nobody but the baby

philadelphia ghost signs

No, this is not another M. Night Shyamalan movie with Philadelphia-area paranormal activity as a backdrop for "what really counts." (How did those aliens that were destroyed by contact with water run through the cornfields at night anyway? Ever done that, M. Night Shyamalan?? A bit wet, I would say.)

The Philadelphia Ghost Signs Project is Lawrence O'Toole's blog of faded "ghost" signs from long-gone businesses in Greater Philadelphia. What's not to love?

Check it out here. Guaranteed no aliens.

delta / highway 61 / memphis (world gon' change)

i took these last summer in memphis and the mississippi delta.

all images copyright caleb maskell, 2008.

the great frozen sea

One of these men is my great-great-grandfather, William Maskell.

His ship, the HMS Alert, is icebound here, on an expedition to try to reach the North Pole in 1875. His party, captained by Sir George Stronge Nares, reached 83°20′26" N., the highest latitude ever reached at that time. He set out north from the icebound ship with a sledge party led by Sir Albert Hastings Markham. He was one of three men to come back walking. They never reached the pole, but they went further than anyone ever had.

William Maskell was an able-seaman, a man of low rank. He came home to a medal from Queen Victoria and some local fanfare but quickly receded into obscurity. Though there are no records of his personal beliefs, he became an avid church musician after the voyage, playing the organ in the local Anglican church for the rest of his life. He was a surrogate father to my grandfather, who had no father.

His entry in the index of The Great Frozen Sea, the book of the adventure by Sir Albert Hastings Markham, reads as follows:

Maskell, William, HMS "Alert,"
songs by, 169, 216;
parts taken by, 174;
sledge crew, N. division, holds out to the end, 317, 318 (n.). ...

praise Jesus

this is incredible. read the whole article immediately.

the drifter's escape

we're back from our long wanderings.

travel stories to come...

here we are at todd's wedding in ragged point, ca. experience my amazing hair.

presumably more pictures of this will surface shortly.

go west young man (part 1)

so this afternoon we leave for pasadena to go to a top secret meeting of the minds at harvest rock church. if i revealed more, you'd read this...and then have to die. so no more for now. its for you own good.

we will however be seeing jen rosner (which is lovely) and flying into the remarkable and convenient ONTARIO AIRPORT! alright!

things are cooking...great homegroup last night. new people. babies on the way. real estate communio. wonderful reports from scott dolff and the mozambique trippers. 

NEWSFLASH!!!! CALLING ALL CHICAGOANS!!!!


TONIGHT AT THE HIDEOUT...THE GET-UP JOHNS OPEN FOR JON LANGFORD.
GO GET CLOSE HARMONY. THAT HIGH & LONESOME SOUND.
GET FEARLESS!

only after the glow...out.

kam ping pong (trip post #6)

ok. thursday held some surprises. i'll tell you that up front.

we needed to go to Kampong Cham to visit diane moss...the great guru who runs house of hope safehouse and the sunrise HIV hospice. to that end, kathy hired a car and driver for the day for $25. incredible. what a country.

we got into the car at 7:30 am for the 2 hour ride up. it was a tight squeeze...four girls in the back of a mid-80's toyota camry, but for two hours and $25, who can complain? we cruised off, and tried to let the conversation offset the discomfort. i was in the front seat...watching the road and chatting away.

about an hour into the trip, i began to have some concerns that i had not yet seen a sign for kampong cham, but i knew that i knew nothing about cambodian geography and that i should probably just take it easy. another hour went by. the feeling was overwhelming. no signs yet. i saw a sign for the beachtown of sihanoukville. all was not well. my sinking feeling sank. i cleared my throat and said to the driver in a loud voice "Kampong Cham?" He looked back at me in horror and said "Uh. Kampong SOM. Kampong SOM."

Kanmpong Som is about three hours directly in the wrong direction, of which we had covered two. So we turned the car around and headed out for the newly minted 4 hour trip to Kampong Cham. It was not cool at all.

about an hour out, we stopped at a gas station for lunch for the driver, where we were presented with one of the most incredible options known in the world, something of which it is unforgivable that we have no picture. a 5 year old girl approached our table with a large blue salad bowl full of deep-fried tarantulas which she was purveying in the hopes that we might be interested in an afternoon snack.
apparently they're a local delicacy, farmed in holes in the ground. from as far back as the khmer rouge whose warm-hearted economics ushered in the near total absence of food in cambodia. we forewent its arachnal delights.

to cut a long story short, diane was great. what a star. we learned a ton, and then headed home. when we arrived at the hotel, i handed the driver $28, $25 plus a magnanimous $3 tip. he looked at me, puzzled, and we headed inside for further discussion. turns out $25 and $75 sound an awful lot alike in PNP. $75 was the right price, not $25, but the confusion of the extra $50 over expectation put a damper on what was a relatively damp day anyway, diane and the spiders excepted.

bed was a welcome relief.

connections (trip post #5)

tuesday was full of wonder. we spent the morning at cafe yejj with helen sworn, the wonderful organizer of the ChabDai Coalition, a group of cambodian and international organizations devoted to addressing the issue of care for sexually exploited people in cambodia. helen is wonderful...she's british, how bad can she be? among many other things, she and her husband trevor are responsible for the development of IT microenterprises in phnom penh. one of the biggest problems here is that it is virtually impossible to find a job, even if you've graduated from university. opportunity really does not knock. this is on top of the fact that the corruption in the government, and in the society at large, is so endemic that many of the university students have paid the teachers to let them pass their classes and move into jobs that they have also bought. the rich get richer and the poor (that is, the average) have virtually no option at all. real jobs for honest workers that are more than just sewing pockets on jeans are desperately needed. long term projects providing education through university and then channeling into viable honest internationally feasible jobs are what is required. that's a battle worth fighting.

we spent the afternoon with HisChild, another amazing orphanage and church building program run by Lucille and Johnny (a Malaysian couple) and by JungYoung (a Korean powerhouse lady). they have tons of kids, in all stages of development. it is a major operation...more than i could handle. compassion and consistency is the watchword. their most amazing graduate is a young woman named Sohka...she shared her story from hopeless jobless orphan to top of her class and fully-employed from university...it was beautiful...gave us  lots of hope in the face of the staggering issues this country faces.

in the evening, we had dinner at anita and danny colombara's house. these are audrey lin's friends who work with the innerchange community in phnom penh. getting to their house was hilarious, as we didn't know the cross street. we walked up and down for a couple of minutes, until we began to hear a sound over the din that sounded like a bunch of people yelling my name. we looked across the roaring  evening traffic on monivong boulevard to discover that it was almost exactly that...more accurately it was just anita (whose voice sounded like the rush of a minor spring) bounding up and down in the air and shouting "CALEB! CALEB! CALEB!" i'm pretty sure that she was waving her arms and kicking her legs in the air too. it was really something.

duly impressed, we crossed the street. once we arrived we discovered that (of course) we have a bunch of mutual friends in the US and we talked into the pitch black of 7:30 pm. they have a rocking young kid named silas who can really fling the lychee. we'll see more of these guys, you can bet on it.

on the way to danny and anita's place, we saw a family on a motorbike. the dad was driving, the mom was on the back holding up a green IV drip bag which was connected to the two year old who was sitting between them. no ambulance for regular people in cambodia.

what does it mean to advocate for the poor?

rocket to cambodia (trip post 4)

i have decided to break this update up into a few posts, as so much has happened since i last we able to write that i gotta take it in small steps so i don't blow yr mind.

my favorite moment at the asia's hope orphanage in phnom penh deserves a little more attention. towards the end of our time with the kids out there, i decided to retreat to one of the outdoor seats and play the godawful outdoor guitar that was hanging from a bamboo roofpost. it was the kind of guitar that had to be played to be believed. the strings were at least an inch off the battered frets and it turned my hands black when i played it. what is more, it was tuned to a loose approximation of open-E, to warm the heart of whatever cambodian jimmy page was accustomed to rocking with it.

despite these hardships, i gave it a bit of a strum. immediately a bunch of kids gathered round, wanting to sing. before i could get a word of a suggestion out, one of the hoarsest punchiest little ones shouted out "JESUS LOVES ME. 1-2-3!" and lit into a rendition of "Jesus loves me" that would have made william booth proud. or joey ramone. ramone fully won the day when no more than three seconds after "Jesus loves me" ended, the same kid blasted into some other equally rocking full-tilt number by shouting the title and "1-2-3 GO!" it was awesome. i want to buy her a leather jacket and some converse.

hello mistah (trip post #3)

we arrived in phnom penh last night in the evening, and immediately began to enjoy the hilarious wonder of inefficient bureaucracy. at the immigration desk, there were no less than fifteen uniformed officials sitting at one long desk in a line whose sole purpose was to stick a one month visa in our passports for the low low price of $20 each. i would have taken a picture except that they might have got the wrong idea. its humor, not the CIA, folks, and never the twain shall meet.

our hotel, the Champs Elysees, is just off the corner of Monivong and Sihanouk Blvd, one of the main intersections in Phnom Penh. it is a fairly spartan place, a former office building that has been converted. it is comfortable enough, and the desk guys are very pleasant. they filled us in on how to say "hello" and "thank you" in Khmer, two phrases which will get you a long way pretty much anywhere, but especially in SEAsia.

we got up at 7ish and spent the morning walking around the city, down to the Independence monument, and then up the Tonle Sap river to the Royal Palace and the Foreign Correspondents Club where the Cambodia reporters stayed during the Vietnam war. quite a productive spot.

after a delicious french breakfast, we headed to our first meeting with dave atkins from asia's hope. upon indicating that we wanted to go somewhere by vehicle, we were descended upon by about five shouting drivers all of whom had the best reason and the nice price for us to go today...total input overload. we picked one and headed off to dave's place. when we arrived, we found that dave lives and works in a cambodian sewing sweatshop above an arabian trinkets store off the russian market. this was a significant surprise to us, as it no doubt was to the guys who were working at the sewing machines. after a few puzzled minutes, it dawned on us that we were in crazy phnom penh and that there might indeed be TWO 138e Rue 450's in the city. so we headed back to the street and down a block, where we found the counterpart storefront, and dave within it.

what followed was an incredible day...a morning of intensive back and forth conversation...hearing about his vision for asia's hope and sharing about the work of JFCI, while his teams of volunteers were ferrying orphans back and forth to their temporary dental clinic for perhaps the first dental check-up in their lives. there is so much to tell, but in essence the deal is that asia's hope is trying to get young kids who have no parents at all and keep them in a consistent program from their youngest years all the way through to college. they are long-term investment people...the kind of folks who really seem to be presenting a plausible way of affecting the future of the nation through its youth. it was so great to be with dave and no doubt we'll be with him and the team several more times this week, in Phnom Penh and in Battambang.

the afternoon held lunch (dinty moore!?!?!?) and a visit to the asia's hope orphanage. there is no looking back once you go to a place like that. its the real thing. besides the wonderful kids, highlights included canuck glenn's magic tricks for the kids and stepping in a really nice puddle of bathroom water in my socks. sad.

all that, then khmer dinner (no more DINTY MOORE!) and back to meet the team in the hotel. tomorrow is a big day...more later....

-c.