
The girl sitting next to Rahel began vomiting into a narrow crevice between her seat and the doorway. The laughter and singing stopped, replaced with the sound of violent heaving.
Rahel placed her hand on her sister’s back, but her eyes were peeled forward, and her smile was gone. She handed the girl a tissue to wipe her mouth. The girl was embarrassed and turned to Rahel to say thank you. Rahel smiled slightly at her and withdrew her hand, collapsing it into her lap like it was too heavy for her to hold up on her own.
The van ride was silent for the rest of the way to the soccer fields, where they would face hundreds of other children who do not know they are HIV positive. It was as if they had forgotten, and then been reminded, of the burden they hold trying to hide their status from the world.
When they arrived at the sports complex, the girls put on their best game-faces and stepped out of the van one by one. They stuck together as they walked slowly toward the fields of children already playing.
The photos that day were strong. The van ride. The soccer match. The sidelines. The kids played games, and clapped and sang together. But most striking was an image of shy Rahel, having forgotten momentarily about the camera, dancing with her sister-friends in front of Shelby.
Rahel and her AHOPE sister, Ruth Tesfaye (middle left), compete in a race during field day.
The fellowship ended, and Shelby completed her assignment. Her professors were pleased. But in her field notes, Shelby was ambivalent. My work and being there for the last two-plus weeks was insignificant and maybe even selfish, she wrote.
When Shelby met Rahel before leaving through the front gate for the last time, she teared up and said, “I’ll see you later, Rahel.” But that wasn’t true.
Rahel said goodbye and waved hesitantly, with a solemn look on her face.
Then Shelby went home.
Scott Winter is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Shelby Wolfe is a sophomore photojournalism student at the University of Nebraska, where she is a senior photographer at the Daily Nebraskan. In November her project on Rahel will be released in a seven-minute multimedia video. Twitter: @UNL_scottwinter
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After her mother's unexplained death, a young woman ponders the long-term toll of not having access to adequate health care. A toothache brings on psychic hysteria about whether her own eventual demise will align with that of her mom.
I don’t know why my mom died at the age of forty-nine because my father refused to allow an autopsy. His superstitious and deeply traditional beliefs mean I’ll never know the cause of my mother’s death. Was it a complication from having high blood pressure? Did she have a heart attack? At this point, all I can do is speculate — so I do.
A theory I’ve come up with recently is that her death may have been caused by problems with her teeth. When my mom was in her thirties, her teeth began falling out for some unknown reason. By the time she died, she had only a few left in her mouth. I wonder if the pain and swelling in her face before she died was due to an untreated tooth abscess. A recent study shows that oral infections are causing more hospitalizations, and if left untreated, a tooth abscess can be deadly when bacteria spread.
“When money and access are not problems, an abscessed tooth can easily be treated with a root canal or an extraction,” reports the New York Times. “But increasingly, Americans rely on hospital emergency rooms for dental care, instead of regular dentist visits — a trend exacerbated by a lack of insurance coverage and trouble paying out of pocket.”
I remember times when I was growing up that my family used old newspapers instead of bathroom tissue because my parents couldn’t afford toilet paper. Having narrowly escaped homelessness, my father solicitously cut the newspaper into squares, and we laughed at the extent of his effort because that somehow made it less dispiriting. Some days we had electricity, and some days we didn’t. But the presence of stressed out, overworked parents was ubiquitous.
My tale of ill-fitting, hand-me-down, thrift-store clothes and sharing a bedroom with my older brothers is not unique. Anyone who grew up poor can tell you similar stories of the challenges that come from not having what you need, materially and emotionally. They can also tell you what it’s like to make decisions about their lives without the assumption of ever achieving financial security. It never occurred to me that I could have a life that didn’t involve economic struggle, and I wonder if my decision to become a writer isn’t a result of this. Who would seek out a lifetime of poverty other than someone for whom it was a prophecy?
Being a writer means I have no health insurance, no steady paycheck, and no stability. While writers who aspire to upward mobility say they’re simply “low income,” as though the condition is temporary, my intimate familiarity with life below the line of poverty makes me uninterested in feigning comfort through euphemistic niceties. It’s not comfortable juggling deadlines for a dozen publications while not technically being employed by any one. I thought I had accepted my lot, but a few weeks ago I began having problems with my teeth.
The dull ache persisted for days. Overwhelmed by my circumstance, I immediately assumed the worst. This was the beginning of the end. In two years, I’ll be thirty, and my teeth will start falling out. Soon after, I will die penniless and alone just like my mom.
I know this line of thinking probably seems extreme. A toothache doesn’t typically bring on psychic hysteria about one’s impending death, but if my life has taught me anything, it is that every misstep can be the start of a downward spiral. One illness can be the difference between making do and ruin.
For months I’ve been putting together a referral binder for a women’s recovery center where I am a volunteer. As soon as my tooth began to ache, I poured through the dental resources, frantically calling each practice to beg for an appointment. They all said the same thing: our budget has been slashed, and we are unable to accept new patients at this time.
One clinic told me their wait-list is over a year long. Another said my only option was to show up at 6 a.m. because the only way I would be seen is if I were one of the first three people in line, although that was only for extractions. All the receptionists I spoke with were deeply apologetic, and I could hear the sadness in their voices. I assume they spend a good amount of their days turning away people in need. Despite these women’s compassion, I cracked. I reached my emotional limit and commenced to sob.
As I wept, I thought back to every crappy clinic I’d visited. I remembered the crackpot doctor who used Google to answer my routine questions. I recalled the times I’d been ripped off because I couldn’t afford another option. I thought about the number of clinic staff who’d told me that if I only had a child I didn’t want and couldn’t care for I’d be eligible for health insurance through the California Medical Assistance Program (Medi-Cal) — but even that doesn’t include coverage for dental work.
I realized I’d gotten so used to receiving poor treatment that I no longer believed I deserved better care. I wonder how many other uninsured Americans believe the same.
I wonder about the lives of people who have health insurance. I imagine the ease of having a dentist who will make an appointment for me because they fear losing my business or care about my well-being. I consider what it must be like to drive to an air-conditioned dentist’s office without having to wait for a perpetually late bus in the smoggy, summertime heat while being harassed by men on the street. I think about handing over a copayment instead of waiting for the visit’s bill, and carelessly allowing the dentist to address my toothache without fear of how much each piece of gauze will cost me.
I want to say I felt happy for the people for whom going to the dentist is not a time of stress and struggle, but my tears in that moment contained only hatred for them and the entire American medical system.
We often don’t consider the long-term toll — personally and as a country — of what it means to have a nation of people who can’t access adequate health care. In addition to our physical depreciation, new research confirms the negative neurological effects of a life plagued by financial anxiety. Having scientific data to back up my personal experience is oddly comforting yet disconcerting. Mostly, it is evidence of the injustice of poverty.
Tina with her mom.
When the poor are treated as collateral damage in a fight between wealthy, well-insured politicians, people like my mom die. It wasn’t so long ago that she and I were snuggled together on the couch, giggling at the sight of my dad cutting that newspaper into squares. And when I am able to find the humor to commiserate with others like me about the absurdity of our situations, I know my mother lives on through me. She gave me what she could when we had nothing at all.
I still haven’t been able to see a dentist about my toothache, and though I have moments when I fear my mother’s and my fates will be the same, the memories of what my mom gave me drive me to keep fighting for something better than she had — so I do.
Raised fatherless and poor in a Haitian coastal town, Dr. Jean-Gardy Marius studied medicine abroad thanks to the financial assistance of an American missionary. Now he is leading an innovative, grassroots effort to root out cholera and bring communities in Haiti’s rural north to health and self-sufficiency.
It’s easy to hear about what’s going wrong in Haiti. Search the news about the beleaguered Caribbean nation, and the negativity overwhelms. Cynical volunteers decry the country’s hopelessness. Aid organizations put forward flimsy justifications for their failures. Frustrated Haitians wait for foreign governments to make good on the “build back better” promises they made, with much fanfare, three years earlier, after an earthquake devastated the country. Today, over 350,000 people continue to live in shelters that were intended to be temporary. The ongoing cholera epidemic has claimed more than 8,000 lives, and malnutrition and famine plague the country.
It is not just that Haiti lacks homes to house its homeless, medicines to treat its sick, and food to feed its hungry. Over the decades, the country has been drained of its human talent, too. There are only four doctors, nurses, and midwives in the country for every 10,000 people, and most of them are located in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s densely populated capital. The dearth of trained professionals contributes to some heartbreaking health statistics: seventy out of every 1,000 children in Haiti die before their fifth birthday, and 350 out of 100,000 mothers die in childbirth.
It is against this national backdrop of despair that local stories of Haitian resourcefulness and resolution stand out. Even in some of the country’s most impoverished areas, there are people like Jean-Gardy Marius, a Haitian doctor leading an innovative, grassroots effort to root out cholera and bring communities in Haiti’s rural north to health and self-sufficiency.
Photo courtesy of OSAPO
Marius and his humanitarian group OSAPO have worked over the past six years to bring health services to the people of Rousseau, a poor rural community about sixty miles north of Port-au-Prince. When the earthquake struck and cholera spread quickly through tainted water supplies, OSAPO responded by putting up tents to house infected patients, distributing water purification tablets and chlorine, and creating hydration stations for ill people making their way to the hospital — ultimately saving the lives of thousands. OSAPO is now partnering with international aid organizations Oxfam and UNICEF in the country’s north to stem the spread of cholera during Haiti’s hurricane season.
But OSAPO’s efforts go beyond emergency care — and even medical treatment. Marius, who grew up in extreme poverty in a western coastal town, believes that groups like his can provide Haiti’s rural areas with the basic knowledge and resources they need to grow successfully on their own. “Our vision at OSAPO is to improve living conditions,” says Marius, forty-three, whom I interviewed over the phone while he was in Lincoln, Nebraska, in June. “To do that, we have to come up with a good primary health care system. For me, this means education for adults and kids, access to latrines, and healthy drinking water — all the things human beings need to survive.”
After all, the roots of Haiti’s current health crisis go far beyond the 2010 earthquake. The country’s deep and pernicious inequalities have existed since its days as a slave colony, the first one where the slaves revolted and threw off the yoke of colonialism two centuries ago — only to be beset by forced reparations to France, American occupation, and international trade embargoes that stunted its growth from early on. Since then, through brutal dictatorships and corrupt democracies alike, Haiti has struggled to grow its economy in any sustainable fashion, leading to a vicious circle of privation and poor health.
With Haiti’s entrenched poverty in mind, OSAPO has adopted a holistic approach to health care. The group does more than run a health clinic in Rousseau. OSAPO’s staff have trained and deployed health educators into the community to teach people about sanitation, immunization, and family planning. They have dug latrines for 360 families and constructed wells to provide clean drinking water for 2,500 more. They have trained midwives to recognize signs that a particular childbirth might require medical intervention, so that women who live hours away from OSAPO’s clinic will arrive in time to save the mother and child if complications arise.
Photo courtesy of OSAPO
The organization’s focus is on helping people to help themselves. At OSAPO’s clinic, patients are charged nominal fees for each service. The fees, Marius says, are about teaching the community about self-reliance and accountability, while also avoiding the corruption that plagues other clinics. Likewise, instead of handing out food, OSAPO’s nutrition program provides seeds and chickens along with agricultural assistance and educational workshops. “You have to put people back to work,” Marius says. “Agriculture is one of the best solutions to help them economically.”
Marius knows something of self-reliance. The oldest son in a poor family, he never met his father and grew up watching his stepfather abuse his mother. After he stood up to protect her, his stepfather threatened him, and Marius moved in with an uncle.
“I took a bus to his house with hope that he could help me get back into school,” Marius says. “But my uncle used me for household labor.”
At the age of thirteen, Marius ran away from his uncle’s home. For a year, he slept and begged on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Then, a friend brought Marius with him to stay with his family in Pierre Payen, a small village in the northwest. When he was fourteen, he got a job assisting Dr. Victor Binkley, an American surgeon working in Pierre Payen. Through him, Marius met an American missionary who supported him financially when he decided to pursue a medical degree.
After studying medicine in the Dominican Republic and Germany, Marius decided — unlike many of his Haitian peers — to return to his country to work as a doctor.
Photo courtesy of OSAPO
In 2007, he founded OSAPO, or the Oganizasyon Sante Popilè (Popular Health Organization). After a year of working out of a mobile clinic, OSAPO built a permanent health-care center in Rousseau. Today, OSAPO has a staff of five doctors, nine nurses, and one agronomist; last year, it served roughly 52,000 clients.
OSAPO’s model of charging small fees for its services makes sense even in impoverished communities, says Dr. Kim Coleman, a radiologist from Lincoln, Nebraska, who has been to Haiti five times as a visiting doctor at OSAPO’s clinic. She points out that international aid organizations that step in to provide free services can unwittingly create “beggar economies” that undercut local organizations. “The buy-in from patients is so important,” Coleman says, “You can see the damage done by giving handouts. [Marius’s approach] is better for the people, and makes for better compliance.”
Whether foreign aid creates perverse incentives is a major point of controversy in the development world. In recent years, prominent economists such as Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly have taken opposing views of its effectiveness, while social entrepreneurs ranging from Paul Polak to Muhammad Yunus have argued — to varying degrees — for more market-driven solutions to the problems of poor nations. Perhaps nowhere else is that debate more relevant than in Haiti, which is believed to have more aid groups per capita than any other country except India — as many as 10,000, according to a 2006 report from the World Bank. (During the rule of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, foreign governments sought to sidestep the corrupt regime — notorious for funneling aid into Duvalier’s personal coffers — by sending their funds to NGOs instead.)
Since the 2010 earthquake, ninety percent of the six billion dollars disbursed to Haiti has been given to international NGOs and private contractors, while less than half a percent has gone to Haitian businesses and locally run organizations like OSAPO. As the group’s partnership with Oxfam and UNICEF makes clear, the two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And yet OSAPO’s supporters argue that its cost-effective, comprehensive, and grassroots approach to development should be scaled up. At the moment, Marius points out, there are not even enough qualified candidates to fill his clinic’s need for trained doctors and nurses. If Haiti’s most educated health-care workers continue to flock to Europe and North America, Haiti will need to keep relying on foreign assistance.
Marius hopes that his example will inspire other Haitian professionals to stay at home and tend to a country that desperately needs their talents. When the aid dries up or the foreign doctors fly off, who will be there to care for the sick?
“I wanted to make something that is strong,” Marius says of his group. And in building that vision, he has made the people of Rousseau stronger.
The expression of a male stranger catches a coffee shop patron by surprise. His eyes remind the young woman of her late father’s, leading her mind to drift between the past and present.
By Shannon Schaefer Perri
For a little girl, I had many big questions while growing up. My mother usually recommended I write them down, so I wouldn’t forget, and then ask my father. No matter my age, my father always treated my questions with awe and philosophical fascination. I remember sitting in our downstairs living room — the one without the TV — me in my pajama set with my wet hair freshly combed, while my father sipped a glass of red wine. I’d feel so grown up, my mom in their bedroom, my younger sisters already upstairs asleep, and my father and I speculating.
I’d ask him greedily: What happens when we die? Do animals have feelings? Does he prefer to be awake or asleep? He’d tell me he secretly wondered if our whole universe was just a cell on the body of a giant creature — the moon an amoeba. I’d ask him if time really exists because sometimes it didn’t seem to. His eyes would widen while the skin around his brown eyes, the same ones I have, would stretch as he spoke and listened.
I’m sitting at a coffee shop, still heartbroken over my father’s death four and half years ago. I’m trying to write, pursue my dreams and all, because my father would have liked that. Yet, I can’t write because an elderly, plumpish man without much hair is distracting me with every lift of his silver eyebrows. He looks nothing like my wavy-haired, spirited father, but something about his eyes, or maybe the thin skin around his eyes, reminds me of him. I try not to stare at this man while he speaks to his friend, but I feel as though he’s flicking pieces of my father at me with every shift in his facial movements. How can this be? It’s like dreaming of my father only to wake up and realize he is dead. Yet, seconds ago he seemed so alive.
It’s trickery for this man to reach into my deepest ache with his eyes and confuse me. I am startled by this man and must remember he’s not my father. And that my father is not here.
I remember getting the call. That particular night I had been studying for a test the next day, books sprawled across my kitchen table. I missed the first few calls, as I had put my phone on silent to concentrate.
When my mother finally got through, she said my father had had some sort of seizure and the paramedics were sending him via STAR Flight to Seton Medical Center Austin. My mother and sisters were driving the hour-long distance. I was already there in the city for college.
I arrived at the hospital before my family, but for more than twenty minutes the doctors wouldn’t let me see him. I paced in the white-tiled waiting room. I wondered if I should have emailed my teacher to cancel my test for the next day. I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening, but I walked around, overwrought that my father could be feeling all alone when I was only a few rooms away.
When I finally did see him, he was talking loudly, but his voice had no variation. He sounded like a robot. He hadn’t had a seizure, but a massive stroke, and his brain was swelling. He kept asking me to squeeze his hand. He wanted to feel his hand on his right side, but he couldn’t because his right side had gone paralyzed.
His left eye darted around, panicked. “Squeeze my hand, Shannon.”
“Daddy, I’m squeezing it.”
“Squeeze harder.”
“Daddy, can’t you feel that?”
I try not to look back at the man in the coffee shop. I could hear his voice soften. My father’s voice used to soften. My father had the most booming, charismatic voice. It was also the most gentle. I’d like to stop thinking about my father now. I’d like to write and get on with my life.
Yet against my better judgment, I begin to study the wrinkly face and protruding gut of the man in the coffee shop. My skin begins to radiate heat. I bite my lip and begin typing furiously — about nothing — on my old yellow laptop my father had bought me.
How come this man gets to live? My father was young and healthy. I want his soft voice, not this stranger’s. Why couldn’t it have been the other way around?
Shame breaks my anger down.
This man seems nice enough. I can’t make out what he’s saying, but I hear his voice. Its familiar cadence starts to soothe me. My mind drifts to another memory of my father. I was twenty years old, and for the first time I saw raw despair in my father’s eyes — or at least it was the first time I was able to identify it.
We met for dinner at a small-town Mexican food chain called Margarita’s, halfway between my college and home. My father ordered a top-shelf margarita on the rocks, while I daringly ordered a Negra Modelo to impress him, two months shy of my twenty-first birthday. I wasn’t carded, and my father didn’t even care.
His face wore a hardened look of intensity that scared me. He wasn’t doing well at work. He and my mother were struggling. He wasn’t where he wanted to be, and he said that time was running out. He wanted to be happy, he was fifty-six, and he wanted to do the best with the time he had left, he said.
“Daddy! Stop! Fifty-six is young these days.”
“I have a lot of life to live. I’m not ready to die, Shannon.”
“Well, of course you’re not.”
But he did, shockingly, just one month later.
I wonder if the fatal blood clot that traveled up to my father’s brain had already started clumping then. I wonder if a part of him knew what was coming.
It reminds me of when I visited Wyoming. I walked along several rivers, and occasionally I’d see natural debris cluster together, clogging the waterway. I guess this is what was happening inside of my father, to the point that his brain couldn’t take it.
As the eyes of the man in the coffee shop widen, I see my father clearly. I now understand why this man reminds me so much of him. It’s a very specific facial expression — the same one my father wore when in meaningful conversation, usually about something existential.
I want my father back every day. I see him and feel him, and I’m unsure that he could actually be gone. I have all the same questions as when I was a little girl. Yet, I am stuck. If there are answers, do I really want to know them?
I’d rather be tormented like this, unsure where he is, than to be certain he’s gone. I’d rather be lost and searching than in a place he’ll never be.
Shannon Schaefer Perri is a writer with a background in social work. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her dog, birds, cats, and husband. She is one of the cofounders of the upcoming literary magazine, the Austin Review. This essay is her first published work. Twitter: @ShannonPerri1
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In this excerpt from her recently published book Generation Roe, pro-choice activist Sarah Erdreich talks with women who had an abortion and discusses the complicated set of emotions they bring to the abortion debate — even decades after the procedure.
By Sarah Erdreich
Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement By Sarah Erdreich
Seven Stories Press. 272 pages.
When people know you work in the pro-choice movement, the stories come out. All of the sudden, you’re a safe person. You can be trusted to hear personal stories about terminating a pregnancy because you won’t judge or criticize. When you go through life hearing such stories, one thing becomes quite clear to you: all kinds of women have abortions. According to the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute, one in three American women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five.
Rachel (not her real name) is one of my mother’s oldest friends. I have known her and her husband practically all of my life. But it wasn’t until I told them I was writing a book about reproductive rights that Rachel opened up about her own experience with abortion, back in the mid-seventies.
Several years into her marriage, Rachel became pregnant. She had already had two healthy pregnancies, but this pregnancy didn’t progress normally. Rachel was vague on the details when she recounted her story to me, but she made it clear the abortion was medically necessary.
Had I not been offered that option, I very well could have lost my life.… There will always be doubts if I did right or I did wrong, but the right thing is that people can make the choice. I was fortunate that I had good medical care, and I was able to understand my options. But not everyone has that liberty.
“I’m not the least bit ashamed of what I did,” Rachel added. “In fact, I feel somewhat empowered by the choice because that was my right.” Yet Rachel only agreed to be interviewed if her real name was not used.
The day after I spoke with Rachel, I spent some time with a longtime friend of my father’s family. Toward the end of our visit, she mentioned that she had had an abortion many years earlier. Months later, Vicki (also a pseudonym) told me the whole story.
In the early seventies, Vicki became pregnant. Her husband threatened to leave her unless she had an abortion. They were living in a city that was hundreds of miles from her parents, siblings, and closest friends – and in one of the few states that had liberalized its abortion laws by then. “It was [the state’s] law to first see a psychiatrist,” Vicki said. “I remember I told the psychiatrist that if my husband wasn’t in the picture I would not consider abortion, but I guess obtaining the husband’s approval was routine.”
The entire procedure was covered by Vicki’s health insurance. After it was done, her husband — who, she said, had “badgered” her to get the abortion — called her a murderer. She later divorced him.
Vicki never told her family about her abortion.
My ex-husband is the only one who knows. I wanted to tell my mother, but that wasn’t news I wanted to break in a long-distance telephone call. That was back when long-distance calls meant something.… If I’d had more confidence to trust my feelings, and realized I was capable of supporting and raising a child on my own, I would not have had an abortion.
When I worked for the National Abortion Federation, I heard many women express gratitude that they could legally have an abortion, even as they regretted the particular circumstances — an unstable relationship, economic hardship, age, or a lack of education — that made abortion their best choice. To appreciate the right to make your own decision, even as you deplore the circumstances that led to that decision, is a complicated set of emotions that established pro-choice organizations haven’t always successfully addressed.
Groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Abortion Federation generally stick to messages about how common and safe abortion is, but they don’t offer a great deal of in-depth discussion about the range of emotions women may experience after having an abortion. Instead, they offer first-person stories, which overwhelmingly talk about abortion in positive terms. While studies have shown that most women feel relief after their abortions, women who have more ambivalent feelings afterward may not find comfort or support in these stories and messages.
The anti-abortion movement has been incredibly persuasive in its insistence that if a woman has mixed feelings following an abortion, then abortion itself must be unethical. In testimony before Congress in 1981, pro-life advocate and therapist Vincent Rue coined the term “post-abortion syndrome” to refer to an adverse physical or emotional response to abortion. While neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognize post-abortion syndrome as an official diagnosis, the term quickly gained traction in the anti-abortion community.
In 1987, Ronald Reagan asked his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, to write a report about the effects of abortion on women. An avowed opponent of abortion, Koop believed that the procedure traumatized women. He had even coauthored a book, Whatever Happened tothe Human Race, which discussed post-abortion trauma. Even so, he was reluctant to do as Reagan asked. Koop was careful to distinguish between his personal beliefs and scientific evidence, and he refused to let ideology pressure him into taking a stance that the available evidence did not support. Answering Reagan in a January 1989 letter, Koop wrote that he could not conclude one way or another whether abortion was harmful to women.
Koop’s position shocked and incensed his fellow conservatives. President George H. W. Bush declined to appoint him secretary of health and human services in the new administration, and Koop left office one month before the end of his second term as surgeon general.
In 1988, the American Psychological Association commissioned a study to review the research on the psychological effects of abortion. After a survey of over two hundred studies, a panel of six experts found that only nineteen or twenty met what they considered reliable scientific standards. Based on those studies, the panel concluded that “legal abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in the first trimester does not pose a psychological hazard for most women.”
While some women did experience distress, they were in the minority. One study found that “seventy-six percent of women [who had a first-trimester abortion] reported feeling relief two weeks after an abortion, and only seventeen percent reported feeling guilt.”
It is important to note that women seeking later abortions reported more distress after their abortion, as did women who had difficulty making their decisions. While eighty-eight percent of abortions are performed within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, women who have the procedure done in the second or third trimester overwhelmingly say that the timing was due to a delay in making the necessary arrangements — including raising money and securing an appointment. Fetal abnormality is another reason: many birth defects that are incompatible with life are not discovered until the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy, or even later.
My college years were shaped by the experiences of several close friends who chose to have an abortion following unplanned pregnancies. I learned from their situations that no matter how deeply pro-choice someone might be, it is still normal to have mixed feelings about having an abortion.
“I would never fault a woman who had an abortion for not wanting to share that with other people, because it’s too difficult,” Shannon Connolly, a medical student at the University of Southern California, told me. “But I hope they would be able to. Until abortion is normalized and people are able to say it’s just another part of health care, we won’t be able to talk about it in a meaningful way.”
Sarah Erdreich is a women’s health advocate, writer, and pro-choice activist. Her work has appeared in On The Issues, Lilith, Feminists For Choice, and RH Reality Check.
This excerpt has been slightly edited to adhere to In The Fray‘s style.
Last July, four women undertook the life-threatening adventure of running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. They did it to feel the excitement. They did it to test their bravery. They did it to inspire other women to take their chances among los toros, too.
By Jeannie Mark
5:30 a.m.: Oneika’s alarm bellows, dragging me from the darkness. Allowing my foggy mind to waken, I lay inert for a moment to process the reason for such an early wake up call. Today, we run with the bulls.
6:00 a.m.: The girls and I start to dress. The four of us slide on our white pants, lace up our runners, and tie red sashes around our waists. I tie my red bandana firmly against my throat. The day before a Japanese tourist was dragged by a bull when his bandana was snagged by its horn. I turn to the girls and say, “Tie up everything tight. No loose shoelaces, sashes, or bandanas.” Why do I feel the need to pretend to be brave and play mother hen? Deep down, I’m not positive of anything.
6:10 a.m.: The girls and I continue the conversation we’ve been having for days: where is it best to run? We’ve received many recommendations. The top of Estafeta. Fifty meters down Estefata. Telefonica, near the bullring. We agree that the last place we want to end up is the bullring. There’s a waft of fear about human pileups. Nicole B. jokes that she fears other runners more than the bulls. A consensus is reached. We’ll go fifty meters down Estafeta, stick to the right-hand side, and try not to leap toward a bull. Secretly, I want to touch one.
6:14 a.m.: Nicole B. vocalizes her nervousness. She says she’s always like this. I tell her that if she doesn’t want to run, she shouldn’t. It’s an individual decision. I feel the pressure though. This was my idea and backing out isn’t an option.
6:21 a.m.: Oneika reconfirms our plans. She’s been an interesting force during this trip. As we watched the bulls run on television the day before, Oneika squealed with unchecked enthusiasm. This morning she seems more sober. “Stick to the right, yes?” she asks. “Let’s not get near the bulls.” I realize she’s adventurous, but intelligent about it. I long to be like her instead of just grossly impulsive.
6:30 a.m.: In San Fermin colors, we leave our flat to meet with a fellow runner, Jarmo Jarvi. We head down a ramp close to where the bulls are housed before the run and stand near the old city wall. A statue of San Fermin has been placed in a cubbyhole and sealed off by glass. This is where corredors sing to the divine and pray for a successful run. Daylight is beginning to trickle in. Mornings in Pamplona are chilly, yet I feel a furnace in my belly. Am I losing or gaining courage?
6:45 a.m.: Serious runners are starting to gather. The nerves among our group are beginning to swell. Oneika and Nicole B. break into hip-hop and pop songs to slice the tension. I join in. Nicole S. doesn’t display signs of cold feet. She laughs at our silliness.
7:00 a.m.: We meet a reporter and cameraman from Cuatro TV. Beatriz, the reporter, spots us easily. The proportion of female corredors is dismally low. The cameraman tells us he’s run before and asks where we plan to start. He says starting on Estafeta is unwise. It’s narrow and there are no barricade openings for us to slip through. We glance at each other nervously. He offers to show us what might be safer. At Telefonica, he says, there’s a curve. After that, it’s a straight run towards Plaza del Toros, the bullring. He leads us down Mercaderes, turns onto Estafeta, and inches closer to Telefonica. We weave through partiers, runners, and watchers. I glance up at the balconies and wonder if they pity me – or if they watch in awe.
7:12 a.m.: The cameraman engages with la policía before we make it to Telefonica. Words are exchanged, and so is an understanding. He says we can’t linger here, or we’ll be shuffled off as spectators. An unease rumbles throughout the group. Do we stick to Estafeta, where any of us could become a target without escape? We begin to make our way back to the beginning of the run. I can tell Nicole B. isn’t comfortable with changing strategy midstream.
7:19 a.m.: We wait in the bosom of the crowd of runners. Male pheromones surround us. The reality is hitting me now, so I imagine how I’m going to run. Elbows out, nimble on my feet. Veterans say this is the worst part of el encierro. Beatriz reappears and interviews us in the throng of testosterone. Word spreads through Pamplona, and we become known as the four chicas – the female runners who are challenging the bulls.
7:25 a.m.: In the crowd, I talk to a small Colombian man who says he doubts he will run. Why he hasn’t left the street yet is beyond me. A tall, muscular man pushes toward me. The look on his face is pure fright. He bows out of the run. My limbs are rigid, and my head is on fire. An audible quake shakes me. It is the chant of the corredor. I join in and begin to feel looser. We are all in this fate together. Whatever happens next, we accept.
7:45 a.m.: The mass of bodies begins to move, and we move with them. I’m worried we won’t make it to the spot we want in time. Our trotting turns into a light jog as we weave down Estafeta toward the corner of Telefonica.
7:51 a.m.: A bit breathless, we make it. I’m now fully awake to this. I feel the pulse of the crowd. I hear the screams of people trying to psych themselves up. Behind me are five young women clutching a doorway. I turn to one and yelp, “Girl power!” We all high five each other.
7:53 a.m.: Police comb the crowds, removing anyone they deem unsuitable to run. With the cobwebs cleared, we are left with a collective jangle of hopes and fears. It’s almost on and I can’t escape now.
8:00 a.m.: A rocket goes off and the mass of runners stirs. People start jumping up and down, trying to see down the street. One of the girls shouts, “What do we do? Start running?” I tell her to hold steady. I haven’t heard the second rocket. People start to rush forward, but I yell, “Wait until you see horns!”
8:01 a.m.: We see horns. I scream, “Run!” And we do. Adrenaline rips through me. All I can make out are hides of animals, blending together in shades of brown and tan. Horns swerve in lightening motion. I expect the slippery cobblestones to conspire against me, but by some miracle, I stay upright. Men and women zoom past me, elbowing me and pushing my shoulders from behind. I steel myself against them. Shouts are popping my eardrums. I swivel my head and see a tan bull shaking the earth beside me. If I angle to the right just a bit I can touch his smooth, furry skin. I’m amazed that in all the chaos I can freeze this moment in my mind. Then it’s gone and so is he.
8:02 a.m.: All I can focus on are flashes of other runners. White and red sensory overload. I see Jarmo and Nicole S. in front of me. I know Nicole B. is behind me, but I keep running. A couple is sprawled on the cobblestones ahead, but instead of tumbling with them, I jump over them. This is where my nerve fails. I spot an open barricade through which I can dive, but I don’t. I cling to my adrenaline like a strung out junkie.
8:03 a.m.: My body moves more lithely than I’d imagined. I shout at Jarmo to keep going. I see the tunnel for Plaza del Toros and realize I’m headed for the bullring, which is precisely where I don’t want to go. There is a human pileup at the entrance. I screech to a halt, unsure what to do. There are more bulls coming, and if I don’t move, things could turn bad. Before I can react, the pile of people disentangle themselves and clear the path. I shoot past them into the bullring, gasping for air. A Spanish man grabs me and plants a sloppy kiss on my eye. He exhales all the air from his lungs and laughs wildly. He’s ecstatic to be alive. I notice for the first time that I’m also intact. I made it.
8:04 a.m.: I notice the atmosphere in the ring. The stands are overflowing. The bystanders are roaring. Some runners have hopped up onto the barriers,where they can avoid humans and bulls. Others are sitting in the stands. Flashbulbs are bursting as photographers capture the pandemonium. I find Jarmo and Nicole S. Jarmo and I embrace. His lip is slightly bleeding. We’re both sweaty, out of breath, and talking excitedly. Nicole B. flies in finally. As she hugs us, a flock of people surge into the ring. The last bull has arrived.
8:06 a.m.: We find Oneika in the stands. She had dived through a barricade after an elbow landed in her eye.
8:07 a.m.: I’m tingly, and playful like a child. When they release the cows into the ring, I leap in and start dancing. Runners with cojones do leaps over the cows. The runners congratulate each other with a handshake or a slap on the back. A woman calls to me, “I’ve been watching you. You are brave!” She anoints me with a high five.
Conclusion: So, we did it. And survived. Would I run again? For some loco reason, I’m game to try.
Jeannie Mark officially quit her life in 2010 to pursue her dream of world exploration. You can find more about her run with the bulls on her blog, Nomadic Chick, and the website Girls Running With Bulls.
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Best of In The Fray 2013. Each spring, hundreds of foreigners converge on Mount Everest, hoping to conquer the world’s highest peak. With them come jobs for Sherpa guides, porters, and guesthouse workers—and lethal risks for those stuck on the mountain’s crowded slopes.
Ever since 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, many more have aspired to follow them to the top of the world. Every year, hundreds of foreign adventurers climb Everest—at 29,029 feet, Earth’s highest peak—each paying tens of thousands of dollars for the opportunity.
For these tourists, conquering Everest is often a lifelong ambition. But for their local guides and porters, it is a mere job—albeit a dangerous and well-compensated one. A porter carrying goods to the Everest base camp on Nepal’s border makes an average of nine dollars a day, more than three times the daily wage of a typical worker in Nepal. High-altitude workers can earn much more: hiring a Sherpa to climb with you costs $5,000 to $7,000, plus tips and bonuses.
And yet few workplaces boast as high a mortality rate. Just last year, eleven people died attempting to scale Everest—the largest death toll since 1996, the mountain’s deadliest year, when over two days alone a blizzard led to the deaths of nine climbers (a disaster documented by Jon Krakauer in his book Into Thin Air).
The photographs above document my travels last summer through the mountains of Nepal. I began my journey in the northeastern district where Everest is located, Solukhumbu. Later, I spent several weeks with a team of Nepalese mountain guides training in Kakani, one hour north of Kathmandu. In exploring the trails and talking with numerous guides who have worked the Himalayan peaks, I gained a sense of the ambivalence that locals have about the growing international popularity of Everest, which in recent years has brought them rising shares of both bounty and danger.
One of over 120 ethnic groups in Solukhumbu, the Sherpa ethnic group has come to control the tourism and mountaineering industry in the district, and their name has become synonymous with the trained personnel who help foreigners up the slopes (Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa, paired up with the New Zealand mountaineer Hillary on Everest’s first successful ascent). For some Sherpas, the work they do above the clouds is a calling. “Some people like to drink; some people like to climb mountains,” says Indra Rai, a Nepalese mountain guide in his mid-twenties. “I like the mountains.”
A Nepalese porter takes a wooden door up to the Everest base camp.
Everest is not for amateurs. Foreigners who seek to scale it from the south must first make a two-week trek to the base camp and then spend six to eight weeks acclimating their bodies to the thin mountain air before the five-day climb to the peak can even begin. But as grueling as the journey is for Everest’s newcomers, the veterans who lead them skyward have a much more challenging task: setting up fixed lines and ascenders—secured ropes, and the metal devices that clamp onto those ropes, which climbers use to hoist themselves up the mountain.
“We climb twice,” says Chhiring Dorje Sherpa, a Nepalese mountain guide in his early thirties. (The ethnic group’s name is also used as a surname in Nepalese culture.) “First, we go up to set the ropes and camps, then we go down to collect our clients and take them to the top.” Often, those fixing the ropes are not just Nepalese Sherpas, but mixed teams of Nepalese and Pakistani guides—working together in spite of the language barrier.
The demand for these mountain men (and women—Sherpas are known to be relatively respectful of gender equality) is increasing. On May 23, 2010, there were more successful ascents of Mount Everest—169—than had occurred in the three decades since Hillary and Norgay first reached the peak. The influx of climbers in recent years has been a boon to Solukhumbu’s economy. Foreigners do not simply employ Sherpas on the mountaintops; they also stay at the family-owned guesthouses scattered along the path to Everest.
Pasang Karesh, forty-five, owns one such guesthouse in Gorak Shep, the Nepalese town closest to Everest’s southern base camp. He speaks of how the tourist boom has transformed the area: the trails are becoming more commercialized, he says, with the outsider-driven demand for accommodations and food supplies spurring gentrification. The recent changes include the construction of a mobile tower in Gorak Shep several years ago—explicitly built to cater to those on the mountaintops who wanted an alternative to costly satellite phones.
As more people from around the world muster the resources (and recklessness) to scale the world’s tallest peak, Everest has itself become commercialized. Privileged Westerners come by the droves to “climb for a cause”—from child poverty to water conservation. Scaling the peak has become just another goal for some to check off on their life’s bucket list.
More worrisome, the mountain’s slopes have become crowded, a situation that veteran mountaineers deplore as dangerous. More than 200 people have died on Everest, and even though fatalities happen less frequently these days, the recent surge in climbers has meant that more than a quarter of those deaths have occurred since 2000. There is a very narrow window between May and June when Everest’s slopes are relatively less perilous, and during that time hundreds of climbers can crowd the so-called “Death Zone”—altitudes above 26,000 feet, where oxygen becomes scarce and mental faculties quickly deteriorate. (Climate change may also be making the climb more lethal, as the mountain’s layers of ice and snow melt and leave the path rockier and more treacherous.)
Last year, an expedition went up Everest to clear debris and retrieve the abandoned corpses of previous climbers. The five-person team ended up having to wait four hours in the Death Zone, as climbers going up “Hillary’s Step”—a sheer rock wall just below the summit—jammed the path down. A South Korean climber died, one of Everest’s four fatalities that day.
Nima Sherpa, a twenty-nine-year-old medic, ticks off the many afflictions that beset those who venture into Everest’s unrivaled altitudes: frostbite, snow blindness, hypothermia, delirium. The Sherpa guides who risk their lives climbing the Himalayas’ toughest peaks cannot dwell on these dangers, though: they have families to support. “The pay is good, and this is their work,” he points out.
And yet that is, perhaps, part of the problem. “When your family needs that money,” another guide says, “sometimes you don’t insist a weak climber turn back.”
Stephanie Lowe is an adventurer and storyteller. She is the founder of Playfull Productions, a firm dedicated to educating and empowering through play.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Best of In The Fray 2013. In search of healing, I took a three-month trip to South America after my marriage ended. But the memory of my divorce was never far: in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, Peru and Chile, it seemed that almost everyone I met was recently divorced. And then, I met Hugo.
Story and photos by Alexandra Levine
Weeks after I ended my marriage, I headed off to South America to clear my head.
Yelling over the loud rock music in the small border patrol office of the Chilean desert town, San Pedro de Atacama, the tan, jolly officer looked at my paperwork and asked in English:
“Married?”
I nodded.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise and looked around for evidence of a husband. Not finding any, he asked, confused:
“Happy?”
I shook my head.
“Por qué?”
Why? All the Spanish in the world wasn’t enough to explain why I found myself alone in the middle of a Chilean desert on the opposite side of the planet from the man with whom I’d shared more than a third of my life.
Having grown up in a divorced household, I had always been so terrified of divorce that for years I didn’t want to get married. But eventually, on one sunny afternoon, I uttered the words I do and till death, only to discover a few years later that I no longer meant them.
After a ten-year relationship, our divorce came as a complete surprise to everyone close and far, and although it was my decision to leave, that didn’t make it any easier. It felt like getting off a bus at the wrong stop. The bus pulls away and suddenly you stand there wide-eyed and alone, in the middle of nowhere, not knowing where to go, unsure whether this detour will lead to a serendipitous discovery of something new and amazing — or a sluggish struggle to get back home.
After the first few weeks of oscillating between the ecstasy of newfound freedom and pangs of loneliness and failure, I decided to make the best of my predicament and skip town. I wanted to go somewhere far away from the epicenter of my former life, leaving everything familiar in hopes of forgetting, distracting, discovering, healing, and eventually moving on.
I looked at the world map and saw South America, which beckoned with the promise of untamed nature, sexy music, exotic fruits, and tropical heat. The fact that I didn’t speak Spanish or know a single person on the continent wasn’t a problem. I had been comfortable far too long. Now I needed an adventure.
Traipsing through five countries in three months, I climbed huge mountains, gasped at divine waterfalls, danced until the wee hours, and ate a lot of strange things. But the memory of my divorce was never far.
No matter where I went, I seemed to meet other young divorcés.
Hours after my plane landed in Uruguay, I met Ignacio, a thirtysomething local businessman who married his young girlfriend after she became pregnant. The marriage didn’t last long, but he didn’t regret it because of the beautiful daughter they share. He told me my situation was easier because we didn’t have any children.
Then, at an expat happy hour in Buenos Aires, I met Leo, a freckled New Yorker who needed a drink after the latest frustrating attempt to divorce his Argentinean wife. She was ignoring all his communications, thus solidifying his belief that all Argentinean women were crazy. Not surprisingly, Leo’s advice to me was to get a lawyer.
Being a crazy Argentinean woman was exactly why my other new friend — Ana, a tall and striking redhead — was forced into a divorce by her Spanish husband. Two years earlier at work, she had a breakdown that turned into a bout of depression, and he wasn’t willing to deal with it. Ana told me she would never love again, and although I’m sure that won’t be the case, I knew exactly how she felt.
In the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, I spotted this mural by the graffiti artist Stencil Land. It perfectly captured my mixed feelings about marriage.
Another friend I made in Buenos Aires, Pablo, told me his marriage ended after he started his business, a neighborhood pub. Or at least that’s what I understood from his long, Spanish-only monologue over two bottles of wine we shared in an old San Telmo restaurant. Having started a business with my husband, I knew more about that than I could express in my limited Spanish.
Then, in Chile, I met Raj, a Canadian entrepreneur of Indian descent, who told me about his marriage to an Indian high-caste girl, his first love, who wasn’t willing to stand up for herself — or for them — to her strong-willed parents. He said that after he left her, he was certain he had made the right decision because she never asked him to come back. Ah, I know the feeling, I thought.
In Peru, my Spanish teacher revealed that she had left her partner of fifteen years — the father of her two children — after he decided to have children with someone else. Naturally, our lessons quickly devolved into exchanging post-divorce dating stories, which left me with some unique Spanish vocabulary.
In Rio de Janeiro, my youthful, blond roommate Leticia turned out to have a twenty-year-old son, whom she’d inherited from her first husband. She has had many lovers since but never remarried. On the night I received my divorce papers, she took me to a bar and said Brazil was one of the best places on earth to get served. I couldn’t agree more.
Although these people’s circumstances were different from mine, I was starting to feel much less alone as my divorce became just one dot on a world map of broken hearts. And then, I met Hugo.
A tall and soft-spoken man with red hair, Hugo was a friend of a friend who owned a mountain lodge in a small resort town in the lake region of the Argentinean Andes. I went up there for a weekend to ruminate. I was the only guest, so while cooking dinner in the kitchen, he took out two beers and asked for my story.
As soon as I got to the “I’m getting divorced” part, he stopped, turned from the stove where he was stirring something in a pot, and said, “You too?”
He told me he was also getting divorced after also spending a decade with his wife, who was also my age. It was starting to sound familiar. Then, he sat down opposite from me, took a sip of beer, and told me his wife had left him because he’d been addicted to drugs.
I was shocked. Not only because of the courage it took to admit that to a complete stranger, but also because it was the exact same reason I’d left my husband.
We both fell quiet, as the boiling water gurgled on the stove. This is what it must feel like when two soldiers from the opposite sides of the trenches meet after the war, I thought.
Slowly, Hugo began telling me the story of his transgressions: how his wife found out, how he kept promising he’d change, how he kept lying, and how finally she stopped believing him and left. I was listening to the story of my life.
He told me she was still angry with him. Check, I thought. He told me that she doesn’t trust him even though he no longer lies. Check and check.
It was the lying that was the worst, I explained.
“I know,” he said. “I wasn’t just lying to others but also to myself. I thought I could stop anytime I wanted to, but instead I kept going.”
Why couldn’t I have heard this from my ex-husband? God knows we tried to talk it out, but anger, shame, or pride would always cloud our minds. Instead, here I was having one of the most intimate, gratifying conversations I’d ever had, with someone I’d just met.
We moved to the living room, where Hugo, a father of two young children, told me about the guilt he was now feeling for having lost his family because of a substance. His words reminded me of my ex-husband’s post-divorce confession, “How am I supposed to live with the guilt?” I could see the agony in Hugo’s blue eyes, and it made me empathize with my ex-husband.
It was getting late and we were both exhausted by the emotional conversation. After Hugo went to bed, I sat on the terrace gazing up at the unfamiliar South American constellations, bright and clear in the cold mountain air. How was it that despite being half a world away from my former life partner, I felt I understood him better than ever before?
It was a therapeutic weekend for both Hugo and me. We took his kids sailing around the mountain lake, hiked through pine forests, and went to a party where he introduced me to other business owners in town. It was more than I had expected from my short getaway. And yet, when I was leaving, it was Hugo who was full of gratitude: “Thank you, it has been a very long time since I had such a nice, peaceful weekend.”
Even though I’ve now left South America, its magic is still with me. I keep in touch with Hugo and other divorced friends I made on that continent, and I know that no matter where we are, eventually we’re all going to be all right.
Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of the individuals mentioned in this story.
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Sticks and Stones By Emily Bazelon
Random House. 400 pages.
Emily Bazelon began reading about the way young people treat each other online in the most apt location: the Internet. The mother of two adolescent sons, Bazelon was interested in how using technology to bully peers made the experience different for contemporary youth. She was deeply curious about how her own children’s lives were affected by bullying, and decided to write a book to aid a generation of parents who grew up without social media or texting.
In this interview, Bazelon spoke with In The Fray about how the Internet has transformed bullying and why Americans have only recently begun addressing the problem in young people’s lives.
Although bullying has been around for centuries, how did the Internet create a new incarnation?
Prior to the Internet, if you were a target of bullying, you would get a break from the harassment when you came home from school. You had a chance to put yourself back together. The social media aspect of bullying can be really devastating because Facebook and Twitter make kids feel like bullying is happening 24/7. Also, there’s a sense that a lot of other kids are witnessing your humiliation, and that is really difficult for targeted kids to deal with.
Are all bullies the same?
There are different types of bullies. One type is physically dominating, the old-fashioned big kid who steals your lunch money. Another type is what we often think of as “mean girls” — though they can be boys also. These bullies use a particular kind of harmful aggression in order to score social points. They are mean to become more popular, and they’re often the hardest for adults to spot because they’re clever at manipulating people and disguising their behavior.
Then there are kids who are both bullies and victims. These kids tend to have the biggest emotional problems, and they all struggle socially. They end up doing the dirty work for the mean kind of bullies. It’s important to understand the distinctions and figure out which intervention makes the most sense for each kid.
How does bullying in the adult world affect adolescents?
Adults are modeling a culture of enormous conflict and aggression for kids. When they watch [characters on] Jersey Shore, and see the uncivil way people comment anonymously online, they learn people can be incredibly cruel. Kids absorb that from adult culture, and it makes it seem like it’s okay for them to talk and act in those same ways.
Why is it important to show that bullying isn’t just about victims versus offenders?
Almost all kids are capable of empathy, but kids who act like bullies are cutting themselves off from those feelings. I wanted to understand why this behavior is going on and what motivates it. It’s only when we understand kids’ detrimental behavior that we are able to help them stop doing harmful things.
A recent study shows that, twenty years after childhood, the people who were bullied, or people who were both bullies and victims, are more likely to have depression, anxiety disorders, and suicidal thinking. That is the best evidence we have of bullying having long-term, adverse psychological consequences, and it underscores the importance of taking this problem seriously.
Facebook has put various methods in place to oversee cyberbullying. Should they be doing more to regulate what is happening on social media?
I was struck by the enforcement challenges in addressing cyberbullying. For example, Facebook has a rule against bullying, but millions of complaints come in every week, and they have a relatively small staff to monitor those complaints. This raises questions about what Facebook’s responsibility is to enforce their own rules.
Also, Facebook cares a lot about building brand loyalty among teenagers and doesn’t want to do anything that’s seen as uncool. But it wouldn’t be that hard for them to have an early warning system, or even respond more quickly when schools complain.
What role do school administrators and teachers play in preventing bullying?
Schools can effectively reduce bullying if teachers and administrators take the issue on. Adults are really crucial and set the tone of the school. They can help kids by leading the way, setting a good example, and responding when they see bullying. We still have the problem of adults turning a blind eye.
The most important thing a school can do is figure out which problems are worth addressing and come up with a strategy. Isolating the problem makes it more manageable and allows the school to throw more resources toward the kids who are acting out.
The second step is giving kids the tools to regulate and express their emotions. Some families do this intuitively and don’t need a curriculum, but other families are doing less in this domain, and the schools have to figure out how to do more.
Susan M. Lee Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.
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