Aldo Benini

Some travel writing

2008  -  "Sunday morning in the Dili fish market" offers a few glimpses at the wonderful color spectacle that tropical fish offer to the eye of the beholder, plus some of the goings-on in this lively spot of East Timor.

2008  -  "Glimpses of Assemblies" takes its cue from an NGO photo poster in Nepal, to embrace images of a few small groups of people in that country. I took these photos while traveling to visit self-help organizations of bonded laborers that the Lutheran World Federation aids. A local secretary drew a person peeking in while standing on its head - I noticed this detail too late to comment on his sense of humor among members who have gone through harrowing oppression.

2007  -  "Encounters in Tanzania" gathers portraits of people that I met during four rewarding weeks with the Tanganyika Christian Refugee Service (TCRS), visiting its Community Empowerment Program (CEP) near the border with Rwanda and Burundi as well as in the hinterland of Kilwa District near the Indian Ocean. These images are meant to capture what the French might call « les gestes élémentaires de la vie sociale » , basic forms of human expression that spring from a universal grammar, although one that we in the industrialized world sometimes find difficult to reconstruct.

2005 - "Apnar chobi tulbo? - May I take your picture?" is an uncommented album of portraits that I took in Rangpur, northwestern Bangladesh. I usually ask for permission to take photos of individuals; and several people there have known me for years. Still, the ethics of photographing people is always problematic. The father of a rickshaw-repair boy whose meagerly equipped workplace in the main street I took pictures of insisted that I must take his son to "your country to educate him", provoking a public ruckus. Over time, I have grown more restrained and chiefly focused on public events that actively invite taking pictures.

2005 - "Sociology at 100" - It has always been my policy to go to one centennial only of any professional association of which I am a member. It was, therefore, particularly fortuitous that the American Sociological Association should celebrate its 100th anniversary in nearby Philadelphia. Although less than marginal to the network of American sociologists, I imbibed some of their novel work and the historic retrospectives with rapt attention. I have always felt that the width and depth of this community contributes to an informed self-description of US society; and this in turn strengthens internal democracy as well as international solidarity. This is a postcard from that happy week with my wife Janet, in seminars and in the city.

2004 - "A brief glimpse at Aldo's workbench" was meant to help friends understand what I was doing within the Global Landmine Survey, with an illustration from Vietnam. However, my facade of cold statistics was broken when citizens of a commune under survey objected: "Your map is wrong. We know this, because the bombs fell on the neighboring village, not us. They killed every one – men, women and children."

1998 / 2007 - "The Railway as a Metaphor of Swiss Society". After nearly ten years in print my “Modern Switzerland: A Volume in the Comparative Societies Series” (McGraw-Hill 1998) has been pulled off the shelves. It concluding chapter took readers on a symbolic train journey across the country. I reproduce it here, augmented with some more recent photos and brief comments.

1989 - "A Short Walk in Afghanistan" is  the account of a seemingly futile chase after prisoners of war in which I, alongside several other ICRC delegates, took part in 1988. Tired, thirsty, and increasingly blind to outside signals, I narrowly avoided stepping on a landmine. This, and work on evacuation systems that would transport numerous freshly mine-injured Afghans, prefigured a deeper emotional rapport to my role that I was to find, ten years later, in the Global Landmine Survey.

The image on this page is from a storefront that I admired in Hargeisa, in 2002, during the Somalia Landmine Impact Survey. As with public notaries, writing has been a means for me to give more durable accounts of things that otherwise will fall by the wayside in our short personal and corporate memories. I am not so sure about my skills as a "key doublicater" ..

I plan to include more travel stories and photo albums over time.

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Last updated: 30 May 2008