"Who did this to you, and who came to your aide?"

What’s up, Hive? I’m sitting at Qamaria in Blaine, MN. This has been my new spot because it’s closer to my house than the Little Canada location. After months and months, I finally feel like I’m back to a place where I can consistently blog here on Hive. I said in my last post that once I’m able to get journaling here to a daily routine, it’s a litmus test of where I’m at mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Next August, I’ll have been an active member of this blockchain for a decade! That’s wild to consider. During that ten years, I consider myself to be at my best when I’m posting daily. Things are good now and believe me, it’s taken a long time to get here but I’m giving all praise to the peace I’m finally at now to God and making the most of these days in all aspects of my life.

I’ve given an entire year of my life to the Palestine movement. Throughout this genocide, I’ve lost a lot of friends — but, I’ve made as many as I’ve lost and these are people that are far more aligned with my principles of human and civil rights. Palestine has gone through a few trend cycles because of TikTok. I myself never really considered myself an activist per se. I mentored under Jim Gavenus, an amazing documentary photography and admired his work. Believe it or not, there was a time […before I became a father], that I was seriously considering war photography after being moved by photos I’d seen from Sarajevo and Bosnia. The documentary, “War Photographer”, about James Nachtwey also drew me to that path. If it wasn’t for @guthrie, I could definitely see that as potential future that was never realized […for better or for worse].

Occasionally, these things would happen where I felt compelled to document them. I had the experience; I had the camera, and historic moments happened near me. Philando Castile killed by police in Minneapolis in 2016 was one of those moments. Standing Rock, I spent a week in North Dakota and of course George Floyd here in the Twin Cities, which ignited a response around the world. Palestine, I discussed in my last blog. My first real friend in Minneapolis was a Palestinian girl named Isra and because of her, I learned the truth about the Israeli occupation. Philando and George Floyd resulted in unrest for weeks and even Standing Rock was months, but the genocide in Gaza is still on going and I’ve still been making it to protests and actions as often as I can.

Christine, one of my closest friends here in Minneapolis, is a Palestinian writer, poet and doctor and she has become the best collaborator I’ve ever worked with. Our chemistry on these activism projects is so in sync and although she isn’t a visual artist, she has great taste in virtually everything. We began working on an ambitious video project titled, “Rise”, based on one of her poems. She arranged the music and recited the prose and together we collected thousands of videos from Gaza. The point of this video was to show the action committed by Israel in Palestine, and then our reaction at home here in Minneapolis. For that, we used footage I’ve shot over the last year at offices of our Senators, encampments at colleges, jails, highway shut downs, etc. To this day, I consider this my magnum opus. After five months or work, we were able to release this on October 7th, one year later.

Eventually, I hope to make my way to Egypt and Gaza. I’ve made friends with so many great Palestinians with family across Gaza and the West Bank. I’m building towards a documentary and I’d like to collect dozens of stories of refugees that’ve lived through this horrible time. I have a project called Rites Of Return where I’ve been compiling interviews with people in the struggle. I recently sat down with my friend Willy Massay, a nurse from Omaha that has been to Gaza as a nurse multiple times. My interview skills and lighting techniques are sharpening so my intention is to continue this project. I’m still broke financially, but we have a concept in Islam called sadaqah, which is charity of your time, skills and effort and that’s what these are for me.

https://youtube.com/shorts/KbhhjTzxJyU?feature=share