Andrew Prinsen

Amputees

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:48:26 +0000

This was a video produced for the humanitarian organization Global Refuge International during the summer of 2006. It paints a scene in northern Thailand on the Burmese border of soldiers from a rebel army who lost limbs in battle, and the desperation they now face.

Beggars

admin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:27:56 +0000

This was the last photo project I put together last time I was in India. It’s a slice out of a day in the life of a couple of men I came to know while living in Varanasi. While during the day these men are seen as lepers … beggars … untouchables, in the evening, after they’ve returned to their slum village on the outskirts of town, they’re revered as village elders … grandfathers … and living examples of the hope that can be found in the face of oppression.

Novel Encounters

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:19:00 +0000

This article was published in 2007 by the India University School of Journalism while on a travel writing grant in India.

I notice the old man approaching out of the corner of my eye. I’ve been sitting against a wall, reading a book while waiting for the next in an endless series of trains that has carried me dutifully around this country. I glance up and have to squint into the sun as I take the man in: his long, oily grey hair, his rich yet weathered dark skin. If you began at his torso, his garments seemed to get more and more dirty the further your eyes traveled out his once-white sleeves and down his pant legs that ended in cheap, blue plastic sandals. He is carrying an equally stained bag stitched with some sort of burlap that looks as if it has been purposely impregnated with the dust of a wanderer’s comings and goings.

He motions towards my book and says something in Hindi that I don’t understand. I look down to where it sits in my lap and then back at him with a confused expression. He has wide eyes that make it seem as if everything he is trying to communicate holds a certain importance. When he motions towards my book again, I give it to him. He takes the paperback from my hand and before looking at it makes an almost startling few seconds of eye contact with me and says “You have no fear?” posed as a question, it seems. Not knowing how or if I should answer, I simply give a slight smile and begin wondering what this odd character would do with my reading material.

He begins with the back cover and recites “An extra-ordinary novel … a work of obses-nal org-nal-ty.” He flips the book over and reads the cover: “One hundred years of …” and trails off on the word “solitude.” As he begins flipping pages, endearingly attempting to impress me with his acquired English skills by pontificating lines from the author’s dedication and publishing information page, a small crowd has begun to gather. They’re all young Indian men, wearing their modern tight, flared jeans with slick dress shirts and shoulder bags. They begin talking with each other in smiles, gesturing at the man and laughing without concealment or constraint, not more than a couple feet from where the man stands, clearly agitated and a bit embarrassed. He answers this mockery with what seems to me like words of displeasure at their presence and even puts his hand on one young man’s chest, shoving him backwards as best his meager old frame can manage. This has no effect except to increase the volume at which they laugh and the hostility with which they jeer.

“Do you need something?” I question the crowd in general, at least 15 of them at this point.

“No, we need nothing,” one of them answers with a smile that isn’t quite sure if it wants to be a smile.

“Why are you all crowding around like this then?” I ask. “Why are you all standing here?” They don’t seem to understand or react at first. One of them, seemingly the most popular in the group with uncommonly blue eyes and arms slung around the shoulders of two of his companions, asks me what I’m talking about. Searching for a way to express what I feel in a way they will understand the lack of appreciation their presence is generating, I say, in none too gentle a tone, “This is my matter, not yours.”

This they understand and most of them turn, still laughing — though now at the strange foreigner — to leave. It’s the first time I’ve spoken crossly to an Indian person, much less a whole group of them, since I arrived here almost three months ago. I’ve always been cautious and quiet, never wanting to hurt the image held of foreigners. I’m not sure what it is about this day, but today I couldn’t take the crowd, couldn’t take the lack of privacy or swallow the staring that is oh-so-common. But most of all, I couldn’t take the public jeering of this sad old man without a single person stepping forward in vocal opposition.

Likely a bit flushed and with the tunnel vision that overcomes my eyes when I get angry, I turn back to the man who, suddenly, no longer has the wide, slightly eccentric eyes he had moments before, but rather a collected and wise look of contentment. He then repeats the same words he had said before, but this time it’s different. “You have no fear,” he says, this time as a statement, as a truth not to be questioned, even by myself. And with that he hands back my book with a smile that makes his eyes twinkle and walks away, the stares from the crowd on the platform burning holes in the back of his dirty, tattered shirt.

The grit

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:37:17 +0000

This article was published in 2007 by the India University School of Journalism while on a travel writing grant in India.

The boy pulls himself along the train’s aisle on his hands, his good leg propelling him as his limp one drags behind, his bare feet sliding silently along the vinyl floor. He uses a small broom, stiff, bristly reeds lashed together, to poke under the seats, fetching a surprising amount of dirt and trash. Old ticket stubs and empty betel nut wrappers, plastered with a thin film of grease and dirt, are pulled from the locomotive’s crevices and added to the growing pile that is pushed along in front of his thin frame. And then I wonder if his leg really is limp or if his gesture, the humbling act of lowering himself to the floor, is simply a way of lowering his own status in the society of the train’s compartment, putting people more at ease and more willing to pay him a rupee since he is doing the job “his people were meant to do.”

I lean my head back against my part of the bench seat right next to the bars in the window. You always hear trains approaching from the other direction about 10 seconds before they’re on you, their moaning whistles sounding so far away at first and then deafening as the column of air they have been pushing meets your face like a hot, ending slap. The force of both trains moving towards each other uncomfortably pops your ears and leaves you with a ringing like someone unloaded a 12 gauge right next to your head.

We depart the train in the early morning at a small, mostly lifeless station. I make my way over to the restroom which is “pay to use” as are most public facilities. The woman sitting outside collecting money holds out her hand before I enter and I fish a crumpled five rupee bill out of my pocket. She gives me back three rupee coins and I stand with my hand still out, waiting for one more. She looks down at my hand, then back up at my face before holding up one bony finger in question form. I nod my head, realizing she’s asking the American equivalent of “you’re going number one, then?” It’s odd for me, as I’m not much accustomed to explaining the plans for my restroom visits to old women, but this is normal here and she presses the remaining rupee into my palm, satisfied that I will not be using two rupees worth of toilet services.

And that’s the funny thing about India. I’ve heard before that it is a place of contradictions, and I’m finding that in some respects to be very true. It’s a place where marriages are arranged and if someone has an attraction or, heaven forbid, a boyfriend or girlfriend, it’s something you simply don’t speak of. There are no billboards or advertisements showing women wearing anything less than the standard sari. But it’s also a place where other basics of human nature that are more repressed in the West are laid brutally out in the open. It’s perfectly normal, for example, to be walking to dinner in the center of town and pass a few men on the way taking a leak on a wall.

The other night, I was sitting in a restaurant and there happened to be a scale sitting next to my table, the kind you might be used to seeing in dirty Chevron station bathrooms back home. But this one was right there in the middle of the place, between my table and another where a family of four was happily chomping on their dosa and curry. And then suddenly a woman in her late 20s had hopped onto the machine and plunked a coin into the slot before yelling the results to her husband across the room. I couldn’t imagine something like this happening at home and still don’t really know what to think about it.

Any time we’re in a larger city there will be people sprawled out on any free piece of concrete, filthy and exhausted beyond belief, at least they must be to sleep as soundly as they do with their limbs hanging out onto the blacktop, just inches from traffic. For me it all just seems so vivid or gritty, textured, real. And it’s not that we don’t have humanity like this where I come from. We do, but it gets hidden somehow. In India that humanity is accentuated. Here, the humanity is in your face.

The Drug

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:35:45 +0000

In 2007 I spent a summer on the border between Thailand and Burma. While I was there I wrote a few articles, one of which was about a drug called yaba, a caffeine-laced methamphetamine. I spent some time in Burmese border towns learning more about this drug and its influence on Southeast Asia.

A low, resonating clang fills my left ear. I glance in that direction to see a long line of monks moving in single file down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, their shaved heads and deep purple robes creating a pattern that cadences with the ringing of their bell. Their bare feet move across the cement without making a sound, their journey across the city a silent one. In my right ear, I hear a loud, English voice exclaiming, “Rolls him into the full nelson, BOOM! And that’s why they’re the Smackdown tag team champions folks!”

Jayad looks across our short table at me with a smile on his face. “Many people in our country think this is real,” he says, motioning with his head toward the corner of this open-air restaurant where a television is sitting and all eyes in the place are fixed on the WWE Smackdown, a Sunday morning tradition here in Techileik. I can’t help but smile at this. “Ours too,” I reply. Jayad squeaks his lips together to call the waitress, the same as I would at home to call a dog. I pay for our breakfast and we begin walking west from the center of town.

Jayad always gives me an excuse to keep in mind if we run into the Burmese police and they stop us for questioning. Today we are going to “the furniture shop,” where Jayad tells me they “make lots of wooden furniture … especially coffins.” In fact, we are headed toward a cemetery on the outskirts of town because I’m told that this is where many of the area’s drug addicts hang out. Or rather, we’re going to a hill overlooking the cemetery, because Jayad tells me we can’t get too close, much less go inside. He says that the men there – the addicts – will do anything for money to feed their habits. He says that they wouldn’t hesitate to kill me for 100 baht (US $2.50).

On the way up to the cemetery Jayad asks me if I would like to meet a drug addict.

“Sure,” I tell him, “as long as he won’t kill me, that is.”

We approach a small, circular building on the side of a mountain. It looks like a military turret, like an overgrown sandcastle shaped from concrete. It seems to be two levels with a peaked roof contraption covering the top half. Jayad hollers something in Burmese toward the building and a raspy voice responds. Jayad pushes open the gate, constructed from a piece of tin siding nailed onto a couple pieces of wood and overgrown by some sort of creeping vine. We have to step down, ducking our heads to enter the room where a skinny man of about 35 sits on a wooden couch with a dank, burgundy cushion.

The man is addicted to a drug homegrown in Burma called “yaba.” The name is conceived from two Burmese words, yami meaning horse, and mami meaning medicine, a reference to the extraordinary boost of strength and energy it gives its users. It’s basically a potent dose of methamphetamine laced with caffeine. The man shows me one of the pills. It’s tiny – smaller than an aspirin – and red with the letters “wy” crudely stamped into one side. The wy, the man supposes, stands for “Wa yaba,” a sign of the army that produced it. The man takes the lining from a box of cigarettes, a very thin tin foil like a gum wrapper. He then tears a piece out of a magazine and rolls it into a small tube. He places the pill on the foil and holds a lighter underneath it, causing it to begin sizzling and evaporating into a misty, white smoke. He uses the tube he rolled to suck the fumes down into his lungs. He’s been sucking this smoke for over a decade. For the next three hours he will have the strength he needs to work in his garden, harvesting tomatoes and ginger.

But the addicts in this town are really just the run-off of a bigger problem. The drug is produced here, some estimated 800 million pills a year in 2003, to be shipped into Thailand where it will easily draw more than double the price. The further south the drug makes it, the more it will be worth, drawing figures around 400 baht ($10.50 US) per pill near Phuket. An Associated Press article from just four years ago states “The drug has caused what officials have called a national epidemic, with the Thai Health Ministry estimating that as much as 5 percent of the population, or 3 million people, regularly use ‘yaba,’” 90 percent of drug-related arrests being a result of the so called “crazy pills.” Originally it was sold illegally at gas stations to long distance truck drivers who used it to make their long trips without falling asleep. But now its reach has grown, showing up commonly in night clubs as an alternative to Ecstasy all over Thailand, places in Europe, and as far as the suburbs of Sacramento.

Just a few years ago, the Burmese were finding it very hard to push their drugs over the border thanks to a no-holds-barred crackdown spearheaded by recently ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. According to the Christian Science Monitor, Thai police went on a virtual killing spree in early 2003, with an alarming figure of 500 people being killed during the first three weeks of the crackdown. Alarming, but effective. However, according to a source in the Mae Hong Song region of northern Thailand, yaba is again on the rise. I spoke with a man in Techileik who told me that now the drugs commonly get re-routed through Laos and into Thailand, or even all the way into Cambodia, through Laos and into Thailand due to more lax border watches and restrictions. The man was very clean for the city he was in with short, combed hair and a crisp polo shirt. I was told that he is half Indian, and his English was impeccable. As he walked away after we had been talking, I turned to my local contact and said something to the effect of “Nice man. Very knowledgeable about these issues.” He responded by telling me that he should be knowledgeable, considering the fact that he is one of the area’s biggest drug lords. Nothing like getting your information straight from the horse’s mouth, I suppose.

Little Grown Up Girls

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:17:02 +0000

I wrote this story in 2007 while spending a summer on the Thai / Burmese border. It’s by far the hardest research project I’ve ever had.

A small, red bulb glows in the corner of this stuffy room, but the area holds a much darker tone. The light is absorbed by the walls, by the porous, homemade cinder blocks awkwardly held together by sloppy, hardened mortar. Something about the light in this room and the way the rickety, broken bamboo furniture is arranged makes everything feel so close – like it’s caving in.

News of my arrival spreads quickly through the rooms of this back alley structure, their high, tonal voices chattering in choppy, short syllables. Before I know it I’m sitting in a low wooden chair, its reclined position trying to put me much more at ease than I feel. Five of them enter the room. They stand so close in front of me with their hands behind their backs that I can feel them. They’re not touching me, but I can feel them. I had expected scantily clad seductresses, but instead my eyes fall on a scene that makes me feel like I’ve just stepped into a teenage girls’ clothing store at a Midwest American shopping mall. None of their shirts are low cut and many of them feature pictures of kitty cats or flowers. None of their pants or skirts come above their knees, and most of them look at me with the sweet, innocent smile of a precious moments doll.

It was about this time that the feeling overtook me. It started in my chest and floated up towards my head, causing a dark blur to begin forming around the edges of my vision. Had this place in fact been a little girls’ clothing store or perhaps a junior high school choir concert, I would have felt fine – everything would have made sense. But this was a place very different from these sorts of settings, ones that were normal to me. I was seated in the viewing room of a dirty brothel somewhere on the outskirts of Techileik, a Burmese border town just across from Thailand on the bank of a tributary of the Mekong River. This was one of about 20 locations for cheap sex that this small city holds, and though I knew my intentions in being there were justified and upright, I couldn’t help but feel just then like the scum of the planet.

But Techileik is only the beginning. The girls begin working at these brothels thinking that they will have made enough money to stop in just a couple of months. But often times they get duped into being trafficked into Thailand under the premise of a restaurant or housekeeping job. They’ll be brought to Chiang Mai and then, once they’ve become old hat at the brothels around town there, they’ll be shipped down to Bangkok, and then from there to Phuket, and often from there all the way down to Malaysia. They are sometimes locked in rooms and beaten if they won’t see customers. Or rather … until they will see customers. When they’re “sold” out of Burma, it’s often for a price around 30,000 baht ($800 US). The money is usually paid to the girl’s parents, but then the girl is in debt, owing her purchaser that 30,000 baht as well as her monthly rent space and meal coverage. They fall into an endless cycle of debt that is next to impossible to break out of, their despair actually bringing them, somehow, to hope for as many customers as possible every single day. There are no days off. In fact, in Burma there didn’t seem to even be any hours off. A man could come any time of day and the girls would all be woken if they were asleep to come out and stand in a line in front of him.

I had my translator tell the girls that I was not there for any “sexual affair”, as I believe he literally translated it, but that I would just like to talk. When they heard this, a confused look spread over their faces. To begin with, young, decent-looking Western men were not the kind of visitors these girls were accustomed to having. The men they saw were mostly aged, Asian men, and when they did see foreigners, they were always “old and creepy” as one girl put it for me. And as if my presence wasn’t enough of a shock, I told them that all I wanted to do was talk, a request that one of the girls told me had never happened there before … ever.

She stood slightly behind the others in her jeans, cheap, plastic sandals, and black kitten t-shirt that her chest hadn’t even developed enough yet to fill. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes, but her tiny frame stood, staring with eyes glazed over at the concrete floor, her small mouth set permanently straight with as complete a lack of emotion as seemed possible. She was 16. The other girls left us together in the room, a dim, foreboding place lit only by two small candles perched on top of the thin, concrete room divider.

Sixteen. I couldn’t help but think that if she were at the same point in her life living in the town where I grew up, she would be going out with her girlfriends, shopping at the mall, counting the days until she could get her driver’s license. In fact, much about her wasn’t all that different. Her favorite band was “The Westlake Boys,” one that, upon having her grab the cassette tape, I found to be very much like every other bleach blonde boy band around the world. She told me she had never had a boyfriend before, and when I asked her why she told me that she didn’t think she was old enough yet.

I talked with many girls like this. I would ask them questions about how this work made them feel inside – if it hurt them to have to do what they do everyday. But my efforts seemed futile. Something in their heads must click when they began working in these brothels … something that helps them block out the pain they experience. Consider stories you’ve heard about women here in the West who have been raped and the emotional trauma they are left with. Most of the time, it was a single event that has scarred them so deeply. In reality, these girls – these little, timid girls – are raped every day, one to six times a day. The kind of strength that it must take to go on through this and to be able to hide their emotion is something beyond my understanding. But this strength is far from being recognized or respected where they’re from – where they’re not even thought of as people but as objects. “No more than a table or a chair,” as one Burmese man put it for me.

But what is the answer? When I come upon hardship like this, my first inclination as a journalist is to document it … to record what I’m seeing or feeling in order to bring to light what is happening to a larger number. But my next tendency is to try finding a way to fix it – to correct the injustice. In order to do this, it would seem that we need to get at the root problems. Like killing an invading weed or taking care of a mold problem, you have to go at the source and correct first what is wrong there. Why are these girls subjected to this? First, their parents are poor, and have to eat to live. They sell their daughters into this virtual sex slavery because they need the money. But often times it is not money for food that the parents are requiring, it’s money for drugs. How can this deficiency be reconciled? Sustainable food subsidy programs and working drug rehab centers. There are a few in the area, but they are often so expensive that it’s more economical to stay addicted.

Another reason for the exploitation of these girls comes as a three-part twist of bad news, those being men’s drive for sex and a culturally-low respect for women mixed with an utter lack of governmental control on the prostitution industry, if it’s even worthy of being called that. It seems to me much more like employed rape. The solution for this? Obviously more governmental crackdowns, though it would be difficult to persuade a government which gets a large amount of its GDP from sex tourism (Thailand) or whose government isn’t really a government at all, but a military junta hell bent on achieving nothing but drug production and making its leaders rich (Burma). And the other two problems – sex drive and a low respect for women – what is the answer here? To remain honest here as a journalist, I must admit that I am a man of faith in a higher power, and believe this to be the answer to both of these problems. It seems to me that it is only once we are able to see each other as brothers and sisters under the same being that we will be able to really treat each other with respect and learn to curb our appetites in decent ways. Perhaps you don’t agree, but it sure does make a lot of sense to me.

When I left the brothel that day, one of the girls begged me to stay. She wasn’t making any money from me, but then again, there wasn’t much business anyway. It was a Buddhist holiday and their normal customers were at the temple, paying their respects. But her reasons for wanting me to stay were more than this. She said that I was the kindest man she had ever met. This floored me. What had I done for her? We had done nothing more than talk about friends and music and skirt around discussions about feelings. But I had shown her a kind of love that she had likely never truly felt from a man before. I had sat down with her and cared. I hadn’t told her to do anything for me – anything that, no matter how deep down the pain was – things that hurt her. As I was picking up my bag to go, the brothel owner, a sour-faced, well-fed woman, started barking something at my translator. “She wants more money for letting you talk to the girls,” he said. I had bought a couple of overpriced sodas to be allowed to sit and talk, but now the woman was demanding more. At this, the little girl stood up and with an angry look on her face, like a teenager arguing with a parent about getting grounded, began yelling something back at her “owner.” I asked my translator what was happening and he told me that the girl was yelling at her that I would not pay. That she would not let me. She then turned back towards me with tears in her eyes and, looking down at the dirt floor, began pushing me towards the gate as her owner looked on scowling.

These girls are everywhere. Child prostitution is not a problem specific to Burmese border towns or Southeast Asia. It’s everywhere. And no matter what you believe, you must believe that it needs to be stopped.

Rowing the Wild Atlantic

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:50:06 +0000

This article was published in Nuvo Magazine on January 16, 2008. Photos courtesy of Sarah Kessans and Emily Kohl.

A rough day

It wasn’t their first time in the middle of the ocean. The last time was much worse. Sarah Kessans, then 22, and Emily Kohl, then 23, both graduates of Purdue University, were huddled in the small cabin of their 24 ft. ocean rowing boat with their sea anchor, a parachute-like outfit, dropped down into the water during the squall that came on them 18 hours before. As they were about to make another call into their distant support ship, a rogue wave, likely close to 20 feet high, slammed into the vessel’s port side sending the craft tumbling keel side up. Having awoken some time earlier to a cabin severely depleted of oxygen, the women had removed the solar fan vents from the cabin’s walls to let in more air. Now that the cabin was underwater, those vents were serving more as sieves while the sea poured in. The women grabbed the few articles they could: the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), a jacket and a digital camera. They emerged from the vessel’s interior in time to see their life raft floating away in the distance. The next 16 hours were spent on the keel of their overturned boat, trying to stay warm as they were visited by wave after chilling wave.

“It was just wicked, wicked weather out there, I mean we’re talking 10 to 20 ft. waves and 20 knot winds,” said Kessans.

They were eventually plucked out of the ocean by a British Tall Ship, a vessel that to the weary and frigid women, resembled a spooky manifestation from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Editor’s note: See the rescue yourself Online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=apo5XsTrXa0

They spent the next 11 days aboard the ship with the crew, making their abrupt departure from their own plans less difficult. They set to learning the workings of the massive vessel and climbing the 300 ft. masts to set the sails. They stopped and explored the beautiful island of Bequia, played beach volleyball on Mayreau, swam around the Tobago Keys and hiked the volcanoes of St. Lucia before arriving in Barbados with one less boat and many more stories. Incidentally, the boat turned up a few months later off the island of Desirade in the French West Indies which, ironically, is just 40 miles south of Antigua, the island the girls were rowing for in the first place. The hull was still completely intact and with the help of the chief of police on the island, they were able to have the boat put on a container and sent back on course for the U.S.

. . .

Mind games

“A lot of it was just putting that ’05 race behind us,” said Kohl. “It was having the mental fortitude to know that things were going to be o.k., knowing what to do when dangerous situations arise.”

In fact, mental preparation was about all the women had time to do this go around. Though they were planning to compete in the ‘07 race, they were still in some debt from ’05, and sponsorship money wasn’t coming in as quickly as they hoped. They resigned to setting their sights on ’09.

But in October, two months before the race was scheduled to start, Kessans got a call from Simon Chalk, the race organizer. He told her that there was a boat called the Mount Spirit waiting in the UK. The boat was still in pretty good shape after being raced across the North Atlantic in 2006 and the team who had used it offered it up to be borrowed for free under the condition that the race support their selected charity. There was one drastic difference, however, between this boat and the one they had rowed back in ’05: This boat was built for a team of four.

A couple of months earlier, Kohl drove down to Florida to pick up the American Spirit after it had been reclaimed from the clutches of the Atlantic. She spent the night at a friend’s house, leaving the boat parked out front. The next morning she found an envelope fixed onto the boat’s scratched and battered hull with blue painters tape. It was from a woman named Jan Kissel, the mother of Tara Remington, an American who has spent most of the last 15 years living in New Zealand.

Kohl remembered Remington from the ’05 race. They met her on the island of Antigua, the race’s finish line. Remington hadn’t finished the race either, she and her rowing partner having gone through a couple of hurricanes, a capsize, a head injury and, oh yes, a shark attack. There was another woman at the restaurant that night as well, Jo Davies, a Brit who had badly injured her back during the ’05 race. She had to wait seven days on the boat with her team after her immobilizing injury before a successful rescue was managed.

That evening, as the girls sat around drinking rum at a restaurant called Trapas, they all shared their oceanic war stories. They decided that, all having unfinished business with the Atlantic, it would be a grand idea to do it all over again in 2007 as a team of four. Thanks to the note left on the boat by Kissel, contact between the four women was reestablished and they started talking again.

But it never really amounted to anything more than talk until Kessans got the call from Simon Chalk. She and Kohl talked it over and decided that this was too great a stroke of luck to pass up. Kessans arranged to take a short break from her PhD studies and they got back in touch with both Remington and Davies, who were eager to accept the belated invitation.

And so it was set. The team of four would depart on December 3rd from La Gomera, a small chunk of land that makes up part of the Canary Islands. They would set a course for Antigua, 2,931 miles away, in a red boat with its fitting name stuck to the side with white vinyl letters: “Unfinished Business.”

. . .

The event

All of this was a part of something known as the Woodvale Challenge. Woodvale Events, a British group, puts on ocean rowing races every year. While 2007 was a year for the Atlantic, 2008 will be the year of the North Atlantic, starting just off the Manhattan shores and ending in the Scilly Isles, 28 miles off the southwest coast of England.

“We help people from all different backgrounds row across oceans, from the Olympian to the sort of house wife athlete,” said Simon Chalk, race organizer for Woodvale Events and himself a participant in this year’s race on the record breaking Oyster Shack team. The group handles 24/7 boat tracking via GPS during the event as well as the insurance and coordination with rescue services. But clearly, judging by the women’s experience in 2005, you can’t prepare for everything.

. . .

And then there were four

The sun was directly overhead in a warm, early December sky over the La Gomera. The anticipation and stress levels of the two women were trimmed thanks to their having been on this same starting line two years before, but nothing could contain the excitement that comes along with have 20 ocean rowing boats out in the bay, brimming with adrenaline. Sarah Kessans sat in their boat reflecting on how amazig it was that this had all come together in just two months. They had found a boat, worked out the sponsorships, and all four of them were in the boat ready to go. The reflecting was cut off abruptly as the sound of the air horn screamed through air and all quivering adrenaline was released and the boats shot out into the wide, consuming sea.

The women could tell at the outset that this race would be a different experience. When they had done the race in ’05 they were a team of two, so while one person was always rowing, the other person was mostly sleeping, not leaving much overlap for things like conversation. But with four rowers the women worked in teams, Kessans and Kohl always rowing together in two hour shifts while Remington and Davies ate or slept, and then switching.

“With four it’s just so much more dynamic,” said Kessans. “Being able to share duties such as cooking and plotting the charts and talking on the satellite phone and just having somebody with you, it’s just so much better.”

An obvious difference this sort of race holds from most others is its duration. Being on the boat for over 50 days, it became a home for the women, it was where their life took place. They did laundry in a bucket, washing as much of the skin-irritating salt out of the fabric as possible.

They had a water-making machine on board, that is, a contraption that uses reverse osmosis to clear the salt out of the sea water to make it drinkable. They carried a spare 200 liters as their ballast, some of which they had to tap into when their solar panel went on the fritz and they weren’t able to power their machine, but luckily not enough to break the 50 liter mark where a team will start incurring penalties.

They ate mostly freeze-dried food, mac and cheese, beef stroganoff, noodles and chicken, things that required only boiling water to be hydrated back into a somewhat edible form. They also brought plenty of junk food along, Doritos, Fritos, Snickers bars, Slim Jims, things to keep snacking on in between rowing duties. Even with all their eating, though, after 50 days of working out for 12 hours a day the girls all came home 15 to 20 pounds lighter.

“I mean, you’re burning about 4,000 calories a day and really you can’t eat 4,000 calories a day,” said Kessans. “I mean you could, but we just really didn’t want to eat that much just because it’s a lot of food.”

And because every reader is now asking the same question: “how did they go to the bathroom …”

“’Bucket and chuck it’ with baby wipes was pretty much the way to go,” said Kessans. She also let me in on the little nugget, if you will, that one of the team members liked to go over the side, but balance issues kept the other three hovering over those buckets that hadn’t been lost over the side or broken.

. . .

One simple question

Most would say that this sort of experience begs one question: Why? Why put yourself through an episode such as this? Why subject yourself to the elements of physical exertion and exhaustion that this sort of journey requires? Why lay yourself out there, vulnerable to the unpredictability of ever changing oceanic weather? Why spend half your daytime hours lying awake in a boat’s small cabin that has turned into a virtual sauna as you await your next turn at the oars? What is the point in all this?

“I think they’re nuts,” said Jere Jenkins, formerly the women’s varsity rowing coach at Purdue University. “I mean, three-fifths of our planet is covered with water. The oceans are an incredibly powerful entity and to go out there for 50 days basically alone, I think, is just crazy.”

He said that he does understand the pull towards rowing, though. “The draw to rowing is that it is a sport where you push yourself mentally and physically to your absolute limit everyday. It’s hard for people to understand when they see it on television because it all looks so smooth and graceful, but when you’re actually in the boat and rowing it’s an incredibly intense experience,” he said.

Jenkins was the coach when Kessans and Kohl were on the team and said that they were both very intense athletes, even in training. “They would put their rowing machines nose to nose and they would basically growl at each other,” he said.

“The difference between being on a bigger oceangoing boat and on a ocean rowboat where you sit two feet above the water, it’s like two different oceans,” said Kessans. “Being propelled by your own power makes it so that the sounds are different. You can hear the ocean, you can see the blind fish practically jump into your lap. You really feel a part of the ocean whereas on a larger ship you’re really just a passenger on it.”

“At times you’re not in control and nature is in control,” said Kohl. “And that’s a big thing. If you’re in a boat with an engine or a motor you have some sort of control, but when you’re in an ocean rowing boat when the only thing you have to move with is oars, that’s something that’s really different.”

. . .

The geography of the sea

One thing that separates huge bodies of water like the ocean from any other place in the world is the simple and overwhelming lack of geography. In any place where people normally spend their time there is always something to see, always something on the horizon that breaks the mind-numbing flatness created by the curvature of the earth. But on the ocean there is nothing to see in the distance, in any direction.

This being said, the women said that you learn to appreciate what you do find. One day the team was joined by a pod of dolphins that swam alongside their boat for over half an hour. But it was the nights that they started to really look forward to. Being over a thousand miles from the closest light source, the sky looked as if it had been ripped open, the rawness of millions upon millions of stars revealed.

They would spend their nights rowing together, listening to the music they piped in through two speakers on deck (everything from the 80s to Death Cab to Dashboard Confessional, for those keeping track at home). Some nights they would put in the earphones from their iPods and listen to recorded books. And there were other nights when they would simply row in silence, hearing nothing more than the sound their oars dipping in and out of the dark sea.

They celebrated Christmas at sea with a few special treats. Davies’ mom had packed presents for all four women, including kazoos and Santa hats. They made themselves a Christmas tree by wrapping green tinsel around the boat’s three antennas.

“It wasn’t your average Christmas tree but it definitely got us in the holiday spirit,” said Kessans, who along with Kohl spent her second Christmas in the middle of the ocean.

“She called us on Christmas eve when the whole family was hanging out,” said Emily Kessans, 21, Sarah’s younger sister and a nursing student on the IUPUI campus here in Indy. She said that she thinks she might actually have talked more with her sister when she was at sea than when she’s normally on land, thanks likely in large part to the satellite phone sponsorship the team had. She said that Sarah was, understandably, always pretty tired when she called and was usually ready to eat or sleep.

Some of Sarah Kessans early Christmases were spent right here on the north side of Indianapolis. In 1992, when she was eight, the family moved further south in Indiana, onto a 160-acre farm.

“At first she was hesitant even to walk outside the house,” said Tim Kessans, Sarah’s father and a resident of Floyds Knobs, Ind. Over the phone, Mr. Kessans sounds warm and proud. Through sheepish, reminiscent laughs, he said that it wasn’t long before Sarah was walking down to the river, building forts with her friends, and eventually off the farm entirely.

“She was always climbing the tallest trees growing up or swimming across the flooded Blue River near our home,” said Emily Kessans. “We spent a lot of time on the roof.”

In high school, Sarah Kessans became involved in the national science fair with her research in creating a natural herbicide. This project took her all over the country, let her meet President Bush, got her a summer in Israel and, in the words of her father, kept expanding her wings more and more.

. . .

Business: finished

It was Jan 22 and the sun was just beginning to set when the mountains came into view. Antigua, an island just a quarter the size of Marion County, lie just 20 miles away and as the sun dropped lower in the sky the little island’s lights seemed to get brighter and brighter. When they were about two miles from shore the team was met by a virtual platoon of boats, one of which was a catamaran that had been rented by their family members.

“At the end we were absolutely hauling,” said Kohl. “We were going so fast with the adrenaline and wanting to get in. I think we did the last two miles in about a half hour.”

As they neared shore they saw flares go off from the top of Fort Berkeley. The flares, which they later found out were being ignited by the men of team Pura Vida, the race’s overall winners, lit up the night sky like a homeward-beckoning beacon. When they did finally make it to port they stepped off the boat that had been their home for the last 51 days 16 hours and 31 minutes into the collective welcoming arms of a huge crowd. Their families had rented a steel band to greet them, the plinking of the metal drums penetrating the normally calm island night.

“We had waited for that moment pretty much for four years since we got the idea of rowing across the Atlantic,” said Kessans. “It was absolutely surreal and we were absolutely on top of the world.”

“It was definitely the finish that we longed for when we were out there,” added Kohl.

The previous record for a women’s team of four in this race was 67 days, set during the 2005 race. With the girls finish this race of 51 days, they blasted the old record out of the water, so to speak. And in a frenzy of excited celebration, the letters ‘U’ and ‘N’ were peeled off the side of the boat, christening her anew as “Finished Business.”

Ends of journeys are always times when you look back on what they’ve been. But it’s also a time when we can’t help but look forward. What comes next for these two women? Will there be more ocean rowing in their futures? As of now, one is saying probably and the other, probably not.

“I may end up doing the ’09 Indian Ocean race,” said Kohl. “It would be kind of a big historical moment for us, having an American women’s four go across and with the experience that we now have with these two races we could hopefully go in and win the race. So that’s a maybe,” she said.

Kessans had different thoughts. “As far as I’m concerned, I mean, I may eat my words later, but I’m sort of ready to get onto new adventures, everything from climbing to hiking to adventure racing. I love the experience [of ocean rowing] and would recommend it to anyone. It really is a life-changing event. But for right now I’m definitely done rowing oceans for a bit,” she said.

. . .

Being able to say that they had rowed across an ocean wasn’t the only reason the women were on this boat. They are also raising money for the Meningitis Trust UK and the Meningitis Trust New Zealand. Their association with the charity sort of occurred by default. It was the charity of the boat’s owning team that had rowed their boat across the North Atlantic in 2006. With the free use of the boat came the stipulation that they raise money for the charity. So that’s exactly what they set out to do, and in no small fashion. By the end of it, they hope to have raised $20 thousand. Currently they’re only about a quarter of the way there, so if you’d like to support the cause, be sure to visit .

Freewheelin’ Community Bikes

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:01:30 +0000

This video was created while doing work for Moved Media. More than just a bike shop, Freewheelin’ Community Bikes is a program that teaches kids self-respect and perseverance. To find out more about Freewheelin’, including shop and bike sales hours, go to www.freewheelinbikes.org. This is a piece we created to help them better tell their story to all of their constituents.