Swirls of alabaster dust puffed through the crowd and settled like confectioner's sugar onto Kyauk Sit Tan, Mandalay's famous stone-cutting lane where Burmese workers have chiseled, sanded and polished stone into sculptures for more than 150 years. Here among the whitewashed crowd of Buddha builders and tourists, a woman smeared with soot sat on her haunches and scooped handfuls of black hope... Continue Reading →
Fire and water
About a year ago, fire swept through a neighboring community and destroyed hundreds of homes. I took supplies to a local shelter and met Tammy Teeters, a woman who grew up playing in bombed ruins in Berlin. She sat in a church gymnasium and worried about how the songbirds in her woods would survive. When... Continue Reading →
About face
What draws us into some faces more than others? Is it the smile or the frown or the wrinkles or the eyes that magnetize our attention and forge a memory with a longer shelf life. I realize now that I have long been a collector of faces. The beauty of a distant land or my... Continue Reading →
The Vanishing Bride
The bride sought the shadows of the long afternoon as the bridegroom's village filled with strangers anxious to see who would marry a favorite son. For hours, the Bengli villagers in China's Guizhou Province had chopped, sizzled and stirred every part of a slaughtered pig and all the vegetables they could find. It was a... Continue Reading →