Dancing & Smiling

A friend sent this to me this morning and watching it made me smile:


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

For more info, check out the website www.wherethehellismatt.com -- if you are like me and become obsessed with finding out not only where the hell Matt is but who the hell Matt is, you will watch one of the lengthy video lectures that he has embedded in his "About" section and you will hear him share anecdotes about traveling that will make you nod your head and agree with him that Americans are too insular and isolated in terms of their thinking about the rest of the world and that while globe trotting certainly won't solve the problems of the planet, there is something to be said about going outside your comfort zone and traveling to places and meeting people from cultures completely foreign to you that is so true.

[June 25, 2008--Addition: I just remembered what it was that I liked about Matt Harding's video commentary. He talked about Rwanda being one of his favorite places (it's in the second dance video, Dancing 2006) in his travels, and he spoke about going there during Hope week, which is the week that honors the Rwandan Genocide--and when he was there it was the 10 year anniversary of the atrocities. And when he described what he loved about the particular clip of him dancing with the kids in the clip (you can see more of him dancing with the kids in the Dancing 2005 Outtakes) he said that most of the time, in the U.S., our only images of Africa are of deprivation and horror, which alienates us from people who live in these countries. And that there aren't enough images about everyday people doing everyday things and being happy. It's a similar sentiment I've heard among people working in developing nations and in various sub-Saharan African nations in particular--that for most of "The West" we view "Africa" as this mass continent of darkness, literal and figurative, and associate it with privation and war, famine and genocide and oppression. And that this renders individual countries and more importantly, individual people as an indistinct mass of suffering rather than seeing them in their own particular ways as people with distinct personalities and histories who have stories to tell that aren't simply about being victimized. I think it's an important perspective--not that we shouldn't be reminded of past horrors, like Rwandan genocide, or ongoing atrocities, like what's happening in Sudan, but that there is also resilience and resistance and strength and hope. And dancing.]