Claude shivers in a surprise snowstorm. We had to rush to get all the nets up because if the olives freeze then their oil is ruinedish.

Philippe examines a rifle, one of the pillars of his spiritual life on Corsica. For a goatherd and cheese maker, he and his family live very comfortably.

The neighbor watches the belts that roll the immense stone that crushes olives in the ancient stone mill. The gears used to be turned by water from a diverted stream, but they are now run by motor.

I was editing photos last night in preparation for a project and noticed the similarities among these three.

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by Mike

I’m volunteering in Haiti with an NGO that’s rebuilding schools. My job is to take photos that make heroes look like heroes. I think that’s pretty cool.

In southwest France, the father of an off-the-grid family taught us about medicinal herbs in his garden. We farmed with his family.

Among enormous sand dunes we danced samba in a shack in Brazil while it poured rain. The rain was warm.

In Paris we bought a scooter and took backroads to the tip of Corsica.

A fisherman in Uruguay sold us shrimp from his boat. In our rented, beachfront house we cooked them with garlic and butter and ate them listening to the sea.

The Burmese monk who lead the revolts against his government sat in front of us and meditated. It was an unexpected private meeting in Rangoon. When he finished he gave us oranges as gifts.

From a town in Laos that had no electricity, I remember the lights: stars like sugar spilled on a table, fireflies dancing in the jungle and candles on the tables where people sat and gossiped.

In Nice, the olive oil on our table never traveled in a vehicle. We gathered the olives, carried them to the mill, bottled the oil and ate it on bread.

Within months, in Bali, Hawaii and France, we talked to three different 90-year-olds who each told us their stories about WWII.

The tsunami hit the Indian town I was visiting, and I survived.

This post has been entered into the Grantourismo HomeAway Holiday-Rentals travel blogging competition.

by Mike

When a place is new sometimes it’s so overwhelming that I don’t quite know what to take a picture of, so I take pictures of the biggest things around – buildings – to represent all that’s different about a place. I certainly noticed the buildings when I first arrived here – the shacks and crumbled homes – but as the weeks have passed it has become less shocking, more normal. The buildings are still representative, but there is poverty in symbolism – in fact buildings are vessels that carry lives, the relevant content of a place, and the lives go on whether the buildings are standing or fallen. One can’t look at a broken building and have any clue as to the character of the people within. All I can know is that a broken house or school is probably making daily life more complicated.

I’m thankful that after a couple weeks of being here the broken buildings are becoming more normal to me because it allows me to see past them and to the stories of this place – the good, the bad, the complex stories that make Haiti so incredibly uplifting and heart-wrenching in the exact same moment.

And I’m glad we’re doing something to fix those buildings.

I hope when you watch this video of David you can see the complexity unfolding around him. He’s carrying water to mix into the concrete that will go into the wall of a new school.

by Mike

A little video of break time at a rubble site. N-Joy!

by Mike

This guy was hanging out at the work site, helping to carry pieces of lumber here and there. He asked me to take this photo, as is the case with most photos of people I’ve taken so far. This was the only shot I took of him.

by Mike

These photos are from an old hotel that was operating as an art gallery and cafe or something. We drove in rural areas this morning and since it was Sunday people were dressed up in their Sunday finest for church. There’s definitely a colonial style to the clothing, to the buildings as well, and when I saw things like a dapper man with a cane, the effect of his bare feet was that I imagined we were driving through Southern plantations in the early 1800s.
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by Mike

Here are more photos from the walk around town today.

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by Mike

We went for a walk around the town today, we actually saw most of it in about an hour. The man above was designing a sign for a studio that he’ll paint directly onto the wall of the building. He was stenciling it very exactly with a pencil and ruler, I’m excited to go back and see what he finally did with it.

This morning it sounded like a rooster war. You could hear them close and far, hundreds at a time, probably. It must have started around 5am or so. There weren’t any other sounds at that time, so sleeping outside with the clear sky and the trees and hills it made me wonder if this was what it was like in chicken-rich tropical places in times before electricity.