Friends in town
Well, just one friend.
Carlito Caminha came to town!
(Yeah, this is another post that’s way behind schedule; two weeks ago. I’m la-zeee)
Another SIPA classmate of mine called me up and sent along the good news - our friend Carlito was in Jakarta. Great!
First met up with Swati, who is from school, and Nita, her co-worker from YLBHI, a large legal advocacy organization in Indonesia. Swati is doing a better job of being in the middle of the human rights thing this summer than I…it’s okay. There will be time. There we are.
We met up at her office which isn’t too far from mine, but in a much more hopping part of the Menteng area. Then we headed off to Pasar Baru, a tourist-trappy (but not too bad) area in North Jakarta, and Swati was intent on finding the vaunted Indian people of the area. There’s a lot of textile places, some of which sell saris. It was real funny - we were walking through, pointing out people to Swati and saying "Is he Indian? Is she Indian?" All eagerly testing out our South Asian-dar. Finally, we found this guy who looked like he could have come straight out of central casting for "Indian cloth shop-keeper." He told Swati where there was a dingy Indian grocery store down an alley, and we went and checked it out, and it made me feel a little bit at home.
After locating the Indian grocery store, we located Carlito. Carlito comes from East Timor. He was in the Human Rights Advocates Training Program at the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia during my first semester, one member of a whole interesting group of activists from all over the world. We were also neighbors at the International House. He helps run a magazine called Talitakum back in Timor Leste. Carlito also helped found an orphanage for children left with no families in the aftermath of Indonesia’s spasm of violence as it withdrew from East Timor. He also snuck a camera into an Indonesian jail to take photos of an East Timorese resistance leader, who is now President of that country. Sometimes, Carlito makes me wonder what I’ve really accomplished with my life. Actually, all of the advocates made me feel that way - which was one of the nice things about having them around; you realize how much you can accomplish and what a difference you can make with so few resources.
There is Carlito at dinner, sitting with a friend of his, Nita, who joined us. Nita is from East Timor; not to be confused with the Nita who I met up with before, who is from the island of Java in Indonesia. (I decided that we needd to have a "Nita Timur" (East Nita) and a "NIta Barat" (West Nita) to solve this problem). The restaurant was Chinese-oriented, but most of the diners were Indonesian Indians, including a pair of old guys who were doing some serious work on a bottle of Walker Black…ah, the good life.
We met Carlito at the Galeri Fotojurnalis Antara, that’s the Antara Gallery of Photojournalism. It was a pretty cool spot, the kind of place you’d totally miss if some Indonesian didn’t tell you all about it. Here is the stairway with a big Indonesian independence mural. They had these almost comic book-like panels up on the wall that I wanted to get pictures of, but the lights were out in the room for the reason we were there (below). It was sort of a picture-based history of how photojournalists contributed to Indonesia’s independence. There was also a pretty good display of photos from Aceh of the tsunami zone. Here is a picture I took of a picture of life going on, someone drying fish to eat. It’s from a photojournalist named Rully Kesuma. Can’t find anymore info on Kesuma. I was also too dumb to figure out how to switch off my flash.
One reason Carlito was in town was to talk about some photos he took in East Timor. Here is the website for the project on Timorese photographers. Carlito’s section of the site is there. Here’s me and Carlito before he went on - rock and roll! He showed his pictures and offered some remarks about journalism and photography throughout Southeast Asia, which was all in Indonesian, and unfortunately, I didn’t really manage to understand most of it. Too bad.
It is a great thing to see people from the other side of the world on the other side of the world.
