At the end of this very long ride, Gunn has learned that the rest of the world is not something to fear. In detailed accounts of his travels posted online, there is an unfettered joy and unrelenting optimism in what Gunn sees. The journey has made Gunn, a former Castro Valley resident, a devout pacifist and left him with an abiding love for humanity.

The most dangerous place, Gunn says, is here at home in America.

“I’ve had more aggressive things happen to me here and more threats physically…than I’ve had anywhere else in the world,” he said. “I believe that people have an idea that the world is a really dangerous place when in fact it’s extremely safe.”

Still, he recounts moments that almost ended his trip, such as a breakdown high on the Tibetan plateau, halfway between Kashgar and Lhasa, that left Gunn stranded for four hours.

“That was potentially life-threatening because the weather’s wicked up there,” he said. Other cyclists have died on that road. He paced as the temperature dropped, until he found a footlong strand of bailing wire strong enough to hold his bike together.

“That piece of wire saved my (expletive) in Tibet,” he said Saturday, pointing to a spot on his beat-up bike frame, where the wire is still attached. “I was stranded on the side of the road, and the only reason I was able to continue is that I found that piece of wire. In Tibet, there’s not a bicycle shop for 1,200 miles.”

Twenty years ago, Gunn’s mother, dying of cancer, tried to take a last trip to Europe. She never made it. Arriving in London, she immediately fell ill and had to return home. She passed away a short while later.

Even with that motivation, it took Gunn another two decades to set out. He’d traveled extensively, but not on the trip he wanted. He worked as a photojournalist for 14 years, most recently at the Nevada Appeal in Reno.

“The hardest part of the whole trip was just getting out of the driveway,” he said. “The realization took place on my 4,000th commute, during my 14th year as a small-town daily newspaper photographer,” Gunn wrote in his second blog entry. “For nearly a decade-and-a-half I was paid below-average wages to record history through the lens of camera, shooting nearly a million photographs. Following each day, my photographs appeared on the sheets of recycled paper that the better part of 15,000 souls complained about on a daily basis.”

The daily grind of tragedy and banality was getting to him.

“Something deep inside me was saying that there was something more to my photographic capabilities than the visual documentation of lackluster events that repeated themselves seasonally ad nauseum. Christmas bake sales, service club check passings, first babies of the year, senior volunteers of the week, groundbreakings, ribbon-cuttings, pets of the week, dimly lit high school sports events and local government meetings — the meat and potatoes of my job,” he wrote.

So he quit.

On July 1, 2005, he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. It was cold and foggy. He and Matt Haverty, a friend of 25 years, rode through the city, took the ferry to Vallejo, then turned east toward Sacramento.

At the end of the journey, his back to the ocean, Gunn is still processing everything he saw. “I’m still unfolding the whole story in my mind,” he said. He is hesitant to pick a favorite place, though in conversation he drifts back to the Silk Road: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Western China.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, about to mount his bike and recross the Golden Gate. “This human family out there wants to see their brothers and sisters. They want to come and meet you.”

Photo by Ray Chavez, Bay Area News Group. This story originally ran in the Hayward Daily Review.

All four studied photography in Dalian over the past year, three completing masters degrees from Bolton U./Dalian Medical University. Much of what they photograph is the same, or follows similar themes: beaches, migrant workers, strange food, blue skies. Yet they see it very differently from each other.

Curious about their perspectives, I interviewed each one and built audio slide shows with their photos. The result is here.

Production notes:

This started as one slide show but became four when the interviews got too long. I figure anything over two minutes better be damn important, so I gave each photog their own piece. Doing that meant I needed a launch page of some kind. There are ways to do that in Flash (tutorial at Multimedia Shooter) but I neither know nor own Flash. And considering that I really just started learning web design for real, I figured that was a bit out of my league anyway, so I did it in html.

I did two of the interviews–Gavin and Kerrilee–in my apartment, and I caught Dave outside the exhibition, hence the bit of background sound. With all three, I put my USB headset on them, then watched the recording waveforms on GarageBand. Christine is back in the US, so we spoke over Skype. If I were to do it over again, I’d just call her (still using Skype) on her fixed line and pay the 40 cents or so for better sound quality and avoid the computer mic noise. I’m still in the market for some better audio gear.

David DeGeest and Lonnie B. Hodge (aka One Man Bandwidth) somehow landed this job. Theirs is the China Dream Blogue (like travelogue, get it?), and the project aims to raise money for two charities through ad revenue and help deserving people make good one their own best hopes. The pair stopped by Dalian last weekend, and I grabbed them for some barbecue and brought the video camera. Here’s how they explain the project:

The two charities directly involved are Tom Stader’s Library Project and the Reading Tub, run by Terry Dougherty.

Now, I’m a little skeptical of the amount of cash a blog can bring in. I know there are those that make heaps, but there are mountains more that don’t. So I gave Tom a buzz, and he’s optimistic. Even if it just brings his cause more attention, that can translate into money or volunteers or more opportunities. “I have had good luck with getting donations from blogs,” Tom said. “I received one US$300 donation from Lonnie’s previous blog.”

Three hundred dollars built Tom’s first two libraries. Both are in Dalian, and I watched each be hammered together by energetic volunteer teachers who were already thinking of ways to expand the project. Tom’s planning to be back in Dalian next month, so I’ll get a progress report then.

It’s a peculiar sort of family, especially in a country entering its second generation of only children. There is talk of bright futures, and no mention of the past. For most who live in this orphanage, it’s the happiest, most normal, and possibly the only family they have ever known.

Lin began taking in orphans in 1995, drawing on her own experience as a foster child and a wellspring of optimism that comes from somewhere else entirely.

The facility is a 20-minute taxi ride out to the edge of Dalian, an upwardly mobile port city in China’s otherwise sagging northeast. The square building is unremarkable from the outside. There’s a small playground at one end of the driveway and a view of Dalian’s massive shipyards at the other. It could be a strange place to grow up, but so little is conventional in this family it becomes difficult to define what is out of place.

Some children find their way here through government orphanages or other temporary arrangements. Sometimes the police bring in those they find wandering alone in the city who have no place else to go. Many are abandoned by their parents, or their parents are dead.

“We can imagine they walked along the street, so they feel very lonely. Because they are young, still children, they are quick to adapt to the new environment,” Lin says. In one or two months, they’re like normal kids, she insists.

One 17-year-old who goes by the English name Michelle was studying alone on a recent Saturday afternoon, a neat pile of books in front of her and a notebook filled with English phrases under her nose. She has lived under Lin’s roof for a decade. Like the other children, she uses Sha as a surname, after Lin’s son-in-law who she calls “Baba,” or “Father.”

Michelle wants to study in Australia “because it’s beautiful” and be a nurse someday. “My grandma thinks my English is poor,” Michelle whispers after Lin pokes her head in the door, reminding her to study, as if the veritable library covering the desk could let her forget. Really, she speaks quite well, her discipline shows and she grins at an encouraging word from a native English speaker.

The smile melts, though, when she is asked about the past. Her comfortable grin and bright eyes seem to go gray, droop like wax in the sun when there is mention of what her life was like before she came here.

“Because I was a child, so I don’t remember,” is all she’ll say. She changes the subject and perks up again, but the shadow on her face lingers.

It’s the same with Shirley, a 19-year-old in the house. She is focused on vocational school, studies English and wants to be tour guide in Dalian. It’s a promising profession in a city that many hold up as China’s shining example of possibilities. But like Michelle, Shirley doesn’t talk about the past:

“Before here, I don’t know,” she says, turning her eyes to the floor. “At that time, I was very small.”

At this point, Lin steps in and stops any more questioning in that vein.

“It is best not to ask about the past, because they are still children,” she says, glaring a bit at the reporter across the table. “If you ask too much about the past, she may cry. Their hearts are tender. The girl upstairs (Michelle) was about to shed tears just now.”

She reminds her guests that journalists don’t often get to talk to her children. It’s a clear warning about what’s off limits.

“This is no need to mention the past. Right now, they live happily here, and things are OK.”

The prohibition applies to Lin’s past, as well. “At that time, it was a hard time for China,” she says. “China wasn’t modern like now.”

Lin was born in coastal Yantai, the second of eight children, when the People’s Republic was also in its infancy. Her parents sent her away when she was a year old. She doesn’t talk about where she lived or the “others” who took care of her. Only her father worked, and her parents didn’t have enough money, she explains now. She returned to her family 15 years later. “It was very hard,” is all she told her mother at the time.

It was those hidden memories that she says spawned a desire to help Dalian’s orphans back in 1995. She was married, then, and working in one of this consumer-driven city’s shopping centers. Her husband didn’t take to the idea, though, and the couple divorced.

“I didn’t know anything about how to run an orphanage,” she recalls 12 years later, laughing to herself a bit at those early memories. “Everyone has a loving heart,” she adds, when asked why she made the orphanage her life’s work.

Jin Meiling oversees the children’s education and helps run the facility. She comes across as less sentimental and more direct than Lin, but no less dedicated or protective.

She offered one clue about what Lin might not want brought up. Pointing to a girl’s picture, one of many in the entryway, the administrator said: “When she came here, she did not look like a person. She had many secret scars on her body.” Jin didn’t elaborate but said the girl studied cosmetics and then baking, and she holds a steady job now.

The oldest of Lin’s foster grandchildren still living there is 21. He works as a mechanic, but he doesn’t want to leave. “This is their home,” Jin says. “They’re afraid of going into society.”

The orphanage is a private enterprise, entirely Lin’s. Her funding comes from a side business recycling scrap metal and from gifts from wealthy Chinese benefactors. A few others pitch in where they can.

On the day Lin hosted a reporter, interpreter and photographer, a quartet of Pakistani medical students arrived with piles of donated clothes. On the building’s second floor, a spacious room now functions as a classroom and library.

Foreign teachers from the Future School chain of language academies spend their off-time here, teaching English to children who likely could never private school tuition. Some of those teachers became so attached to the place and the woman who runs it that they came back and built the library.

The battered books on the new shelves came from children at Future School who, hearing stories about kids who had no parents, donated around 3600 paperbacks, coloring books, comics and textbooks to the library project.

“Originally we thought we’d just fill their bookshelves, but we got way more books than would fit,” says Adam Godwin, one of the Future School managers involved in the effort. “The idea isn’t just to give books, but to give a space where kids can grown on their own, just a nice little area.”

Back in Lin’s office, Mao’s smiling portrait looks down at the desk adorned with old propaganda posters. The whole room seems anachronistic in Dalian, a place built far more on Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in the 1980s than Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideals of the previous generation. Indeed, much of the country seems to be forgetting the Great Helmsman these days, much to Lin’s lament.

“Nowadays, there are less and less in the government like him,” she says, calling Mao a “selfless person.”

The heroic pictures of the Chairman and his premier, Zhou Enlai, diligently planning in their matching drab suits are relics of a troubled Chinese past that, like Lin’s and her children’s, is rarely spoken about openly. The future is brighter, though, and Lin is happy to look in that direction.

But Ateyah is not from the United States. She is an Iraqi from Baghdad, and the flag she waved had 51 stars.

“I tried to welcome the troops in my own way,” she says. “I wanted Iraq to join the United States, you see.”

Now, almost a year later, Ateyah sits next to American students in American classrooms, surrounded by classmates who overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Santa Cruz may seem a far cry from Baghdad, where Coalition forces still battle with insurgents and the U.S.-appointed Governing Council struggles to ready the country for sovereignty on June 30. Ateyah, however, doesn’t feel out of place.

“Here in California, I don’t feel that different,” she says, sitting in her University Town Center apartment where she has lived since her arrival on February 6. “I am a student, and I have been a student before. It’s just like life in any other place in the world.”

Ateyah is one of 25 Iraqis participating in a new Fulbright scholarship exchange program, the first such program in Iraq in 14 years.

According to the Center for International Exchange of Scholars, which administers the Fulbright Scholarship, the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs worked to re-establish the Fulbright Program in Iraq in order to help the country reconnect to the U.S.

Two independent, bi-national committees in Iraq reviewed the applications and nominated the finalists who were selected by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Paul Bremer, the U.S. Administrator for Iraq, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage announced the re-establishment of the Fulbright Program in Iraq in October 2003.

Growing Up Without Peace

Ateyah was three years old when the Iraq-Iran War started. She remembers the random violence and being surrounded by terror. She remembers fear, but not her own.

“They (the Iranians) would bombard randomly,” she recalls. “There were children so afraid. I don’t know, I wasn’t afraid of all that.”

Her own confidence often coincided with concern for friends. “I couldn’t stand seeing some of my classmates who were afraid about their fathers and brothers,” she says.

Ateyah’s life in Baghdad has always involved conflict.

“I don’t remember how life was before the war,” she says. When asked what life is like growing up surrounded by violence and death, she retorts, “What is peace like?”

“I’ve been there for all the wars,” Ateyah says, shifting her gaze as the memories return. “Every time I leave, I see people crying after receiving their son dead.”

Her country has never known peace in her lifetime.

“Iraq is one of the few places that is quite different from the countries of the West,” she says.

The war with Iran ended when Ateyah was 11 years old. Two years later on August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait. Iraq was again on the path to war, this time with a coalition led by the United States and backed by the United Nations.

America, however, was a far different opponent than Iran had been.

“The USA was much more peaceful because they don’t target random people,” Ateyah says. “I feel the USA was the enemy of the Iraq leadership.”

She quotes a Dari proverb: “Having an educated enemy is better than an ignorant friend.”

The Final War

“The final war was the happiest one,” Ateyah says with a grin. “Iraqis were waiting for that war. We were the ones who were liberated. We wanted the war. This was going to be the final war.”

She is insistent that the American invasion was justified. Iraq, she says, is a far better place now than it was during Hussein’s rule, despite the ongoing violence.

“The most important thing is that we’re liberated,” she says. “Life now is much better than it was at the time of Saddam. As a Shiite, I was discriminated against before. I was not a member of the Ba’ath party.”

Ateyah explains that Iraq now has hope of joining the world community. Under the old regime, the only hope for a better life was in getting out of the country.

“Your dream was to escape Iraq and get to a Western country as a refugee.”

Ateyah, a 26-year-old Shi’a Muslim, lived through more than a decade of UN economic sanctions that devastated the country’s economy.

“There were so many problems in Iraq,” she says. “People died from lack of medicine. They have to eat unhealthy food because it’s cheap.”

Despite the overwhelming depravation brought by the sanctions, she does not blame the UN. “I blame Saddam,” Ateyah says emphatically. “They would never have suffered from sanctions if he had agreed to the (United Nations) Memorandum of Understanding.”

In February 1998, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan signed the Memorandum of Understanding, guaranteeing that Iraq would cooperate with international weapons inspectors and re-iterating that UN would respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq.

Within months, the UN Security Council had again condemned Iraq for not following through with its commitment to fully disarm.

While Ateyah rarely left Baghdad, much of her family is in mostly Shiite Southern Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, Shiites in Basra were brutally repressed after an uprising against the Hussein regime. Ateyah was barely a teenager at the time, and her parents said little of the rebellion.

“Usually in Iraq, parents don’t let children of that age listen to the news,” she says. “If a child says something against Saddam, the parents are in danger.”

She explains that the government had spies everywhere, and parents would often be held responsible for the words of their children. Ateyah only heard about the 1988 gassing of the Kurds in Northern Iraq when she was in her 20s.

Ateyah insists that most media outlets are presenting the wrong image of Iraq, especially Arab news.

“I have to tell the truth,” she says with a hint of stubbornness in her voice. “When I talk to journalists, I have to tell the truth. That’s why I stay away from Arabic media. They either get the story wrong or they wouldn’t say anything. They think this is something scandalous against an Arab nation. We say, ‘This is not an invasion. This is liberation.’ They try to offend you when they find out you’re happy for the liberation of Iraq.”

Santa Cruz Responds

Peace Activist Nick Reynolds, a third-year Merrill student, was one of the many students who organized rallies and marched against the Bush administration’s drive to war last year. Now, he tries to empathize with Ateyah’s perspective.

“It’s understandable for people under these dictatorships to want the U.S. to come in and liberate them” Reynolds says. “My opinion is that they are misled—just as many Americans are—to think that warfare is the right way to go about it.”

Santa Cruz Mayor Scott Kennedy wrote the City Council resolution opposing the invasion of Iraq. He remains committed in his rejection of war, even after hearing Ateyah’s words.

“One of the major problems with the U.S. war on Iraq is that we’ve never explicitly acknowledged our role in propping up Saddam,” he says. “When it suited our purposes, we’ve never had any problem with Saddam. Do we want to live in a global order where the law of the jungle prevails? The UN needs to develop effective means to deal with dictatorships.”

He is, however, understanding of Ateyah’s position. “On the other hand, most of us in the United States have never had to live in a dictatorial regime,” he says. “I visited Iraq in 1990, and I’ve never seen the level of repression and fear to talk for fear of reprisal that I saw in Iraq.”

He adds, “Bombing a country to oblivion doesn’t mean that you transition to a democratic, secular government.”

America, Kennedy insists, cannot continue to enforce its will at the barrel of a gun. “People don’t want to live in a world where the biggest guy on the block can do whatever it wants,” he says.

The mayor, who has worked to promote peace for years through the Santa Cruz Resource Center for Non-Violence, says he would still have sponsored the anti-war resolution. “I’m too old and wizened to see this as a melodrama where all the good is on one side and all the bad on the other side,” he says.

The Iraq that Ateyah returns to in two years is likely to be far different than the country she left. She will have a master’s degree in literature, and experience that she hopes will help her bridge the gap between the two countries she loves.

Pondering the future, she muses about foreign service jobs and bringing people together. She says, “I’d like to do something for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or an embassy or something like that.”