by Maggie Ybarra
Daily Lobo
Seventeen journals were all Kathy Eldon had left after her son, Dan, was stoned to death by an angry mob in Mogadishu, Somalia.
As a testament to the way her son had died and lived, she selected pages from his journals and had them bound together in a book titled The Journey is the Destination.
Dan Eldon was a photojournalist on assignment for Reuters when United Nations forces bombed a house they believed to be the headquarters of Gen. Mohammed Farrah Adid.
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He and three photojournalists went to the house to document the attack.
Hundreds of people died during the bombing. Relatives and friends who survived the incident were so overcome with their emotions that when they saw the four foreign men working with their expensive cameras, they attacked them - stoning and beating them to death.
Dan Eldon was 22.
The first eight pages of the book lists a brief account of Dan Eldon's short-lived life. They are followed by page after page of colorful testaments to the inner workings of his mind.
He did not keep ordinary journals. He taped and glued photographs, used paints, bits of tickets from treks into other countries and a multitude of objects he picked up along the road that extended from his arrival into the world to his last moments of existence.
Each page gives you tiny clues to where he was coming from and where he intended to go.
Dan Eldon's love for his camera meant he always had it to document his excursions into the African bush or through the coffee-crazed, fast-paced streets of New York City. He was an avid traveler, constantly curious about his surroundings and interested in other cultures.
"One girlfriend complained that he spent more time recording their relationship than actually enjoying it," Kathy Eldon writes in the book. "He packed his hours with life, seemingly afraid to miss even a moment. Many people wondered then why he was in such a hurry."
Dan Eldon had enough time in his life to start a charity, intern for Mademoiselle magazine, go on safaris to multiple countries, work on a film, start his own photography company in Africa and become a freelance photojournalist for Reuters.
The book also has excerpts from a self-published book Dan Eldon had written about what it was like to be a photojournalist documenting the famine and fighting in Mogadishu.
"After my first trip to Somalia, the terror of being surrounded by violence and the horrors of the famine threw me into a dark depression," Dan Eldon wrote in his self-published book. "Even journalists who had covered many conflicts were moved to tears. But for me, this was my first experience with war. Before Somalia, I had only seen two dead bodies in my life. I have now seen hundreds, tossed into ditches like sacks. The worst things I could not photograph."
Kathy Eldon's book is about the life and death of her 22-year-old son. And if you look through each page carefully, you can still see pieces of him, of his passion and philosophy.
"What is the difference between exploring and being lost?" he wrote in one of his journals beneath a picture of his dirty safari jeep. "The journey is the destination."
