and then i left

the view from and of the nuba mountains. a small slice of them, anyhow.

well, here they are. the last few photos i took of sudan before i stepped on a plane just a few mornings later and left for ethiopia.

a little context: after heidi and i had left dilling, we kept heading into central sudan. we made it to kadoogli, a small town that we'd heard was greener than anything we'd seen yet. (that, of course, is not saying much.)

when we arrived at the bus stop, we found a town that had been overrun by international ngos. the surrounding area, the nuba mountains, are a central area of conflict in this huge country, and kadoogli offers a nice jumping off point.

we had to pay some $20 a night for accommodation, which, as i write this from my home in portland, doesn't seem like so much, but at the time was a huge expense considering our meager budgets.

all that said, the landscape surrounding the town -- which is what you see here -- was beautiful and unlike anything i'd seen in sudan. or really anywhere else, for that matter. we hiked some small mountains in the massive range, and wandered through hill-side villages. people would point us to the proper path that wove its way through their homes and to the top.

on our way back, a group of children found us, and helped direct us down the hill. the dogs, they said, were coming, and we should get out before nightfall. i'm not joking. not even a little.

there may still be some photos of sudan yet to come, but this really is the end of the bulk of them. i don't want to get too maudlin. so, i won't. but sudan, you were amazing to me.

stay tuned for pictures from ethiopia and mongolia and southeast asia. oh, and portland.


this, to me, looked like a baby baobab. i'm not sure it is. but i sure hope it is.






up there would be heidi, my travel companion and translator.

globes & maps

a globe waiting for a home in a portland thriftshop.

there's something funny about globes. they give you the world in this manageable form, in this form that you can twist around and run your fingers over and feel that maybe, still, there is enough time for you to get out there and see all the places where your fingers land.

but when you do get out there, you realize all those beautiful globes -- all those bright-blue, muted-brown, black-and-white, stone-inset, whatever globes -- didn't do the enormity of the world justice in the slightest. those globes don't really convey the easy little fact that you could spend a lifetime wandering what they show you as just one square inch and still feel like you didn't explore it fully.

i've always been a little taken by maps. but lately, whenever i come across one, i can't help but find africa and look for some winding path back. maybe, i've lost it. maybe, i've been reading too much david sedaris.

a song to meditate on if you're feeling restless or nostalgic or a little bit of both: Map of the World by Monsters of Folk.

soggy instants

all at once

here's the best of a few packs of polaroid film i shot over the past couple months or so. click on the images and they'll get real big. so big, you'll be able to see the whole polaroid. wow!


(most of these images were taken on tz artistic film with an sx-70, though a few were taken with regular ol' 600 film and others with some specialty film from the impossible project.)

in honor of sundays

do you remember when you'd get home from sunday school and immediately start ripping of your dress-up clothes because they were 'itchy'? i do.

they do what i cannot

the chimney at chapman school.

when i was young, all i ever really wanted was to be able to fly.

this, i'm sure, is not an unusual desire among the under-five-years-of-age crowd. what i think, however, might be unusual is the degree to which i went to achieve this modest goal of mine.

i remember tying dish towels to my neck -- we had tons of them in our kitchen drawers; my dad's mom would embroider a set and send them to my mom every christmas -- and then run around our tile floor, hoping that, eventually, i might liftoff. when that didn't happen, i added more towels.

i remember playing soccer on some youth team. i remember getting bored playing soccer, forgetting the ball, and running around the field, flapping my arms instead. it seems like a better use of my time.

i remember persuading my dad to make bat wings for me out of cardboard. we put little rope straps on the back so they'd stay firmly on my arms. i spent an afternoon coloring them with markers and crayons and construction paper. they were amazingly crafted and amazingly detailed. after running around the yard for a good thirty minutes, though, i came to the conclusion that they were not amazingly functional. when i suggested that i might have better luck jumping off the roof, my dad suggested i would not.

all of this sort of came back to me this month as i watched some 8,000 swifts find their way through the sky and into the chimney at chapman school in nw portland. i suppose if i can't fly, at least i can watch them do it in that way they do.

after it rained

malakia after it rained and the sun had just begun to come out.

heidi and i made it to central sudan just as the rainy season had begun. this was amazing for a few reasons, not the least of which was the fact that in eight months in sudan, i had only seen rain once up until that point.

one afternoon the sky turned a familiar gray -- familiar, i mean, to those who have lived in portland, ore. for any amount of time -- and just opened up. we ran into the living room and listened to the drops smack the top of the tin roof.

when it was all over, one of the cousins came to get us. he held his hands to his face made a little click with his finger. it was time to take some pictures. so we did. and here they are. this, by the way, is my last little bit from malakia. next up: kadoogli.

by the by, i've switched to flickr. here's hoping the pictures will show up as i've color corrected them from here on out.


some donkeys, with their water drums in a flooded field.


the cousin who wanted to show us what things looked like after the rain.


the central market.

making music and coffee

a traditional coffee ceremony in malakia, dilling.

almost as soon as heidi and i had arrived in malakia, helawa, the woman who would put us up for the next few days, asked us if we'd like to share a cup of coffee or tea. coffee, we said, would be great.

in sudan, coffee is served strong and spiced with cinnamon and cardamon. grounds are cheap and easy to come by and a cup of coffee is just a boiling pot of water away. but in malakia, things, it seems, work a little bit differently.

after we'd decided on coffee, helawa went into her kitchen and came out with a small fire pit, a pestle and mortar and fresh beans and spices. she set about roasting the beans right in front of us and then grinding them with the spices. nearly an hour after her offer, she served us fresh coffee. the next day, she promised, we could do it again but she'd bring around the neighbors and her sisters.

that's exactly what happened. helawa and five other women gathered to perform a traditional coffee ceremony. they roasted the beans and ground them up and all the while they sang. have a listen to what making coffee in sudan sounds like:




the coffee is roasted over a coal fire. you have to keep the beans constantly moving or they'll burn.


once the beans are roasted, they're ground along with some traditional spices.


the pestle and mortar became the drum beat for the songs.


while the coffee is brewing, the women sing and the cups are clanked along to the beat.


the coffee is served in a traditional pot with bits of twigs that act as a filter for the grounds.


the children don't get to drink the coffee, but they do get in on the singing.

after waking up

some more images from our time in malakia:


the women spent most of their day hanging around the kitchen.


grandma and granddaughter.




helawa, our hostess, made some kisra, a traditional sudanese hand bread, sort of like ethiopian injera.




we all ran inside during a pretty crazy rain storm. it was the first time i'd seen it rain in nearly seven months.


mom and daughter.


hamoodi doin' his thing.