I’m in the waiting area of the Dutch Harbor/Unalaska airport in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. I’ve been here for less than 24 hours accompanying some colleagues on some consultations with Alaskan fishing communities. This place is all about fish, and that is all: pollack, halibut, salmon, cod and of course the world famous crab fleet which plies its trade in the Bering Sea on the World’s Deadliest Catch. The motto on the wall here at the airport is “The highest degree of opportunity” and that is indeed what this town is all about. Opportunity abounds to make money for …
My summer is drawing to a close, although the weather is still lovely and I’m only easing back into work. Coming off ten days in Ontario where I was at my sister’s wedding, enjoying some extended time with an extended family that lives all over the world. We only come together for weddings and funerals and this is the far better reason of the two. The wedding was in Thornbury Ontario, where my parents live, in the heart of Ontario’s apple growing country. From there we went down to Peterborough where my new brother in law Steve Weir is from. …
On the stepe of the Chugach Mountains north of Anchorage. I’m still trying to figure out Alaska. When i was here in 2002 I was up in Fairbanks, working largely with non-Native people doing peacemaking work in the school system. Fairbanks struck me as an interesting place, one in which you defintely had to have a deep intention to live in. I enjoyed the people and the land – which is incredible – and I liked the feel of the town, which in all of its glory and ugliness, felt like northern towns everywhere. Anchorage is a different beast. There …
And then just like that, you hop a plane from Johannesburg, stop after 8 hours in Dakar for refuelling. Take another 9 hours to arrive in New York, take a cab into the city with a great driver who hails from Guinea and is going back there to work on the democratic elections this spring, and you get dropped in front of a small boutique hotel on Madison Avenue. The air is cold and crisp and the city seems to be in a good mood. The woman at the check in counter at The MAve Hotel directs me …
Been here nearly a week now and I’m starting to get a very limited sense of this incredible place. I have a few random thoughts and notes, offered up as they come to mind. *** I visited The Apartheid Museum today. The museum sits next to a small amusement park with roller coasters and helicopter rides. The screams from the roller coaster and the thwapping of the helicopters could be heard at the museum and had the unnerving effect of recreating the soundscape from the late 1980s when the state of emergency was in effect here and helicopters and screams …