Twice a week hundreds of fishermen and families make passage to the one town at sea to trade the fruit of their labors, to Madam Bernard on the island of Ile-a-Vache, to what they call the floating market.

I am standing in the market in Madame Bernard in mud made of sea, fish, and filth. A little girl who has followed me through the stalls has taken hold of my hand when I stop to inquire of her. She holds my hand loosely like we were old pals and just stares at me blankly like she is waiting for me to finish a sentence I haven’t begun. Uncomfortable I look back at her. Now she is speaking, but lowly to where I barely hear her. A crowd forms. Daniel the translator appears and squeezes through the throng that now feels like it is tipping into the sea on top of us. From the seed pod of this flesh mob the girl reluctantly repeats her query to Daniel, a little embarrassed.

She wants to know if you will take her with you, Daniel says. Thinking she means to find a ride on our boat I pause to consider the request then Daniel translates more, saying, she wants to know if you can take her home with you back to your country.

The world stands still. I am a pillar of salt. I have stared back down into a god-forsaken valley of despair and in looking have somehow become engulfed in it myself. It is a feeling that surprises me and I am lost for words and just stare at her.

We have to go, Daniel is saying tugging my arm. We have to get out of here, he is saying and moving away through the crowd as if none of this has taken place and she and I are not standing here in this filth wondering what to do.

Then there is faith.

The trajectory of our lives… how is it determined? Was I a spirit in a sky in a universe before all this began? Was I part of a primordial muck? Did my soul, if my soul exists, descend from God into a womb of one I would call my mother? Or did I ascend the ladder of matter as the product of millions of years of evolution? Am I an I? Why do I get to stand here with a ready boat and she gets left behind in mud, an in between orphan, one neither on the street or with a family, the daughter of a dead mother left to eek out a life in a poor and uncaring home of a relative who cannot afford her? Why am I asking these questions I decided years ago cannot be asked because they have no answers? The questions have come back again and Daniel is begging me to leave, everyone else is waiting to board the boat.

Later all has changed. I am back in the village of Ka Coq at the home of Captain Wagner Tanis, our boatman for this expedition. He is showing us his new house he is constructing, which is impressive. It is a house built over top of a house so he can continue living in his house while constructing a new one in its exact location. We admire the construction and the quaint look of the white stone and coral mortared into walls as is common so I ask about the stone and coral. It is all taken by hand from the bottom of the sea, he says. Two people or more have to do it, he says. He swims in the bay and dives and brings the pieces to the surface and hands reach down and lift the stones into the hull of the vessel.

I try to imagine his house that has all the exterior walls completed now and tin roof set and try to comprehend how many hands it took and feet to bring this structure here. It is as if the seabed has displaced itself in some evolutionary leap to become a house. Is this how God made my body?

There is no easy way to write about an experience without the risk of forcing the experience to make a point. I suppose this is one of the attractions of the storyteller to use photography, that the photographer in some way can distance themselves from the didactic. An image seems a little less preachy, more of a pure moment, though images suffer the same problems as narrative prose or worse, the expository tale. So I give a haiku version of this Haiti exploration, a pictorial display of moments and even emotions accompanied by a single episodic image. This is where we were and what we saw. May God help us make sense of what of it will be true.

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 10th August, 2010.

“That night train’s a mean wine” –John Belushi as Jake Blues

We are sitting on a weathered asphalt pad three feet from the railroad track late night in rural Kentucky waiting on a train already an hour overdue.

Finally warning lights, dim red a quarter of a mile away in the blackness. Then three burning white lights the shape of a pyramid. And it seems the lights are coming slowly so we rise and wait, but as the lights come closer they do not slow but seem to increase speed then in a flash a mammoth steel projectile is blasting across the earth and shaking the air and my bags, mountains of metal rocketing through the night without a passenger except some anonymous figure in an engine I barely see but for a yellow light, the driver not of my train but of that of the dead.

Lori and I stand still for a moment and I think if even a pebble rises from these tracks in the speed of this draft it will shatter my skull, and as if sharing a thought we both step back, then move further and finally enter the agentless station, a plexiglass shelter we had ignored for its chemical stench and the heat. We watched from the dirty plastic as the behemoth roared in and out of blackness, a wink blur of machinery in the narrow path of a single white light on a pole, like a rip in the fabric of night revealing the passage not of a locomotive but of a ship of strange commerce born of blackness and bound for blackness. In the limits of light in that place it seemed an endless train.

Then it was silent again and we were standing on the asphalt again and I was telling Lori I insisted she go and that she had done enough just by driving me to the tracks so late at night especially since she had to drive to work an hour at dawn and that I would text her when I was safely aboard the train and her saying absolutely not and that, what, was she old or something, she was perfectly fine with staying up as late as she wants, and she is an adult, and to stop asking because she was waiting and that was that, and then we were sitting again, now leaning back on my bags stacked around the light pole and our shoulders touching and us talking more and more.

What to the impatient is inconvenient, to the grateful is a gift. Waiting for the train I gained a friend. The terms of our life are that we are either bound or broken by the late tracks.

We are in a hurry or we desire more sleep. He is leaving so I will say goodbye on the steps of my house, she says. What difference is it if I say goodbye here or in the night beside a set of old railroad tracks? Why should both of us be inconvenienced by the threat of a late train, she asks herself? I told him it would be late, she complains to no one. What difference does it make if he is dropped off at the dark tracks by my car or a taxi?

Of course the answer to the question is that the waiting makes all the difference. She who waits for him is whom he loves and who is loving. Love waits.

St. Paul wrote a letter to an impatient and pragmatic bunch of friends in the ancient Greek city of Corinth a letter about this. “Love is patient, love is kind and is not envious; love does not brag and is not arrogant.”

There is no arrogance in the night waiting beside railroad tracks. There is patience. What greater kindness is there but to wait in darkness? No one brags and no one is jealous. That you are missing a little sleep does not matter because what you are not missing is each other.

To imagine a God loves me is to imagine God waiting patiently for me… along dirty tracks at midnight. God knows the train will arrive even when no longer believe.

St. Paul wrote this letter to his pragmatic friends in the magnificent ancient city because they had lost their way with love. They no longer troubled to wait for each other beside the railroad tracks—or at the lonely wharf.

Here is how Paul put it to his friends: “Love… does not act unbecomingly; it does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” He might have added, love waits for you waiting for the late trains.

Love isn’t a poetic expression. Love is patience in darkness.

Lori and I settle into our asphalt sofa, then silence, the kind only known to friends. And it occurs to me Lori and I have become friends. After years of casual acquaintance this is the very first time we have sat beside each other in silence. It further occurs to me this has occurred not by conscious decision like ordering a sandwich at a restaurant, but it is the result of something less mechanical and more organic. Friends are not gained they are grown. Friendship is an organism and it is often fertilized in dark bouts of patience and in waiting. Friendship comes through driving someone to the rail station at night and waiting with them in the stifling Kentucky heat until the train arrives.

My daughter and I are friends. Earlier this same day Sofia and I sat in silence at my little desk in my house, she chatting up friends on facebook and me organizing paperwork and photos, our friendship born from hours of texting across the world, of evening drives to Starbucks for sweets and smoothies, of wandering downtown shops and laughing and listening and waiting for no reason other than it is time spent together. Sometimes Sofia says, sorry, when she rings my cell while I am on the other side of the world. But it is each of these calls that fertilizes the love that is just now taking root between us.

My mother and I are friends, our friendship born—as difficult as it may be for some to conceive—in silence watching midnight reruns of her favorite show, NCIS, and indulging in ice cream.

Finally other people arrive at the tracks. It is now past midnight and the train is almost two hours late. An older man in khaki cargo shorts and clean white shirt comes and introduces himself. Turns out he knows my family, was a school teacher to my older siblings. He and his wife have come to meet an old friend, a girl from Taiwan who was an exchange student in their home 20 years ago when he was a college instructor. She is coming to visit with her daughter. Friends at a railway station in the night.

When the train arrives it is as if a new life has emerged. Friendships have organic personalities. It is as if we can name them apart from ourselves. Like a child incubated in the womb of a mother, friendships are often nurtured in the dark wombs of life’s passage, though patient enduring together—brothers in arms in war, the silent comfort of our presence in the pain of loss to death of a loved one, or simply the kindness of waiting with someone beside the railroad tracks on a weekday night. In the case of Sofia and I it has been through m faithful responding to her texts no matter where I am in the world and her occasional kiss on my cheek, a gift greater than ever she could imagine.

Maybe this is why I hold Lori’s arms and kiss her cheek before I hop the impatient train. It wasn’t the kiss of romance. I have only kissed three women in years—my mother, my daughter, and tonight Lori. I kissed her cheek because I was overcome with gratefulness for her quiet kindness. It was the only appropriate response to the birth of friendship.

The train bore me into the night along rivers and across dark villages and I arrived only a few hours later in the colorful if not depressed Queen City, Cincinnati. There to retrieve me was my sister Barb and her boyfriend, Todd. Barb had insisted I not take a cab but that she come get me. It’s really no problem, really, she insisted. Putting my bags in her car in front of Union station at 3:00 a.m. I felt like one of the luckiest people in the world to be loved by so many friends.

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 8th July, 2010.

an email response to an unspoken question…

“I appreciate your placing me among the high moments of your life in your story. I appreciate the lack of sentimentality. “Silence follows his exit, like an audience unsure of whether or not it’s safe to clap.” I am in searcy this week and as always it is a bag of mixed emotions because I lived so many lives here, some good, some not so good. Ghosts hang in the trees and memories scatter like dust with every flutter of leaves from the ghosts’ restless feet. The audience is unsure for sure. So they clap. And I leave. Or I will tomorrow, for Ohio, on to yet another geography of ghosts and at least one angel. Then its china then new york city then haiti again. I seem to have boarded a train that will not arrive… a man in perpetual motion. I am like the Dostoevsky version of the movie Crank–just as tragic but without the Hollywood glitz or the hero’s ending. But now I’m being verbose, “a forehead on the steering wheel.” I don’t know what else to say. If you are in Haiti while I’m there this summer look me up and I’ll buy you a coffee from a dangerous vendor in a dangerous neighborhood.”

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 10th May, 2010.

I shouldn’t have been surprised to see them but I was. Boy Scouts in Haiti. Dressed up in customary khaki and wearing multi-colored scarves. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Thousands of them. Dressed out with patches and carrying batons and marching and calling and responding… with a lot of singing and dancing thrown in too. It is Haiti, after all. No matter where I went, there they were. In downtown Port-au-Prince directing traffic–efficiently… and often while the Haitian National Police stood by idle and chatting, doing nothing. I found the Scouts delivering food in trucks. Providing a wall of people for offloading goods for scared aid workers. Giving a peace of mind for their order and security. In Jacmel on the streets helping people. At a massive camp in Jacmel housing three thousand in a walled compound the Scouts there had set up and were running–again safely and efficiently–complete with three daily feedings. In Leogane, in Gonaives, in Cap Haitiian. I encountered them guarding a funeral procession.

I came to learn it was by design. The Haitian Scouting association has good leadership and when the quake happened the Scouts were among the first to assemble and rush to the aid of their neighbors. As my good friend and Port-au-Prince Scout Chapter President, Alex, later told me the Scouts were told that this was what they were here for and that they had to decide whether they were going to fend for their individual selves or sacrifice their own wants to help their fellow countrymen. They were told they would have to pass out tents and food and water and always give it all away and keep nothing for themselves. It was a lot to ask. Alex and others told them they would feed them but that they had to accept the call to duty. They accepted, Alex said, and by the thousands the groups joyfully assembled and served.

It wasn’t a sales pitch. Everywhere we encountered Scouts they sought us out to help us and asked nothing in return. This was especially incredible given the fact most of the Scouts were victims themselves. But they gave. They worked hours serving aid workers and their fellow countrymen. They worked with our group to deliver more than four thousand tents.

One day the Scouts had a rally in Port-au-Prince as a show of solidarity and to encourage their entire nation to accept the call to service just like they had been doing. Thousands of Scout troops from all over Haiti assembled in the capital and marched through the destroyed downtown to a little piece of field donated to them for their headquarters. In this photo the Scouts gather in a circle at the beginning of their march and sing and shout before the march. A circle of servants unlike any I had seen before.

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 8th May, 2010.

a man named red pennoyer told a story once in maine at a dinner table in a seaside stone and timber cottage passed down generations through his family to his comedic hands and where he invited many characters to join him… whom of which i was one… about how he wanted to be a deep sea diver and and inventor (having become the latter in fact–he invented the dog-run! pulley system!!) and how he invented an underwater breathing apparatus consisting of some form of a bucket helmet with a window and boots sealed in concrete he laced on and a garden hose running from the top of the bucket latched to his head and the hose connecting to some form of kids bicycle pump that would pump fresh air down to his bucket head and how he put it to test one summer day back when Lyman Islander boats were the hottest thing running on the Maine bay waters and he asked his flower-loving little sister to please do him the honor of operating the life-breathe pump for him and he walked to the end of his family’s dock and subsequently stepped courageously into the clear sea and sank… far. The table went silent and red held it like he was robin williams… or billy dee williams (i have no idea what that means, it just sounds good)… then he punched it. He said he stood on the rocks fifteen feet down standing with the lobsters and immediately struggling for breath. He had not accounted for depth pressure in pumping the air of course… and he had underestimated his sister’s attention span… she had grown bored with her brother’s drowning act they later supposed and wandered off in pursuit of a butterfly. That’s the truth! red says and hits the table again! From tight breaths to no breaths red frantically tore at his at that moment no longer so cool concrete boots laced tighter than he should have and he wondered if this was it.

Butterfy!!! red said and hit the table again and laughed.

He survived and his sister lived to laugh about it. and i lived to hear it retold and embellished…

There was a time in my life where I dreamed I could breath water. Literally I had dreams where i swam with the fish and I would suck in thick lungfuls of the sea and exhale the salty mixture with stout pleasure. That was when I was living in maine and first making my way in life. My dog would go with me to select rocky coves with tiny sand beaches few knew of and i would hold my breath and dive and swim like this for hours until my body couldn’t hardly take the cold even with a farmer john wet suit. My dog would round the cove tracking my passage by my bubbles i imagine and sometimes diving in when i was close to the rocks. The sea was my mother and my lover. it may seem weird to say it that way but that is how i remember it. It was that intimate and quiet. Like a perfect and unending womb shared with a million species.

I have talked a lot about the sea this week with students and workers. Someone asked me, why aren’t you still there? And I told him I don’t know why. I made up some explanation later about having a duty to serve mankind and work in places like haiti but i knew i was just making stuff up. I don’t know why i am not there. I know that looking at this photo of mine from the other sea in the west it reminds me of the phosphorescence of the waters of maine at night. little glowing eddies and swirls as a hand passes through the cold water. On this day in the west it was as if the light from the sun was not just being filtered in the evening sky but was actually gathering in the clouds so that it was actually the clouds glowing… as if the sky had become phosphorescent… and I wondered about building a plane and learning to fly so I could put my hand in the clouds to see them swirl the more

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 4th May, 2010.

Yeah I did it. I got in the skip. I fell in the line. I jumped the rope. Got some shots then got some game. I did the jump, baby!

Jacmel, Haiti. Boy/Girl Scout assisted camp outfitted by tents from the Argentine government. Sometime in March of this year.

Sometimes you just gotta get in the game. Haha.

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 24th March, 2010.

I think I long to be a tragic action movie character like jason bourne because even when it ends badly, at least it ends. Waking up after the climax and going on with a hum drum day is a lot more difficult than heroic acts of courage. I am tired More from the fatigue of facing what is really a normal life. Today I am editing paragraphs for a website. I made lists of my current and future writing activities on giant white boards on three walls with bright colored markers in code. I spent the first two hours of the work day with Brandon fixing a troubled iphone. I have managed to screw up my third iphone now. I answered phone calls and made phone calls. I spent time on hold waiting for the ATT customer service operator to tell me what ATT will and will not do about my bloated phone bill due to all the Haiti aid work. I waited like a zombie just holding my newly repaired phone to one ear and staring blankly at my emails I did not want to answer (Molly Mccoy, this line is the embellishment–the tuna fish).

At one point I just decided I couldn’t do it and I walked outside. Brandon and I strolled over to the art department to see my friend’s show–Marycaitlin. It smelled good in the art building and I liked the almost violent stillness of the art gallery where her show is hanging. I felt an urge to just lie down and sleep. Why do I want to sleep so much? Am I depressed? I just sent a text to Alyssa telling her I am. I told Kevin last night maybe I am suffering a bit of PTSD. I don’t know. I wish bombs were dropping again in some ways. I wish the Haitians were throwing rocks at me and fighting me about everything. I wish my pants were ripped and filthy and my body stinking of days of sweat. I wish I was thirsty. But really I don’t wish any of this. I don’t think.

Maybe when we accept the responsibility to engage in heroic acts we have to suffer the recourse of the whiplash to our egos when we realize there is actually nothing heroic about the heroism. I don’t even know if that thought makes any sense. Last night Kevin said something really wise about the paradox of our expanded ego in the heroic act and the humility of knowing we are not actually heroic–at least that is how my mind processed his idea. It made more sense when he was saying it.

Maybe its just that I get used to the trauma. It isn’t uncommon. I live in perpetual motion. In Haiti I live in a world of constant fighting and arguing. Even asking for a cup of coffee is sometimes an epic undertaking. I get so worn out that when I come back to a place of clean rooms and quiet hallways i feel what amounts to terror at the quiet. Last night when I arrived at the cottage at the Kleins I felt so uneasy because there was virtually no noise. Not even the wind. It was so good to see Kevin bouncing over the pine needle path to say hello and talk awhile. I feel so awkward talking some days. Especially after firefights, even if they are only metaphorical.

I put this photo at the top taken at Hugo’s house in Qingdao China last autumn because it has that empty normal emotion to it… and yet notice the light coming through the window in almost violent glare. It is as if this hallway is my mind, the dresser drawer the girl searches is my meaning and the window the constant draw and threat of everything outside me that both will mold me and possibly destroy me. Only God can control the outcome of this outside influence on me.

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 23rd March, 2010.

My body is tired, but you don’t need to know this. What does it matter about my body. Hers is tired too. This girl in the dump standing by vultures picking through the rot of human trash. Some think she is trash too living in this place as she does, house of sticks and plastic propped up by smoke and wind. Tired. She doesn’t act tired. She plods through rubbish with her girlfriend giggling at our questions. The vultures swarm and as natural and ordinary as her smile is the vultures still swarm and i cannot think of her life as ordinary. Benny says she chooses this vocation, or her family does, so there is no excuse for it and therefor there should be no pity. What I can’t get out of my mind is that this is even a choice her family can make, to live in a garbage city on a cliff and have as your vocation garbage pickers. How does this girl introduce herself, me llamo so and so and I live in the dump on the top of the hill. All the boys would laugh and make fun of her dirty pants and filthy shirt. We drive now from the mountain again to plates of hot food and clean beds.

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 12th March, 2010.

She kept at me to take her photograph but I didn’t want to because with the pot on her head I thought she looked ridiculous and I didn’t think she would appreciate me making a semi permanent record of her ridiculous moment. But she kept at me. So I went at it. It was like high fashion in the tent city–a serious tent city, by the way. Heavy duty military stuff with U.S. painted on it with some other country’s flag painted over the black block U and S. Hah. She posed and I shot. Then this girl hopped behind her to see what it was like looking into the lens. The woman never revealed much and I began to wonder if she was unhinged. Then she laughed and said something and everyone laughed and Neal told me she was just being silly. I saw so much humor last week. Once there was a food truck came by where Neal and I were photographing and when they began to throw food off the truck into the crowd where people were lined up for a hot meal the people erupted and spilled into the street and climbed the moving truck and it looked like mayhem and I wondered if someone would be killed or if the truck would overturn. Everyone looked so violent and angry. Then the truck was gone and everyone turned and sprinted back to their places in line… laughing and giggling. I had to wonder if CNN were here would they have edited out the last part of this episode, the giggling. Even a chase for food was funny for my friends waiting in line for a hot meal. Sometimes its just funny. Not everything is so heavy and serious, even when it is.

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 7th March, 2010.

“All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.”
- Louis Kahn”

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 3rd March, 2010.