What is Brasilândia? A many layered thing- literally.A mix of textures, colours, sounds, “lá tudo nublado, aqui tudo colorido” as my host sister put it, The day she took me on a walk Through her colourful neighbourhood.A slice of life all in one short street.Where the church and local pub vie for customers, And airspace- And the tousle keeps you up on a Saturday night-It’s a many flavoured thing: here…
Tag: poem
a year later: on being ‘back’
It has recently been making itself known to me that it is a year since I finished my travels on my fellowship. Perhaps it’s because it’s now getting warmer in Nairobi- and it had been a while since I was in one place long enough to see all the changes in weather over a period of time. The year after the fellowship has not been one where I have come…
nairobi in winter
This cold that takes residence in, chills, and sets your bones. You’re seated inside but you might as well have been walking outside in a Wellesley winter. Seated in these stone houses: borrowed, gifted, stolen, forced- they were not meant for the unwarmed cold. They come with chimneys, diligently built into every sitting room. And as diligently used to prop wooden flowerpots, store old newspapers, and confound the odd bat…
why make one?
“Why make one when you can buy one? Why bother with all this wood-hammer business, Wouldn’t it be easier to go to the shop and buy one?!” My host brother in Brazil, Dimas, and I made a shoe rack from pieces of discarded wood he found at a dump on his way home. While we sand-papered the wood by fast dimming evening light, pulled out and straightened nails, figured out…
on travels and life
I’ve been back home for the past few months, and between applying for school, looking for a job, managing family pressures and expectations, as well as finding ways to share all I have learnt with the world, I have had to learn patience. A friend from IHP used to quote me a line from the poem below by Antonio Machado whenever I got too anxious about the future: ‘se hace…
memory making
We curate our own experiences. Our lives. So that they don’t say we were never here, we did not exist. We were here. We are here. I was noticing how at every event held at La Escuelita, they were always taking photographs, some which would end up in the annual newspaper/magazine, La Calavera, that they print and distribute. Additionally, anytime an article in one of the newspapers mentioned the centre…