American Experiences: American Nomads

Washington DC- His rebellion was quiet and kind, and sought only modest change in the lives of a few. His efforts were tireless, however,and touched more people than a quick look might reveal. Such a look is all that Sakhi Gulestan usually garnered from the hundreds of locals and tourists that passed his vending stand each day. His 24 years on the bustling corner of 20th and Q streets in Washington's Dupont Circle earned him extensive visual recognition from commuters and locals. Few, however, took the time to examine his simple existence. The hurried dash to make the 9 a.m. call time reduced him to inanimate background, no different than a turnstile.

His importance became apparent last Saturday morning in the spring of 2009 when the Afghan-born vendor, who estimated being in his early 70s, passed away inside the white, rented box- truck he called home. His wife and two sons, who slept in the family's other vehicle on 20th street, discovered him after an acquaintance claimed that knocks on his window could not roust him from sleep. Upon further examination, the family discovered that Sakhi passed peacefully in his sleep in the early hours of the morning. As the family mourned his passing in the parking lot of the PNC bank where his truck was parked, a dozen Buddhist monks, out to protest Chinese crackdowns in Tibet, appeared to pray over his body.

Locals were shocked and dismayed at the news. While Sakhi suffered from a severe abdominal hernia, for which he had not received sufficient medical treatment, his overall health appeared fine. In the months leading to his death, while I worked to photographically chronicle his daily life, his energy levels were astounding, leaving this able-bodied, 26-year-old exhausted long before him. He woke at five each morning and worked tirelessly in all conditions until in retiring to his truck after midnight each night. His wife Phoenix, an American woman in her late sixties, assured me that I was not alone in my shortcomings. “None of us could keep up with him,” she explains. “Not for 24 hours, let alone 24 years.”

His work, however, was always admirable and made a significant, yet largely unappreciated, contribution to his surrounding environment. Each day he cleaned the streets around the 20th and Q intersection, sweeping up cigarette butts, flyers and other trash left behind by those too careless to find a receptacle. He deposited this waste in his own trash cans as to not overburden the Metro workers tasked with emptying the adjacent receptacles. He placed a high premium on this egalitarian contribution and it was, perhaps, the least of his gestures towards his environment and those who shared it with him.

Each night, after dismantling his vending stand, Sakhi visited local food and beverage establishments collecting leftover bread, sandwiches and pastries that were destined for back ally Dumpsters. After first offering a modest portion of these goods to his wife and sons, he would distribute the remaining items to homeless and working poor members of the Dupont community. “There were points where Mohammed (a nickname that locals gave Sakhi), was feeding hundreds of people who had nothing,” explains Tim, a homeless Vietnam veteran who spends his days in the Dupont Park. “I can remember when I first met him when I came into this town in 1986. He said ‘my friend, you’re hungry.’ He left for a minute and he came back and fed me.’” He added that Sakhi would routinely come into the park late at night, wake up those sleeping on benches, and pass out the food he’d collected. He did this quietly and expected nothing in return.

On a number of occasions, I witnessed not just homeless people receiving food, but employed people whose paid wages left them longing to adequately feed larger families. On a frigid afternoon in early March, I watched Sakhi pass out numerous pre-made sandwiches to a group of Metro workers who said they fed them to their children. He worked actively to distribute as much food as possible. During my time with him, I often made morning toast with baguettes from Dupont bakeries due to his unwillingness to send me off empty handed.

The items he could not distribute to people, he kneaded into a watery paste and fed to the birds each afternoon. Every day at 3 pm, he collected hot water from a local flower shop and spent thirty minutes soaking and crushing bread into an easily spreadable mixture. He then walked to Dupont Circle and cast the stew for dozens of seagulls and pigeons that eagerly awaited his arrival. He considered the act the most sacred of his day, citing the importance of birds in the natural environment and the purity of their existence. Birds are smarter and more pure than human beings, he would say, and the consequent $500 ticket for feeding them could not dampen his commitment.

“All the homeless people out here loved having him around,” said Tim, with affirmative nods from others on the bench, “because he brought life into the park. He brought the birds, and the birds sing. We called him the birdman.” A clerk in Connecticut Liquors added remarks about Sakhi’s concern for the birds. “He was very interested in protecting the creatures, which he thought were tremendously important.” Some members of the community took issue with these feedings, expressing concern that loose food attracted not just birds, but rats, a less welcomed population.

Few knew the late vendor more intimately, or held him in higher esteem, than Phoenix, his wife and self-described student. She first encountered Sakhi in his native Afghanistan some thirty years ago after arriving in that remote country from Nepal, where she’d lived briefly as a Buddhist monk. Her recollections of meeting Sakhi are doused with spiritual overtones, recalling a vivid premonition in which she met a man resembling a “Mexican bandito,” donning Levis jeans and a black jacket. In the days that followed, she says, she met Sahki, who fit the description exactly and who she felt inclined to follow. The two married in Afghanistan in October of 1974.

“When he asked me to marry him, he also asked me why I’d marry him. Which I thought was quite usual,” she recalls. “But I said, ‘I’ll tell the truth,’ I’ve never seen anyone with the patience and the ability to give regardless of who or what or why. It’s starts at 5 o’clock in the morning and does not end until 1 o’clock at night.” The answer seemed to suit Sahki, she remembers, and thus they began a life together. Phoenix spent several years with Sahki in Afghanistan, during which time she learned an Afghan dialect, became familiar with local customs, and studied Islam, the religion to which she converted after leaving Nepal.

Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the couple and their young children moved back and forth between Afghanistan and the United States until deciding to settle permanently in the Washington area in 1983. Sakhi, who possessed no formal education and could neither read nor write, began working as a street vendor in December of that year. “It was one of coldest Decembers in ages,” Phoenix says with a tone and facial expression that makes me believe her. He adopted the corner of 20th and Q streets as a permanent location and filed for a city-issued license, which he continually renewed until his death.

His faithful presence on that corner gradually earned him sight recognition from hundreds of locals and commuters who pass the location each day. While many recognize his face, few knew the full extent of his involvement with local people, particularly those in need. “His compassion was universal, his giving was universal,” Phoenix says. “Man, the thief and the braggart and the son –of-the-whatever-you want to call him, he [Sakhi] gave him a sandwich. An old malang (a term used among Afghan Sufi’s that refers to one who wanders the streets aimlessly, free of earthly concerns) came everyday for 24 years and everyday we have him three dollars and food.”

Those who knew him remember a series of individuals struggling with poverty, drug addiction and other ills that stayed and worked with Sakhi for varying lengths of time. “Over the years he got a lot of people like that [troubled], people disoriented with drug problems and he would train them in something,” explained a clerk in Dupont Flowers who preferred not to give her name. “They would disappear after a while, they got better and they left.”

Others suggest that at times, such relationships went farther than they should have, with certain individuals falling under some sort of trance. Suzanne Szari, a 44-year-old, Hungarian-born woman and GW graduate, spent a significant amount of time with Sakhi and his family some 20 years ago. “I was in my mid-twenties at the time and trying many things,” she explains over the phone. “I was depressed and seeking to answer the ‘who am I’ question, and did so through experimentation.” Suzanne recalls shaving her head, meditating for full days, engaging in voluntary abstinence from sex, meat and an array of other activities aimed at attaining spiritual clarity. “Of course these are the kinds of periods, where very quickly you don’t have a place to stay. When I could no longer stay with friends, I’d stay with Gulestan, who was always on the street with the family.”

She explains that she was a natural fit with the group. “I already understood a different mentality, not necessarily their mentality, but a different one and I think we all got along as a result.” She recalls helping Sakhi with his vending stand, grocery shopping for the family and doing other chores in tacit exchange for a place to stay. While Suzanne came and went with the family between 1987 and 1995, she speaks with some concern for a woman called Lisa, who she claims became extremely caught up with the group, and seemed to fall under some type of “brainwashing.”

Suzanne describes as a well-educated, journalist who also held a degree from George Washington University. According to Suzanne, Lisa stumbled upon the family as an aspiring journalist and, after some months with them, seemed to fall under a kind of hypnosis. “Lisa ended up becoming Sakhi’s second wife,” Suzanne reports, “and after that, I was no longer allowed to talk with her. I went my own way and when I asked that they have her call me, I never heard anything.” During our phone interview, Suzanne urged me to find Lisa, less out of interest in the story and more out of genuine concern for her.

The family retains a house and some property in a rural area of West Virginia, the state to issue the license plates of their vehicles and drivers licenses. Despite inquires, the true ownership of the house and property remains a mystery, although it appears to belong to someone in the “adopted” family. The number of people who reside there and their names vary depending on who you ask and few seem particularly open to discussing that side of the story. On the basis of my conversations with family members and those who know them, it seems that a middle aged woman and her adolescent son are a conservative estimate of the residents at their West Virginia residence.

Prior to Sakhi’s death, Phoenix divided her time evenly between the West Virginia residence and Dupont Circle, where she lived out of a van near the corner of 20th and Q streets. Despite the option of living in a formal house in West Virginia, Phoenix opted to live out of the van in order to be close to Sakhi, who stayed in Washington to work. The couple explained that Sakhi’s illiteracy made finding alternative work impossible and that he believed that his higher calling was to help those in need. In the days after his death Phoenix remarked, “I said to him recently, can’t you come out to West Virginia for a week or something? He said, "no no no, there are people out here who need me. I am the birdfeeder and I have other business here to attend to.”

And tend to business he did, until hours before his death. Those who saw him the night before he died informed me that he seemed in fine health and good spirits. He visited local shops, broke down the stand and cleaned the streets as usual. The following morning, a Jamaican woman knocked on the window of his truck, which was parked in the PNC parking lot on 20th Street. She’d come to return four dollars she borrowed from him earlier in the month, but her knocking could not disrupt his slumber. Phoenix arrived shortly afterwards, opened his truck and realized that her husband, friend and teacher, had departed.

As daily life resumed later that day, his son, Ieasaw, set up a small memorial in his honor at the corner of 20th and Q streets. Family and friends quietly gathered in front of flowers, several loaves of baguette bread and a framed photograph of the deceased vendor. Lacking an alternative, Ieasaw placed a traffic cone amidst the items upon which he wrote a departing message to his father. Throughout the morning, dozens of curious passer-bys stopped to ask what occurred, and many were shocked and dismayed to learn of Sakhi’s passing. “He gave me these glasses,” exclaimed a distraught older woman, “I’m glad I have something to remember him by.” Some shared kind memories and words while others crouched to write additional messages on the cone, which was almost full by the time it was removed.

The course of events in his life and mentality that guided him through was highly unusual. He suffered tremendously, particularly after the death of his 13-year-old daughter, Mountain, who succumbed to AIDS she contracted during a neo-natal blood transfusion in 1981. “When his daughter was in the hospital, he would come in every day to buy a flower for her,” explained a worker in Dupont Flowers who’s known Sakhi for nearly 20 years. “Her death was extremely difficult for him.” It was exceedingly difficult for Phoenix also, who never truly recovered from the event. She keeps a meticulous count of the days since her death, and feels certain that her spirit will visit her again. She horded small amounts of money which she used to purchase beads and thread which she turned into elaborate items that she intended to present to Mountain upon her earthly return. On on the 14th anniversary of Mountain's death, I spent the night in Phoenix's van where she attempted summon the spirit of her lost daughter. The experience was chilling and moving at once, at times compelling me to weep. Phoenix's love for her daughter is nearly tangible, and the pain of her departure remains omnipresent in her daily life.

Despite the hardships that Sakhi and his family endured, his outlook remained overwhelmingly positive. “There are no bad days, Peter,” he often quipped at my complaints over various trivialities, “only what God gives us.” I muttered words of agreement while silently cursing the February frost and wondering if I’d someday find the tranquility to deal with life’s adversity as graciously as he did. He welcomed me each day with offerings of tea and pastries and patiently tolerated my pursuit of images that would ultimately be the last ever taken. As I mourn his death, I cannot help but feel grateful for the opportunity to document his humble life and the kindness he shared with all those around him. The rooftops upon which the birds waited for Sakhi were empty the week he died, as if the animals knew that their guardian had gone.