Do you remember the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami?
I have spent the past 10 days in Meulaboh, a small town in the Indonesian province of Aceh. Five years post-tsunami, I’ve come here to work on a multimedia project with my boyfriend, James, who came here as a photojournalist one week after the 2004 tsunami. Meulaboh was [...]
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I am sprawled across a bed inside a bungalow, with rain pummeling the roof until about 12 seconds ago. It is now silent, though the blue-black sky still flashes here and there.
Like the rain patterns, I have ebbed and flowed continuously over the past two months — between calm content, floods of exhilaration, and the crush of overwhelm. I am immersed in working on an oral history book project, focused on people’s life stories in the context of a regional social justice issue. This involves extensive interviews, the sort that last three to five hours. I have fallen in love with the interview process, as I’ve described in a previous post — the unfolding of a narrative, the challenging questions it raises for both the interviewee and me. It is intense, and I feel my body filling up — not only with these stories of hardship and persecution, but also with the delicate dynamics remembered and recounted in the interviews.
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