Physician assistant Scott Will recently spent a month providing medical care to Rohingya people from Myanmar living in a large refugee camp outside Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. This week we bring you Part 2 of his camp journal. Check out Part 1 here!
STORY BY SCOTT J. WILL
Physician assistant Scott Will recently spent a month providing medical care to Rohingya people from Myanmar living in a large refugee camp outside Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. This journal-style article from him offers a behind-the-scenes view of aid worker life as well as offering a small introduction to the Rohingya people. He previously wrote for Culture Keeper about the family he gained while living in South Sudan for five years.
STORY BY HOLLY WREN SPAULDING
We must give you fair warning: Upon reading this article, you are likely to find yourself checking directions to the tiny village in Michigan where Melanie Parke’s The Provincial resides. As in her other MADE columns, Holly Wren Spaulding has introduced us to another artistic gem, in so many senses of the word.
Illuminating tall ceilings, vast white walls, and shiny, painted wood floors that evoke the vintage of this place, natural light draws me through the doors of The Provincial. As my eyes adjust, a collection of paintings come into focus, by some of painter Melanie Parke’s favorite artists: this is her studio as well as a space for showing others’ work and fostering artist projects.
POEM BY BRIT WASHBURN
PHOTO BY MANUELA THAMES
COLLABORATION BY JONATHAN RANDALL GRANT AND WILL JOHNSON
Culture Keeper is all about collaboration, and this whimsical impromptu photo shoot by Jonathan Randall Grant, Culture Keeper’s founder and creative director, and photographer Will Johnson embodies this Culture Keeper ethos. For creatives, space to improvise and play is fertile ground for new projects! (For more creative projects that emerged from an artist’s playing, check out our MADE column.)
STORY BY JANE POTTHAST
This week’s writer illustrates the power of art for guiding us to new places. For her, two paintings in a Vatican gallery thrust her into a spiritually profound encounter.
These, the “Pope’s paintings,” cried out to God more than any others as we wound through masterpieces in the sad, vast Vatican.
We were plodding through the quarters and it was less crowded than the other museums, as it was not on the path to the Sistine Chapel.
I started to tremble when we saw a Raphael, his last before death. A secrecy pervaded the image, forcing me to a craggy edge of longing at which my eyes watered.
STORY AND PHOTOS BY CATHERINE RICOUL
ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY KAMI L. RICE
Last year the Belle de Mai neighborhood of Marseille, France, gained a garden. Residents are working together to cultivate new life in ground that had lost its former glory. Thanks to our contributor Catherine Ricoul, one of forces behind the garden, we get to meander through the Jardin Levat as it dissolves (think film editing terms) from one season to the next.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JC JOHNSON & STORY BY KAMI L. RICE
A real life scene turned miniature through the magic of photography has inspired a tiny fictional tale that invites you to discover the other stories hiding in this image. Explore the world with us and let your imagination play along as you do.
STORY AND PHOTOS BY ARMON A. MEANS
It was the colors that surprised me the most. Color is wrapped into the essence of this place. Chiang Mai’s vibrancy is translated in hues of such intensity, often unlike anything I’ve come to know in the States. These colors were formed into surface and texture, adapting pattern and creating form across textiles such as scarves of hand-woven cashmere, and across silk dyed with such delicate precision that it seemed as if nature organically created the object itself.
POEM BY BRIT WASHBURN & PHOTO BY TAYLOR SCHUELKE
