Come and get it!

Karen and I are very happy to announce that you can now pre-order a fantastic book of stories and photos from our years of travel along Asia’s backroads (and some main roads, too). Click one of the links above to reserve a copy for yourself. Heck, order them for your friends, too! (Publishers Weekly liked it…)

And here are photos from Asia’s backroads, by yours truly, including many images that couldn’t fit in the book. You can also click on your favorite images and buy prints (nudge, nudge):

This Way More Better

Both countries have transformed in the intervening years – Burma (or Myanmar, depending on your tastes) also changed its government – dramatically so. And, in case you missed it, Obama visited Burma less than two months ago to acknowledge their change. Four years ago, that possibility was simply unimaginable.

At the time, the people I spoke with talked little about hope but often about rice – they worked hard and they were hungry. Today, the emails we receive from our friends in Burma are full of hope and the possibility of change. Though there is still much talk of hunger and crushing work. Obviously, great things are possible in four years; but not all great things.

All photos ©2009/Jerry Redfern, and taken in Mandalay on January 20 of that year. The text I wrote at the time to accompany the photos follows.

A novice Buddhist monk works to clear a clogged sewer system that had backed up, flooding the surrounding neighborhood with sewage and creating a breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes, on the outskirts of Mandalay. Here, the people must do the work usually carried out by local governments in other countries.

A woman carries bricks atop her head at a construction site in downtown. She makes approximately $1.30 USD a day working from sun up to sun down carrying bricks up four flights of stairs at the construction site.

A young woman’s breath ripples a microscopically thin sheet of gold leaf as she affixes it to a sheet of paper for sale at a gold leaf factory. She can make about $0.30 USD for every 100 sheets of yellow paper (lower left) that she covers with gold leaf. Those sheets sell to customers at $3 USD for ten.

A teenage boy stirs a pot of curry in the kitchen of a teashop in downtown Mandalay. About 40 boys work in this teashop, all from the same rural village in Shan State. They make from $15 – $25 USD per month, working seven days a week to send the money home to their families in the country. They get three days off a year to visit their home town.

Dockworkers load bales of reeds weighing roughly 50 kilograms each onto a transport truck with a painting of a baby boy. The dockworkers can make as much as $4 USD a day if they get work, which doesn’t always happen.

An older couple pounds dents from 50-gallon gasoline drums used to transport fuel. For the incredibly noisy and physical work, they make about $0.05 USD per barrel and they can repair about 150 barrels a day. They couldn’t remember how long they had worked at this job, but guessed it was more than 20 years, the age of their grown boy who now has his own son.

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I am glad to see how much much hope the Burmese people have since I wrote the following bit. But I think little has changed in what people do for a bowl of rice.

There is little to be said about hope in Myanmar, as to hope is to think of the future.

In Myanmar, the future takes two forms – eternity and tomorrow. Every day, the country wakes to the sound of Buddhist prayers, broadcast from monasteries in every city and town across the nation. The prayers reflect the people’s hopes and beliefs in an afterlife, and, eventually, the possibility of Nirvana. This is the hope of eternity.

Before shooting, I discussed this project with a friend in Mandalay and he said, “Most people in Myanmar don’t think about the future and they don’t think about the past. They just think about today and ‘If I get my bowl of rice to eat, I am content.’”

This surprised me. After so many years of troubles, I didn’t think contentment had a place in Myanmar. But my friend assured me. He said it’s because so many Burmese today are completely uneducated. To be educated is to think of the world. Thinking leads to understanding. Understanding leads to wanting. Wanting leads to discontent. My friend admitted it’s a simplistic explanation, but it’s meaning is clear.

The hard reality of Myanmar is that few people have the time to be discontent. Their bowl of rice is the hope of tomorrow.

These photos show the cost of a bowl of rice. They show what these Burmese have done in the past; they show what these Burmese likely will do in the future.

One night over dinner with friends in Yangon, I spoke of the growing middle class in nearby Cambodia, long one of Asia’s most troubled and impoverished countries. I finished and there was a pause in the conversation before one of my friends said, “There is no middle class in Myanmar. Only rich and poor.” He is college educated, has a job that would land him squarely in the middle class anywhere else in the region. Here he works for his rice.

So there is little hope. But as long as people work, there is rice. For now. – January 2009, Mandalay

Mr. Magnet stands in the crater created by a 750lb bomb detonation.

Karen and I began the project documenting the continuing deadly aftermath of the American bombing campaign in Laos back in March, 2005, on an assignment to the Plain of Jars. All told, the project distills work from roughly 13,058 exposures on two cameras (I counted), at least 15 notebooks for 110,451 words written in the field (she counted), seven trips to Laos lasting more than seven months, several months of first drafting in between other work and three solid weeks of final drafting with no other work. That’s all.

What we saw when we first flew into the Plain of Jars on vacation in 1998: 25-year-old bomb craters.

We first visited Laos, and first saw the aftermath of the war, on vacation from Phnom Penh in 1998. We saw the craters and the bomb bits, but didn’t know enough to piece the whole story together. But when we started looking, it was impossible to miss the effects of war scattered amid the peaceful scenes of daily life across the country.

Frangipani tree framed in the window of a downed American helicopter in Phin, Phonsavanh province.

Fingers crossed, Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos should be out by the end of the year.

http://jerryredfern.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Gastronomica-UXO-2011.pdf

Kids and clusterbomb casings in Xieng Khouang Province, Laos

I am quite flattered to announce that Karen and I have been named Senior Fellows at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. It is to help us get our long-term project on UXO in front of a wider audience.

Our plan is to create an interactive online archive of information about the American bombing campaign and its deadly consequences. Stay tuned for more on that project.

Meanwhile, take another look at what the US left behind in Laos.

Eternal Harvest – Images by Jerry Redfern

Romana Goncalves, 43, is comforted by two of her six children as she slowly dies of a uterine tumor. Her husband was a member of an Indonesian gang and fled East Timor when Indonesia was driven out of the country in 1999. He wrote to her from Bali a year after he left, saying he had married an Indonesian woman and was not returning to East Timor. Romana Goncalves did not have $2000 for the operation doctors said she needed.

It’s a pretty darned good book, If I do say so myself. She (and apparently I) covered a lot of ground in the last 14 years, and talked to a whole helluva lot of people.

These two photos are from our travels in East Timor in 2002. Timor Leste (as they themselves call it) will celebrate its 10th anniversary as a sovereign country next year. While independence from Indonesia has brought freedom and security, it would be difficult to say that the tiny chip of a country is prospering. There is little infrastructure, little education, a tiny population and overwhelming poverty. And the memory of the crushing Indonesian occupation.

Children place flowers and candles on the grave of their father, Jose de Carvalho, in the Santa Cruz cemetery. The cemetery was the site of a massacre by the Indonesian Army in 1991, when they opened fire on a massive funeral march, killing at least 180.

Perhaps in the next year we can get back there and see first-hand how the country is doing ten years on.

Looking at Albuquerque and one of its concrete-lined storm ditches from the Sandia foothills. The ditch takes mountain storm runoff all the way across town to the Rio Grande.

About a year ago I began a project photographing the Rio Grande, the not-so-grand-or-wild river that runs near my house south of Albuquerque. It’s polluted, it’s smelly, and it’s over-utilized, in political lingo (i.e. there’s often not a lot of water in it). The river’s traditional Spanish name, Rio Bravo (Wild or Brave River) is what it still goes by in Mexico, though much of its recent history is a list of attempts to tame, control and “utilize” it.

Spanish soldiers and priests followed the Rio Bravo from the modern Mexican border north to Santa Fe back in the 1500′s, much to the long-term chagrin of several native communities.

I plan to photograph the cultural, political and climactic forces that continue to mold the river to the needs and wants of the people all along the river’s length. The project likely will take a few years to properly complete.

These kites are like hawks: ungainly on land, powerful and fast in the air. They can easily lift 2-3 men off the ground in strong winds, which is why they are flown by teams of more than a dozen.

You can see several other photos here. The color is courtesy of Kodak slide film. Yummy.