Category: caravan

a long intense and exciting conversation with kristy today. funny how that works after months of emails; if i think about it, the last time i saw her was probably in february. and there never really was an opportunity to connect much, there merely was a recognition or promise of something possible. i suddenly remember the scene at the Katrina conference way back in January; i had just arrived and was still under some kind of shock or terror of this place. maría and i had found a little corner in the dinning hall during lunch break, and we were partly listening (and partly getting annoyed) to a picture slide show about New Orleans and Katrina. we spotted these girls talking together, and at that moment they seemed like the only other people in the room i could envision some kind of connection with. let’s go to talk to them, i said, with an urgency that smelled of survival. one of them was part of the Chavez coop and invited to me interview at their house, and kristy and sam were part of the Student Workers Coalition to Justice, and that is how we joined the group for a while. but kristy somehow disappeared from santa cruz soon after that. when her first email from beirut arrived, we learn that she had decided to live a year with her lebanese family. then there’s war, and email becomes something else. the need to write, have life-lines. the decision to leave beirut, accompanied by an unmendable need to go return. back in the U.S. she returns to New Orleans. from one kind of war zone to another; seeking an understanding of how they are connected in so many ways. a intensity of a war zone quotidian that is difficult to live with, but that also installs itself under one’s skin and seeps a vital restlessness into one’s veins. she had just come home to her parents, down in L.A., when she seriously sprawled her ankle and is forced to stay on the couch for three weeks. these moments when your body forces you to stop running around. until she can walk again and… leaves for beirut. eager to catch up with each other in San Francisco before she goes.