New Orleans, Louisiana | Saturday, Dec. 16 to Dec. 23, 2006 | Service Trip

It was late August 2005 that Hurricane Katrina rattled through the Gulf Coast, beginning a series of destructive events in New Orleans, one of the many great U.S. cultural centers. Americans were touched and flooded the entire region, offering services and products. Thousands of displaced Louisianians were brought all the way to my Philadelphia neighborhood near Temple University. I spent a great deal of time there, acting as roving security, an untrained 20-something in a condemned school-turned-evacuee-shelter stuffed with too many suffering and desperate people.

(Photos courtesy of my talented friend Neal Santos)

More than a year later, I was presented with the opportunity to do more. With a few friends, I flew to New Orleans to help Common Ground Relief, an organization that had been helping to clean up from the aftermath of Katrina. Racial and socioeconomic politics were alive and the Lower Ninth Ward seemed it was days after the end of war, not a year after a category 3 hurricane. I slept in an abandoned classroom, ate military surplus corned beef hash and took cold showers to rid my skin of asbestos and the debris of poverty and rage and one of the deadliest storms in modern American history.

Tennessee and KY | Tues., Aug. 15 to Aug. 20, 2006 | Greg Babbitt and Mike Butler

Puerto Rico | July 2006 | Vacation

White River, SD | Thurs., May 11 to May 17, 2006 | Service Immersion

Read my reflections on my first jaunt there, during spring 2006 with a volunteer group, here.

Laredo, Texas | Sat., March 5 to March 12, 2006 | Alt. Spring Break

Montana Road Trip | Monday, June 20 to July 1, 2005 | Michael Butler

Mepkin Abbey | Monday, June 13 to June 17, 2005| Moncks Corner, SC

I spent a week at the historic Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery.

I spent about a week in a few Italian cities, unfortunately, my luggage was lost, so I was without my camera for most of the trip.  I flew in and out from Rome, was based in Florence and made day trips to Pisa, Sienna and Venice.

Here are some photos I took from Venice, in addition to others pilfered to fill in the gaps.

Cross Country | Thurs. Aug. 9 to Aug. 23, 2007 | Mike Butler and Matt Sheehan

With two friends, I took a long-awaited trip from the Pacific to the Atlantic. See more here.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania | Friday July 20 to July 22, 2007 | Father/Son Trip

New York State | Fri., Jun 8 to Jun 10, 2007 | Matt Sheehan and Jon Irmiter

Cooperstown and Buffalo

Niagara Falls

The Complete New Jersey | Friday, July 27 to July 29, 2007 | Matt Sheehan

Los Angeles, California | Friday, January 5 to January 10, 2007 | Matt Sheehan

By Christopher Wink | August 29, 2005 | Travel Reflection

Africa was not real to me.  It was imaginary; I saw a place where elephants roam and people starve.  I saw children with flies around their faces in villages and huts and tribes.  I saw in stereotypes and misunderstandings and prejudices and lies.  That was all before I arrived at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra, Ghana.

I gave two months of my teenage life to West Africa, and I was given in return a lifetime of awareness and understanding.  I studied in a classroom at the University of Ghana, but Ayi Kwei Armah and Abu Abarry didn’t teach me nearly as much as the cab rides and post offices and market women did.  Reading about West African culture in my overpriced course packet never satisfied my hunger as well as freshly pounded banku and groundnut soup did.  I played basketball with Octung and Salam to hear them speak in proverbs.  I laughed with Tonko and met too many Kwesis to remember.

I visited traditional villages: the kente cloth of Bonwire and the dancing of Nkwantanan.  I can still feel the sweaty, waxy palms of children greeting me with any English they could muster.  Familiarity is immediate.  A first name and a U.S. city is all it takes for a Ghanaian child to devote his life to you.  I still sometimes find in my pockets scraps of paper with addresses and names that I can no longer connect with faces.

I bought too much fruit from young girls on the street, and in return they laughed too much at my clumsy attempts to juggle oranges.  I was an “obrunei” trying to speak Twi, debating on whether I would ever wear a dashiki, yet more than a few times my eyes opened wide as I was certain I was seeing someone I knew from Philadelphia.  West Africa is most certainly as different as a continent can be, but its inhabitants show cultural and personal similarities to so many I’ve known for years in ways they may never know.  Africa is not beneath America; it is merely as far removed laterally as possible.

No elephants roam in Ghana, and I may have met as many Ghanaian architects and engineers as starving Africans.  Villages reflected more on traditional lifestyles than poverty, and I learned that one says “tradition,” not tribe.  I went to Africa ignorant and stupid; I leave less ignorant and a little less stupid.

As it has become my custom after long trips, I write my thoughts here, seven miles from the ground without even a passing fear of falling.  Somehow the decompressed cabin air and meagerly reclining Economy class seats help me to comprehend my time away.  What I have learned here is that one needs not to be brilliant to say something of importance, only the experience to form the words.  Africa now is real to me; it has a feel, a taste.  I can hear Africa, touch it, I can see Africa, as I never have before.

Text as it was written in late August 2005, on returning from a summer in West Africa. This piece won first place in Temple University’s 2005 Travel Essay Contest.

By Christopher Wink | May 25, 2006 | Travel Reflection

I have proudly represented Temple University on service immersion trips before. I have had South Dakotan ground beneath my feet before, too. Moreover, I have been with Jason Riley in a rental car and with John Dimino on an airplane before. Still, it is easy to understand that some experiences, no matter the similarities, can never be fully replicated.

Our group of ten administrators and students flew into Rapid City, South Dakota in May 2006, destined to work on the Rosebud Reservation of the Lakota Nation. While nearing the airport from above, below me South Dakota appeared wrinkled and aged. As we further approached, her features took form: trees that survived passed generations of agricultural clearing and beef cattle that survived passed days of agricultural slaughter.

This region of Dakota’s limitless expansion is only interrupted by flurries of elevation change. Once on ground, the pavement of interstate 90 appeared to have tamed the land into a consumable table of gentle slopes and caressing ridges. All of which leads me to offer muddled explanations of the region’s geographical features: endless plains with small, yet punctuated elevation changes interjected regularly.

Our group was there to begin something, surely. Our time was an investigation into the trip’s possibilities. We were trying to find regimen, activity, and purpose for groups who would follow our path. We found it all, not surprisingly. These service immersion trips have the remarkable ability to lead me to places that can be captured in brief explanations of outstanding experiences: all powerful alone, hard to fathom when put together.

I sat in on a healing ceremony and grappled with appreciating prayer that was so foreign to my Judeo-Christian world. I was overcome with the contrasts of seeing light in sheer darkness and uniting in what should have been separation. The calls of tradition and the rituals I couldn’t fully understand pierced the crisp spring of White River.

I sat next to American Indians and foolishly attempted to play an instrument I met days before, while those seated around me treated it as a father, something they had always known, from which they learned, from which they defined their manhood. I banged a drum, while next to me Cy and Johnson touched their spirituality. While my fellow group members closed their eyes to find the beat or met eyes to find comfort, I was left staring at Harold Whitehorse, a Lakota medicine man whom I had befriended. I was so captivated by his mouth; when I watch someone’s mouth speak a language I don’t know, I hear words I don’t know, when I watched Harold’s mouth sing Lakota, I heard noises I didn’t know. It was a non-Western experience in the Western world.

I was in a sweat lodge, watching thoughts rise and fall in my mind while, as per custom for an Inipi ceremony, water was splashed on more than 40 near-molten hot stones, causing intense heat to overcome my ears before it trickled down my back. Afterwards, feeling as if I had been pushed to some threshold of mine, I waded into the Little White River and I sat staring at the distant hills, surrounded by group members and a worried-looking dog, aptly named Blackness.

Our week was to pilot future trips, so turbulence was expected, if not welcomed. Some speakers were longwinded, to describe politely. The cuisine wasn’t traditional Lakota, leaving me without any knowledge of what would be. Our days were long, but maybe not long enough, as I would have liked to see more ceremony, hear more stories and learn more culture. This is all said in stark amazement with the successes of this, an introductory trip.

Our leader, John Dimino, managed to supplement our Lakota learning with Dakota discovering, while he met and spoke and remembered in order to improve the experience. Our group saw the Wall Drugstore, a quirky commercial creation grown to attract consumerism in South Dakota desolation. We scaled a small outpost of the Badlands, an uncomfortable imposition of jagged rock that only appears steeper when one clings to their rough, brief and interrupted summits. We visited a nature preserve around Fort Niobrara, an excuse to snap photographs of elk and prairie dogs and buffalo in Nebraska. We pulled off the road and looked at South Dakota’s night sky, losing count of the stars and track of our hands.

It took weeks, as it often does, for me to exhale and review what I had done. The United States and Pennsylvania and Temple University have offered me so many outstanding opportunities. My eyes have been crowded with wonders and the Rosebud Reservation was another. If this trip was a beginning, how difficult it would be to describe the end.

Written after a service immersion trip with a group from Temple University to work with community groups on the Rosebud Lakota Reservation near White River, S.D.

By Christopher Wink | March 18, 2006

Temple University sent 23 of us to Laredo, Texas to work with Habitat for Humanity. We slept on the ground of vacant classrooms, took less-than-hot showers, and worked a watered-down form of construction from 8am until 4pm daily. For those unfamiliar with what the phrase college spring break generally connotes, this wasn’t your garden-variety week off from American higher education.

Yet, nearly 100 volunteered to pack screwdrivers and hammers in their spring break suitcases. It’s a shame that only 23 of those who applied got to work with the international group that manages to build beautiful homes with volunteer crews and sell them to deserving families with long-term, low interest loans. -The teach-a-man-to-fish type of charity that makes us get mushy inside.

It was a sneaking sensation, a shot from a faraway tree reminding us that we weren’t getting paid $8 an hour to cut baseboard trim or paint wood siding. We were a group of 23 whose lives had only intersected because of our interest in renovating a house we’ve never known for a family we’ll never meet. For our group, who would never see the house be turned over to a chosen family, it was an anonymous act. We found a penny on the ground, turned it heads-up and hoped it would serve well someone who deserved to come across it.

It is regrettable that an active Habitat chapter generally means there are plenty of people hoping for luck in a penny facing heads-up. No one wants a funeral home to have too much business. In Laredo, where 30 percent of its 200,000 residents are living below the poverty level, business for Habitat is, unfortunately, good.

We enjoyed our time there, anyway, whether we should have or not. Somehow this group, which seemed to be chosen more as a whole, than as individuals, made even the worst of the trip seem nothing short of enjoyable.

There was a moment when the van’s rear-view mirror showed eight group members singing a song in terrible harmony. We all know that feeling, when we are blessed enough to realize we are experiencing something we won’t soon forget. It is so much more special when that moment involves nothing more significant than the always-rare moment when strangers feel a bit closer than strangers. That screeching collaboration with mumbled lyrics is just such a moment for me.

We were lost and we laughed, we sweated and we smiled. I will not remember building a base frame for a bathtub or cutting cedar trim nearly as well as I will remember watching these people whom I got to know in Laredo play basketball or take silly photographs.

It is so common for me to offer so much of so little of me. I am prone to manipulating the truth when describing myself to strangers. I claim it’s an attempt to dramatize my surroundings. In reality, though, my propensity for withdrawing from bonding is probably motivated by other reasons. After all, lies are like shoes, they not only protect us, but often hide our ugliest parts.

Yet, for once, I stumbled upon an interest in offering personal truths to others. It’s been a long time since a collection of 20 individuals knew my real name. It’s been longer since I cared to know the real names of a collection of 20 individuals. I personally arrived 42 hours later than I was scheduled to be home, but my memories of airport creeping and airplane sleeping are hardly contentious because I wasn’t waiting to get home, I was avoiding the end of an exceptionally distinctive week in my short life.

I have been given so many unbelievable opportunities, Laredo being one. What I have learned through the years is that people don’t need much to be thankful. I was reminded of this in my time just north of the border.

Life in a U.S. border town is American by geography but Mexican by population. The Rio Grande, which lazily and, looking around the Tex-Mex city, haphazardly splits Laredo, Texas from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, is the only clear sign that this portion of the Lone Star state isn’t Mexican property.

In the northeast United States, Latino seems to be more of a race than an ethnicity to me. There are features, neighborhoods, and culture associated with Latinos, like whites or blacks.

In Laredo, where more than 90 percent of the population speaks Spanish, everyone is Latino. It isn’t a skin color and it isn’t stereotypes, it’s going to a hardware store and needing to know what “clavos” means or realizing that winning a jalapeño eating contest is a serious accomplishment. It’s curves, and salsa dancing, emotions and a roll of the tongue.

I slept outside one night, with clouds ruining my opportunity to describe my siesta as star-strewn, yet I continued to find it odd how much I, someone who craves dissension and difficulty, genuinely liked the group by which I was surrounded. It is only now that I just accept it as another reason the trip wasn’t just a trip, but, instead, needs more than 1,000 words to be described.

Very little of what we do is actually worth the invaluable time we spend doing it. 23 of us went to southern Texas and made, when compared with the rise and fall of civilizations, a very small contribution. Yet, I can’t help but grant myself even a fleeting moment of complacency for at least doing something. Indifference has claimed far more lives than the height of any war or the depths of any famine.

My feet haven’t gotten larger in the past few years, but I tend to believe I’m still growing. I am in a genesis, it feels. Teenage notions of my indefatigably destined place as a worldwide historical actor have fallen, though I maintain my hope to always make a micro-change to my macro-community. My actions may not be able to change the world for the better, but I certainly won’t let the world change my actions for the worst.

Written after a service immersion trip with a group from Temple University to work with Habitat for Humanity in Laredo, Tex.

Our group of Temple volunteers and some of community leaders with whom we worked

By Christopher Wink | January 28, 2005

On a recent trip to poverty ravaged Tijuana, I could not help but see the irony, clichéd as it may be, of a border wall – that divides with great tumult the U.S. and Mexico – extending into the serenity of the Pacific Ocean. It is unreal to brace oneself against the rusted wall and watch it snake its way into the greens and blues of the water below as it divides San Diego and Tijuana. Here, lines drawn on maps are far from imaginary and they carry emotional meaning that no fence should.

But for me, when I travel, the first things I notice are the similarities between where I am and where I live. Mysterious or not, the smiles of children are the same in Mexico: where south not only describes its geographic relationship to the U.S. but also its location below the poverty line. Of course American business spills over the fortified walls, so the border region oozes the products of Sam Walton and Ronald McDonald with a Mexican touch.

Otherwise though, the two sides could hardly be more different. The smiles of youth, globally recognized, are eclipsed by the speed with which Mexican children are forced to mature. Repeatedly I was asked if I were married: an idea, as a nineteen year old American boy, that had not yet occurred to me. But there in Tijuana, resting with other volunteers who were helping to build a school for kids with special needs, I stood a man without a wife. A few miles north and I was back to being a boy without a care.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that the exchange rate is not in pesos or dollars, it is in decades. Time has a different meaning in Tijuana. Ages don’t translate. Twenty-three year old women with more horrors in their pasts than the American troops we support and more violence in their presents than the urban teens we neglect are forgettable there. Married fifteen year olds and buried infants are part of a generational pancake, where diversity of age is as nonexistent as paved roads. The cavernous potential of Mexican youth is too often eroded through bitter time and darkening age.

And so crossing the border becomes a way of life: a fundamental part of Mexican culture. For many, Tijuana, where a gallon of milk costs the same as in the U.S. but wages don’t correspond, is a stopping point before moving on to the riches and splendor of an American minimum wage. Some say that migrants are criminals, but it is hard to imagine doing anything less for your family than risking your life. It is hard to lean against that fence dividing work and poverty, success and failure, life and death, and imagine fathers and sons, mothers and daughters watching their families die without risking a trip across the border.

Standing in the way of the hopes and dreams of millions of Mexican migrants, however, are walls of steel, armies of border agents, and the most dangerous predator of all: the mountains and deserts that line the border east of Tijuana.

Since 1994’s Operation Gatekeeper instituted hugely increased protection of the border, the mountainous and desert regions offer the only possibility to cross for Mexicans without the money for the documents to cross legally. Physical boundaries will not stop men and women from trying to save their families; they will instead ensure that many will die with unimaginable pain.

It is not rational to support open borders, but it is altogether impossible to live and breathe in Tijuana and not recognize that American enforcement of the border has become savagely murderous and insufferably unjust.

I write this on the plane ride home after watching a patient father with bags under his eyes walking the aisle with his recently pacified daughter. It seemed to me that in Tijuana even the most devoted parent rarely had the strength, if blessed with the time, to coddle his child. So the crying doesn’t stop and the closest thing to being pacified is in the reach of the nearest ocean. The fences may muffle the sound, but as the death totals climb well over three thousand, the cries cannot be ignored forever.

As prepared after spending a week working with community groups and living in a migrant workers’ home in Tijuana, Mexico.

Things are easier on this side. I realized that when I woke up and, in my persistently active manner, decided I had to go the bank and settle some business. I spent at least a full minute worrying about how I would say what I needed to say in Japanese. Once I realized that wasn’t much necessary, it occurred to me that I have begun a nice grace period where everything I do is going to be awfully simple in comparison to my maneuvering and studying and eating and buying and banking in Tokyo.

The question I am almost always asked is if it is “strange” to be back in the United States. Of course, mostly it isn’t. I am a man of limited means so, while I most certainly have done a lot for what I have been offered, I have spent a great deal of my life wherever my family considered home. It is not strange to return to what I have known for two decades. I may have to readjust and rediscover, but strange is unknown and different. To be sure, in a grand sense, there is nothing different about the America I have found.

The Democrats have majority in Congress, a few more small businesses have been replaced by national chains in my (once) rural county, and many people have had changes of fortune in their lives, but History will not speak of this. The Northeast still has great pizza, there are still dirt roads I can drive on, and I still lose cellular phone service going through Culver’s Gap.

I am just a little less ignorant and stupid than I was half a year ago. I was at a little bar and I spoke effusively of tatami mats and konbini when I discovered I was sitting near a Japanese-born businessman. I didn’t get far before I was reeled in by friends because, “what is Showa?” I don’t know a great deal about anything, so I am prone to rattling off nonsense to the rare listener who knows less about something than I do. I have just spent four months in Japan, and I have to accept that, for once and for now, I know more about a topic than most here. I will file all that I have learned and certainly maintain and expand it, but, knowing myself, soon enough I will be twisting and battling against another world of knowledge about which I know nothing. Education should be without a destination.

It is “strange” to think how rapidly I have gone from over-confident plane traveler, to lost American in Japan, to comfortable student in Tokyo, to trying to remember how to change gears in a pick-up truck near the Delaware River. The Christmas music and holiday cookies are overflowing and I haven’t had a conversation in Japanese in days but I am not overwhelmed or confused. I feel as if someone pumped a Tokyo semester’s worth of learning and seeing into my head without my ever leaving Philadelphia or Sussex County. The memories and pictures are here to prove otherwise, but I can’t quite convince myself I climbed Mount Fuji or studied the Korean War, or played basketball with a Japanese college team before sharing a meal and drinks.

Maybe I don’t have the time to think of it all, anyway. Forget unpacking, I am throwing clothes in a bag to take on a flight to New Orleans tomorrow, where I am doing a bit of reconstruction work with a group called “Common Ground.” I guess this is the life I chose.

I am home and a little smarter but facing no epileptic shock. It is closer to the feeling you get when you wake up half a day later after three days of incessant and sleepless action. Trying to find the beginning and end of your new memories and understanding is pointlessly arduous. They are there and you are better for it, so you crawl out of bed and have the same cup of orange juice you have had every morning since you can ever remember. You take what you can remember and otherwise wipe those lost days off the calendar, leaving you a long continuity of what you might readily consider your normal life. Tokyo never happened.

Thank you for watching, thank you for reading, thank you for making all that I have done a little less solitary and a little more soluble. I would certainly appreciate any final comments or questions if you have them.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Text as it was written as the final post to a semester-long blog from Japan for Junior Year Abroad.

Everyone who is in Japan raise your hand.

Note: I am typing with one hand. Clever, I know.

I am writing to you in my small – but expensive – two hundred thirty square foot apartment which I share with another here in the quiet residential Meguro-ku ward of Tokyo (one of 23 such municipalities). It has been quite a little adventure already, but let’s get ourselves orientated, no?

In the realm of self-evaluation, I love to consider myself the elder statesman of travel – at least for an independently traveling twenty-year-old. While most of my extended absences from my northwest New Jersey home have been wanderings throughout the continental United States, I spent the summer of 2005 in Ghana, West Africa. That was my first attempt at using education as a façade for international travel. Here in Tokyo I am keeping up that very pretext, though the time before I fall asleep is spent dreaming of travel and language, not books and tests.

I leave my homes for places I don’t know, yet I hold two very deep geographical allegiances: one for my Sussex County, NJ childhood home and another to Philadelphia, which I have grown to love through my studies at Temple University. (Of course I am equally enthralled with the country that houses both; please note there is a six foot by four foot American flag tacked up on my kitchen wall even here in Eastern Asia).

All that being said, I am here in one of the world’s largest cities, with a population exceeding eight million in the city’s 23 wards (some small surrounding islands and municipalities are considered part of the Tokyo prefecture and push the city’s population closer to 12 million). Sensibly those figures do not include the nearly 200 students from around the world studying abroad here at Temple University-Japan, including myself, and other international travelers who might label this city a temporary home.

So, like my fellow not-quite-Japanese Japan residents, I have the same seemingly ethereal effect on the country. A presence for sure, but we’re not all quite here, despite what my passport visa and Alien Registration card say.
I am playing loudly the country music of my childhood in an attempt to quiet the jack hammering of a city desperately trying to find more space for growth and usually finding it skyward. The some 620 square kilometers (roughly 385 square miles) that comprise Tokyo’s 23 wards are crammed with buildings, rarely with less than two or three floors. A friend spent the 1,000 yen (nearly $9 USD) to climb the 54 story Mori Tower in the hip international scene of the tourist district Roppongi Hills. Once he came out, all he could say with much efficiency was, “buildings forever.” He noted the playing fields that top some of the structures, to which the denizens of space-strapped cities everywhere are accustomed.

There are differences for sure, but the nascence of my stay has left me noting Tokyo’s similarities to, not its differences from, my beloved United States of America. I am working to settle into these walls which will shelter me for the next four months of my life. But that will be for another time.

Jaa mata!
Christopher

Text as it was written as the first post to a semester-long blog from Japan for NBC’s Junior Year Abroad.

I sent in a two minute video to NBC’s Manhattan headquarters in June 2006. It was an altogether last minute decision. I saw the promotion of the pilot season of an NBC show called ‘Junior Year Abroad’ in an email that came from the communications department of Temple University. I decided there wasn’t anything to be lost.

Not a month later I heard back. After a brief interview and legal semantics, I was offered a spot on the show. I was driven to New York City for an introduction and training, given several hundred dollars worth of equipment and had my semester studying in Japan essentially paid for by a corporation. During my five month stay, I filmed 10 hours video, took more than 1,300 photographs and wrote nearly 60,000 words on my experience in Asia. It offered me a world of knowledge, the only cost being a more passionate desire to see and explore more while I was abroad.

Ten, in all, young college students from across the country, traveling to different parts of the world were selected, as seen above, the only time we met.

The NBC crew used my footage to produce five show-specific pieces, which you can see below, in addition to another seven podcasted videos while I was living in Tokyo, which you can see here.

Premiere JYA Video

My Audition Tape

My First JYA Video

See additional videos during my time in Japan here.

My Last JYA Video

Concluding JYA Episode