The Story Behind the Photo
November 16th, 2005 by Sarin
In college, I took many pictures of typical scenery. A familiar friend giving the thumbs up, shots of beruit action throwing down, and my occasional voyeuristic shots of my young drunken friends. Most of the shots were pretty straightforward and you were either there or you weren’t. Hence, a lot of the shots carry no explanation, and sometimes that is what made them great. However since moving on from college, a lot of the pictures I’ve been taking have had some sort of story behind it. If I show them to somebody, I have to stop and explain how and why I took that picture. My pictures abroad don’t carry that “oh you just had to be there” type of exclusivity. Sometimes, it’s me, another person, a nice scene and camera just readily available for all to enjoy.
While blog entries can be written fast and uploaded in a snap, it is a bit harder to keep my photos updated. So whatever I write about won’t have any visual aids till like months after, and any photos I upload will be clueless unless you read about it earlier. I’m also realizing that I take a lot of photos of nothing just so I can remind myself that I was there, and my feelings at the time. So here are some short stories that I have with certain photos, all with my adventures with the Peace Corps. I didn’t write about them earlier because, well, I just had to have the picture in hand.
I took a photo of myself wearing a BoSox hat in the common bathroom area of the men’s residence at the Brooklyn YMCA. Well this isn’t Peace Corps related, but considering I was taking the trip because I was leaving for the Peace Corps in 2 weeks, this almost counts. Earlier this year, I had taken 2 trips to New York City but have always got back home around 4 or 6 in the morning. This time though, I wasn’t going to take the train home late at night, but instead, stay drunk and crash in the city. I also wasn’t very rich at the time, so the only thing I could settle for was… a dorm room at the Brooklyn YMCA. I gotta get used to roughing it up sometime.
First, we go back to the night before, I drove home from Manchester, NH at around 1:30 in the morning from a friend’s house. I stupidly ignore the signs about road work in Boston and continued my way into the city anyway. However, little to my luck, I found myself stuck in standstill Boston traffic where drunk clubgoers are moving faster than I am. Eventually, I clung onto an ambulance to pull me onto the Mass pike (which was dead empty), drove past Fenway, and ended up 95 a few moments later. I got home and crashed into bed at around 3:30am and was instantly reminded of how late I went to bed on another one of my NYC trips earlier this year.
Anyway, back to that day. We left Cranston around 7, pound a couple coffees to cure the 2 and half hours of sleep, and drove to Stamford, CT. Took a train to GCT and was in the city around noon with great timing. Subway ride itself just to get to the YMCA took an hour out of time and then we would have to walk the mean streets. The whole time, I’m wearing my Boston Red Sox hat (which I bought to remind myself of home, and as a good conversation piece in the future to Cape Verdeans, who’s biggest emigrant population is in Beantown) just cuz I wasn’t a pussy and wanted the bragging rights. We walked the streets of Brooklyn for about another hour before we finally find the YMCA, check in, and come to find out that the entire facility does not have a clothes iron. My friend who came with me, starts to freak out because his Sean John button-down can’t “unwrinkle” itself. I give him a good tip to put it in the shower and allow the steam to smoothe the wrinkles.
As he is letting every shower in the communal bathroom run for about 10 minutes with no luck on his fine dress shirt, this old resident comes in to ruin our party. He’s about 84 years old and says with great satisfaction that he has been living in the Brooklyn YMCA for the past 16 years. A little bit longer than I have been alive. He freaks out in thinking that my friend is actually trying to break his many and only showers and starts screaming for security and running down the hall. I look at my friend and exclaim humorously “oh crap, I don’t want to get kicked out, we paid good money for this room!”
And immediately after I took this picture. While I do love the city, I really enjoy being a Masshole.
Here we are again in New York City. Here’s a shot of me and my brother at JFK airport in NYC, mere moments before my flight to Africa. Earlier in the day, I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to be taking this plane considering our connecting flight to Cape Verde was MIA. Yep. So, somehow we went ahead and drove from Philly to NYC knowing we needed every precious minute for our international flight to the mainland, and then worry about the rest in Africa. Let me tell you, driving through NYC one last time, as my last memory of the states was so surreal. Driving from the freeway, you see the island and the skyline for miles. Once we hit Manhattan, I knew my way around and knew how far we were from the airport. It isn’t until now that I realized that I was good with my geography, because that time in NYC was my 3rd time in the city in about 6 weeks. Not bad to say goodbye to something I just learned to love. Anyway, you can see me in my hiking backpack ready to take off, as well as other Peace Corps Trainees unloading their belongings from the bus. My brother, who knew I was going to be in the city that day, took a vacation day and some of his friends took off to see the rest of the city before meeting up with me at JFK. It was unfortunate that I had lost time dealing with our connecting flight to Cape Verde so I couldn’t sit down and have coffee or anything. But I at least got to see him as he drove out to see me at my last stop out of this country. What’s really unique about this photo is not the circumstances or the events of that day. It’s more like, this is probably the only photo of me and my brother in like 5 years. No joke.
Almost continuing my story from above, after boarding the flight from JFK to Dakar, Senegal, West Africa. We were under the assumption that our connecting flight to Cape Verde would have us leaving in 2 groups, instead of one all together. Well, neither of those were true, the airline itself shut down, and we were now stuck in the French-speaking African country of Senegal. About maybe 2 of us of about 26 knew even just a lick of French. The best part I believe, is that you don’t need a visa to enter to the country, so bam here we were, complete strangers to a country that I don’t think any of us knew anything about, especially me. We got picked up by a Peace Corps contact and routed to a transit house where we would sit and wait for our next plan of action. Since our flight left NY at 5, and we traversed through the Pacific Ocean and through 5 time zones, we arrived early morning at Dakar, Senegal. It was bright as hell, and I really did not get a lot of sleep the night before (and that alone is another story, which stars half a handle of Morgan’s) so I just went right to bed for an hour long nap. When I woke up, some of us were having breakfast, and immediately afterwards we got right to playing cards. After that nap, my head was finally on straight and I got sucked in to how surreal this experience was. Just one week ago I was showing my friends around RI one last time, and now I’m sitting here playing cards with people who were strangers to me 4 days prior, all in an African country that I knew nothing about. I just had to snap a photo to remind myself in the future.
Nothing defines “beach corps” than the impromptuness of this photo. After, we got moved out of the transit house, Peace Corps placed us in a 3 star beach hotel in the capital city of Dakar. We immediately got to work partying considering how cheap everything now was, and that we knew we might as well be in this country for quite a while. Some of us were drinking and swimming by the beach, and I just knew I had to take a quick fast photo. I zoomed the camera in, put on the self-timer, placed it on the steps and told everybody to run into the shot while the red light was still blinking. It was one of the rare times where the self-timer actually, actually made the photo. It just wouldn’t have been the same.
My new friend Wey-O says to me, “Hey you can sit in the captain’s chair, but watch where you step off or it will topple over”
Again, still in Dakar, Senegal. But this time, I’m sipping a can of Coca-Cola that is written in Arabic, listening to Celine Dion, enjoying a great view of the beach of Dakar down below, and sitting in a makeshift throne in some stranger’s beachfront apartment who is actually an Egyptian pilot who understands English. Wey-O, as I interpreted it, invited my friend Alli and me over one afternoon when we were just lounging by the pool at our Dakar hotel. It was cool to get up and see the local’s side of the beach and hang out with someone who spoke some English. He showed us around his humble abode, which is quite spacious for one person and very posh to be living right on the beach. He didn’t really have a lot to offer besides Celine Dion, DSL internet, and airplane snacks, but it was his stories that were interesting. I mean, c’mon, he’s an Egyptian living in Dakar, he’s seen the world a couple of times. While I might not become a pilot to ever know what he’s talking about, if I am ever in Dakar again, I know who go to first. This is the last photo in the Dakar series, as we later left the hotel that night around 4am for a 6am flight to Cape Verde. None of us slept that night. Before that, I had a weird encounter at a bar with an African hooker that I wrote about earlier.
If there are ever any first stories about Cape Verde, it should always be about the first time you taste the local’s favorite alcoholic drink, grogue. Grown, processed and bottled locally, Cape Verdeans live and (can literally) die from that stuff. So on our 3rd day of training, several of us visited a bar and tried shots of grogue. Its breathtaking strength was seriously way, way too much for all of us to bear, so we each took a Fanta, as a wussy way to chase it down. Hence, there are more Fanta bottles than grogue shots. As of today, I have come to actually appreciate the strength and harshness of grogue and now am able to smell the sugarcane. If you haven’t smelled the sugarcane yet, you obviously need to drink some more. This reminds me. I should probably get some right now.
My first trip to the beach at Tarrafal. I went with Mike’s homestay family and Brent as well. It was sort of like a family day out, we would pile in a minivan, go right to the beach and have a picnic for lunch. What’s interesting about this trip, was how much indifferent this trip to the beach compared to family beach trips of when I was young. You see when I was little, family beach trips were probably about once a year, and they always consisted of family friends that tagged along, a big Asian meal picnic, Jasmine tea, and tons of Cambodians speaking fast Khmer that I didn’t understand. This trip to Tarrafal totally reminded me of those days. However this time it’s Cape Verdean food, sun soaked wine, and tons of Cape Verdeans speaking rapid Creole. I was 6 all over again.
Fresh off my day field tripping it through Cidade Velha and its deep canyons and European houses, I was eager to take more photographs of well, other things. I took a hike up the rocky hill behind my homestay house in Sao Domingos with my host brothers. I donned my camera and Chacos this time, in case I don’t fall down the hill like my previous encounter. I originally started to go with just the 2 of them, but soon a group of about 5 other kids and a dog joined us. When we got to the top, I was really surpised that the dog stuck it out and followed us the whole time. I asked my host brothers to pose with the dog and was very surprised at such a clean shot. Kenny on the left, is a mischievous fellow, always borrowing things without asking, sneaking up behind up you, hangs out with us at the bar, and always demands that you hold his hand if you’re walking together. The other brother Heltom, heck it reminds me one time when he showed up one day with a huge scrape on his forehead from playing soccer and I just laughed at him. The dog, well, he’s just a good looking dog.
