Student Action to Global Citizenry: The Voluntary Heart of Community

Optionless from Nora Younis on Vimeo.

"I recall the brutal massacre of Sudanese refugees in Mostafa Mahmoud square in 2005 when security forces violently interfered to dismantle their protests in front of UN Refugees Agency Office resulting in killing dozens of protesters including women, children, and elderly people." Ahmed Awadalla, Cairo-based Global Voices blogger (also published on Daily News Egypt)

Introduction

The focus of my volunteerism is with those who currently experience oppressive marginalization in the inhospitable host country of Egypt, who in 1951 made reservations to refugee rights chartered by the UNHCR Refugee Convention, also known as the Geneva Convention.

El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Centre was founded in 2006 in Ain Shams, a neighborhood in the outskirts of Cairo known for its African migrant population, by a group of committed Darfurian community leaders in order to address challenges within the refugee population in Cairo, with a focus on refugees from Darfur. The mission statement of the El-Wafaa Centre is to alleviate suffering of vulnerable refugee communities in urban areas.

Background

Egypt’s reservations to the UN’s Refugee Convention withhold national responsibility with regard to refugees within their country accessing public relief and humanitarian assistance. There are no refugee camps in Egypt. African peoples seeking asylum in Egypt continue to be unjustly marginalized based on race, ethnicity, religion, etc.

Initiated in July 2006 by local community within the African forced migrant population of Cairo, El-Wafaa Centre was physically founded in September 2006, with the assistance of Student Action for Refugees (STAR), a student-run organization at the American University of Cairo. Then president of STAR, Jennifer Renquist, now a foreign officer with USAID, organized the orientation of new students at El-Wafaa Centre, as well as the donation of books and stationeries to the center’s library, remaining a principal need.

I was introduced to this world in 2007 as a young student of literature and language at the American University of Cairo, after volunteering for STAR as an outreach English teacher. I soon met the director of the Refugee Culture Centre, named “El-Wafaa” (The Fulfillment in English) after teaching an intermediate level English course to an incredibly diverse class of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees from all over Africa.

The director of El-Wafaa, Abdel Rahman Siddiq Hashim, is from Darfur, Sudan, educated at a Sudanese university in English. He is a respected and humble community leader, known by many Cairo-based African refugees as “Teacher”. Abdel Rahman’s activism was far-reaching and all-inclusive, welcoming students into the education center, also serving as a cultural and community resource center, without discriminating ethnicity, religion or politics.

During my initial ten-month stay in Cairo, I became deeply involved in the refugee community beyond the interests of Student Action for Refugees (who soon abandoned and undermined local leadership), including organizing independent classes through the El-Wafaa community, running a food bank and managing library resources. Since then, I have poured over the role of the international community as a last vestige of light for the urban refugees of Cairo. In 2010, I returned to Cairo through a fully funded research endeavor with support from a Peace Studies consortium at the University of Calgary, where from I graduated the same year with a B.A. in the Social Sciences.

Highlights from the 2010 research period in Egypt include directly funding the El-Wafaa Executive Director’s return trip to Sudan to register El-Wafaa in Sudan, as well as with a Darfuri NGO network, to assess the situation of refugees returning home to respective countries of origin after living in Egypt as a refugee. Other successes included a film screening and discussion evening on related issues at the inner city Sudanese-led NGO Tadamon, offering charitable funding to vulnerable women-in-need, engaging Sudanese youth students in a music and culture recording project, and personally meeting and attending a course with Barbara Harrell-Bond, founder of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, the world’s first institution for the study of refugees.

Through my studies, research, and experiences in activism and fundraising since 2007 to the present, I have concluded that it is truly up to international civil society activists to help community leaders foster educational and cultural activities in their communities. UNHCR and local NGOs in the region have proven insufficient, whether as seen in the outcry of the Mustafa Mahmoud demonstration in 2005, or the current state of life for refugees during the unstable political turmoil in Cairo, today.

Their is a great need to support those who appreciate and enable the sustainable establishment of human rights organizations in Egypt providing proper services to any and all people, with a focus on African refugees.

Demographic

The target demographic of El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center is any and all residents and migrants of Egypt seeking a safe and inclusive community resource center that specializes in language education services. The target communities are refugees and asylum seekers from African countries who seek to transition from Egypt to resettle in a more hospitable country, or move back home after losing many years of their lives to impoverishment, lack of education and opportunity for employment. Such social challenges are due to many causes, including misinformation and a serious deficiency of awareness regarding the nature of life in potential resettlement countries, as well as in returning to often conflict-ridden countries of origin.

Conclusion

Currently, the El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center and its concomitant community initiatives are in dire need to generate sustainable activism (both local as well as international) to support the immensely wide gaps unfulfilled by the UNHCR, NGO, and academic, as well as faith-based service providers in Cairo.

On behalf of an international network to support the community vision El-Wafaa, led by the volunteerism of PhD student and Fulbright scholar based in New York City, Thomas Leddy-Cecere and myself, a freelance journalist and human rights advocate currently based in the city of Calgary in western Canada, we petition support.

Currently, the 2013-2014 budget for El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Centre to thrive in Cairo requires 1,280 USD (center rent, office supplies, external programs). Membership fees from refugee communities in Cairo seeking services are not adequate. International networks with preexisting solidarity groups in the U.S. and Canada are integral to the sustainability and overall maintenance of the El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Centre.

Related issues raised by the refugee community in Cairo include accessing micro-credit loans, contacting UNHCR, overcoming crises in housing and basic needs, among other areas of recurrent concern.

Anyone can learn more. If interested, please correspond with mind to the pressing need for immediate action. I would very much like to start a meaningful dialogue on this issue on behalf of an extended engagement with the urban refugee communities of Cairo.

References:

IRIN Middle East: Egypt’s turmoil makes life tougher for refugees

Muftah: Refugee Protests in Cairo

2010 Peace Studies Research in Cairo

Egypt’s Reservations to UN Refugee Convention

This blog was originally published at VolunteerCenter.com on July 29, 2013

• Please contact me @ mhanson1717@yahoo.com for a free informational brochure if interested in learning more about my initiative with refugees in Cairo, Egypt

_____________

With the Executive Director of El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center,  Mr. Abdel Rahman Siddiq of Darfur, Sudan 

Walking Away into the Bright Lights of Cairo

Partnership with the Bangladeshi Community

Global Youth in Cairo Apartment

With Student and Singer from Kordofan 

Twilight of Peace

With Student at St. Andrews Church in Cairo

A Creative Student at Arba Wa Nos Centre

Night Cafe with the Bere People of Sudan

American University in Cairo, Old Campus

Abdel Rahman Siddiq, the Teacher

In Honour of Community

El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center Logo

With favourite tea-seller, Julia

With student from Central African Republic at Tadamon Centre

Sudanese Teacher Registers Students at the El-Wafaa Refugee Center

Cultural Heritage of Sudan

The Quintessential Meeting Ground, the Sudanese Restaurant

 ____________

From Behaved Freedom to Absolute Nonsense

I go from a behaved freedom to absolute nonsense
            Without friends yet steeped in family love,
I publicly play and proclaim the monetary divide
            In my rich eyes which disguise the poverty
            line’s frozen glare
In Canadian expatriate stench, painstaking
            To be fugitive without mind
            to the loosed volley
Cracking against the one shield fortress of Mattapoisett
            One place of rest made into settlement with guns
            and stolen disaster
Ripped from the bosom of Europe’s scheming
                      English name
            Now massacring the playful
            artistry of our own inborn life

On this impossible continent
            Freely taken from a gamble and faith
In blond-headed angels
            Whose divinity was parted
            by the bald imprisoned hallucinations
Driving out demons with Masonic symbology
            Over the infinite sands of civilization,
            breathed and created out of time
In the sun’s ravishing corner of a universe,
            un-tempted and forever at a loss
                     Between the child’s two eyes
                     closing
On death and the holocaust of our forsaken government
            Laughing at the trees’ roots

When stretched to the bottom of India’s or Africa’s wells
            Ousting up the belief in life as a drunken tragedy
                                    Yet, be not humorless
                                    nor without comic sophistry

In the dance and song
            Come alive by the sexual majesty
                                    In theatre’s delicate ways,

To present the creative being
as one with truth’s bold and upheld music
            Reflecting back in the caged mirror
                                    A creator anew

This poem was featured in my most recent self-published chapbook, Act or Confront

Introducing ContinuuMusic

Musical explorations within continuous evolutionary creativity. Discovering new world fusion - instrumental, improvised music.

"For global community awareness" Vi An said at the TedxYYC event this summer to a packed house of 1500+ audience members, plus a streaming webcast to the entire world, before beginning a ten-minute set with co-creators Bijan Maysamie on Persian Santur, and Matt Hanson on xaphoon and percussion.

The debut concert of the ContinuuMusic trio is intended as a gift to the community. Often performing for charities and private events, ContinuuMusic has raised thousands of dollars for Ten Thousand Villages, Children's Health and Education in Iran, among other meaningful initiatives.

Inspired by their invitation to perform for TedxYYC at the grandest concert hall in Western Canada, ContinuuMusic is looking to sustain their creative efforts well into the future. Vi An is a professional artist of over 18+ years, an award-winning (Betty Mitchell) theatre composer with the Green Fools Theatre and recording artist with over 15 albums and hundreds of collaborative tracks worldwide. Bijan Maysamie is steeped in the classical tradition of Persian music. Originally from Tehran, Bijan is now venturing into fusion music for the first time, and is enthused as ever, at the helm of organzing this debut concert. Matt Hanson is a multi-instrumentalist, whose artistry draws deeply from a musical family with roots in Mediterranean and American intercultural tradition.

Music and War: A Dream of Youth

"I've been living in the war zone my whole life. It has always been my dream to make it to Kampala, because the National Music Competition is the biggest competition in all of Uganda. I want to win and I want our name to be known throughout Uganda as winners." Dominic, 14 year old Acholi xylophonist in War Dance

When I conducted research with refugees in Cairo, Egypt, I engaged the community in a youth music project. One night, I sat listening to the diverse musical traditions of Sudan, exhibited before me with unrivalled emotion. The room filled with traditional incense as we drank hilo-mor, a Sudanese herbal drink special during Ramadan. The lasting words of the night will forever echo in my head, when my co-researcher, a man from Darfur, asked his friend from Kordofan, a young singer, "Why do you sing your traditional music?" He responded, "Because when we sing, we remember where we're from, our place."

________

as the enlightening face of my old Israeli cousin, young of age, though old in memory blinks fearlessly in lieu of horizon’s edge, her eyes brighten in front of mine, a parallel daze, as she sends through her pupils an image of the bomb pattern of military flight

House of Ypres by A.Y. Jackson

and I see a Dutch friend, an emergent activist on the path to knowing her similarly, her pale face scans the leaping vigor of machine angst over the virtual land, upright in a jet, we scan the earth with the dotted map, bounding over villages destroyed at our mechanical feet as we leap through the air and finally touch down over a secretive hill, where green earth changes to beige desert 

F-16 over Pentagon 9-11-01 by U.S. Air Force

and part of a caravan, we gather direction with locals, Bedouin men allies, as they guide us towards the perimeter of our land, and espionage fills our lungs with the hot breath of wartime lies 

_________

“Where in whose pleasing leisure does our stock grow and go bolder in fields of blank duress from childless talent, filling space and accentuating silent harmony in the ever-widening round?”

To believe in light, and the possibility to endure the ground’s own failing trials

With Her round nature, orbiting in the mess of experience

Without prior knowledge, except when I believe in Her as my own

...dreaming up beauty in the complimentary fold / with airy locks peeled over the dead / sick earth swells with an overwhelming decay of restraint from life / into a confident foray with spirit’s unidentified heights or doorways into the New World / cornered, lightless

excerpt from "A Songster's Realisy"

A Long Sleep in Fellini's Most Vivid Dream

"I can't come down.

I can't land.

It's your fault.

It's up to you."

"A long sleep."

- From the penultimate scene of Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" when the main character receives a barrage of visions and the spirits haunt her as no other time in her life, consequences of the "long sleep"

In my experience, a longer, fuller sleep induces more vivid, more frequent and more discernible dream narratives. What the penultimate scene from "Juliet of the Spirits" and indeed the entire film points to, in my mind, is the idea that Juliet, the protagonist, has been submerged in subconscious urges and preoccupations for too long, that their inescapable manifestations begin to peek out into her waking consciousness as in the stupor of sleep. The gorge and slew of both inanimate and living tempests swarm about, as a march of assailants in the form of multiple kinds of attractions and diversions. Has she simply been subject to her own delusions for too long? Or has she been too unable to realize that her very surroundings are incontrovertibly diluted by the anxiety of an unremembered dream or a lingering past, whose burden weighs on her as a traumatic background in her now semi-formed consciousness.

[Dr. Ernst] Bernhard’s focus on Jungian depth psychology proved to be the single greatest influence on Fellini’s mature style and marked the turning point in his work from neorealism to filmmaking that was “primarily oneiric”.[31] As a consequence, Jung's seminal ideas on the anima and the animus, the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as 8½ (1963),Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Satyricon (1969), Casanova (1976), and City of Women (1980).[32]

31 - Kezich, Fellini: His Life and Work, 227

32 - Bondanella, Cinema of Federico Fellini, 151-54

- from Wikipedia 

_______

A frenetic blur of imagery sparks like lightning through an overcast sky in my subconscious as I travel through unknown whereabouts and experience fragments of lived time with indiscernible rhythms and consensual mysteries evacuating from my internal realizations as soon as they are actualized. Upon waking, there is an absolute fading of dream memory at once overcome through cleansing the doorways to my dreaming with pristine internal perception inspired by listening to John McLaughlin’s composition “Lotus Feet.”

I walk through the volatile lighting of an American department store. Above, through the radio speakers latched against the top of the high-rise shelving reaching to the visible reinforcements in the ceiling, a couple having passionate sex is emitted very audibly throughout the air of the building. As I pass by the cash register, I notice people are mostly trying to ignore this obvious audio incursion. Looking through an entrance to the back warehouse behind the cash register, I see a half-naked woman and her lover. I continue on, ever more rapidly in pace to the back of the department store, which then is suddenly converted into a movie house.

I am seated with my wife and a woman who very much resembles an acquaintance I made in Cairo. She was a nice young lady and very tall, who used to give me rides in her dilapidated Volkswagen bug through the atrociously busy streets of Cairo, driving with an ease and confidence unlike even the most seasoned taxi cab drivers. Here she was sitting next to me and my wife. I could tell we were watching an experimental video installation by the artist John Cage. All of the monitors are three different sizes, placed in different areas of the room, with exchanging audio frequencies, but mostly silent. Two of the monitors screen the same video, while the one behind us is a totally different screening. This experimental cinema is fascinating, however I am distracted by the two women beside me, one who is coaxing me to stay, trying to seduce me, the other is leading me away, trying to get me out of this confrontational presence. My wife soon leaves, and the Cairene lady sits in the theatre ever welcoming, however I soon exit.    

The street is cold, it is night and your breath exhales as thick as a cream-based soup out into the freezing air. The weather is dry, and so the breath evaporates and disperses as quickly as my wife’s gone and disappeared. I cross through the low-lying wintry brush of a coastal woodland environment. I can feel the salt of the sea on my skin and on the felled trunks and trees. At a clearing, I stop, inhale the glorious freshness of the seaside air and lean against a massive horizontal tree, lying upon the ground with its majestic, silvery gray icing.

I find my way into a house resembling a wood-floored home of my upbringing. I am at a computer, as I used to sit at one when I first began to use a computer. I feel an intense anxiety. My mother walks in the room with my tropical biology professor from Peru. This is an odd sight however I am completely pre-occupied with an overwhelming nervousness, as I feel that I have missed my final exams to complete high school. I become extremely angry and frustrated with disbelief at having to continue on into my pre-mature schooling. I wake relieved.   

________

she exits

diminished to bodiless spirit 

or soul wordslip 

(meaning)

at the door

he crumbles 

grandfather cookie 

a humility that knows only human end 

laugh

after the show 

before coffee

- excerpt from "Soul Wordslip"

Reading Predators on a Street of Arabic

“Reading, something most of us take for granted, can help unlock remarkable powers. Reading builds new connections in the brain, which in turn allow us to use written words as stepping stones to understand other people’s worlds. A good book literally has the power to change you."

Origins of Reading

"Our ability to use our visual areas to immediately know whether that object is prey or predator is actually being recycled for us in order to be automatically recognizing symbols."

Using Nouns as Verbs

"...it's like an evolutionary tool, that's to say it raises levels of attention, it primes the mind for difficulty, and the chances are, that it may be that it leads on to the mind being ready to take different pathways from the obvious one"

Creative Reading

"...I think that reading is a creative act in itself, as writing is, because you are creating something while you're reading it, you are bringing in your own experiences...when you can get into the minds of other characters and see what they're experiencing, it makes you better at empathizing...fiction has made me see things from other people's points of view”

Literacy and Empathy

"So, when we think of reading as purely about literacy, there's obviously another dimension to it, which is empathy."

From BBC Documentary “Why Reading Matters” documentary

________

Kasr al-Aini Street in Cairo, Egypt is primarily a street for government bureaucracy centers and large and lucrative local banks and other big businesses, however there are a good many small juice stands and cafes tucked away, one is called cafe Vienna. 

I find I am living on this street in a quaint little house, feeling something like the way how in Calgary there are random character homes sparsely interwoven in the city core. The insides and the outer wear reminds me of a ramshackle country house. The first time I exit the home, I am immediately met by a shady individual, a rotund young white male, who offers me money in exchange for delivering a package just around the corner at the gas station. Curiously, I take the package and run inside, asking my wife what to do! She vigorously reminds me that I am being foolish so I return the package to the exceptionally inexpressive young man. He takes the package back without question and rounds the bend, after which police storm immediately. 

In the next instance, we are at the house when a roommate is moving in. He is a man with dark complexion not unlike the local Egyptian man, however he seems more American in his mannerisms. He later tells me he is from Hawaii. He is a nice man. One day he helps us receive two amphibians and a fish. I am not sure why we have these creatures, however another smaller man, a caretaker of such amphibians, helps us all to cut them out of a stomach lining packaging. He says to be careful of the one as it spits mini-bullets. I take the creatures, beautiful and exotic to a pet shop, leaving them there. I return to the house only to find my wife is missing, I look all over our property in the dimly polluted urban backyard for any sign of her, staying awake in a candlelit room all night contemplating her loss. I don't feel she is dead, only that I may be in the wrong place. I am without any impetus to look. I simply wait, despite the presence of our Hawaiian roommate who offers to help.

_______

My fingers press into each letter

with a singular stroke

My head figures weightless across shoulder and palm 

holding up my brain box, short-circuiting

“What actually happened?”

“Conversations of new words

led to the experimental consciousness

of language

as a human creation.”

“What else?” 

- excerpt from "What Else?"

The Lucid Bansuri: Remembering Dreams from Cairo to Khartoum

- Create Space & Reflect -

Listen to Bansuri Music 

This is a Key 

To Remember Dream

- Reflect & Create Space -

“Our ability to transcend grief and trauma that affects our every waking moment, our relationships, our ability to connect with anyone and everyone, becomes a symbol of how this can be done culturally and globally. Down under the blanket of denial runs a river of grief so despairing that our pain is but a thread…”

Source

______

Embedded deep in my subconscious, a dream was invoked which actively combined elements of my imagination mixed with reality, as it were wholly over-arched with the peculiar logic of dream. 

I traveled to Sudan with the Sudanese friend & mentor I met while in Cairo. Together we left for Khartoum from Egypt. When we arrived, I found myself called to visit an ecological park. The city infrastructure and the park itself is strongly reminiscent of Puebla, Mexico where I recently visited. Also, the park reminds me of a painting I used in The New West of Dreams, however with features of Calgary's eastern outskirts in midsummer, with straw grass, lit beige along the side of railroad tracks unto an open field horizon. This is important, as entering through this imagery leads me into a labyrinth network of my psyche set in a past residence. In this case my Zamalek dormitories are transformed to receive me, with special emphasis on their washrooms, out of which I meet an unusually forward acquaintance who begins to accompany me and assist me throughout the city. This friend is someone who I studied with in Canada and met again in Cairo, asking him to volunteer as a part of a research project. In this dream, he takes another name as we've since fallen out of contact.

The substance of the dream lies in me going into the city of Khartoum. As I've never been there in a waking state, I create the city out of sketches of video I have from a research project I collaborated with there in June 2010. I often return to the ecological park, however my friend from Sudan resides in the city. He is the principal character in this narrative. Over tea, he emphasizes to me the fundamental error of my research, which if on the subject of refugees should not be "why are there refugees?" but instead "how do we get these people out?" One should not undermine or exploit an act of exile, as exile is often the most decisively conscious choice of all.

Now, the trick to remembering the content and substance, i.e. narrative structure and significance of the dream, as practiced in this example is that after forgetting the dream, after its sleep cycle had ended, I dreamed lucidly, where I told the story of what I went through in Sudan to close friends and family in intimate settings, and it brought me right back into the substance of the previous dream. Upon waking, the only discrepancy between dream memory and waking memory is the fact that I never traveled to Sudan, though the content of the dream itself was wholly based in waking memory.


When one is able to manipulate their psyche with regard to memory and consciousness, one finds that upon waking, the substance of reality becomes more and more resonant with principles of dreaming.

_______

and what do our ramshackle hearts smell?
close to a savage waste
as overwhelming and without choice
as drowning in the rice stew magic
of a motherless animal
eaten raw, over a lover’s fattened tummy
now screwed into all intoxication
and psychic bewilderment,
until the stare blows rhythms of ancient minds

- excerpt from "Cave Home"

Skeletal Percussion under an Insurmountable Cliff in a Cairo-Western

Moses Striking Water from the Rock by Francesco Bacchiacca

I fail in my attempts to scale a sheer cliff face. The convex shaft of rock rises with crumbling shale and patches of vegetation. About 12 stories high, there a small plateau can be seen, whereupon a sparse array of pines and a wild horse appear at the glinting corner of my eye against the vertical immensity.

With extreme patience, I wait so long at the bottom, contemplating my journey up to the top of this rocky upshot plateau that my surroundings turn to nightfall. I am somewhere, it seems on a street corner of an old Western town mixed with a particular street corner in Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt where an old-fashioned, abandoned colonial bar still exists as the sole edifice of its kind across from the Iraqi embassy. It is nightfall and the dirt road is damp. Eyeing a nearby cat atop small, ramshackle homes and halfheartedly constructed projects, I shoe away stray dogs. I am playing an odd percussion instrument. With vertebrae, it seems of dog, horse and cat, in different sizes strung up, and hanging down off a piece of wood, I knock against them with the skull of a dog. The bone-knocking sound is then accompanied with a metallic cymbal-like object that I also strike against the differently-sized vertebrae hanging down in various lengths, to produce specific tones upon striking them. The sounds are enlightening, yet as the dog nearly kills a cat, attempting to chase it into certain death around my roofless quarters, I still yearn to rise with break of day and scale the rocky outcrop. 

Busking, Gambling and Escape from the Assured Life

Peasants Playing Cards in a Tavern by Adriaen Brouwer

A dream of two days ago will not escape me. It is ever pertinent, because it lingers still in my memory, and its narrative, symbology and emotional meanings are carried through into my dreams today:

Dream 1

I am running, as a fugitive would run, I run with everything that I am. I seem to be escaping the watch of some unknown authoritative holding. The police, FBI, it could be any of these, or it could be something more abstract. I am unsure, yet I am running.

Next, I find myself busking with a guitar beside a Fire Station in the town of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. This is an odd place to find one's self busking, however I am in the eye of governmental authority. My change bowl clinks with a Canadian loonie and a few pennies. I am enjoying playing the guitar, then I feel as if I am being chased again, the firefighters seem to all glare and approach as if from above, and my whole environment around me seems to do the same.

Dream 2

I at New York University. My step-father is guiding me to sign up for a set of classes with a Master's program as he had always wished for me. I comply with passive-aggressive remarks and actions, thinking in my head one thing while doing another. I sign up for some classes in his presence. Next, he buys me a cheap guitar out on the street. I see him speed off with an unforgivably strange partner, however he is happy, and so I am content.

I visit a friend, we are in a small space, inside what seems to be a bedroom of a trailer. I show the people there the guitar and it seems to be entirely unplayable. It is a cheap piece of trash. We sit awkwardly around the television, wasting time.

I then go down an alleyway which appears similar to the alleyways in and around Cairo, Egypt's downtown midan or squares. In the alleway, I see people busking. They are bringing such authentic vibrations of strength, persistence and genuine enjoyment to an otherwise dull and dreary atmosphere of biological decay and mental stagnance. The street performers are still not well-recognized nor respected well by passerby onlookers. I cheerfully greet these buskers and enjoy their drumming.

Next, I am in what seems to be the inside of a warehouse, it is a filled with the stereotypical busker of the public mind. A recurring dream-character, tall, stout, blonde-haired, bearded with bad complexion. Within the warehouse there is homelessness, deprivation, madness, poverty. I walk through unaffected yet witnessing, somehow removed by unique experience. I have returned to a world filled with inequalities and cheap resolve for a way of life which transforms peoples minds into that of a fugitive.

                                                                    ____________

One day, while reflecting on the act of street performing/busking, I was taken with the notion that busking is in many respects like gambling. And from a crude perspective, the art of pure improvisation is in a way a form of gambling, wherein you anticipate, based on one's knowledge of the variables at hand, the outcome of a certain action. The fact that my experience as a street performer/busker has been through performing completely improvised music further emphasizes my notion that improvised street performing is a kind of gambling, however with the due sophistication of musicianship and the wealth of experiential confidence in playing one's instrument. For further understanding seek: myspace.com/vian and youtube.com/nivsha

Journey into the Underworld with My Older Brother

The Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross, detail by Vittore Carpaccio

With my older brother, we take off within what seems as a deep opened chasm within a cave, into a body of water, as if endless. The water extends dream-like with opaque energy into a vast fear. We are on a small raft, a canoe of sorts, with all of our paternal cousins. The raft edges out onto the water and its depth begins to fall under us as a tremendous anxiety takes hold, and suddenly it's as if we are all alone, although together. One of our cousins holds a light out at the front edge of the vessel. Then, I begin to fall into the treacherous dark, depth of cavernous liquid. My brother reaches out to me as I fall overboard, though his arm reaches out too short. His palm opens up with fingers outstretched with a genuine attempt full with the strength of his being unto the ends of his fingertips. Still, in the water, full of fear, I feel a great abandonment. (I remember the time when in a small bay in Massachusetts, I was left to swim for over a half hour while he and friends did watersports, completely forsaken to the water and its full, unforgiving depth of life, I swam, as it were endlessly facing my most shallow of fears.) I begin to swim, however immediately I see a shark's fin. I call out to my brother, yet he is nowhere to be found, the vessel has left without me. The shark fin passes by me and I feel a brief moment of relief, however it then turns around and heads straight for me. I experience the full great depth of fear as the whole vibration of the body of water shakes with my fear unto the ends of the finality in our human mysterium. I grasp hold of a rocky edge. (Suddenly I feel the safety of swimming in one of the sonotes in Yucatan, Mexico.) The rock seems as resin, a sharp and hard-edge crystalline foment similar to the floors of the Chauvet caves in France. I climb atop the cavernous rock, it is as tall as the side of a mountain, yet I edge into its porous underlying texture and finally ascend to the top. I reach a pile-on similar to the Inukshuk in Inuit country, however it is as constructed with the street trash of urban Cairo, Egypt. I observe this pile-on as a marker that I have reached the summit of the cave's own tallest mountain and I seem to be again in the solitude of the fantastical cliffs and mountains of Petra, Jordan, with its piles and collections of small trinkets still bundled up and set on display in the after-hours of tourist visitation. This marker reminds me that I am somewhere, although foreign, that has been visited by human hands prior to my arrival and suddenly I am in the safety of human existence. I continue to forge on, in the absolute opacity of an endless night.

Next, I am driving with my older brother and our father through to a mythic resemblance of Falmouth, Massachusetts, the end of the bay into the open Atlantic ocean. We are driving him to be sent off by ship to the other shore; Europe. He is holding a concert ticket, as if he is going there for music. We are so glad to be seeing him off, and inside I am a little jealous! The sun is bright and it is a green day in what seems like the heart of Spring. In the backseat of the car, I imagine a bird's eye view of us driving through the open roads to carry my brother off to a glorious and resounding destiny filled with music and the brightness of a future fulfilled with mutual Love.

Discolored Urban Landscape Sexualized in Youth

Ciudad by Ulpiano Carrasco

The landscape is a discolored, underdeveloped urban setting rising high up, similar to urban sprawl of Cairo, favelas of Brazil and the outskirts of D.F., Mexico, I can see out from a high rise, immediately outside the underdeveloped core are more riche developments that look more like suburban residences in Boston, upstate NY or Washington DC, then after that ring which has a certain brilliance and illuminates in the harsh sunlight much clearer than my immediate surroundings in a somewhat dim vantage point, the most outlying division is a pentagon-looking, round-shaped government-type building similar to the famous MIT hall in Cambridge, yet the building is surrounded, as are all outlying developments, with dense low-lying jungle similar to southern Mexican traditional Maya lands, I seem to have checked into the dilapidated high-rise I'm in, as it is a hotel. I'm with four others, 2 guys and 2 women my age, one of the ladies looks Provencal French with a Roma nose, the group becomes quite sexually aroused and active, altogether, I'm observing with care how they treat the French-looking lady as her naked body is mounted revealing a pointed mass of moving genitals, the group soon disperses with an air of slight dissatisfaction, I seem extremely anxious and leave the building

Sept. 29 2011

Lifelong Blood Infection at a Refugee Community Center

The Pasha by Jean-Honore Fragonard

In Ain Shams, Cairo, Egypt in El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center teaching rooms. It is dark with single light bulb light wavering, chalky walls, the tattered blue paint against the rough globs of unsmoothed concrete, my finger is sucked clean by a strange jellyfish type being, it gives me HIV, though I try and clean the blood in a hand/face washing sink basin

July 14, 2011