October 2021. I hope you are sitting comfortably wherever you are as you click on the link for this essay. It has arrived to this website after a long journey, riding on the coattails of a project that itself has been quite a journey for the past two years. Now a change in direction is ahead and so I wanted to take you to the fork in the road, find a boulder (taking off the backpack is always a good feeling) and sit, for a think. Daniel will pour tea - basically his default mode for any break on the trail.

Home notes in Amsterdam and Haarlem, early October 2021

This is our own, autonomous reporting project. It was begun from our personal motivations, our search for inspiration. The underlying drive has been unchanged: as a journalist and a photographer, we want to get the lay of ‘the region known as the Middle-East’ to transcend the tropes that a Western audience might be familiar with. Really, we just want to be on the ground and learn about life behind those preconceptions that are all too easily reproduced.

Walking is central to this project, because we believe it to be a way to beat such frames. By travelling in what many consider to be an unconventional manner we can meet precisely the unforeseen we hope to uncover. As pedestrians we cross overlooked landscapes and witness scenes that would otherwise go unnoticed. When weary, we take rest in the in-between places, with hosts who harbour their own stories to share if they so wish. It is these kinds of encounters we are after, and we aim to capture the unexpected and slowly settling insights that serendipity brings the traveller. We strongly believe in this feet-driven approach. And we think that it will serve to surprise our audience, eventually inviting them to join us in considering the perspective from our and others’ vantage points (or, as the saying goes: to walk some miles in someone else’s shoes).

This undertaking of ours spans thousands of miles. We will likely be at it for years. Every time a friend or loved one asks me about our progress – I must admit, I sigh. “There are just so many moving parts to it”, I will say, and list the complications: “The logistics of it, safety and budget, how and where to find stories.” 

Such bewilderment of where to find stories may sound … bewildering, coming from a writer who takes off for weeks on end to roam around places she’s never been, to write what she finds to be the truth of those spaces. But the thing is: there are so many tales! The two of us try to catch them by the means that we can fit in our hiking backpacks, a limited set of cameras and a bunch of paper notebooks. There is an indescribable joy and challenge to setting out on a trajectory like this and prying loose the lessons learned. Or, more light-heartedly: to live the anecdotes that tie humans together. And then to untangle those bonds to tell you about it. 

Now we’ve come to the telling bit and the point of this essay. At the core of our project are the brushes with passers-by, with generous hosts, with guides and translators. It is people, of course, who help us the most in understanding about their myriad realities. Meeting all these people, often randomly, sometimes thanks to sheer luck or the painstaking planning and hard work of fixers, is the highlight of our reporting trips. Recently though, we have come to the realisation that we have gone about presenting these encounters in the wrong way.

If you have visited this site before – or stumbled on our Instagram posts, or even met us on one of our reporting trips – you might have become used to the first name for our project: until recently, it was called ‘Meeting Abraham’. 

This is the former introduction on the ‘About’-page that was online since 2019:

A journey through the Middle East. Not for politics, not for cultures, not for war or religion. Instead, this adventure is an opportunity to meet people connected by one name, regardless of their background, their heritage, their nationality or their faith. 

Looking at this introduction, one can wonder how we could ever skip these major topics. They belong to everyone we meet - at home as well as on our trips. We conceived of this venture to examine the notion that we can all find common ground in our humanity ‘even’ ‘in a place’ ‘like’ ‘the Middle-East’ — we’ve come across so many iterations of that starting point I don’t even know where to put the emphasis anymore. 

With three stints under our belt, we must acknowledge that we have restricted not just ourselves when we were on the road, but those we met. The original monicker for our project sparked curiosity in our own public spheres - which is a very nice place to be for two people who make a living fostering an audience. The walking route was inspired by the work of Western researchers, as a long-distance thru-hike to test a theory for conflict resolution: that every attempt should start at the conflicting parties’ first common denominator. Focus on the one thing you can agree on, and take it from there. 

We went looking for Abraham because the figure holds a much-revered position in the region. Abraham as an icon became a vehicle, and our story-telling a quest: Daniel would photograph each one we would find en route. We thought that would be an inspiring story, or even an engrossing analysis, to relate.

But in the first place, this English name didn’t quite fit those who were supposed to be captured in it. Our portrait subjects were not called Abraham, but mostly Ibrahim. Of course, we would communicate the bigger idea we were after, and we succeeded in doing so numerous times. Through this search for Abrahams/Ibrahims we have met close to one hundred of them, from all walks of life, jotting down the bare bones of their lives. We’ve described that quest-like approach in earlier publications: 

There is something powerful in taking down the details of each life, in short bullet points: family name, age, place of birth. There is a future and a past to each Ibrahim we encounter. Their communities bring us in, take hold of us. I think that among our favourite and most impressive experiences on these reporting hikes are our chance encounters. All it takes for us, really, is to have faith in the hospitality that is associated with the legendary figure. We’ve found people are curious and we entertain them. 

You can imagine this scene, the two of us, sweaty and strange, arriving in a random village, straining to ask people: 

“Excuse me, do you know an Ibrahim?” 

“You are looking for Ibrahim? Ibrahim… who? Which Ibrahim? What does he do?” 

“Oh, we don’t know, just—any Ibrahim, an old man, a baby…” 

Anyone with a bit of time and hospitality, in fact, will do.

Re-reading those paragraphs now, I wish we had told readers more about those futures and pasts. And I think the actual meetings would have been better, more whole, if we hadn’t used some contrived search as an excuse for them to take place. It’s what brings us to the second discrepancy: while we were very warmly welcomed by virtually everyone, we have not repaid this hospitality of which I wrote. The brunt of the project’s attention was on just half of these communities. Where were the women? 

And finally, there was the question of geography. Were we journeying through the Middle East? Through a collection of communities, contested maps? The paths we walked did not follow one single direction — they held their own histories and usages, they did not always connect and at times they weren’t even walking trails but highways. Crossing borders has proved a very tricky feat - heck, getting permission to stay in places has proved a challenge in and of itself.

We had remarked on these things while on the road, but only amongst each other. We treated them as interesting semantic oddities - sidelines to be examined “at some point” - or matters of practicality. 

Now we see that the first set-up of this project risks leading us to the very point we wanted to avoid. By operating on the thesis that all these Ibrahims should share something we have presented them as a monolith, precisely where we actually wanted to add nuance and curiosity. We set out to break the frames we knew make up regular reporting (bad news; ongoing conflict; stereotypes), and it turns out that all the while we have been lugging around our own set: dismissal, short-sightedness, a misplaced compulsion to order our findings. We were on the ground, but strangely enough we strayed. We were still ushered along, by presets that proved much more obstinate and even subconscious than we would have known before. 

We have to remain vigilant of our own leanings.

This is why we think an overhaul is in order. Instead of looking for the one lead character, what we want in this project is to find a company of many - to share ideas, experiences and lives. From now on, we will be walking with them in the region broadly painted as the Middle East, which we will locate on our crumpled maps as Southwest Asia. Our constant objective is to gather ‘short stories of a bigger picture’. We want to be looking at ecology, tourism, history. Take the personal as well as the universal. 

The work from our previous trips in Jordan, Southwest Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan is still here. That’s because these productions held the same intent - it’s just that we were slow to acknowledge how much larger the scope of these stories and pictures might be. We won’t be retracing our past steps, because those are what got us here. The point of truly learning something is you don’t have to do it again; you have to continue practising. We think it more honest to project the observations we gleaned at this level, and draw new conclusions. They will be the new pickets in our guidebook. Lines to walk by.

And now we think we can move forward again – in the slow trod and with the hampered freelance agendas that you might have become familiar with if you know us. (That’s the other thing about a re-do, honestly. Can we please get to doing the whole thing first?) That’s to say, if you clicked this essay to read what’s next: Yes, we will probably be moving onto the next reporting trip pretty soon. And no, we don’t know where to yet.