one leg

yes, said orphan, let's fly away.

elf agreed, after a month playing with spontaneous five-year young experts. 

where shall we go?

it's a small planet.

how about cambodia, we know it well.

ok. 9 months in laos learning, laughing, loving, sharing was a joy.

on fool's day they arrived in siem reap. a hustler showed up. i am poor. i need money for my family.

i remember this story, said elf.

it's an old one, said orphan. 

let's go see friends.

they walked into a gritty world, surrounded by empty glass and brass hotels.

children scavaged trash.

they passed a one legged man on crutches. what happened to him, asked elf.

he stepped on a land mine while planting rice.

photos of tuberculosis

Misha Friedman worked with Doctors Without Borders or Medecins Sans Frontieres.

While working in Chechnya in 2008 he began making photographs.

He continued to work with N.G.O.’s to pursue stories, “because journalists can’t be trusted,” he said. “These patients, who do they trust? They trust the people who care for them. So credibility comes from showing up with people they trust.” 

“Most of the people you see here are dead,” Mr. Friedman said last week, looking through the photographs. “My images have not really helped them. Maybe they’ll help people in the future. Maybe they’ll help with fund-raising here and there. But to these particular people, they did not help.

“So that part is harder, being kind of just a photographer.”

You may see his slide show at LENS.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/saving-lives-or-photographing-them/

More...

An invisible epidemic

burn

the woman at the metro
with a burned leg - you remember her clearly
how she sat after dragging her bad leg
into the car, into the compartment
this image of her
alone
cold
scared
in pain
how did it happen? why is she alone?
on a late night in a flimsy sweater
her skin below the knee
running to her ankle
all burned away
exposing blood red lines
her abstract expression
her sacred scared distracted face
watching night fly past windows
where blue televisions and children kept an eye 
on each other
how the woman kept going
on the metro past a stop
where the expensive private hospital on a Roman
hill gleamed its extensive intensive pensive care
ward and her treatment was delayed,
forgotten, useless
here
because she is poor
so she stayed in her seat
anxious now feeling her pain
wondering where she would go
where she would end up on this night
as a stranger studied her anxious, passive 
expression feeling burns, violent burns
inside sensations fire and heat
nerve impulses darting through, along sensory
channels where signals are blocked by
neurotransmitters shutting down
her chance

Sing

I found a temporary room at an expensive private suburban hospital. Clean sheets, a cot and three daily hots. It was an intensive care color spectrum zonal theory filled with young lovers in their emotional zombie reality of lies and uncertainty.

Downhill from the hospital a crying man waiting at the Metro station held a cardboard hospital chart and paper package. An orange paper folder discovered papers from a doctor, a lab, a prognosis, a definite definitive defining medical history. It revealed a story about someone dying, a wife, uncle, someone he loved.

He waited in heavy unconditional silence for a green Metro to collect him and his package of fear, loss and regret transporting him down the line. Home. Where he’d spill the contents on a table surrounded by friends and relatives sharing his tale. Loss and hypodermic needles of pain, pleasure, desire, sloth, envy and assorted fabulous conversations laughed.

A bird pressed itself against a thorn to make herself sing.

A stranger passing the hospital smelled wild roses. A bird sang. He whistled. Bird answered. 

The bird’s song were short sharp sounds, a trill, long deep vibrational throated mysteries, harmonic scales, warbling. 

“Now I know why the caged bird sings,” whispered an orphan child scrambling across mined fields next to her Cambodian bamboo home.

The man and bird carried on this musical conversation until the bird was satisfied the stranger knew the music. It flew, singing. 

buzz process

orphan's penned this BUZZ before. about getting your ears cleaned in china.

do you want to hear it? ok. 

so, I’ve heard but you can’t believe everything you hear. easy to say and hard to do as they say in China. 

speaking of hearing china in mandarin, you can get your ears cleaned there. 

what! really? 

yes. now it happened at the empty chinese opera one afternoon in chengdu, you sit down in a wicker chair and give the girl in a blue uniform 10Y or slightly more than a buck.

a group of chinese men in wicker chairs drinking tea stare and laugh at you. everyone stares at you in china because it is a zoo and you are an exotic humanoid species of endless speculation.

look at the funny foreigner! he’s going to get his ears cleaned. boy is he in for a surprise!

you sit back and close your eyes. she has all the tools; long steel wires, cotton swabs, ointment, a microscopic spoon on a post and a pair of stainless steel tongs.

she probes into your right ear with the spoon and digs out hard brown wax. she flicks it on the ground where it becomes part of Ear Wax Mountain, a brave new world order. she swabs and cleans out your ear with a small cotton ball on a thin wire.

while this is buried in your ear she taps the tongs creating a vibrating frequency. she touches the steel rod in your ear and you hear the WHIRLING! BUZZ! BUZZ! as 1,000 bees and cicadas invade your 

consciousness with a deafening crescendo. she has opened your aural chambers big time, taps the tongs again, you receive the echo chamber canyon of sound, the WHIRLING BUZZ like sandpaper being rasped against old fibers of skin or yes, the fast centrifugal centrifuge of heartbeat reactors, roaring rivers inside a galaxy of weightless streams. BUZZ!

she eases it out, massages your temples and your eyes are closed and you are dreaming you are in a Chinese opera playing the role of an old dramatic hero dying at his post after proclaiming his undying love for family and harmonious social order and stability in the country.

she attacks and cleans the other ear and the vibrations take you away. BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ! far away.

she caresses your ears with something soft, massages your temples, and scalp and when she finishes you no longer have a hearing problem. it’s all in the listening. you’ve been buzzed back to clarity.

everything that goes in the ear comes out as language. it becomes a tool for emotion and expression.

the greatest sorrow is the death of the heart.