Eiregem Belgium, March 2009.

I had just left the Sahara Desert. I was sick, really, really sick. The kind you have a fever and where everything leaves your body from all possible routes.  It was hot and I wanted to get north, to the Oasis’s, to Touzer, to sit in clear clean water until whatever this was left me. Yvette and Rita picked me up;  Rita is a nurse and mother, and Yvette a farmer and a mother as well.  I laid in their car unable to talk.  They nursed me back to health and for the next 5 days we spent together until they had to fly back to Belgium.  They left me on the island of Jerba, saying, “We will see each other again. I don’t know where or when but we will.” Two years later I was on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska, when I heard that they wanted to come to California to see me.  I made it down there and for a week we were together again.   Then I was back in Europe to testify in a court in Ireland.  I went from there to Yvette’s farm where I met her family, I was there for the birth of her grandchildren;  twins born prematurely.  It was an intense period, as they were not sure of the outcome.  Three years later, I was back again for an exhibition in Mochengladbach, just a two-hour drive away.  I went to see them, the twins, now three, riding bikes and giving kisses. The photo is of Camile, family friends, at his uncles’ farm.  Together we shrunk the world, put it in our pockets and skipped around.