Listening to my daily podcasts last week, I was introduced to author Paul Salopek, who was detailing his ordeal as a captive of Sudanese rebels. Salopek, along with two others, was captured by young rebels as they made their way across the Sudan-Chad border, an ambiguous zone deep in the heart of the Sahel (shore, in Arabic). He was sold to the Sudanese Army for a box of uniforms, and kept captive in a walled compound for over 30 days; later being freed through diplomatic initiatives. Remarkably, after being freed and flying to the states with Bill Richardson and the Editor-In-Chief of National Geographic, he then returned to the Sahel to finish his story. He wanted to capture the strength and capacity of the people living in this barren land; not the stereotypical weakness and helplessness. He wanted to see how people can adapt to live in hardship; how their stories can parallel ours. How the differences in landscape mirror the differences in perspective and reality. His prose is beautiful.
Salopek describes the Sahel as, "...a belt of semi-arid grassland that separates (or joins) Arabs and Blacks, Muslims and Christians, nomads and farmers, a landscape of greens and a world of tans. Some 50 million of the world's poorest, most dis empowered, most forgotten people hang fiercely onto power there...it is a crack in the heart; a tightrope, a brink, a ledge...The Sahel is a bullet's trajectory. It is the track of rains that fall but never touch the sand. It is a call to prayer and a call for your blood, and for me a desert road without end."
The photos accompanying this story were some of the best I have seen in a long time. The photographer, Pascal Maitre, accompanies the written poetry with visual poetry. Unfortunately, NGM does not allow cutting and pasting of their photos, so nothing to show here. But this is the link for the story:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/featurehub
