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The Rebel Saint of South Sudan
After 30 years of service in Sudan, often defying her superiors’ orders, a remarkable Indian nun is forced to ask herself whether she’s made any difference at all. Ground Zero in the City of Wau Sister Gracy sits on the edge of her seat as she guides her Landcruiser through the back roads of Wau, South Sudan. She knows every dusty path by heart. At five feet tall, she barely clears the steering wheel. She smiles as she peers over the dash, keeps a rosary hanging from the rearview, and has a habit of grinding the gears when she’s distracted, as she is now. The 60-year-old nun has one hand on the wheel while the other points out the demolished huts that pass by, burned down and bombed out. Furniture, grain sacks, family photos, remnants of looting litter the roads. We keep an eye out for mil...
Edoardo Chavarin: Beautiful Mexicanity
This week on The Trip podcast: Tijuana design legend Edoardo Chavarin on growing up with one foot on each side of the border wall, how to brand Mexico, and why Tijuana is having a creative revolution. It is deceptively simple. Exchange your dollars, walk a couple hundred yards, get your passport stamped, keep walking, wave off the taxistas and hustlers, sit on a plastic chair and order an al pastor torta, a sandwich so heavy with meat and mayonnaise and jalapeños that it can only mean one thing: you’re in Mexico, just past the San Ysidro Port of Entry, one of the busiest border crossings in the world. Easy. It’s also incredibly complicated. I happen to have been born in the land of the blue passport, not the green, and to have walked from north to south, not the other way around. So I cann...
Ruffo Ibarra: Reclaiming the Soil
This week on The Trip podcast: Chef Ruffo Ibarra on leading a new era of Tijuana culinary excellence, electric flowers, and mind-bending chilis. The word milpa means different things depending on what part of the Americas you’re in, but at its root it’s an agricultural system, a simple and sustainable combination of the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. The beans climb the corn stalks while the squash shades the ground. Pure pre-Columbian harmony. Good for total nutrition, good for reclaiming poor soil. And it’s a helluva metaphor for what’s happening now with the food scene in Baja California. There’s been a lot of poor soil in Tijuana over the years. Even before those years when it was some kind of border Fallujah, one of the most dangerous cities on earth, it was a spotty destinat...
Jorge Nieto: Cartels and Culture
This week on The Trip podcast: Journalist Jorge Nieto on covering Tijuana’s good and bad days, losing friends to violence, and what happens when you accidentally get the wrong beer for members of the Sinaloa cartel. Ah, the sound of a dozen hellhounds slavering for a taste of sweet gringo flesh. This is actually part of my perennial Mexico soundtrack, from the south or north, whenever the omnipresent guard dogs catch that scent of vanilla or sulphur or whatever the hell Caucasian men smell like when they’re wandering around looking for an address they cannot find. This particular bit of the Baskervilles was on the Otay Mesa, a plateau that spans the border from Tijuana to San Diego. There’s an absurdly wide view looking down across the sprawl of Tijuana from up here. And people like the ne...
Gera Gámez: Stuck on the wrong side of the wall
This week on The Trip podcast, deportee Gera Gámez on surviving L.A. gangland violence, jail and deportation, and adjusting to his new reality in Tijuana. I got a WhatsApp voice message in Tijuana from a journalist named Jesús Aguilar. He’s one of a special breed of police-scanner-hawks, independent reporters of the people, who zoom from crime scene to crime scene, take pictures of the carnage, tell what they can about what happened, and post it on their social channels. Every Mexican city seems to have a handful of these—in Tijuana it’s people like Jesús and Margarito 4-4, and they can have huge followings, partly for the lurid fascination, partly for the sense that this is the most honest reporting people can get on dishonest system. In this message he left me, Jesús is telling me that h...
An Elegy for Karachi’s Empress Market
The dismantling of Karachi’s markets and informal shops isn’t just robbing the city of its soul. It threatens the survival of the very people that make it a city. A group of women in faded patterned saris sits by the side of a road, some shaded by umbrellas, with bags of dried nuts in front of them—almonds, pistachios, cashews. The image would rack up a lot of Instagram likes, if it weren’t for the devastating landscape—mounds of sand, steamrolled expanses, clouds of dust, debris, and the stark sight of a building smack in the middle. Or that these women aren’t sitting on a pavement, protected and secure in their work. They’re on the side of the road, an easy target for harassment, being pushed out from the only place they’ve ever worked, where their fathers worked, and where their childre...
Panca: A Muralist in the Age of the Wall
This week on The Trip podcast: Smoking out with Panca, Tijuana’s border-crossing muralist. Ah, those are some sounds from the last day of Tijuana, one last taco with chef Ruffo Ibarra, and then one last ballad from a street singer. The taco was a beef stew masterpiece from Tacos Fito, where the taquero slings the stew across his outstretched arms, from the ladle in his right hand to the taco in his left. The wall, it can’t stop music, it can’t stop drugs or guns, and it certainly can’t stop art. So on my last day, I went back over the border, to San Diego, where I met up with Tijuana-based artist Paola Villaseñor, better known as Panca. Panca’s next show is at Bread & Salt in San Diego on February 8. I feel like you’ve seen her work, or at least, if you have seen it, you remember...
Havana Youth: Q&A with Greg Kahn
Photographer Greg Kahn’s new book explores youth culture in Cuba. Greg Kahn was sitting at his fixer’s house in Cuba one night when he heard the thump of a bass beat echoing through the streets. He wandered outside, where he found a plaza with hundreds of kids dancing to electronic music. “It was current music that I had been listening to in the States,” Kahn said. “It just totally flipped that idea of everything that Cuba is.” Khan points to this moment as the foundation for his work over the next two years, and the subject of his new book “Havana Youth” (Yoffy Press). “Havana Youth” (Yoffy Press) “Havana Youth” is the DC-based freelancer’s first book, and its pages reveal the color and vibrancy of young Cuban society, brought to life by Khan’s meticulous attention to detail and intimate ...
Anissa Helou: Good Morning, Beirut
This week on The Trip podcast: Greeting Lebanon’s revolution with culinary hero Anissa Helou. Good morning—early morning—from Beirut. It’s dark out in the Hamra neighborhood, a beautiful little fist of city that pushes down into the Mediterranean. It’s dark up here but the muzzeins calling the prayer and the roosters calling to no one at all are well-caffeinated and already firing. Good morning. Good morning from Beirut. Wake up. Wake the fuck up. There is a new day out there, just beyond your horizon. There is a revolution going on in Lebanon. That’s why we’re here. They started gathering months ago, at the Egg, an odd concrete derelict landmark in the heart of downtown Beirut. They are still there, camped out, peaceful but very urgent, resolute that they will stay until the goals of the ...
Chyno: Beirut Battle Rap
This week on The Trip podcast: Beirut-based, Syrian-Filipino rapper Chyno on Lebanon, rap, and revolution. I’ve been thinking here in Beirut about the many-sided… let’s call them gifts, that America has given to the Middle East. And of course when you wade into it, when you look at yourself and your country in the mirror, you’ve first got to walk your mind through a vast swamp of evil action and intention. From cluster bombing to propping up Saudi hoodlums to supporting the instincts of Israel’s politics, there’s a lot to regret, past, present and future. But tucked inside the exports of empire, sort of the opposite of a poison pill, there’s also this wonderful counter-programming, an exported American liberalism, a real and instinctual belief in free speech that is a beacon for many ...
Jade George: Cocktail Culture in Beirut
This week on The Trip podcast, publisher Jade George on Beirut’s booze culture and her hopes for Lebanon. The rain is coming down in Hamra, Beirut on a Wednesday and Jade George are headed out to drink. We are going to drink gimlets, we’re going to drink Manhattans, and we are going to drink Negronis, because you drink in Lebanon for the same reasons you drink in Lima, Ohio and Los Angeles, California. You can cope in those cups, you get that conviviality, that extra 5% burden melting off your shoulders. Sure, maybe it’s also a bit of a maintenance high, but here in Beirut, there’s an urgency to the drinking. Jade tells me that during the revolution, everybody is smoking and drinking more. And you know, they can. Despite the call to prayer ringing from every mosque, despite Hamra being the...
Gilles Khoury: The Heart of the Lebanese Revolution
This week on The Trip podcast: journalist (and protestor) Gilles Khoury on what sparked the Lebanese revolution and what’s next. Welcome to the Egg, the battleworn concrete theater that has become epicenter of Lebanon’s revolution, where today a rally of small business owners and entrepreneurs kicks off with a singing of the national anthem. Small business is the heartbeat of Lebanon’s economy, and they’ve been terribly affected by the banking crisis since the revolution began, leading to a wave of layoffs across the country. Our guide here is a singular voice in Lebanese media, a young writer named Gilles Khoury who writes a weekly, whimsical slice-of-life column for the French-language paper L’Orient Le Jour, about Beirutis and their hopes and dreams, and lately, about their revolution. ...
