This site is the documentation of a journey.
For the last year, I have been living in nomadic communities in Asia, Africa and Europe trying to understand how nomadic people build homes and community through a culture of movement.

The project is not a catalogue of nomadic peoples, listing the details of their migration and building technologies, but a glimpse of some of the homes that were open to me.

This website is currently being redeigned, transforming from a travel blog into a more interactive, content heavy site. In the meantime, the site can be navigated by scrolling through entries at random, or by begining with a country (listed on the right) and following my travels through a particular landscape.
Please check back in a few weeks!

Final Report

Submitted to the Watson Fellowship in completion of a year of movement...

Now that I have returned to the US, it is refreshing to look back at my Watson project and have the distance to process not only the past year and what I learned, but also what brought me to these places. My project sought to examine the relationship that nomadic people have to their natural and built environments and how that relationship, as expressed through portable, domestic architecture, communicates a different understanding of space and place than that of settled people. My methodology was rooted in a belief that architecture functions as ideology in built form. Homes are more than just houses, more than just shelter. Not only do structures shape the people who live in them, but communities use architecture to invent and reinforce visions of themselves. Additionally, structures are powerful communicators of identity and values that one can learn to read.

The project was formulated within the framework of Cultural Geography, or Cultural Landscape Studies, a field that focuses on how people use everyday space – streets, buildings, fields, town squares, parking lots, factories, farms, etc. – to create, support and express the ideas and values of the community. In this case, landscape is more than scenery; it is it is the connection between people and the spaces to which they belong, those from which they derive collective meaning and identity.

I began my project in Mongolia with a long list of questions, but with little intention of doing formal interviews. I was there to live with people, to move with them, to dismantle and rebuild their homes, to try and understand what these structures meant to them and how they spoke through the homes they were perpetually building...

click here to read full text
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being still after all this movement

Last April, I was in Essaouira for days longer than I had anticipated, staring at the ocean, drinking red wine on my rooftop and writing. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was wasting time, that I should be moving south into Western Sahara, that I wasn’t really working on my research. My friend Rob told me to stop worrying. He told me to take my time, to enjoy the luxury of a perfect espresso and a brilliant sunset and a well-lit square and the comfort of familiar faces amidst so much movement and new scenery. He convinced me to stay a while, to give myself space. He told me that I wasn't wasting time, that it wasn't possible to do so; that I was incubating, preparing to dive back into the desert in Mauritania, in Mali, to do great things and to be inspired. He reminded me that sometimes I need to be still.
These days I think often of Essaouira and West Africa and Rob with his words of wisdom and the honesty to speak them.
I try to listen.

Back in the curious USA.

cycling north of Killarney Fjord, Co. Galway

Nothing has been posted on this site in the last month and a half.
I apologize.
I assure you that I was in Ireland, and was indeed working with Irish Travellers in various capacities. I hope to get a series of ireland posts up in the next week as well as a new batch of photos up on flickr account. www.flickr.com/photos/stephcarlisle

I landed back on this side of the Atlantic a few confusing days ago. Happily, I am no longer running about carrying my little world in my backpack. Instead, the pack is sitting in a corner, crumpled and dejected. I don't exactly have a home or too clear of a plan for the next year. I think my project is over at last, but I keep getting in all these trains, subways, cars, airplanes.
I am eager to unpack.

But rest assured, I am healthy, happy and readjusting to being back in America. For now, I am hiding up at my parent's lake house in Westport, NY writing, reading, playing with my dogs, biking, swimming and generally trying to slow down and figure out what to do with myself. I'll be up here till the 20th or so when I return to NYC to try to find a new place to live.

Thank you for all the words of encouragement and extension of kindness and support to everyone who kept in touch while I was gone. It was much appreciated during those lonely hours, days, weeks.

much love,
Steph

Ireland Retrospective -- under construction

Entries and photography from Ireland will be added soon!

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trading camels for caravans

A regrettably late quarterly report...

I am trying to not think about my time in Africa as a complete failure. It wasn’t a waste of time but things certainly did not really go as planned. I can honestly say that I don’t think I learned much at all about Toureg tents, about their ideas of space, family, land and community.

Of course, I can now speak at great length about economic challenges to herders and Saharan nomads, about wells and water politics, about camels and the salt trade, about the flooding of the Niger River, about political turmoil and Komeni and the Toureg rebellion and an ongoing demand to keep slaves, about food aid and poverty and tourism.

The material that I gathered and the project that emerged, despite my attempts to make things “work” and stay on track, was not so much based on clear data or even clear stories and lives of people, as it was a discovery of emotions and relationships, of things that cannot be measured accurately or explained fully. I will never be sure how much I glimpsed of Malian or Toureg culture and how much I projected on the people I encountered. I left with several charged experiences that I have no way of explaining.

The four countries that I visited in Africa left such completely different impressions that I have a hard time grouping them together into any sort of coherent “African experience”. I still laugh at the irony that the location where my project seemed the most set, where I had by far the best contacts and logistical planning, where my expectations were the highest was the greatest disaster. You can’t plan everything. And no one can make the rains come or make the heat break before it is ready.

I realize that I had been traveling, physically moving to a new location, a new community (or lack thereof), a new bed, on thirty three of my first sixty days in Africa. And this included a fourteen day stint in Essaouira and nearly two weeks in Bamako. This cannot be healthy.

There must be an optimal pace for movement according to the land and social specificity. But this is not it. Nomads move slowly, gently. They tend to move together - in families, in clans. Or if traveling solo - a man or a boy leaving with herds and then returning periodically like a ship gone out to sea and coming back to port. It is important to return, to rejoin.

I never intended to run like that, but it was some fever that took hold of me and kept me moving, that wouldn’t let me settle. My restlessness climaxed and was only exacerbated by a series of difficulties which made each resting place seem particularly undesirable. Things will be better once I leave Bamako. Things will be better once I get out of Mopti. Things will be better once I am in a village and out of Timbuctou. In retrospect, the situation was even more telling because it was unintentional.

A bit of ongoing illness mixed with a smattering of personal violence, a heavy heap of abuses and intimidations, a few bruises, and some witnessed ugliness did little to make me want to stay in with my reluctant hosts. I wanted to make things work, but after washing blood off of my hands and wiping the spit from my face, I realized it was time to leave. There are just too many places in the world far more beautiful and welcoming for me than Mali in the hot season. So, I ran off to Amsterdam and luckily I arrived at the Academic Medical Center Polikliniek Tropische geneeskunde just before my dysentery fully jumped to my liver.

Now I find myself in Ireland flying through the last phase of my project. Things feel remarkably easy. I am in a country where everyone speaks English, the land is fertile and beautiful, where it cools down in the evening and where a long bus ride is only 4 hours. Some of my best “interviews” have taken place over a few pints in the local pub while a band plays at a nearby table. There are local Traveller groups all over the country and wonderful people who have been very patient and open to talking with me about their lives.

The settlement of Travellers, conditions of halting sites, and general accommodation issues are something that everyone in Ireland seems to have an opinion about. Not only does this make my job easier, but it shows that the situation means something to people, people care about the answers to questions I am asking, they want me to understand their side of the story and how the issue is present in their lives. Opinions are strong and filled with personal stories.

This week, I have been meeting with several women over at Traveller Visibility Group in Cork City. Over many hours worth of tea and scones we traded stories of living on the road. The conversation bounced back and forth between Cork, Galway, Mongolia, and Rajasthan with the women asking many questions about the other nomadic groups I have been living with and pouring over some of my photographs that I brought along.

I leave Cork this afternoon to cycle out around Kerry for the next week, visiting halting sites and eventually ending up at the Carimee Horse Fair in Buttivant, a major meeting for Travellers from all over Ireland.

My health has been steadily improving, and I am taking lots of time to write, process, and enjoy Ireland and my remaining time with this project before I return to the states. I am trying to slow my pace a little, but time continues to move quickly.

Holland

I retreat to Holland for rest, readjustment and some medical attention. After a week of every imaginable test, the fine doctors at the polikliniek Tropische geneeskunde in the Academic Medical Center cured me in the end and were very, very thorough. Turns out I did have all sorts of parasites living in my belly, my intestines and blood. I suppose I wasn't travelling solo after all.
But, I'm a terrible host and after two attempts at peaceable eviction, I have finally killed all of my guests.

It takes two weeks for the results to come in and for the doctors to convince me not to return to Africa and to continue my trip in Ireland instead of Ethiopia. It is the right decision in the end. We are all glad that I made it to the clinic before the ameobas jumped to my kidneys. I'm not in such rought shape anymore.

I pass my days cycling, walking all over the city and making new Dutch friends. I am happier when I move out of the hostel and into an appartment with Joris over near Westerpark. I settle in and have a hard time leaving. Unfortunatly, the medicine I am finally put on is strong and makes me ill. But, spirits are high.

By now I am excited to head over to Ireland and to meet some Irish Travellers. I have processed Mali and had a chance to talk to some patient friends. I buy a plane ticket for Dublin and imagine of green pastures, sheep and rain. I am finished with the desert for a while.
I dream of a new bike and fiddle music.

Homes

When you’ve been on the road for a long time you eventually hit a point when home is the memory of all the places you have passed through. When you travel alone you live in a house that your mind has built for you. You are perpetually a guest in the homes and community of others. But you find that you become a host through your words, with story, as your address bears no post code, but falls between streets, towns, borders.

I think of all the houses, apartments, tents and spaces that I have lived in since I left my parent’s home six years ago. It is an odd assortment, filled with curious characters that make up my chosen family. It is thoughts of these people and these special places, some whom I have known for years, and others with whom I shared only a few weeks, that fill my head on the long bus rides and in the night. As my year comes to a gentle end and I think about coming home, I am glad. It will be good to be amongst familiar faces. But I am not sure just where that place is. If anything, it seems I miss the space between the places of my life, the movement between them, the conversations, moments that remain fluid.

leaving afrika

chick on the photo for a short slide show...

I’ve never before left a place because I couldn’t see the beauty in it. It is the most painful and complete defeat I can think of. Now I am running away from Mali because I can’t feel anything that isn’t sharp.

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Dry season

I’ve been moving continuously since I came to Africa
looking for water in the desert
a spot to relax and feed
a place that would sustain me
where I could build a shelter of branches
set down my load
and let the animals graze.

But I never did find a place
With more than a drop or two
of beauty and sweetness
the dust swallows up any moisture
that touches the earth.
It is the dry season after all.

I wait for the rains to come.

Bella women hiding from the heat in a reed mat shelter

I realize that I have been travelling, physically moving to a new location, a new community (or lack thereof), a new bed, on thirty three of the last sixty days since I arrived in Africa. And this includes a fourteen day stint in Essaouira and nearly two weeks in Bamako. This cannot be healthy.
And indeed it is not.

There must be an optimal pace for movement according to the land and social specificity. But this is not it. Nomads move slowly, gently. They tend to move together - in families, in clans. Or if traveling solo - a man or a boy leaving with herds and then returning periodically like a ship gone out to sea and coming back to port.
It is important to return, to rejoin.

Instead, I feel like I am blowing across the land like some deranged sandstorm. Misunderstood, unseen, cursed and unwelcome. The people are all tightened turbans and closed doors, squinted eyes and pursed lips.

the saddest village in my desert

The sky is white.
The sand is white.
The trees are gray and tiny.
They have lost their shadows.
The sun is the moon,
round and soft.
We are underwater.
In a land stripped of hue,
or contrast
or emotion.
The sun burns quietly.

Even the camels are so sad
we have to sing to keep them going.
Touregs ride with their feet on the neck
and a wooden stick hidden
in the fold of their robes.

In the quietest village in the desert
I catch no sleep.
Even the stars keep their distance.

There was just too much blood
for me to help that tiny girl.
They brought her to me all wrapped up,
like an unwanted parcel,
They ask for medicine,
unable to name what had been done to her.

I think she fell down... on something sharp.
How long has she been like this?
Three days.

Here we are, just 15 km from a doctor.
Such a short walk.

I’d carry her to town
(please let me take her to a doctor...)
I don’t care about the military
They won’t shoot a Toubab with a sick girl

But I can’t play hero.
I can’t tell these people what to do or think.
How dare I?

I am not part of this community.
I don’t belong here. (what am I doing here?)
I can only do what is asked of me.
I can only act with permission.

I can’t cry or scream.
But I also can’t hide my feelings
even though I know my eyes betray my disrespect.
I’m not even sure I can stop the bleeding.

Please, no more tea.
Can’t you just touch her arm or speak to her?
Some warm milk perhaps with sugar.
Maybe she can drink that.

I am not a doctor.
Having white skin doesn’t make me a doctor.
I don’t know how to bandage a wound like this.

Maybe tomorrow she will go with you back to town.
I don’t know if she will be alive tomorrow.
I don’t know.

The chief just says,
We’ll see. Inshallah.

Mousaf is angry.
No one will sleep tonight, he says.
A half hour later I can hear him snoring.

I watch the stars
empty.

We leave early in the morning.

I am running away, back to Bamako. Anywhere.
Away from the dark eyes of that little girl,
from the face of her mother, blank and without emotion.

The open window has left half of me olive green and
painted the other half with the red clay of the road.
The window is broken
and I sit with this hot wind
damp with sweat.
Not sure if the air is cooling
or making me ill.

They say there is a herd of wild elephants left here
But everything else has been killed,
the trees felled.
Only dust remains
and the small huts of men.
Some things are actually very simple
And some sights are unspeakable.

The day makes my eyes sting and my skin peel.
It is enough to stay awake,
to keep moving.
I can't stay here.

Trying to get to Timbuctou

From Mopti, I catch a shared 4x4 jeep to Timbuctou. We are 13 people in a small vehicle, but I manage to pay a bit extra and get a front seat with no head rest. The large Toureg man next to me takes up most of the room and I try to doze in my little place. We are driving at night, so there is no view. No stars, no animals, no moon, just sand.

Every hour or so I am woken by a flat tire, a ditch or a bag of fish that keeps falling into my lap. The bag has broken and the man next to me just keeps stuffing the cooked fish and bones back into the ripped bag and jamming it into the crease of the dashboard and window. As if the bag won't just fall again. As if it doesn't already have a huge rip down the middle. I don't care any more. I couldn't be more sweaty and dirty. But, who is going to eat this fish?

We make it eleven hours in the dark on a rolling sand "road" before the driver finally falls asleep, crashing into a few scrubs, very very narrowly avoiding flipping the car and crashing into yet more sand. The driver gets out, looks at the car, bangs a few things, then somehow gets us back on the dirt road. He jumps under the car, bangs around, shrugs his shoulders and drives on. He is silent. Everyone else is screaming as usual. A lesser driver would have flipped the jeep.
We reach Timbuctou with the first light of morning.

The town is dead.

central mosque, Timbouctou

The Quebecoise girls that I rode up to town with and I all find a room with air conditioning and hide from the heat. Its about 40 degrees in the morning. I want nothing more than a flat place and maybe some water to wash with if possible. I get a tiny bit of water for my bath and enjoy it immensly even if hot water in this heat is not particularly desireable. I gulp down two liters of filtered water and pass out for a good five or six hours. There are no windows in the room and we can't tell if it is day or night.

People here never tire of speaking about the heat.

I never tire of drinking fake fruit juice.

Tonight I look for camels.

Aside from a general helplessness, a constant pain in my stomache and head, a host of daily frustrations and fights -- there is still so much beauty here.

For every five people who snicker or yell or abuse me, there is some little girl who smiles, some baby who wants to grab my hand or dance in my lap. another soft sunset, a baobab tree in an empty field, vegetables planted amongst the garbage on the riverbank, an old man who offers me a glass of steaming tea.

It is laughter, dancing, children and a great feeling of total absurdity that gets me through these days. I am faint and exhausted and feel the heat building behind my eyes, but I can usually find some patch of shade to squat in and a little frozen bag of bissap to suck on for a breath.

But I've never felt so overwhelmingly unwelcome.

Il y a beaucoup de chaleur a Bamako...

Bamako is filled with color, sweat, markets, mangos, tired and overworked women who don't bother to smile and absolutely mad young men who think about nothing but money and white women. They are not the only men in Bamako. But on some hot, frustrating days (which are the only ones I get to see) it seems like Malian men come in town types: soft and loud. The crazy, young, crazies are clearly the minority, but they are an active minority, cruising around the streets looking for trouble. Trouble isn't very hard to find this time of year.

It is a tough town for two pretty young Tubabs fresh off the train from Senegal. We have left the Lion of Hospitality. Gone are the music, smiles and laughter of Dakar. Instead virtually all interactions leave that dirty aftertaste which is a special mix of desperation, ego, greed, pride, misogyny, ignorance and a perchance for violence. When you are called a Tubab in Bamako, it is not just a comment on the color of your skin – the word is spit at you. These men have no shame – but they also cannot handle loosing control or being proved wrong or being called a liar even as they continue to lie, intimidate and abuse you.

It must be even worse now in the hot season when there are few tourists, no work and when everyone is tired and angry. The men roam the streets like rabid dogs looking for a Tubab to bite.

I spend four days in Bamako with my German friend Helga staying with a family in Hamdalie. In those sweaty days, I was stalked, grabbed, screamed at, and threatened. One particular crazy followed me all over town starting fights with anyone I might appeal to for help, trying to hit me with his motorcycle, then screaming, crying. I have bruises on my arm and the last time I saw him, he chased me for five blocks yelling all sorts of abuses at me in Pulle and Bambara and French. All the time waving his registered guide card in the air. As if that gives anyone permission to hit and abuse white women. Eventually he spit in my face and drove away. It was quite a climax.

I suppose it is good to have another person spit in your face completely unprovoked. Makes you develop a certain sense of humility and bewilderment. Things remain very surreal until I leave Mali.

It makes a girl tired, and these run-ins ruin my experience of the city. I can't even go out to hear the music this town is famous for. By Monday, I just want to escape. Tuesday morning I jump into a 16 hour bus ride to Mopti hoping things will change. The bus ride leave sweat stains on my clothing. You can't drive away from 45 degree weather. The heat is unbearable.

West Africa Retrospective

MOROCCO (April, 2006):

Lost in Fez - Finding myself to be no longer in India, I proceed to orient through the disorientation of the winding alleyways and markets of Fez's surreal medina.

Mathematics - Hassan teaches us all a lesson in humanistic calculus.

Into the desert - from Marrakesh to the mountains to the desert. (with a slideshow link)

More Questionable Nomads - The sand dunes and desert of Merzouga are a sad and beautiful fantasy.

Sweet Essaouira - Another slideshow with photos of the lovely seaside town where I took time to rest, write and drink espresso.

South into the Sahara - Leaving Euro Disney Morrocco and entering the actual desert en route to the border with Mauritania.

MAURITANIA AND SENEGAL (May, 2006)

South into the Sahara - Leaving the cafes and tourists of Morocco behind for a dustier Sahara. But the buses keep running and so do I.

Mauritanian Nomads - The family I should have stayed with but didn't. Arrived and realized my heart wasn't there.

Lured to Senegal - Avoiding my sandy future for the meantime and instead hugging the coast. I an alternate route through Senegal, lured by music, fish, dancing and the promise of a doctor.

The Infamous Dakar-Bamako Express (Dakar part 1) - The joys of waiting in Dakar for a train with no schedule.

Battling the Chef de Gare (Dakar part 2) - More days or waiting and a day of victory against all odds and custom.

Travelling first class in Africa - Pre-photos of my luxurious compartment. This is what eighty dollars will buy you in Africa.

click on photo to see a slide show of photos from Senegal...

MALI (MAY 2006)

Il y a beaucoup de chaleur a Bamako - A difficult first few days in the capital.

Unwelcome - A determination to find beauty in the streets of Bamako despite my aching belly.

Trying to get to Timbuctou - Even a crashed jeep and bags of fish can't keep us from the desert.

The saddest village in my desert - My medic training leaves my unprepared to deal with five year old victims of female circumscision. I decide not to stay in my Touerg village.

Dry season - Waiting for the rains.

Leaving Afrika - a slide show and an apology.

Homes - A few thoughts about imagined community and isolation.

Trading Camels for Caravans - Reflections on leaving Africa, movement, illness and heading to Ireland

travelling first class in Africa

battling the chef de gare. (Dakar part 2)

I relinquish all control over my movement here.



In the meantime, I meet some other Tubabs living in Dakar who want to make sure that I see the city and have some fun before leaving for scorching Mali. This mostly involves cold beer, swimming, soccer, and music. I am glad to be out of Mauritania and back in a country where people dance and smile.

I meet the first batch of Tubabs at Chez Dany on the night of the bar fight that gets Tony punched in the face. Things are a little less serene that night. Things are very silly that night.

Ben, the other Californian is drunk and dancing. He is speaking in Wallof and declaring his love for the city and all its inhabitants. It is good to meet people who love where they are living. For the next two days he shows me around town and takes me his school – Ecole de la Rue, where he teaches English. He showed up in Dakar seven months ago not knowing anyone, not speaking a word of French or Wollof and having never taught before. Now I watch him singing and dancing, switching between English, French and Wollof to explain grammar, to keep his girls awake and to make everyone laugh.

We walk all over town and drink café touba in tents, while he teaches me about Muslim mystics, dancing beggars, these children everywhere with their tin cans asking for sugar for their marabou, of going on pilgrimage to the African mecca and of making a life here.

My days are filled with walking, little chores, visits to the beach, bottles of cold beer, bags of bissap juice, and a steady diet of haricot and chocolate sandwiches and bananas. I swim in the ocean, hear lots of live music, stay up late talking with Danny and almost forget that I'm waiting to leave.

Danny and I leave the city and spend the weekend in a rented house on a beautiful beach with ten French kids. Back in Dakar on Monday morning; everything feels different. I am hopeful. I think I am going places. Danny takes off class and we go see that troublesome chef de gare, the only man who can actually get me on this train.

We wake early, make our banana and chocolata sandwiches, take café touba au lait in a tent near the corner truck stop, buy some chewing sticks and walk into town through the perpetual rush hour. How can the chef de gare say no to us when we are chewing sticks? Impossible.

We arrive, the boss is in his office. We talk, I get excited. He gives us a story, come tomorrow in the afternoon to buy a ticket, the train will leave Wednesday. Yes, yes, the train is here. No it won't leave before Wednesday. Vraiment. Absolutement.

I'm excited. I begin to dance. We take a little walk and come back.

The chef asks us to wait some more. He's decided he likes us now, because he picks up the phone to call someone. It's a long phone call. He makes another.

Okay, buy your tickets now. The train leaves tomorrow at one o'clock.
Vraiment? Vraiment. Absolutement? Oui.
Is the window open?
Okay, come, we'll open the window.

We find the ticket seller and make him open the window. A sign is posted with a day and a time. It is all very official. An hour later, I walk out of the station with a ticket in my hand, a stick in my mouth, the happiest toubab in Dakar.

the infamous dakar - bamako express (Dakar part 1)

I am in Dakar waiting to buy a train ticket for a train with no departure date. There is no schedule for the Bamako – Dakar train. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. Unfortunately, everyone is very happy to give answers. It's all very absurd. But the enormous amount of mystery and drama surrounding this train is reason enough for me to stick around for a few days. I am not trying to spend three days in a rusting puegot with eight people driving to Bamako. Though, it would be considerably faster. Again, it's not about the time, but the movement.

"Excuse me, do you know when the train leaves for Bamako?"
"It just left a few days ago."
"What day?"
"I don't know, a few days ago. You missed it."
"Won't it leave again?"
"Yes, but it has to come back first."
"Of course, but what day does it leave next week?"
"Depends on when it returns. It can't leave before it gets back."
"I suppose not. Well, do you know when it is supposed to come back from Bamako?"
"How can I know when it will leave Bamako if it hasn't arrived yet?"
"Well, when did it leave here?"
"I don't know, a few days ago, just after it arrived."

Everyday I go to the station and have some variation of the same conversation.
On other trips, I am told that the train will leave in two days, that it is still in Bamako, that it has already arrived, that it already just left last night… all by men in uniforms with big smiles and sticks in their mouths.

It's perfect African logic, of course. But I never leave the train station more sure of things than when I arrived.

I can't buy a ticket until the window opens. The window opens when the train returns and is going to leave again. I find out when the train gets back from the guy who works who works behind the little window. He'll sell me a ticket if he is there, and I'm there and it's the right day and he feels like it.

But, there are worse places to wait for an imaginary train.

I begin to wonder if the only way to get on this train is to set up a blue tarp in the station, camp out, and sell bags of peanuts.

lured to Senegal

After the allure of that first Senegalese wedding, a few more uncomfortable run-ins, continued sickness of an undramadic but unimproved sort, and general indecision, I end up not heading straight overland into Mali as intended and instead find myself jumping into a car bound for Senegal.

I am just not ready to leave the ocean just yet. I need to do a little dancing, eat some more fish and see a doctor. Senegal helps be do all of these things with grace. Landing in Dakar for a few days also gives me a chance to sort out some embassy paperwork, write more and try to get myself a seat on the infamous Dakar-Bamako train.

I'm in a bushtaxi, waiting in the Rosso bound lot in Nouakchott for one more person. We leave when the car is full. Anytime a taxi arrives, all the boys jump up and fight for the new passenger. We are three partially filled cars. After an hour of waiting, a taxi pulls up and body jumps out completly covered up in a dusty black turban. But, I know those runnign sneakers...

Either some toureg has robbed my poor Dutch friend Merijn, or it is the devil himself. I jump out of the cab and fight with the rest of the touts who are only mildly suprised when I grab the turbaned man by the shoulders and kiss him on the cheeks. I hurry him into our car and off we go.

During the next ten hours of driving and then waiting at the border for the guard to return the passports without a bribe (after five hours of waiting, he is convinced we are not going to pay up) I am happy indeed to have a fellow traveller to talk to.

The ride is long. We are stopped every twenty minutes or so at police checkpoints where our sassy smuggling carmates pay off the police each time. I still wonder what these ladies had in those sacks on the roof. At one stop the policeman comes over and appologizes to Merijn and I after pocketing the cash. It adds up pretty quickly and soon the girls are asking us for cash to bribe the police with.

Merijn and I decide to stop in St.Louis for a day or two before continuing on the Dakar. The town is beautiful and lush with a crumbling colonial charm flavor. But the days pass quickly with hot showers, good food, a real bed. I even manage to catch a Yossou N'Dour concert and visit a famous wildlife reserve where I see nothing but hundreds of dead fish, a cat skeleton on the beach and the carcass of a goat.

mauritanian nomads

south into the sahara

The move into Western Sahara, with forty hours of desert outside my bus window does wonders to clear my head. It is a quick exit from Euro Disney Morocco. I travel bus buses all the way to Ah Dakhla. Stopping rarely, seeing little but sand and truck stops. Agadir, Tiznit, Laayoune... People get on the bus and leave. I hold my ground watching as couples say goodbye, husbands allow thier wives to leave to visit a sister or attend a wedding, boys leave thier families to join the army. No one goes to Western Sahara without a reason. There is really nothing to see but sand and sun and the occasionsal military compound or prison. Outside of Laayoune, we stop at what I think is another customary military checkpoint. But I start asking questions when we are detained for over an hour. It seems we are picking up new passengers. All the women move to the front of the bus and I am left all alone in the back with three empty rows behind me. A while later, a group of five convicts board the bus handcuffed together, along with two police escorts with thier shiny white patent leather gun holsters. I am suddenly less interesting to the police when we stop at checkpoints and we raise an eyebrow or two at the canteens where we stop to eat from then on.


There is something remarkable about this place where the sand of the Sahara reaches the ocean. I don't know if I am looking at dunes or the beach, at the blue of the ocean or the sky on the horizon. For hours we drive along a cliff just above the water and I strain to make out the waves. I am happy to wander through these dusty towns - if only for a day or two.

As I move south, the land gets drier,
people become darker,
the light becomes sharper,
the tea becomes stronger.

I don't stay in Noudhibou for long enough.

Downtown Noudhibou

Noudhibou is a small, dusty border town full of beat up mercedes making border runs, Arab businessmen with thier flash cell phones, Senegalese boys sitting on street corners listening to Tupac, Arab women covered in meters and meters of beige fabric while the Senegalese girls strut around with braided hair and beautiful wrapps in bright fabric flashing smiles at everyone. Its like I haven't seen sunshine in days. I'm captivated.

During my stay in Mauritania I am overwhelmed by hospitality, but there is always something a bit unwholesome about things. Everyone wants to be my guide, my driver, to take me to a friend's place. It is always like this, I know. Maybe it is because I begin to fall sick right about the same time that social graces begin to strain. I am tired. I come to Mauritania thinking that I could stay a month. I look and look and look. People welcome me into thier tents, thier homes. I am offered rides and information. But nothing feels right. The place doesn't grab me and I continue moving down the coast never stopping for long in one place, never heading east further into the desert.

Still, there is never a dull moment. I am taken to two weddings - one Senegalese and one Mauritanian. I am brought home often; I eat steaming couscous and millet out of huge basins with great awkwardness and western hands that burn easily. I drink dozens of foamy glasses of tea with drivers, shopkeepers, herders, grandmothers, and a herd of new suitors. I get driven around for two days by an insane man named Moulai who spent the past three years living in Brooklyn and sort of speaks English. I am his immediate best friend and he takes me everywhere - a situation that would be better if he weren't possibly the most unreliable, bipolar, fierce, ego inflated, jackass I have ever met. One minute he loves you, the next he has tossed you out on the side of the road to flag down another ride in the middle of nowhere. literally. amazing. Two days later, he is convinced we are going to get married. He is a small nightmare, the only consolation is that everyone knows it and his friends are helpful and sympathetic. I play along for a few days, then decide to leave town.

Mauritanian tents along the road to Nouakchott

sweet essaouira

ah, no words, just a petite slide show...

more questionable nomads

I fall so much in love with the desert at Merzouga that I cannot stay there. I am in Epcot Sahara and it hurts even more because its more beautiful than anything I have seen. I look out the window of my little room at Auberge Le Petit Prince and it is nothing by rolling waves of sand, a fluid horizon without distance, proprtion, reference points.

I drink some water, take off my sandals and walk into the ocean to be alone for three or four hours. There is nothing to see but light, nothing to feel but your body, legs and thighs and calf muscles straining at the urge to slide, energized with the new uncertainty of wether or not the ground will choose to hold you.
I feel completly alone. I can scream here. I can dream here. I can die here. I can walk for hours following the sun. But it is all an illusion. Virtually all deserts are these days. The Erg Chebbi Dunes run due north south for about 30-40 km. But they only spread about 7 km wide. They are not the Sahara or even the "doorway to the desert". They are a puddle. But they seem limitless and it makes them lovely. All this illusion, all these Berber men dressed up like Touregs, all these fake nomad camps with toilets and wells hiden by palm fronds, perfect paved roads to a desert sunset.

Much of Morocco strikes me this way. It is stunning, but never seems real. Tourism has a way of turning everything into a charicature of itself. There are always some Spanish tourists doing circles on their 4x4s over the next dune or a tourbus full of French couples snapping identical photos of a veiled woman carying water.

I talk to Brahim, a guide at the auberge for a while about life in the desert. He tells me he can take me to a "nomad" family that lives at the edge of the dunes. I ask why they would live there when there is no food for animals there. Eventually he tells me they don't have any animals, that the auberge dug a well for the family and asked them to stay there so tourists could come visit a real nomad family. It all strikes me as rather bizzare. He tells me that it is like this all over the world. That there are no real nomads left, for live from the land in the desert. We talk about India and Mongolia and Mali and he looks at me like I am full of well crafted lies.

into the desert

There is still some challenge left in getting to the desert.

I leave Marrakech for the Erg Chebbi dunes outside of Merzouga with my backpack and no real hurry. I stop first to the Boudum de Dades and take a few days to hike through the gorge and spy on some shepherds. I climb up some rocks, I fall down some others, I get brought home for tea and couscous.

Then its time to move on. I check out of my auberge, buy some bread and cheese and sit on the side of the road at seven am waiting for a bus that never comes. Eventually, I start to thumb down anything that rolls by. Sadly, wealthy french tourists seem particularly petrified by hitch hikers. Evenually, all the guys on the block are flagging down trucks, vans and tour buses seeing if anyone is going to Rissani or Merzouga. Evenually a little red Fiat full of spanish kids from Madrid picks me up and the adventure begins.

It's Fete de Mouhammed and the day only gets stranger from there...

The road is good and clear and we stop once for petrol, once to visit the Todra Gorge, once for a freak hailstorm that threatens to crack the windshield, twice for sandstorms, again for directions and tajine kalia.

We stop for tea at an art deco cafe in Risani. In ten minutes we have three new friends all offering in good faith to be our guides. la shukran. la shukran. Abdoul tells David about his tent camp and tries to make him name a price for a camel trip that we're not interested in. Hassan goes on and on to me about a girl friend of his in DC that he met on the internet.

It's the Prophet's birthday and all the shops are closed and people are in the streets. Sudenly, there are shrieks and yells. Rgiht through all the sunshine and mild breeze, big fat raindrops begin to fall. The boys leap to their feet. A car skids, an old man dances in his slippers in the middle of the intersection, little children turn thier palms and mouths to the sky. Someone begins to sing. A boy crashes his bike in front of us. A policeman sits and drinks his tea slowly as his uniform changes color.

And then it's over.

I take another sip of tea. Hassan turns to me, "It hasn't rained in this town in two years". Maudé points to Delia, "It always rains wherever we go. Promise". Delia chimes in, "500 dhiram and we'll give you some more rain. Just 500 dhiram".


We drive on across an ocean of tiny black pebbles. By dusk we reach the dunes. We dust our selves off, stretch a bit and wait for the camels to take us to a tent camp. There is a lovliness about riding a camel in the dark.

Watch a slideshop of the trip by clicking here!

mathematics

Hassan, my favorite waiter in the cheapest coffeeshop in Marrekech whipped out some math one day to prove to us that all people are the same.
Beautiful!

lost in Fez

Do not worry, Fez is a mirror, you can find anything here.

The beauty of the medina is to be lost...

I spend days sinkning into the beauty of the medina. I walk and walk and walk, never knowing quite where I am or where I want to get to, so perhaps I am not lost at all. I follow the hemlines of enshawled women, bags of bread being delivered, great sacks of refuse twice the width of the donkeys that carry them. For a while I follow a great pile of skins with two shaky legs. I finally pass the smelly mass and look back to see a tiny boy buried down to his chest, revealing only a sunshine yellow sweatshirt bearing the words Young and Free.

Mostly I chase after shadows and specks of light.

On my second day of wandering I become more sensitive to the sounds and smells around me. I listen to voices that I blocked out before. I allow myself to be led around; I take directions; I have conversations in my gradually loostening French. I open myself up, only half expecting someone to really hastle me, to throw a scam my way, to trap me or try something. And against Fez's reputation, no one does. I remain open, relieved. I am glad to have time again to be alone in a crowd, to let my mind skip and jump with my feet, to be without schedule, without plan, without hurry. I let the city take me into its arms. I agree to surrender. Today three strangers stopped to tell me I have a good heart. Then they walked away without even asking me to visit a shop.

I begin to meet all sorts of characters -- Missouri the singing progfessor, the grizzled 70 year old guide who lived in Harlem in the eighties and tells me all about Nancy, the kindest woman he ever loved,
the sad waiter, the cookie boy...

India Retrospective

Previos Posts: November - March, 2006
“My home is with us. My village is the mobile camp. It is all my relations and friends who have left their home, and have come with their sheep. Every year my village is in a different place because there is a different group that makes up the camp… everyone changes, they become different people… ”

Namaste – arrival in India
Tamil Nadu – travel in the south
Leaving Benares – leaving friends and teachers for the desert
Jaisalmer Ayo! – heading out to Rajasthan to recommence the project.

Nomads in all castes and colors – brief introduction to nomadic castes in Rajasthan
Naguar Cattle and Camel Fair – a thousand men, two thousand camels and one lost white girl.
Mafkijie
Reasearch Woes and Wonder
Oh ghori, aapka gaon kahan hai? – Jaisalmer and my bhopa family
Wandering men and a very old story – Jogi part 1
We Find a Lonely Place - Jogi part 2
We Stay in this Place - Jogi part 3
Raikas

Raikas

"Our home is under the sky. our village is the forest. For 300 days out of 365 we are on the road. Using the motor road you get to your destination quickly. But we move along the narrow by-paths in the fields. Others would get lost. Instead of taking us to the end of a journey, these paths always take us to new places. Each new place is a destination. In each new place, we again sleep under the sky, our pillows. Our home is the sky. I find it wherever I go." -Kherji, a sheep herder

Raika camel herders boiling camel milk for tea. Sadri, Pali District, Rajasthan.

In the village of Sadri, twelve to fourteen hours by jeep south west of Jaisalmer, there is a woman who knows everything about camels and the desert and raikas. If you want to understand herders, go meet Illse...

I make the trek down to Pali to meet Illse and visit Lokhit Pashu Palak Sansthan, a local NGO that works with herders in the region looking at issues of land rights, animal health and general community initiatives for camel and sheep herders. The Raikas are fascinating and a complete shift from the musicians and performers of Jaisalmer.

Lonely men and thier animals. Opium and chai. Smoldering fires and camel milk for months on end. Endless walking. Falling wool prices and rising medicine costs. A hostile Park Services and sea of police and small scale beurocrats trying to keep the camels out of lands they have grazed for hundreds of years. Water pumped in from Punjab, farmers pumped in from Gujarat.

Vegetarian pastoral nomads who don't make use of any animal products, except for the milk of their camels. More stories of Shiva and Pabuji and the first camel and his assigned caretaker. Thirist and hunger and desperation. Dignity. Sons who refuse to follow their fathers into the hills. Girls who refuse to marry herders. Death fests and jaggery and protests with ten thousand goats in an intersection blocking a minister's car...

a Godwar Raika, drinking tea during a community meeting

We stay in this place now-- Jogi part 3

Fulli chopping vegetables for dinner

I have spent weeks in Jaisalmer wondering when I will leave again. Then one day, I begin giving things away. I have a parcel sewn up and take it to the post office. I start looking at my pack lying in the corner of my tiny cell of a room. I wonder what I will tell Fulli. But she knows what is happening, of course. The other day we spoke of Africa. She said she was happy I would be living with other kalliwallis (black women) but that I should really come live with her in her mamma’s village where we could sing and dance and make food together.

I know that my time in Jaisalmer is over. At the end of the day, there are not any nomads here. Everyone has settled at least a decade ago. I cannot chase after ghosts. The interviews with the Jogi community were so helpful because they helped me realize that I need to move on. The memory of movement, its imprint has grown faint with these people. It’s a lifestyle they have rejected and it is clear why. There is no respect for them as Jogis. There is no more life in this wandering. Communities no longer support them and there are jobs now – honest labor, the idea of homes and land allotments and schools for their children (at some point in the future…).

So, bas. No more, says the elderly Jogi in his saffron shirt and clean white dhoti. If this ancient wandering – this restless begging was a curse from Goraknath, the casting out of Kandipath, who through his greed and deceit rendered generations of Jogis unclean – if begging is truly a daily death, then perhaps the curse has run its course and the Kalbelias and Jogis are ready to live a new life, to be reborn in a new status, to raise children with a new idea of home, to write a new story.

Homes made of mud and thatch and stones will replace beds of sand and stars. These new houses, these pucca ghar will pull these travellers away from an endless trail of footsteps, a winding road through the desert that has lead to water and grain, to a hundred faces, a hundred bowls. Dust storms already begin to erase these roads, paved with repetition, these roads that render a history and a movement visible.

The Jogis of Jaisalmer are still landless. They have no papers and for this reason are in constant fear of another eviction even though they have been living in this spot of eight or nine years. There is no school, no clinic, no market, no stability for their children. Still, they cannot settle in town. There is no place for them in Kalakar Colony. Still they find their “lonely place”. Everyday they walk the few kilometers into town or to the mines. Before we leave, Gael asks one man a question. After this long conversation about wandering and hardship and uncertainty, Gael asks, In two years time, where will you be?

Right here, Tota Ram Nath says and strikes the ground between us with his large and worn metal tipped walking stick. We stay in this place now.

I leave Jaisalmer less certain of things than when I arrived. I can still feel Fulli's kisses on my cheeks. Suman wouldn't speak to me at all on my last day. I am headed to Pali and can't say when I will be back. But still we don't say goodbye, we don't have words for that, only phir melange, we will meet again.

We find a lonely place -- Jogi part 2

The story of Kannipau is about deception and pollution. It is an explanation. Every time I try to learn the story, I become exasperated and confused. The names and details keep changing and for weeks I fool myself into thinking that they are important. I know so little about the Jogis, but more than almost anyone in Jaisalmer, they stay with me for weeks after I leave.

Everyone wants me to understand. Old men argue amongst themselves. Imam runs in circles trying to translate between Hindi, Marwari and English. Still there are words that only the Jogis understand. I ask questions in Hindi whenever possible even though these old men don’t catch it. We stumble through four versions, hours of tape and too many questions. The story resembles all of the important things I am told while travelling – I hardly understand the words, but the meaning is clear.

The story begins with a great teacher, a guru (Goraknath) and his two disciples (Jalandernath and Kannipau). One day while travelling, the guru sends out his two disciples into the desert to collect alms for his daily meal. Who will bring me flour for making the rotis? Who will bring me dhall and namak for the subzee? Jalandernath wanders for hours with his bowl, begging a handful of lentils here, a few chillies there. The desert is full of empty stomachs and clean thalis and he has a difficult time finding anything for Goraknath. He continues to walk all day.

Kannipau meets the same difficulty. After a few hours, he comes to the hut of a farmer, or maybe it’s a banjara camp, or the cart of some Raikas, or a destitute Bhill. The site of confrontation, the object of Kannipau’s indiscretion shifts with each telling of the story. But each time, Kannipau is offered a choice. He is asked to do a service in exchange for something he can bring back for his guru. He chooses pollution in secret under the guise of duty and charity. There is always the best of intentions and always some element of altruism and self-interest. Jaldernath is a non-character, only existing as a place maker for the obedient and unchallenged. His descendants become saddhus, wandering holy men. Kannipau is cursed to remain an outcast, a beggar and a wanderer without a teacher, shroud in ignorance and poverty. He failed a test he did not know he was taking and is sent out into the desert.

Imam Deen and I are sitting at the museum with a young Jogi talking through this story and his memories of growing up the only Jogi in his dang who could read and write, who could speak Hindi with confidence. He stayed as a boarder in various small town government schools while his family wandered, sending word of where they might meet up on weekends and festival times. He wants nothing more than to see all of the Jogis settled, to built a school where he can be a teacher. All his stories and explanations carry the aftertaste of this conviction.

We cannot live in the villages; no one will give us land. It is terrible to earn food from begging.
But Diwana provides a way for all people. We have learned to live even this difficult life.

Each family wanders alone, but knows the location of other families. They organize so that they cross paths only when desired, but never visit the same homes. Groups are constantly breaking up and meeting again in other locations, setting up camp together, where there is water, but walking towards different villages to beg.

In the older days, Jogis would travel with dogs, donkeys and hens. The few possessions a family had was piled on the donkey – some cookware, a quilt, maybe a charpi to load everything on. A lucky family had some chickens riding on top of the whole lot. Jogis are famous for breeding fierce fighting dogs. They hunt with the dogs and use them for protection against hostile villagers who might try to rob them or forcibly drive them away.

We find a lonely place.
There is no space for us in the villages. So, we remain hidden.

Families moved slowly and regularly -- always on foot. I am told that for years they were prohibited from riding in trains or busses. Food is whatever is given: some left over grain, old bread, a few wilted vegetables, some tea or milk, salt, chillies. They would return at night to shelters made from a few sticks, some branches, an old disintegrating sari. Some families might fashion some sort of dera, a shelter made from odds and ends, all sorts of plastic sheets, newspaper, shrubs, glass, sticks. During monsoon, they might make a more stable hut, a jhoperi or tsupera with mud and sticks and a plastic tarp if possible. But Jogis can build homes out of anything.

There is no one solution for surviving a life of constant motion. Different Jogis find different means of feeding themselves. Sometimes the men would enter towns and offer to play music or sing, to do some pujas or work with snakes. Some say that all the folk songs of Rajasthan came from these people. For a long time Jogis were barred from traditional wage labor and rarely received any monetary compensation for their skills and wisdom. I am told most Jogis lived on begging alone.

You find beggars in all of India. What differentiate the Jogis from the many other landless people in Rajasthan are this story and this practice of movement -- this way of moving over the land and finding resources in a barren landscape.