For twenty-five years, my work has taken me across the world — from river deltas and coastal towns to fishing villages and busy ports. I’ve spent much of my life “on the road,” moving through places where water defines how people live, work, and imagine the future. My work has mostly been in research, education, and advisory projects — often at the shifting edge between land and sea, between safety and risk, between what humans build and what nature reclaims. Yet the moments that stay with me come more from brief human encounters — ordinary, unplanned, quietly revealing. These are the fragments that linger, the memories that remind me why I keep doing this work.
Wherever possible, I’ve chosen local hotels, eaten where the residents eat, taken the same buses they take, and small boats that leak just enough to remind me they are real.
Sometimes it’s the only way to understand a place beyond its surface — to see how people actually live, adapt, and get through each day. There’s a kind of honesty in those shared moments of discomfort — a crowded bus seat, a long wait in the sun, a meal served without ceremony. In these small exchanges, you begin to sense how resilience is lived rather than described.
In those moments — a shared meal, a few sentences in a broken language, a glance across a dusty road, or a trip across the country — a person’s story unfolds briefly, like a door left ajar. I almost always ask their name, though I never use their real ones here. I note the year, the place, the circumstances of our meeting. I take a single photograph — never posed, always in passing — and later, a sketch is made from that image to accompany each story. The sketches hold what the camera cannot: the quiet, the hesitation, the space between seeing and understanding.
I seldom know how any of these stories end. I didn’t stay in touch, and perhaps that’s what makes them matter — they remain complete in their incompleteness. These are not stories about experts or professionals. They are about the people in between — those who shared part of their day with a stranger passing through. A fisherman squinting at the horizon, a woman selling fish in a fish market, a child drawing in the sand. They didn’t explain much, and I didn’t ask for more. But in their gestures, their laughter, their pauses, I found traces of the larger story, and the hope for the future.
Over time, I’ve learned that every landscape, every community has its rhythm, and to sense it you must slow down long enough to hear it. Observation isn’t neutral. To look carefully is to connect; to record is to admit that something is worth remembering. I try to keep that balance — to notice without intruding.
This way of looking — of looking instead of merely seeing — is something I learned early from my father, who had the patience to notice what others overlooked. From my mother, who taught me that attention is a kind of respect, that to really see someone is to honor their presence, even briefly. My uncle added a touch of humor to it. We used to sit together in small cafés in Amsterdam, Antwerp, or Brussels, watching people pass by and quietly inventing their lives. He even printed “social observer” on his visiting card — half joke, half truth.
Perhaps, I’ve become one too.
Over the years, I’ve realized that the people we meet in passing often leave the most lasting impressions. The conversations are short, sometimes no more than a few sentences, but they shift the way you understand the world. They remind you that the world is larger and kinder than we often imagine — and that every crossing, no matter how brief, adds something to the map of who we are.
This collection gathers some of those crossings — moments recorded with care but never claimed. Each of us is a story, told partly by what we reveal, and partly by what remains unspoken. They are not about conclusions but about attention — the simple act of looking closely, of being present long enough to notice what matters.
In truth, I’m also writing these stories for my daughter, Hannah. She was never thrilled about me leaving home — the packed suitcase by the door, the late calls from hotel rooms, the time zones that made our mornings and nights trade places. Yet in her quiet disapproval there was always love, a reminder of what it means to belong somewhere while constantly moving through other people’s worlds. I hope that one day, reading these fragments, she might see what I tried to see — that the world holds together through brief, graceful connections. And that behind every stranger, there’s a story waiting to be told — even if we never find out how it ends.
Each of Us Is a Story 