Esse seu olharThat look of yours
When it meets mine
Speaks of some things I can’t even believe…
This excerpt of a song by Tom Jobim, even out of place, suits better than the words I was thinking of writing…
It is the eyes what we know better in people. It is there that our first look is directed… it is the look that tells how we feel… how the ones surrounding us feel…
… that’s why it is so important to look each other in the eye!
I only saw this boy on the day I took his picture.
His look disturbed me… he looked straight ahead, with no fear or evasions… it was always me who looked away…
He didn’t talk much, but he liked posing for the photos. While taking this one, I bent so my eyes were at the same level his were and he also bent…
This attitude makes us think… does one always bend when someone does it next to him?
Ok... I can’t keep a silent cycle...
There is so much to write that I can’t limit myself to posting pictures…
This is Tomás once again, of whom I have already written so many times. By looking at this picture I was reminded of a conversation I had with Helena – his older sister – during which I asked her who ate less at home. She replied it was Tomás. He just ate two or three spoons of rice and that was it…
I must confess that with the ending of the DEL8 contest and the ending of my classes (both the ones I teach and the ones I attend), I have been swarmed with work…
Since I still have many photos, I think I will take the advice of Ketta and make a silent cycle… (comments are, however, welcome!!)
This is a little sight of Empada’s market.
Most of the sellers that sell goods other than food are Senegalese or Mauritanians. There is a bit of everything but in August 2008, what we saw more were plastic sandals.
The trip to the market was a real adventure! Everyone wanted to sell us everything and more!!
In the beginning of May, Ana Carvalho published a text that made me nostalgic.
Back then, I had the nerve to ask her if she could send it by mail and after some email exchanges, a package coming straight from Guinea arrived to my house.
I can’t decide about the ideal moment to open and eat this delicious cashew…
This Friday, May 29th, I will be presenting the documentary we made in Empada in Linhó, Sintra. Maybe that is the right moment to share one of Guinea’s main riches!
If anyone is interested in watching the documentary, it is 30 minutes followed by a conversation/debate about Guinea, the Millennium Development Goals and the DEL8 contest. It will start at 9pm (I think it is in the salon/cultural club). It will be an enjoyable evening with the promise that I will take this delicious cashew to share!! Be there!
Ps: Thank you, Ana!
After lunch it was impossible not to take a nap. I wanted to make the most of my time there but the weather there is so strong that it messes our bodies and it is imperative to rest.
One day, during nap time, it started to pour. All the children that were playing ball on the field of the mission of the sisters of Consolata took the opportunity to stand under the exit of the water from the gutter. As soon as he realized I had gotten up and left the room with my camera, Tomás came to me and asked me to take a “postcard” of him.
I set the shutter with a high velocity to “freeze” the fastness with which the water fell and the result was this absolutely intimate moment that takes me there every time I look him in the eye.
Nowadays, in May, the rain starts to fall down in Guinea.
This boy was happily walking under the rain and only later did he open his umbrella. I think the temptation of standing in the rain is so much that no one can resist it…
Just imagine: heat and humidity before the possibility of a refreshing bath of the size of a river’s flow!!
This picture ends the cycle dedicated to Kudom.
The school in the back isn’t big enough for all the students anymore, so the population from the village had to start building a new one. Because there is a lack of “everything”, the construction has been like this for quite a while now…
Some time ago I lost a whole class because the laptop wouldn’t work. Of course I was upset with the situation!
When I look at this picture I wonder how it would be to teach there… one thing is for sure: there would be no chance I would get upset over a faulty laptop.
How would it be to teach Art in Guinea-Bissau? More, with which art do you teach in Guinea-Bissau?
The search for this answer charms and motivates me!
In this picture you can see sister Anistalda, who has spoken to dozens of Portuguese students using a mobile phone during this school year, and Patrícia, greatly responsible for the video images captured for the documentary Cuma qui bu na mansi?.
In the middle we have the main theme: the well. This is similar to the ones of Empada. There is no need to say that a great part of the Kudom’s and Empada’s inhabitants’ life revolves around the well:
- when the day begins, they go to the well;
- in the midmorning, they go to the well;
- near meal time, they go to the well;
- in the afternoon, they go to the well;
- in the late afternoon they go to the well to get water to wash themselves;
- in the evening they don’t go to the well to get water to cook because there is no dinner…
Here are the two girls I mentioned on one of the first posts about Kudom.
It is tradition that no man can see them during the week prior to the marriage, hence their covering. Since I was “white”, tradition didn’t apply, so I got to see them. They even lifted their veil … I don’t know why, but I decided to photograph that moment…
I don’t have the courage to publish that image.
If it were today, I wouldn’t even take it…
In Kudom, like in most villages in Guinea, children have umbilical hernia, a result of bad healing of the cut of the umbilical cord at birth and during the first months of life.
The swollen belly is a sign of undernourishment…
Despite all of this, the children chased me running, posed for the pictures, laughed when they saw themselves in the small camera screen. They touched my pink skin and felt my arm hair as something very strange…
Darwin was right. Survival makes us develop more accurate techniques. Even in a biological level, some are more able to endure the cold than others…
What you see in the middle is a cow corral.
Kudom is a land of cattle handlers. In the past, the cows were kept in a place out of the village, but as some robberies started to occur, the inhabitants decided to keep the cattle right in the center, among the houses. The result is kind of smelly and full of flies, which makes Kudom a land that requires some adaptation time…
These containers keep cereals, especially rice.
There is a blog with precious information about Guinea that has a lot of information on this subject.
To get there, we have to take a dirt pathway, with lots of holes and very treacherous. The final part was made on foot because there was a tree lying in the middle of the road. So you can have an idea, the log that fell on the floor was taller than me – it should be about more than 2 meters high.
If Empada is cut off from the world, Kudom is lost in the map…
In 2003 I participated in the recording of a cd whose profits would be used to construct a primary school in Kudom (Guinea-Bissau, in the region of Quinara).
On the 10 August 2008, I visited the village that beneficiated from this project for the first time. I saw the built school and more: I saw a new school being built next to the other one!
But what marked me the most on that day wasn’t the built school...
There was a wedding taking place in the village. Two girls were inside the house covered with a veil and could not be seen by anyone. The respective husband was in Buba (the nearest city) doing a complementary teacher formation. Up until this, not much of a big deal, right? Well, this teacher was in a delicate position, as he was the son of the chief of the village and had taken a decision that went against his father’s will: he wanted to have a single wife.
For the father, his son having only one wife would be a disgrace, for there were no guaranties that his children with that woman would survive and that way the family’s descendancy would be compromised.
During his son’s formation in Buba, the father took care of the wedding with another two women (girls, that is) so that, when he got to Kudom, his son would be forced to accept those two new wives…
I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. All I know is that the culture has a huge weight upon our lives. I cannot criticize anyone for I too, live in drenched in a culture that draws my limits and guides my actions… for better or for worse…
I was born after the 25 April 1974 and I imagine that the majority of this blog’s readers are in the same situation, but that doesn’t make me feel indifferent to this date.
On this day, I always remember a song by Sérgio Godinho called Freedom:
The peace, the bread, habitation
The health, education,
There is only real freedom
When there is
Freedom to change and decide
When what the people produce shall belong to the people
Is it just me or the big toe in the picture doesn’t have the ‘freedom to change and decide’? it is there, stuck to a task it didn’t choose…
The other smaller toes are just watching, but they have no task…
But there is something that never changes: it is always the bare foot that works the hardest…
With this picture, I finish the photographic cycle dedicated to Safi.
Safi is a brave woman: she had 7 children with her first husband, who died bitten by a snake. She got married again and she had another 7 children. Her second husband abandoned her. Three of her children died.
When she was left alone with 11 children, her family pressured her into marriage again, for she couldn’t stay alone. She didn’t accept the situation since she didn’t know what kind of husband she would get – one that would help her or one that would force make her have more children.
Because she didn’t want to remarry, her family refused her and she had to move to Empada, rejected by her own family…
The Safi I met was a woman free of the weight of traditional values. She thought with her own head, which was a result of the courage she had to decline yet another marriage.
She is, however, one of the poorest people in Empada…
