On the way home from North Korea I got an email from CARE Atlanta asking me if I would like to go to Guatemala and cover a joint project there between CARE and The New School in NYC- a group of their students were in San Lucas Toliman working with a Mayan women’s association there to improve the women’s marketing and manufacturing of their textile projects. I jumped at the chance. I have spent so much of my working life in Guatemala that any chance to get back there is a bit of an old home week experience for me. So much good has happened there since the peace accords were signed in 1996, but the level of violence there rivals that of Afghanistan but, outside of local coverage, doesn’t appear on the international radar screen.

Three months ago I got a call from the Mennonite Central Committee in Akron, Ohio. “We need a Canadian photographer. Would you like to go to North Korea?” What else could I say. “Pick me. Pick me.” I couldn’t refuse a chance to go to a country that almost nobody really knows. Three weeks later I was there photographing orphanages that were receiving soy beans and the pressure cookers to convert them to soy milk. All part of a program called First Steps run by a woman named Susan Ritchie. Susan was raised in South Korea and her command of the language and knowledge of the culture and politics is amazing. I had free reign to photograph when we were in the orphanages, but when we were on route or on the street, we always had a handler with us and that meant for the most part- no photos. I grabbed what I could of this unknown land, this one is on a back street where they are making charcoal for heating. Wish I could have grabbed a shot of the steam powered trucks that were moving down the streets behind a cloud of smoke- moving slowly for sure, but moving.

Back in late spring I was with a group of men cutting logs the old-fashioned way: cross cut saws and heavy horses. Hard heavy work even with a big horse to help out. Right at the beginning, when the horse was acting skittish, I had a close call- at least in my book. The horse had just been hooked up to a log and instead of waiting for the teamster’s command, it bolted. With a wide-angle lens up to my eye, it seemed that the one ton horse and the log it was dragging were coming right for me. I bolted and just got out of the way. It made me realize how hard those old lumberjacks worked and how easy it was for them to get injured: crushed fingers, legs or worse- and no hospital nearby. A tough job.

Sometimes you get lucky. I’d been to Ben’s a few months ago working on a book project on the Miramichi area, but missed the late night action there. Guess I couldn’t stay up till 3 for it. Well, I just happened to be passing through the area on the night of the Irish Festival and thanks to a friend up there we didn’t have any trouble staying up to catch the late night crowd at Ben’s. I didn’t have my D700 or D300 with me, but I did have a Canon G9 with image stablization built in- a good thing judging by the hour. And the burgers- great.