Grief, Grind, and Glory of Work

Last month the world heard the tragic news
that more than a thousand people working at a clothing factory in Bangladesh,
were killed when the factory they were working in collapsed.

Burma

The appetite for cheap clothing in the West is insatiable.
The people making the clothing  often pay the true cost of these items.
The scale of this factory in Burma is vast.
The sense that these workers are just part of an immense machine is
accentuated by the pink shirts they are obliged to wear.

Burma

Labor disgraces no man;
unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.  
- Ulysses S. Grant

Yemen

Whether it is men fishing,  nuns washing dishes, miners digging beneath the earth, or 
working in the heat of a steel mill, work is universal, yet intensely personal. Millions work in order to survive, and for them,
there is no debate about how to achieve a life/work balance.  

Woman working in a field devastated by volcanic debris and flood waters.  Java, Indonesia

Shoe repair shop in India

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.
- Horace

Burma

India

Your life is a journey, not a rest.
You are travelling to the promised land, from the cradle to the grave.
The Sunday at Home, December 7th 1854

Candy Factory, Kabul, Afghanistan

Mumbai, India

Gujarat, India

All happiness depends on courage and work.
- Honore de Balzac

Miners search for gems.  Hindu Kush, Afghanistan

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

MKS Steelworks, Serbia

Japan

Working for long periods under extreme stressful work conditions can lead to
sudden death, a phenomenon the Japanese call karoshi. The word in China is guolaosi.

Landi Kotal, Pakistan

Bakery run by Afghan widows, Kabul, Afghanistan

Croatia

Many find their identity in the work they do. Some enjoy intense satisfaction in their work.
For others, the line between work and play is hard to find.

India

           Mumbai, India

Sugar cane farmer, Philippines

Everything yields to diligence.
- Thomas Jefferson

Drying coffee beans, Brazil

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or
Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of
heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.  
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Flower Seller, Dal Lake, Kashmir

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Right as Rain

During the year I shot the monsoon assignment, I learned to see it as a critically important event, 
and not the disaster it had first seemed to my Western eyes.
Farmers experience the monsoon as an almost religious experience
as they watch their fields come back to life after being parched for half the year.

Varanasi, India 

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s annual monsoon rains have arrived at the southern Kerala coast,
a top weather official said on Tuesday, brightening prospects of higher farm output by aiding
farmers to plant summer-sown crops such as rice, soybean and cotton on time.
- June 6, 2012

Goa, India

Rain is grace;
Rain is the sky descending to the earth …
– John Updike

India

For half the world’s people, good monsoons, those rain-bearing winds of
Asia and the Subcontinent,  mean life and prosperity.
Poor ones are marked by famine and death.

Bangladesh

The rains fall on one horn of the buffalo, and not on the other.
-Indian Proverb

Kabul, Afghanistan

Java, Indonesia

Nepal

Northern Territory, Australia

Tokyo, Japan

Tibet

It is no use to grumble and complain; It’s just as cheap and easy to rejoice.
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain – Why, rain’s my choice.
- James Whitcomb Riley

Sri Lanka

Indonesia

Cambodia

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.
- Lucretius

Porbandar, India

India

Dalit women cleaning streets, Mumbai, India

Burma

Only He shakes the heavens and from its treasures takes out the winds.
He joins the waters and the clouds and produces the rain. He does all those things.
- Michael Servetus (1511-1553)
Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer

Cambodia

Monsoon History
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
The air is wet, soaks
into mattresses, and curls
In apparitions of smoke,
Like fat white slugs furled
Among the timber
Or silver fish tunnelling
The damp linen covers
Of schoolbooks, or walking
Quietly like centipedes,
The air walking everywhere
On its hundred feet
Is filled with the glare
Of tropical water.
Again we are taken over
By clouds and rolling darkness.
Small snails appear
Clashing their timid horns
Among the morning glory
Vines.

Bojonegoro, Java, Indonesia

Monsoon Festival, India

For months there is no rain, and then there is too much.
Half the world’s people survive at the whim of the monsoon.

Two men try to cross a monsoon swollen river after the bridge was swept away, Goa, India

The Lives We Live

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.
- Flora Whittemore

Maimana, Afghanistan

Since the beginning of time, doors have
symbolized both great opportunities and thwarted dreams.

Varanasi, India

Morocco

The open door is a metaphor for new life, a passage
from one stage of life to another, and metamorphosis.
Closed doors represent rejection and exclusion.

Kashmir

The Door
Too little has been said
Of the door,
its one face turned to the night’s
Downpour
and its other
To the shift and glisten of firelight.

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

For doors are both frame and monument
To our spent time,
And too little
Has been said of our
coming through and leaving by them.
- Charles Tomlinson

India

Cambodia

Tibet

A door just opened on a street–
I, lost, was passing by–
An instant’s width of warmth disclosed
And wealth, and company.

The door as sudden shut, and I,
I, lost, was passing by,–
Lost doubly, but by contrast most,
Enlightening misery.
- Emily Dickinson

Kabul, Afghanistan

Mingun Pagoda, near Mandalay, Burma/Myanmar

West Kabul, Afghanistan

India

Los Angeles, United States

The door swings open:
O god of hinges,
god of long voyages,
you have kept faith.
It’s dark in there.
You confine yourself to the darkness
You step in.
The door swings closed.
- Margaret Atwood

Kabul, Afghanistan

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Bombay/Mumbai, India

Kabul, Afghanistan

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Monastery at Rolous, Cambodia

Macedonia

The Door

Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden, or a magic city.

Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye, or the picture of a picture.

Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.

Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if nothing is there,
go and open the door.

At least there’ll be a draught.
- Miroslav Holub
translated from the Czech by Ian Milner

Yemen

Vietnam

The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and
comfort – the opening, terror.
Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing -
the opening a wonderfully joyous moment.
- Andy Rooney

More Fun and Games

Wodaabe Tribe, Niger

Laughter is by definition healthy.
- Doris Lessing,  Nobel Laureate in Literature

La Fortuna, Honduras

Shanghai Circus, Shanghai, China 

Moscow, Russia 

Perugia, Italy

If music be the food of love, play on.
- William Shakespeare

Havana, Cuba

India

Rajasthan, India

Lucknow, India

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.
- W. H. Auden

Bekaa Valley, Lebanon

Mersin, Turkey 

Could we look into the head of a Chess player,
we should see there a whole world of feelings,
images, ideas, emotion and passion.
- Alfred Binet

Jodhpur, India

Peru

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Some people believe football is a matter of
life and death.
I’m very disappointed with that attitude.
I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.
- Bill Shankly, English soccer manager.

Maningrida, Australia

Tibet

Young Shepherd during Holi, Rajasthan, India

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
- Immanual Kant

Istanbul, Turkey

Until one has loved an animal,
a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
- Anatole France

Mumbai/Bombay, India

 

Buzkashi, Kabul, Afghanistan

Yangon, Myanmar/Burma

They say golf is like life, but don’t believe them.
Golf is more complicated than that.
- Gardner Dickinson

Bangladesh

 

Yemen

 

You must invent your own games and
teach us old ones how to play.
- Nikki Giovanni

Burma/Myanmar

Varanasi, India

Fun and Games

 

Tibetan Refugee Settlement, Bylakuppe, India

 

 

 

 

  

Tibet

 

 

If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed

himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become
unstable without knowing it.
– Herodotus

 

 Lhasa, Tibet

 

The true object of all human life is play.
Earth is a task garden.
Heaven is a playground.
G . K. Chesterton

 

 

 

 

Gubbio, Italy

 

 

 

Burma/Myanmar

 

You can discover more about a person in an
hour of play than in a year of conversation.
– Plato

Tokyo, Japan

 

 Spoleto, Italy

 

Mumbai, India

 

 Rajasthan, India

 

Play is a uniquely adaptive act,
not subordinate to some other adaptive
act, but with a special function of its own
in human experience.
– Johan Huizinga

Pul i Khumri, Afghanistan

 Wrestling Match, Kahan, Afghanistan

 

Los Angeles, California

Games lubricate the body and the mind.
-Benjamin Franklin

 

Nova Scotia, Canada

 

Play is the exultation of the possible.
– Martin Buber

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

  Bangladesh

 

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the
seriousness of a child at play.
– Heraclitus

Mumbai, India

 

 China

It is requisite for the relaxation of the mind that we make use,
from time to time, of playful deeds and jokes.
– Thomas Aquinas

  Bamiyan, Afghanistan

 

 

Myanmar/Burma

 

 

Rajasthan, India

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Importance of Elsewhere

Calcutta, India

In Paul Theroux’s new book, The Tao of Travel, he writes,
“As a child, yearning to leave home and go far away, the image in my mind was of flight — my little self hurrying off alone.
I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about.  The importance of elsewhere was something
I took on faith.  Elsewhere was the place I wanted to be.”

Afghanistan

 ”The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human; the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to
change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger,
to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown …”   – Theroux

Brazil

Niger

Mali

Mizoram, India

Shanghai, China

Havana, Cuba

“…The tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a
few weeks or months,the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly,
over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.”
- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky 

Tibet

Tibet

Thailand

India

 

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
-Marcel Proust

India

Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan

“All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the
midst of terror and wonder. ”
- Pico Iyer, Why We Travel

Varanasi, India

Bangladesh

Bangladesh

 

Sulu Sea, Philippines

“There is a change that takes place in a man or a woman in transit.
You can see this at its most exaggerated on a ship when whole personalities change.”
- John Steinbeck

Burma/Myanmar

 ”Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain

Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet

Paul Theroux, Papagayo, Costa Rica

 

“Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts.”
The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux

Agra, India

 

Open and Closed

 

 

Vietnam

 

Since the beginning of time, doors have symbolized both great opportunities and thwarted dreams.  The open door is a metaphor for new life, a passage from one stage of life to another, and metamorphosis.  Closed doors represent rejection and exclusion. 

 

 

Kashmir

 

 

The Door
Too little
has been said
Of the door, its one
Face turned to the night’s
Downpour and its other
To the shift and glisten of firelight.

 

 

 Bamiyan, Afghanistan 

 

 

For doors
Are both frame and monument
To our spent time,
And too little
Has been said
Of our coming through and leaving by them.
- Charles Tomlinson

 

 

 India

 

 Cambodia

 

 

Tibet

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Mingun Pagoda, near Mandalay, Burma/Myanmar

 

 

Porbandar, India

 

 

 West Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

India

 

 

Los Angeles, United States

 

 

 The door swings open:

O god of hinges,

god of long voyages,

you have kept faith.

It’s dark in there.

You confide yourself to the darkness

You step in.

The door swings closed.
- Margaret Atwood

 

 

 Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

 Bamiyan, Afghanistan

 

A door just opened on a street–
I, lost, was passing by–
An instant’s width of warmth disclosed
And wealth, and company.

The door as sudden shut, and I,
I, lost, was passing by,–
Lost doubly, but by contrast most,
Enlightening misery.
- Emily Dickinson

 

 

Bombay/Mumbai, India

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 Dhaka, Bangladesh

 

The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort – the opening terror.

Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing.
 The opening a wonderfully joyous moment.

- A. Rooney

 

 

 

 Monastery at Rolous, Cambodia

 

 

 

 

Macedonia

On the Road

Stories about roads and journeys are as old as humankind.  One of the earliest ”on the road” stories was Homer’s Odyssey, from 800 B.C.E., the story of Odysseus’ journey home after the Trojan Wars.

 

 

Southern Afghanistan

 

Madaoua, Niger

 

From Homer to Dante,  Xuanzang , Marco Polo and Cervantes to Halliburton, to Kerouac, Durell, Theroux, Iyer, writers have taken their readers along on their roads, whether the journey is  fiction, non-fiction, or a combination of both.

 

 

Tiguent, Mauritania

 

  The words, “on the road”, can mean many things.  To the salesman, it is a time away from home trying to sell products.  To the explorer, it means setting off on an  adventure.  A road trip for athletes means that they’re playing in a different city.  To a homeless person, being on the road means the search for food and shelter.  To a Buddhist, the road may symbolize the path to enlightenment.  For refugees, the road is an escape route and symbolizes hope and safety.

 

 

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

 

 

Near the Afghan/Pakistan border

 

 

Myanmar/Burma

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Ahmadi Oil Fields, Kuwait

 

 

Calcutta/Kolkata, India

 

 

Calcutta/Kolkata, India

 

 

Rajasthan, India

 

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

India

 

 

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA

 

 

Havana, Cuba

 

 

 Calcutta/Kolkata, India

 

 

Bangladesh

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Porbandar, Gujarat, India

 

 

Angkor, Cambodia

  

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began,
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

- Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Kham, Tibet

 

Amdo, Tibet

G O A L – Football Fever

Sitwe, Burma, 1996

 

Whether you say futbol, futebol, voetbal, soccer, футбол, or calcio, you already know that football is the most popular sport on the planet.  This World Cup Tournament final match will be the most-watched event in television history.

Burma, 2010

More than simply kicking a ball around, football stirs passions, and crosses every boundary of nationality, race, class, generations, and religion.

Burma, 1984

 

Istanbul, Turkey, 1998

Yemen, 1999

 

Herat, Afghanistan, 2003 

 

Football is played in every corner of the globe by every child who sees a moving ball and kicks it.

The Sahel, Africa, 1986

 

Morocco, 1998

 

“Some people say football is a matter of life and death.  I assure you, it’s much more important than that.” -Bill Shankley

Bangladesh, 1983

Children at Play

Tanks become toys in Kandahar, Afghanistan, 1994

No matter how dire the situation, how dangerous the environment, children need to play.

Children play on an anti-aircraft gun near Beirut, Lebanon, 1982

Whether it is splashing in puddles or climbing on abandoned tanks, their world of make believe is almost as important as food and shelter.

Boys playing football in flooded pastures, Bangladesh, 1983

“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” - Heraclitus

Children play next to an abandoned freighter, Sitwe, Myanmar (Burma), 1995

Two children play a game by a road, India, 1993

Young Cambodian boys play in the ruins of Preah Khan near Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 1999

Young monks at play, Burma, 1994

Yemen, 1997

“Child’s play is the exultation of the possible.” – M. Buber