4am morning prayers:
a terse history resonates with an inner tuning, filling me with the reflections of all listening ears
assumptions:
diplomat,"It's going to be a hard audience, almost everyone covers."
audience member, "We are not thinking about you that differently because I know we are the same."
(a case of human contact piercing perceptions)
An encounter:
I was always fearful of being that person with the camera, happily snapping the exotic, those foreign images so beautiful so quixotic to the virgin eye. An Anthropologist's guilt would surge through me every time my index finger bent down. It was a simultaneous shutter with the lens. All until another eye had a look. This eye was a familiar one for it belonged to a man who at one time had daily interactions with the places and people captured by my wonderment. His name was Ibrahim and like many of my encounters in Ramallah it was not one that I will soon forget. No longer privileged to leave the occupied land, Ibrahim had not been to Jerusalem in ten years which as a Brooklynite I would equate it to not being able to set foot in Manhattan. Image not being able to visit friends, family, loved ones just across the river; not being able to go listen to your favorite musician play live or visit an exhibition by an artist you always wanted to see; image not being able to stroll through central park or have a quick bite at that amazing underground Indian restaurant you have come to know so well. Imagine having to relive all of this through the photos of a tourist who is visiting your country for the first time. Ibrahim was grateful for the small taste I was able to provide of the place he had known so well before. His thankful eyes helped to subside some of my guilt and yet I still shutter, now for a different reason.
