By the time my feet touched Irish soil, it had been six months since I’d been in an English-speaking country. Even so, when the letter “h” is “haych,” the word “film” has two distinct syllables, the remark “oh, it was great craic [‘crack’]!” can be heard in polite company and Republicans have my respect and admiration, there is no mistaking Ireland for the United States.

I spent a couple of weeks in the South (the independent Irish state that includes 26 of the island’s 32 counties), then went north to Belfast (the capital of the British-controlled six counties that make up “Northern Ireland”) for the remaining month of my trip. It had been three years since I was in the North, and this time around I had a Yale grant to do a news photography internship at a newspaper in the overwhelmingly Catholic and Republican community of West Belfast.

American press coverage of the situation in the North has too often had a decidedly pro-British bias. It depicts the British army as a neutral force in the conflict, and condemns the IRA for “terrorism” while remaining silent on violence by Loyalist paramilitary groups supported and often tipped off by British agents. It attempts to explain away “the Troubles” as senseless sectarian tribalism (Catholics and Protestants killing each other for no other reason than for belonging to the opposing group)--dangerously ignoring the complexity of Ireland’s status as one of the first, and one of the last remaining, colonies in the British Empire-- and the discrimination, violent intimidation and denial of civil rights that this status has entailed for its non-Protestant subjects.

If the specter of the modern “Troubles” in the North of Ireland dates from the late 1960s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the roots of Republican-Loyalist antagonism are deep. I will spare myself the task of writing an extensive history of the British presence in Ireland, but to give you an idea I will point out that the still highly contentious, often violent, Loyalist marches through Catholic neighborhoods every summer celebrate a military victory that took place in 1690, and that when Belfast’s City Cemetery was built in 1869, a 3m deep underground wall was constructed to ensure that Catholics were separated from Protestants, even in death’s decay.

During my time in West Belfast I lived with a wonderful and amazingly hospitable couple, whom I’ll call Tim and Eileen, and their four children. After months of staying in hostels, it was a pleasure to live with a family again: the boys, aged seven and ten, who watched soccer matches bouncing on their feet in excitement with their eyes just inches from the television; the girls, aged eleven and fifteen, singing Rihanna songs in their pink rooms. There was the Sunday morning when I was woken by the plaintive cry of “Mummy can we never have ONE DAY off from Mass?!”; and the night when the youngest boy asked me to show him in his atlas coloring book the places I’d visited (“Have you been to Barcelona?” Yes. “Have you been to Celtic [Scotland]?” No. “Have you been to Alligator?” His finger rested on Algeria.)

The night I arrived in Belfast, Tim and Eileen had another couple, their friends since childhood, over for dinner. As the sun sank and the kids played soccer in the backyard, the adults started to reminisce, as adults will after several bottles of wine. Eileen remembered when her family was chased by Loyalist mobs which burned the family house to the ground along with those of the other Catholics on the block--leaving her, her parents, and her twelve siblings homeless on the curb. She remembered how after that, two of her brothers joined the IRA—and how her parents didn’t want them to, but they could understand why they did. She remembered how the only time her mother slept well over all those years was when her sons were interned, because while she knew that the guards beat them viciously, they were unlikely to kill them. (The two brothers were eventually sentenced to long prison terms—25 years for one, “natural life” for the other.)

Eileen remembered the British soldiers in blackface who kicked in the door of her family’s house nearly every other night looking in every room for her brothers before they were interned--and after they were imprisoned, looking simply to terrorize the family. She remembered how she and her older sisters would go out into the streets to protest during the day, banging pots and pans at the soldiers, and how her youngest sister, Mary, would mostly stay in the house, because the raids made her so anxious and scared.

The man they’d invited remembered growing up with “involved men” (IRA volunteers) hiding out in his house each night, and making bombs at the kitchen table. He remembered the iced lollies, meat and crisps all the neighborhood kids used to grab from the hijacked delivery trucks during the riots that erupted in 1971 when the British interned 342 men (all but a handful of them Catholic), imprisoning them without trial.

His wife remembered watching her father get shot before her eyes, and watching, too, when fourteen-year-old Mary was shot in the head with a rubber bullet by a British soldier, unprovoked. In Long Kesh the following day, the prison governor summoned Eileen’s brothers into his office. “Do you have a sister called Maria?” he asked them. It’s Mary, they responded. “Yeah, well she’s dead.”

Auntie Mary, I would learn, still faithfully attended every family gathering. She was in the framed pictures on the wall and on the mural on the side of the brick apartments just a few blocks away; she was the namesake of the niece who described excitedly the new apartment she was preparing to move into, the niece who saw the end of the Troubles, and has already outlived her aunt by twelve years.

The Belfast Mary lives in is very different from the Belfast in which her aunt, her namesake, was murdered twenty-six years ago. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement announced the end of the war (if not necessarily the hostilities). And in May of this year, a devolved assembly was reestablished at Stormont with Ian Paisley--a man who once stood on a truck with a bullhorn urging on the Loyalist mobs who burned down Eileen's family home—as Deputy First Minister , doing what he swore again and again he would never do: sharing power with former high-ranking IRA man and Sinn Fein politician Martin McGuinness.

For those of you unfamiliar with Irish politics, the sight of Paisley and McGuinness working and even laughing together publicly might have seemed, not so very long ago about as likely, in an American context, as Strom Thurmond and Malcolm X draping daisy chains around one another’s necks.

But in Belfast today Loyalists and Republicans are indeed sharing political power.

In staunchly Republican neighborhoods the long-resisted, Protestant-dominated police force (recently renamed the PSNI) is patrolling again for the first time in years, with Sinn Fein’s support.

Along the top of the deep green hills from which Tim remembers that Loyalists would fire shots into his neighborhood, his youngest son rides his training-wheeled bike down a recently-completed hiking trail.

At family gatherings Eileen’s brothers, once condemned to 25 years and “natural life" are in attendance. Thanks to the prisoner releases stipulated by the Good Friday Agreement, they laugh and drink with their wives, siblings and cousins. And when their youngest nieces and nephews ask them why they were in prison, they’ve been known to say, ashen faced, that they were caught smoking cigarettes on the bus.

In Eileen’s backyard her sons play soccer, and she says to me simply, “Thank God our kids don’t have to go through what we went through.” They will grow up in a house where no one is making bombs at the kitchen table; and while they will know about their Aunt Mary, of course, Eileen will have the luxury of not having to discuss politics with them unless (until) they ask.

In Belfast today Eileen’s youngest son climbs all the way inside the army-themed laundry hamper that he’s dragged into a corner of the kitchen, his eyes just visible peeking mischievously over the top while his older brother stalks the house with a toy revolver looking to hunt him down. As Eileen explains what she means by “what we went through” (burned-out house, imprisoned brothers, blackfaced soldiers, dead sister) her youngest son catches my attention with a forcefully whispered “Psssssssst.” I look over at him. “Do you see anyone out there?” In Belfast today I lean back in my chair, take a wide look around and whisper back: “I think the coast is clear.”

Belfast today is not the Belfast that was.

But still, there are the death threats against the Republican ex-prisoners-turned-black-taxi-drivers accused by Loyalist paramilitaries of spying in their neighborhoods while dropping off passengers. There are the 12 July bonfires where, in Coleraine this year, Loyalists placed the name of a 16-year-old Catholic boy recently dead of a heart attack on top of the pile to be burned (next to effigies of Gerry Adams and the Pope), and when the boy’s grieving father climbed to the top to retrieve it, he was issued a death threat. There is the Orange Order march where a banner commemorating Ulster Volunteer Force man Noel Kinner was unveiled when the procession reached the spot just yards from where Kinner once murdered a Catholic father of three.

There are the visual demarcations of turf: the Union Jacks and red white and blue curbstones in some communities, and the tricolors and IRA graffiti in others. There are the ironically named “Peace Walls” that divide the two communities and the fact that while more and more of them have been built since the trumpeted end of the Troubles in 1998, not a single one has come down—a troubling reminder that peace is distinct from reconciliation.

And what, after all, is meant by peace? If peace is, as Einstein put it, “not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice,” than Belfast (along with many, if not most, places in the world) may yet be far from it. Which is why when I asked Eileen how she felt about seeing the PSNI patrolling her neighborhood again, she sighed and said “It’s hard. For a lot of people, it’s just too soon. Sinn Fein, they expect you to walk down the street and look [the PSNI officers] in the eye, they really do. But I just can’t.”

She can’t because although the name and uniform of the police service has changed, and although they are taking steps to recruit more Catholics, Sinn Fein is asking its constituents to look to the very people who terrorized Republican neighborhoods for decades suddenly to protect and serve them. “For me it’s too soon. It’s hard to change when they don’t—and a leopard doesn’t change its spots. I don’t want anything to do with them—because of Mary.”

Because no one was ever prosecuted for Eileen’s sister’s death, just as no one was ever prosecuted for the deaths of so many civilians on both sides. Because despite the reports of external international commissions confirming the existence of collusion between the British Army and Loyalist paramilitary groups, the British government continues to obstruct investigations and prosecutions in the highest profile cases (notably the murder of lawyer Pat Finucane, which Amnesty International cites in its report finding that the United Kingdom “continues to erode fundamental human rights”).

Belfast today is not the Belfast that was, and thank God that Tim and Eileen’s children will not have to go through what their parents did. But they will have to grapple with things their parents did not.

Across the North Protestant and Catholic communities alike are plagued by a growing epidemic of suicide, with 57 people already having taken their own lives so far this year in West Belfast alone (a community of only about 90,000).

Residents complain of “anti-social behavior” (drinking, arson, vandalism, racist attacks) among gangs of youth. One afternoon I photographed residents who live alongside a nursery school playground where janitors have to quickly clean up the remains of the night (underpants, broken bottles and used condoms) every morning before the kids arrive. As the reporter and I turned to leave, an old woman shouted to us from the front yard of her house: “See the peelers [cops]? They haven’t shot enough of them [the teenagers who’ve been partying at the school at night]. Tell them they should shoot them all.”

With the PSNI only halfway patrolling the Republican neighborhoods where they are only halfway welcome, and with the Provisional IRA (which policed Republican neighborhoods very effectively, if unofficially, for decades) having officially given up violence, the resulting vacuum is being exploited. In the Ballymurphy housing estate, a feud between two families has been linked to 600 criminal incidents, ranging from arson, to murder, to the nighttime leveling of a house with a stolen bulldozer. So for the residents of these communities plagued by crime, there is little peace in peacetime Belfast. As someone wrote in an anonymous letter to the editor that referenced the IRA’s former favored form of punishing criminals, “bring back kneecapping!”

Drug abuse is another problem claiming more and more of Belfast’s young. On one morning I sat with a reporter in the darkened parlor of Mrs. McVeigh’s house as her fifteen-year-old daughter Ashling, who choked on her own vomit while on ecstasy, lay in a wooden box covered by cards just feet away. “She was the heart of this family,” Mrs. McVeigh told us as Ashling smiled from the framed photographs on the mantle. “She was our whole world in this house. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to go on.”

She lifted a couple of the cards from the coffin and handed them to us, explaining that the ones we were holding were from Ashling’s Protestant friends. Ashling was a popular kid, popular with everyone, and when she started going to the Protestant neighborhoods to see her friends, her mother was worried that it wasn’t safe for her there. “But Ashling just couldn’t understand what all this bad blood was between Protestants and Catholics,” she told us. “All her wee Protestant friends came by last night and you should’ve seen them. They loved her.”

Ashling bridged the sectarian divide only to die from a drug overdose—a fitting poster child for the complexities of peace, sealed up in a polished wooden box.

Tim and Eileen’s children will have to grapple with things their parents did not.

When the eldest daughter asks about politics one night at dinner after the younger children have gone away, her parents will struggle (understandably so) to explain cogently a war half won and a country half free. “Is the IRA still around?” The Provisional IRA isn’t, but the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA splinter groups are. “Are Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams mates now?” No, not exactly. “And Ireland, Belfast, is part of Britain?” Yes, right now it is, but we want a united Ireland. “So I’m a British citizen then?” No. No, don’t ever say that, you’re Irish. “Is the war going to start again?” No. “Well how do you know?” It’ll never be as bad as it was. You have to work through politics now if you want to change things. War is a very bad thing. “But the IRA wasn’t bad, was it?” No, because the IRA was fighting for our civil rights and our freedom. “So if you’re fighting for your freedom then war is okay?”

In Belfast today peace—even peace without reconciliation, even peace without justice—is better than war. So in reply Tim said to his daughter, because he knows it all too well: “look, it’s not a pretty thing standing over coffins.”

And now I've come to the end. Over seven and a half months I’ve passed through three continents and twenty-five countries. When I arrived at American immigration and was handed a customs declaration directing me to list the “countries visited on this trip prior to U.S. arrival” in the space of about two inches, all I could do was laugh and write down three or four of the least offensive ones. It’s been a hell of a trip.

I realize that a lot of you thought I was crazy to travel around the world by myself, and from the beginning I could see your point. Maybe it was the fact that the recurring sentiment nearly every one of you expressed to me in our goodbyes was “please don’t die,” or maybe I was just being realistic, but before I left for this trip I was really scared. Scared enough to write letters to friends and family in case anything happened to me. Scared enough to pack a knife.

The letters are still unopened, and the only person I cut with the knife was myself (making a sandwich). When I think about the people I met, the kindness I was shown and the fact that I have seen more of the world in twenty years than most people will see in a lifetime, I feel nothing but overwhelmed, humbled and fortunate beyond measure.

Maybe I was crazy to do this trip, but given that I could, I would’ve been crazy not to do it. I may have come to the end for now, but traveling is no cure for a longing to travel—it only makes it worse.

Two days before I left early last January I had a strange dream. As some of you have heard me complain about how outrageously boring my dreams usually are (sipping a mug of tea, turning the pages of the newspaper, and the like), I thought I should pay attention to this one. I was sitting on a long flight next to two of you, and the plane suddenly split open like a Christmas cracker. As all of the passengers hurtled to the ground I realized that the plane had been equipped with parachutes under every seat, though I hadn’t known to grab one before I’d jumped from the wreckage. As I fell faster and faster, as I braced myself for the impact and awaited my certain death, one of you reached out and pulled me in, deployed the parachute attached to your back and guided both of us gently to the ground.

It's a crazy thing to think you can travel around the world; to show up in places where you don’t know a single person and sometimes don’t even know the language and expect, even depend on, finding a welcome.

And the fact that it worked says something desperately good about a world that so often seems so desperately bad.

This trip was a crazy and presumptuous thing to do, and I knew it even before I left. Which is probably why I dreamt what I did, that dream about manmade wings melting in a too-high flight.

I can say two things equally: that I have missed all of you for every day of the past seven-and- a-half months, at times so much that it physically hurt; and also, that this trip has been the best time of my life. No matter how often you wrote, and no matter how long I took to write back, please know that I simply would not have been able to do this without you guys.

So thank you for letting me wander so far—and above all, thank you for reaching out to pluck me from freefall, bring me home.

Love,

Fitz