Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Article: The Treasures in the Baul, Readers' Digest, January 2009.

Readers’ Digest, January 2009


The Treasures in the Baul

Others may see them as trivial possessions, but to me they are emblems of an unforgettable love
by Josefina N. Dy-Liacco

Before I proceed, let me explain what a baul is. It is a wooden trunk made of two compartments where old folks store their clothes. The first compartment is a shallow one and stores underwear and other small things. The second compartment is deeper so it can hold bigger garments. Camphor balls keep away the rats and cockroaches.
My mother had a baul. It was her hope chest.
I was only 13 years old when Mama died. Father told me that after giving birth to my youngest brother the previous year, she had become very sickly. Yet she went on with the usual household chores. It was my role to see to my five siblings, whose ages ranged from one to ten years old. I saw to it that they were properly bathed, clothed and fed.
Not wanting to worry us, Mama carried on with her usual calm disposition, never faltering in her speech or in her steps. Still, we noticed her sudden loss of weight and paleness.
Being an optimist, Mama had strong faith in God. We would have our morning ''promenade,'' as she called it, praying the rosary as we went along. Our home - in Barangay Sagpon, Albany province, in central Philippines – was a stone's throw from the church, so after our walk, we would attend Mass.
During one of these walks Mama casually told me about her baul. She said it contained her burial dress and some treasures she was leaving for me. However, she explicitly told me that I should only open it in the event of her death. She handed me the key of the baul for safekeeping.
Her words didn't have much of an impact on me. Not having experienced death in our family, I thought that it was nothing to be reckoned with.
As days went by, Mama's health did not improve. Gradually she became weaker and weaker.
One day, I saw her sewing a brown dress by hand in spite of her condition. She was adept at sewing and needlework. It was from her that I learned all these things.

In spite of all the medications, her condition became worse. The doctor, who visited regularly, diagnosed lung infection. On her final day, a Thursday, she woke up in the middle of the night. We found her profusely sweating and struggling to breathe. But her mind was clear and lucid.

She called us one by one - my father, my brothers and sisters, my maternal and paternal grandparents and myself - to ask for forgiveness. She also told me that, being the eldest, I had to take care of my siblings and love them. She finally breathed her last breath after the priest gave her Holy Communion.

My father, who had never been away from Mama, was inconsolable in his grief. Immediately after she died, he seemed to be lost in time, not knowing what to do. God must have given me the strength and the courage to take action.

I went to my father and told him about Mama's burial dress in the baul. He broke into tears, for how long I cannot remember. He must have come to his senses at some point because he eventually started making preparations for the wake and the burial.

Obeying my mother's request, I took the key and hurried to the baul, which was kept in a storeroom. I was apprehensive; a feeling of mysterious expectancy overcame me. I wondered if a genie, like the one in Aladdin's lamp, would spring forth when the baul was opened.

As the key rattled in the lock, the lid lifted with a melodious ring. The room was filled with the scent of camphor, reminiscent of clothes stored for ages. There on top of the first compartment was Mama's burial dress. It was the brown dress I had seen her pain-stakingly sewing by hand.

I felt a tug in my heart. Mama must have imagined herself wearing it on her deathbed. Optimist that she was, she still had a premonition that death might come to her any time. So she prepared to face the Lord in proper attire.

Occupied with thoughts of the funeral, I quickly removed the dress and closed the baul without looking any further. After the burial, I could not contain my curiosity; I went back to the baul to see what else Mama had left for me.

There, underneath bed linens at the bottom of the second compartment, I found dozens of hankies - some embroidered by her own hands, others fancy ones - fans made of silk and paper, and bottles of perfumes. Were they the treasures that she had lovingly set aside for me?

That day marked the beginning of my fondness for all these things. I would rather lose a dress than lose a hanky. In my free time I embroider hankies. I collect fans. I make rag dolls, which I give to my grandchildren.
I am nearly 90 years old but my love for these things have never waned. To some they may seem trivial, very material things, but to me they are the symbols of Mama's love, mementos too sweet to forget for they bring poignant memories of a tender, loving mother. My mother is still with me when I daub her favourite scent, jasmine.

My memory fails me now, but there is a line in a song, which says, ''If you lost your mother, you lost the best of all.''

Article and Summary: Iraq's once mighty river drying up.Straits Times, July 15, 2009.

July 15, 2009 Straits Times 2009


Iraq's once mighty river drying up

Water misuse, drought and neighbours' dams causing Euphrates crisis

JUBAISH (IRAQ): Throughout the marshes, the reed gatherers, standing on land they once floated over, cry out to visitors in a passing boat.

'Maaku mai!' they shout, holding up their rusty sickles. 'There is no water!'

The Euphrates is drying up. Strangled by the water policies of Iraq's neighbours Turkey and Syria, a two-year drought, and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the river is significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago. Some officials worry that it could soon be half of what it is now.

The shrinking of the Euphrates, a river so crucial to the birth of civilisation that the Book of Revelation prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times, has decimated farms along its banks, left fishermen impoverished and depleted riverside towns as farmers flee to the cities looking for work.

The poor suffer more acutely, but all strata of society are feeling the effects: sheikhs, diplomats and even Members of Parliament who retreat to their farms after weeks in Baghdad.

Along the river, rice and wheat fields have turned into baked dirt. Canals have dwindled to shallow streams and fishing boats sit on dry land. Pumps that are meant to feed water treatment plants dangle pointlessly over brown puddles.

'The old men say it's the worst they remember,' said Mr Sayid Diyia, a 34-year-old fisherman in Hindiya, sitting in a riverside cafe full of his idle colleagues. 'I'm depending on God's blessings.'

The drought is widespread in Iraq. For two years, rainfall has been far below normal, leaving the reservoirs dry, and United States officials predict that wheat and barley output will be a little over half of what it was two years ago.

It is a crisis that threatens the roots of Iraq's identity, not only as the land between two rivers but also as a nation that was once the largest exporter of dates in the world, that once supplied German beer with barley, and that takes patriotic pride in its expensive Anbar rice.

Now Iraq is importing more and more grain.

Droughts are not rare in Iraq, though officials say they have been more frequent in recent years. But drought is only part of what is choking the Euphrates and its larger, healthier twin, the Tigris.

The most frequently cited culprits are the Turkish and Syrian governments. Iraq has plenty of water, but it is a downstream country.

There are at least seven dams on the Euphrates in Turkey and Syria, according to Iraqi water officials, and with no treaties or agreements, the Iraqi government is reduced to begging its neighbours for water.

With the Euphrates showing few signs of increasing health, bitterness over Iraq's water threatens to be a source of tension for months or even years to come between Iraq and its neighbours.

Many US, Turkish and even Iraqi officials, disregarding the accusations as election-year posturing, say the real problem lies in Iraq's own deplorable water management policies.

'There used to be water everywhere,' said Mr Abduredha Joda, 40, sitting in his reed hut on a dry, rocky plot of land outside Karbala.

Mr Joda fled to Baghdad when Saddam Hussein drained the great marshes of southern Iraq in retaliation for the 1991 Shi'ite uprising.

He moved to Karbala in 2004 to fish and raise water buffaloes in the lush wetlands there that remind him of his home. 'This year, it's just a desert,' he said.

Officials say nothing will improve if Iraq does not seriously address its own water policies and its history of flawed water management.

Leaky canals and wasteful irrigation practices squander the water, and poor drainage leaves fields so salty from evaporated water that women and children dredge huge white mounds from sitting pools of runoff.

The farmers, reed gatherers and buffalo herders keep working, but they say they cannot continue if the water stays like this.

'Next winter will be the final chance,' said Mr Hashem Hilead Shehi, a 73-year-old farmer who lives in a bone-dry village west of the marshes. 'If we are not able to plant, then all of the families will leave.'

NEW YORK TIMES


Summary Question
Read the newspaper report .
Summarise the causes and effects of the drying up of the Euphrates River.

Grammar Cloze: El Nino, Straits Times, July 11, 2009

Name__________________( ) Class _______ Date _______


Grammar Cloze Passage – EL NINO

STRAITS TIMES JULY 11, 2009

NEW YORK - WHAT meteorologists have suspected for weeks now is apparently official: El Nino 1. _______________(arrive).

WEAKER THAN NORMAL MONSOON IN INDIA

The main source of worry for commodity market players is India, where the weather cycle seems to have contributed to a weaker-than-normal monsoon rain season

2. ___________(consider) critical to the country's sprawling farm economy.





While rains 3. ____________(be+ now+ cover) all of India, its Meteorological Department said that as of July 1, the rains were running at 29 per cent below normal.

... more




The US government 4. ________________(warn) that that a dreaded El Nino weather pattern 5. _______________(develop), putting countries from Asia to North America on alert for meteorological havoc to crops, infrastructure, ports and mines.

The phenomenon, caused by a warming of the seas in the Pacific, 6. _____________(be+ already + bring) drought to Australia and 7. ___________(delay) monsoon to India. It's impact could be felt in Latin American and North America by the fall.

The Climate Prediction Centre, an office under the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, said in a monthly report on Thursday that the equatorial Pacific Ocean 8. ________________(be) 'transitioned ... to El Nino conditions.'

The trends favour a 'weak-to-moderate strength El Nino' into the northern hemisphere winter of 2009, 'with further strengthening possible thereafter'.

It was first noticed by Latin American anchovy fishermen in the 19th century and scientists say it tends to come in cycles of three to five years. The 1997/98 El Nino 9 _______________(kill) more than 2,000 people and caused billions of dollars in damages.

This El Nino 10. ____________(strike) just as global economies are struggling to overcome the impact of the world's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in 1929.

An El Nino-spawned drought would 11. __________(pose) a major risk to wheat production in Australia, affect palm oil output in major producers Malaysia and Indonesia, and 12. _____________(hi) rice production in the Philippines, the world's biggest importer of the staple.

News over the past few days that this El Nino may be weak to moderate 13. ____________(lead ) to a sell-off in Malaysian palm oil futures, which 14. ____________(slide) to a three-month low on Tuesday. -- REUTERS



ANSWERS

1. has arrived 2. considered 3. have now recovered 4. has warned

5. is developing 6. has already bought 7. delayed 8. has

9. killed 10. is striking 11. pose 12. hit 13. led 14. slid

Bomb Blast- Terrorist Attack, Straits Times, July 21, 2009

Straits Times, July 21, 2009


Jakarta blasts: More than 2 bombers?

Two Dutch guests of Ritz-Carlton reported missing

By Salim Osman & Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja

JAKARTA: Indonesian police are not ruling out the possibility that more than two suicide bombers were involved in the twin strikes on two luxury hotels, JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton, last Friday that left nine people dead and more than 50 others injured.

Police are still trying to identify four of the bodies recovered from the two hotels, deputy police spokesman, Brigadier-General Sulistyo Ishak, told a press conference yesterday.

'We are not ruling out the possibility that there could be more than two perpetrators of the bombings. They might be among the four unidentified bodies,' he said. 'Investigations are on-going.'

Two of the bodies were decapitated, making it difficult to verify their identities, although police are certain they belong to the suicide bombers.

Yesterday, police released the names of the five victims identified so far. They were Mr Timothy Mackay, a New Zealander; Mr Andrew Craig Senger, Mr John Rupert Garth McEvoy and Mr John Nathan Verity, all of whom were Australians; and Indonesian chef Evert Mokodomvis, 33.

Mr Mackay, 61, was chief executive of PT Holcim Indonesia, a cement firm; Mr Verity, 39, a business consultant; Mr Senger, 36, an Australian Embassy trade officer; and Mr McEvoy, 40, the commercial manager of PT Thiess Contractors.

Two Dutch citizens, said to be guests at the Ritz-Carlton, were also reported to be missing, and a Foreign ministry spokesman in The Hague disclosed yesterday that it was already in touch with Indonesian police about the matter.

Gen Sulistyo said investigators had yet to conclude that the terror group Jemaah Islamiah (JI) was involved in Friday's attacks, even though an unexploded device found in a room in the Marriott - believed to be the control room for the terrorists - was similar to the ones used by the JI in the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people and a cache of bombs found at an Islamic boarding school in Cilacap, Central Java, two weeks ago.

'From the way the bomb was constructed and the type used, they bore similarities with the ones we found in Cilacap and Bali,' he said.

Police believe the unexploded bomb showed 'strong indications' Noordin Mohammed Top, a 40-year-old member of the Al-Qaeda-backed JI network, or terrorist cells linked to him were involved in Friday's attacks. The police have so far identified one of the attackers only as 'N', without giving further details.

The deputy police spokesman yesterday declined to comment on media reports identifying one of the bombers as Nur Hasbi, a former student who graduated from the Ngruki Islamic boarding school in Solo, Central Java, in 1995. The school is run by militant cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, widely regarded as the spiritual leader of JI.

State-owned Antara news agency said Nur Hasbi's parents in Temanggung, Central Java, were taken by the police to undergo DNA tests yesterday in a bid to help the authorities identify one of the bodies.

The Indo Pos daily yesterday carried a picture of the almost intact severed head believed to belong to Nur Hasbi as well as a photo of him in dark glasses.

The alleged bomber, who had a string of aliases, including Nur Hasdi, Nur Said and Nurdin Azis, has not contacted his family for many years, said the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo said life in the capital had gone back to normal, and dismissed speculation of an exodus of expatriates from the city.

Article: Billions in Asia to witness eclipse, Straits Times, July 21, 2009

Straits Times, July 21, 2009


Billions in Asia to witness eclipse

Swathe of darkness will sweep across India and China

NEW DELHI: The world's most populous nations will gaze skywards tomorrow as the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century leaves a swathe of darkness across India and China, from Mumbai to Shanghai.

The up to 258km wide shadow will first strike the Gulf of Khambhat, off western India, at 0053 GMT (8.53am Singapore time). It will then sweep across India, blacking out the holy city of Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges, squeezing between the northern and southern tips of Bangladesh and Nepal before engulfing most of Bhutan, traversing the Chinese mainland and slipping back out to sea off Shanghai.

Its next landfall will be Japan's southern Ryukyu Islands, after which it will curve south-east through the Pacific Ocean, where the maximum duration of totality - when the sun is fully covered - will occur.

The total transit will obscure the sun by 50 per cent or more for an estimated two billion people, from the salt flat farmers of Gujarat to herdsmen in the foothills of the Tibetan Himalayas.

The event is being hyped in the world of eclipse-chasers as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity which, due to its trajectory over some of the most densely inhabited areas on earth, could end up being the most watched eclipse in history.

'This is a very important milestone. None of us will live long enough to see another one like it,' said Mr Federico Borgmeyer, the German-based manager of the specialist travel agency Eclipse City. American astrophysicist and acclaimed eclipse expert Fred Espenak has simply labelled tomorrow's event 'a monster'.

Total solar eclipses occur when the moon comes between the earth and sun, completely obscuring the sun. The excitement this time is largely due to the unusually long duration of the instant of greatest eclipse, or 'totality'. At its maximum, this will last six minutes and 39 seconds - a duration that will not be matched until the year 2132.

Some have seized on the natural phenomenon as a business opportunity. Travel firm Cox and Kings has chartered a Boeing 737-700 aircraft that will take off from New Delhi before dawn, 'intercept' the total eclipse at around 12,500m and then chase its path to the western state of Bihar. All 21 sun-side, window seats have been sold at 79,000 rupees (S$2,362) each.

In Shanghai, hotels offering special eclipse packages were booked out well in advance by guests from Japan, the United States and Europe. Shanghai Sculpture Park, one of the best viewing locations in the city, has sold more than 2,000 tickets.

On a less commercial note, 1.5 million Hindu pilgrims are expected at the holy site of Kurukshetra, in northern India, where bathing in the water during a solar eclipse is believed to further the attainment of spiritual freedom. Japan, which has not seen a total eclipse for 46 years, is celebrating with fireworks on the island of Yakushima.

An astrologer in Myanmar has warned that the eclipse is a sign of impending chaos. In India, some pregnant women have been told to stay indoors to follow a centuries-old tradition of avoiding the sun's invisible rays.

There are also less other-worldly concerns - the potentially massive audience for this eclipse has raised fears that many could end up with permanent retina damage from viewing the event with the naked eye.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Lost In Sahel, National Geographic, April 2008

National Geographic
Published: April 2008

Lost in the Sahel

Along Africa’s harsh frontier between desert and forest, crossing some lines can be fatal.



By Paul Salopek

Darfur—the road to Furawiya



The road was not really a road. Its two ruts led into Darfur, to the war in western Sudan, from the unmarked border of Chad. So much of the Sahel was like this—unmapped, invisible, yet a boundary nonetheless. The land stretched away in a monotony of gravel pans and dried grasses so translucent—so brittle—they seemed made of blown glass. The iron horizons never budged. Yet we were crossing boundaries with every passing hour, mostly without seeing them.



After I was arrested and imprisoned in Darfur, an American soldier told me, shaking his head in disgust, “You fly over this place and all you see is miles and miles of nothing.” But that was an outsider’s delusion. Every outcrop and plain was parsed by unseen tangents, lines, ghostly demarcations. They portioned off the claims of tribes, individuals, clans. They bulged and recoiled according to war and season. No-go zones encircled water holes. Certain unseen lines, masars, dictated the migration routes of nomads. There was nothing haphazard about any of this. To cross one line or to venture too far from another might invite retribution, even death. And that was the ultimate line of them all in the Sahel: the one between knowing and ignorance.



The Sahel itself is a line.



The word means “shore” in Arabic, which implies a continental margin, a grand beginning and a final end. Stretching across northern Africa roughly along the 13th parallel, the Sahel divides—or unites, depending on your philosophical bent—the sands of the Sahara and Africa’s tropical forests. It is a belt of semiarid grassland that separates (or joins) Arabs and blacks, Muslims and Christians, nomads and farmers, a landscape of greens and a world of tans. Some 50 million of the world’s poorest, most disempowered, most forgotten people hang fiercely on to life there. And for 34 days in Darfur we joined their ranks.



There were three of us.



Idriss Anu drove the Toyota truck that would be stolen by militants. Daoud Hari was the translator, and for this he would eventually pay with severe beatings. We were en route to the village of Furawiya when the pro-government guerrillas rose silently from the grass.



“Stay in the car,” Daoud said.



But it was already too late. Even as the gunmen sauntered up, their hair matted in dreadlocks and their chests slung with small blackened things that looked like dried ears but which were Koranic amulets, we still hadn’t grasped that we had crossed a threshold where it no longer mattered what passport you carried, that you were young and loved, that your skin was supposedly not of a torturable color, or that you were a noncombatant. Words had lost all currency as words, and by the time the grinning teenager with the Kalashnikov reached for my door handle, we were condemned to live and die according to choices made by others. We had become truly Sahelian.



The Sahel is a line.



But it is also a crack in the heart—a tightrope, a brink, a ledge. See how its people walk: straight-backed on paths of red dust, placing one foot carefully before the other, as if balanced upon a knife edge. The Sahel is a bullet’s trajectory. It is the track of rains that fall but never touch the sand. It is a call to prayer and a call for your blood, and for me a desert road without end.



Gaga refugee camp, Chad



My journey began among refugees in eastern Chad. This is where I met George Bush’s father.



Bush tyrannized his family’s small plot of sand. He threw his mother’s battered dishes to the ground, pulled on visitors’ noses, and scampered away giggling. He got away with this because he was an only son. His elder sister, age four, despised him. Bush was fat-cheeked and two. “Boosh!” the refugees cooed. “Boosh-ka!” He was clearly a great camp favorite. This was in the Gaga settlement, where more than 7,000 Darfuris lived and died under UN canvas.



“Only George Bush can stop the Arabs in our land,” said Bush’s papa, Ahmed Juma Abakar. He corralled the boy in his lap. “When he grows up, he will help kill them.”



Multiple lines of identity were braided through Abakar. He was a coffee-colored African with a puff of white hair on his chin. He was a Masalit, a member of one of the African farming tribes driven out of Darfur at gunpoint by the janjaweed, the Arab nomads armed by the Arab-dominated government of Sudan. He detested Arabs. Yet he himself spoke Arabic. He also served sugary tea in shot glasses like an Arab, wore a white Arabic robe, and prayed five times a day toward Mecca. I, too, find this puzzling.



The war in Darfur has killed at least 200,000 people and displaced more than two million. It may be the first genocide of the new century. But it also happens to be one of several similar, if smaller, conflicts boiling across the Sahel. Chad, Niger, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal—low-intensity battles smoldered in each nation I visited. Niger was expelling its Mahamid nomads. Tuaregs were ambushing African soldiers in Mali. These clashes were parochial, obscure, yet part of an overarching quarrel: the eternal struggle over grass, water, and soil between pastoralists and settled peoples. Viewed this way, the Sahel represents the oldest killing field in human history. In the Sahel, Cain is still trading blows with Abel.



In Darfur the violence is infamous because Sudan’s government had cynically armed one side—the Beni Husseins, Ereigats, and other Arab herders—against rebellious African farmers such as the Masalits and Furs. These two rivals, both Muslim, had earlier evolved a complex entente. When a farmer speared a nomad’s camel, elders docked part of his harvest. The plaintiff usually claimed the grain in a hungry year. It was an antique food bank system. Murder between tribes was settled with a sliding scale of blood money—a hundred camels for a man, fifty for a woman.



A ten-pound machine with eleven moving parts has erased this legacy.



The flood of cheap Kalashnikov rifles into Darfur has devalued individual responsibility in warfare. It has undercut the tribal authorities. Young men who once sang songs to their favorite cows now serenaded their guns: “The Kalash brings cash / Without a Kalash you’re trash.”



“We used to get along,” Abakar said. “The Arabs would graze their camels on our fallow fields. They were my father’s friends.”



I asked when Arabs and Africans would be brothers again. Abakar looked at me with genuine incredulity. He then tuned his transistor radio to the BBC. The Israelis were bombing Lebanon. “Allah-u akbar!” the old Muslim tribesman said, cheering on the Israel Defense Forces. He raised George Bush’s chubby little arms in triumph.



Darfur—Towé village



On our first night in Darfur the gunmen forced Idriss and Daoud into a pickup truck and drove them off into the moonlight. They tortured them out there, tied to a thorn tree for three days. Me they pummeled without enthusiasm inside an abandoned hut in the burned-out village of Towé. Between sessions, I lay trussed on my belly, breathing hard against a dirt floor that smelled of rancid butter. I squinted out a brilliant doorway at two women.



They were planting sorghum in a dry wadi.



The women’s work appeared rudderless. They planted their seeds in lines that wriggled across the field, nudged here and there by whims of conversation. The older woman swerved whenever she told jokes, and her seed rows lurched like cardiograms. She giggled into her hands often, and I decided she must be mad. The younger one was more solemn. She toiled briskly, with a sense of purpose, as if engaged in a race, and her planting was much straighter. A tiny child crawled at her side, trying to eat the seed grain. The women labored like this all day. Then, late in the afternoon, they quarreled, and their plantings veered apart in rancor.



It occurred to me that the women were doing more than growing food. They were sowing their autobiographies.



Sex jokes, village gossip, little wisps of song, rebukes to children—all of it lay scribbled in the eccentric lines of their crops.



Women have been singled out for maximum violence in Darfur. Mass rapes by the janjaweed are systematic and well documented. As part of a Sudanese campaign of ethnic cleansing, women have been burned alive, shot, bayoneted, and dumped down wells. These stories, too, would be recorded in their fields. Lying in the hut, I imagined flying low over the savannas of Darfur and reading the women’s lives inscribed in plots of millet, peanuts, and sorghum. (See that row of melons ending abruptly at midfield? A Fur grandmother dropped her seed bucket and ran at the sound of approaching hoofbeats.)



In Towé the women were Zaghawa seminomads. The laughing one was named Fatim Yousif Zaite. She wasn’t crazy. She was 40, with the burning, clairvoyant gaze of the starving, and a smile that transmitted the innocence of her heart. She brought me gourds of asida, a yellow lentil paste she could hardly afford to share. Once, while untied to eat, I grabbed both her dusty hands in mine. She sprang back in fear.



But I only wanted to thank you, Fatim. You will always be with me. The janjaweed may toss your kids into vats of boiling water as they had done to children in another village, and the Sudanese Air Force may bomb your wretched fields as they had before, killing five of your family members. But for three days in Darfur you were my mother.



Kirou Bugaje, Niger



A few months later I was in Niger. I took a bus east. The plains turned lush.



Oxcarts jerked along red roads, hauling mountains of peanuts. Children’s laughter dribbled from the high grasses. The thok-thok-thok of women pounding millet telegraphed the news of full granaries.



This was a surprise. The Sahel of the imagination is a geographic hunger pang. Cataclysmic droughts scorched northern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. The most recent famine lashed Niger as recently as 2005. In places, the Sahel continues to starve, to lose ground to the Sahara. On the banks of the Niger River houses lie buried in coffins of sand.



Yet in Niger, a country twice the size of France, researchers have been fascinated to discover that 19,000 square miles of savanna are more vegetated today than 20 or 30 years ago. Similar regeneration of trees, grasses, and bushes appears to be under way in parts of Mali and Burkina Faso. The most precious line in the Sahel has always been green. And lately it has been growing thicker, brighter, more lustrous.



Why?



Ecologists disagree. Some credit global warming, which may be boosting rainfall in sections of northern Africa. Others say years of warfare and chaos in the Sahel have depopulated the African countryside, allowing millions of acres to lie fallow and recover.



At the Hausa village of Kirou Bugaje, the plump chief, Abdurahaman Ademu, had his own explanation: the miraculous leaf of a tree.



“The gao improves our yields of millet and sorghum,” Ademu said, padding in a white robe and sandals across his tree-shaded fields. “That’s why we don’t cut the trees down anymore. We plant around them.”



The gao, an indigenous acacia known to biologists as Faidherbia albida, is a nitrogen-fixer like the alfalfa plant. Its leaf litter is rich in nutrients. Twenty-five years ago Ademu and his people had wiped out virtually every tree within a day’s walk to feed themselves in a famine. When their crops failed, they ate the leaves. When the leaves were gone, they razed entire groves to sell for firewood and buy food. But eventually, somewhere, someone remembered that the yields of grain were richer when sown in the fertile shade of surviving gaos. Husbanding wild trees is an ancient practice in the Sahel. Its importance was rediscovered. And from there, the dusty boughs of the gao spread in widening circles of green. Today, without fanfare or mercy concerts, some of the world’s poorest farmers are busy stitching huge tracts of the Sahel back together again.



Ademu had three wives. Their names were Zeinahu, Hajara, and Hadjia. He had 20 children whom he called Hey You and This One. He was amused that I found his village beautiful.



At dusk the sky turned orange, and we ate spaghetti drowned in palm oil. The village chirped and squealed like a playground. A white moon rose, and out on the savanna the Fulani nomads were driving their lyre-horned cattle south into Nigeria. They were armed with bows, and some carried broadswords strapped to their backs. There hadn’t been a war for years. Drifting to sleep on a prayer rug outside Ademu’s family mosque, it was possible to imagine that there was nothing in the world that could not be reclaimed.



Darfur—Ghost House prison



On the third day of our captivity in Darfur, the gunmen traded Idriss, Daoud, and me to the Sudanese Army for a box of uniforms.



A military helicopter ferried us to El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, but over Kutum, a loud banging made my muscles grab. We were taking rebel ground fire. Holes blinked open in the fuselage, and a bespectacled officer sitting across from me toppled out of his seat. He rolled around on the deck clawing at his back. It was just a spent round, so he survived. His comrades congratulated him as if he’d won the lottery. But the pilot knew better. After a hard landing at the airport, he jumped out of the machine and strode away without looking back.



We were taken to a “ghost house”—one of Sudan’s many secret prisons. It was night. A gang of armed toughs screamed into our faces and shoved us against a mud wall. They called us spies and waved their cell phones in front of my eyes. The tiny screens displayed burning towers and lilliputian images of Osama bin Laden. I thought: This is the end. But of course it was only the beginning.



What can be said about those days?



An agent of the istikhbarat pawed through my cell’s pit toilet each morning, looking for what I can’t say. His work was unrewarded because I was on a hunger strike. I was protesting my being held separately, in solitary confinement. I resumed eating on the eighth day when the guards informed me they would force-feed me through a rubber tube. “Like Guantanamo,” they said.



My dreams reached malarial intensity. I dreamed of my wife and of running through the wheat north of Mosul where the falling Iraqi shells made the sound of bedsheets ripping and of Don Benito soaking his oak plow in the ranch well in the Sierra Madre. I dreamed of men I had worked with at sea, and where did you go, Edie Brickell, and of la vida loca.



During one of the midnight interrogations I spotted a small, spiky animal sniffing its way across the interrogation room floor. It looked like a hedgehog. I was light-headed with hunger. I had long since run out of things to say. I reached down from my chair.



“Don’t touch the hedgehog,” the colonel said.



“OK.”



I reached down again.



“Don’t—touch—the—hedgehog!” It was his pet.



I remember this distinctly: My face felt odd. It was my first smile in ten days.



Kano, Nigeria



I bumped south in a bush taxi shared with five Fulani nomads and 140 pounds of goat cheese bound for the markets of Nigeria. There were flies.



But for a fly, all of Africa might be Muslim.



Islam galloped across northern Africa by horse and camel while Christian Europe dozed under rulers like Henry the Quarrelsome or Ethelred the Unready. By A.D. 1000 Muslim emissaries—warriors, gold merchants, slavers, scholars, holy men—had planted the green flag of Muhammad and Allah on West African shorelines that wouldn’t see the bleached sails of a Portuguese caravel for four centuries. But the bite of the tsetse fly, Glossina, barred the way south. A vector for the blood parasite that causes sleeping sickness, the insect killed off numberless waves of invaders and their horses in its lethal domain, the open woodlands below the Sahara.



Today the tsetses still reign, and the religious border still holds. North of the fly zone, Africa remains austerely Muslim; to the south lies a steamy patchwork of Christianity. I encountered this frontier in Kano.



Nigeria’s second largest city lay smeared inside its smog. It received few tourists. It had a reputation for pious mayhem.



Hundreds had died in riots between hotheads among Kano’s majority Muslims and thousands of minority Christian migrants from Nigeria’s south. Conservative imams encouraged the governor to impose Islamic law, or sharia, on the state—a provocation in secular Nigeria—further inflaming tensions. Street signs in the city were written in Arabic, and the shops were stocked by Lebanese, Yemeni, and Egyptian traveling salesmen. Motorcycle taxis didn’t pick up women: Contact with male drivers was deemed unseemly. A few years ago local officials boycotted a UN antipolio campaign, claiming the vaccines were sterilizing Muslim girls. Polio, which had been almost wiped out in Africa, has since rebounded in Nigeria and is reinfecting surrounding countries.



There is now a black Taliban movement in Kano. One local mullah dubs himself “Kandahar,” after the capital of Afghanistan’s fanatics.



“I would pay with my blood if I preached inside the Old City,” said Foster Ekeleme, the Methodist bishop in Kano’s Christian outskirts.



Ekeleme was an Igbo from the southeast who moved with the stiff gait of a retired boxer. He had survived good and bad times between Kano’s two great faiths. When I visited, he complained bitterly that his flock was targeted every time the U.S. bombed another Muslim country, but he ended with a plea. “I am hopeful! We Christians and Muslims must learn to coexist. Look—even my night watchman is Muslim!”



It was true. A bored Hausa youth in a white skullcap leaned against Ekeleme’s church. The church itself was a fortress of raw concrete circled by a high iron fence. The fence was spiked. All that was missing was a moat. Suspecting that the Christians were speaking from a position of weakness, I consulted a Muslim thinker.



Salisu Shehu was a mellow scholar with droopy eyelids. He taught Islamic studies at Bayero University, where hand-painted billboards exhorted students to Dress Fashionable and Decently.



This is what the professor said: While it was lamentable that people had been burned, hacked, and shot to death for their choice of gods in Kano, the real enemy was poverty. Christian Igbos and Muslim Hausas required jobs. The youths were unemployed, restless. As for Islam in the Sahel, it was neither extremist nor intolerant—it was a very old type of Sufism expounded by the moderate Imam Malik; a nomad’s faith rooted in the traders’ live-and-let-live ethic.



“The Sahel isn’t a wall between Africans,” Shehu said. “It’s a crossroads—a bridge.”



Today that bridge is groaning. Both the Muslim and Christian populations of Africa have boomed over the past ten years. In the Sahel, where birthrates are among the highest in the world, mosques financed by conservative Middle Eastern states have sprouted in cities and villages. For their part, many of Africa’s Christians aren’t of the turn-the-cheek Presbyterian sort. Church loudspeakers boom out sermons, preachers bless militias, and several of the riots in Kano were ignited by Christian massacres of Muslims elsewhere in Nigeria. But I never got to meet the extremists.



At five in the morning my hotel phone rang. It was a secret policeman.



“Whatisyourpurposehere?” he demanded.



“Beg your pardon?”



“Youmustcometothelobbynow!”



The tone was clear if the English wasn’t. My paperwork was in order. But I panicked. I raced through the list of sources who might have betrayed my presence in Kano, settling on a dour pharmacist who must have Googled my name and pounced on the recent headlines: Sudan Charges U.S. Journalist With Espionage.



With the echoes of cell doors clanging inside my head, I made excuses to the agent in the lobby. I frantically began hiding my notes but only managed to throw out my back lifting the room’s refrigerator. I tossed my bag out the second-floor window, eased myself down the exterior sill, and dropped the last nine or ten feet to the ground. My back exploded. So I quit. I gave up. Hobbling into the lobby jackknifed at the waist, with my T-shirt on backward and my surviving notes tucked into in my socks, I found the place empty. The policeman had got tired of waiting. This was Nigeria.



By sunrise I had bought all the open seats in an old Peugeot bush cab and left for Mali.



Darfur—police station jail



The Russians were very drunk. There were three of them—small, medium, and large—and the Sudanese police had shot out their truck windows. The guards pitched them into our cell at midnight. The Russians had broken curfew.



They were helicopter pilots contracted to AMIS, the beleaguered African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur. One began singing patriotic songs that would last all night, and the other two asked why I was there. I told them. I had crossed into Darfur illegally, through the side door of Chad, like scores of other Western journalists. But I had been caught. I faced a 20-year sentence. I had to repeat “spying” three times until they understood.



“Sudan”—spat the small one—“is fakit.” He wore a mullet hairdo and yellow Beatle boots that curled at the tips like elf shoes. Eventually they would all be deported.



Another prisoner had meanwhile escaped in the night—a Darfuri gunrunner—leaving a cupful of his blood splashed on the jail yard wall. He’d maimed himself on the concertina wire. As a result, Idriss, Daoud, and I spent the next two days locked down with 16 other prisoners inside a 15-by-15-foot cell. We hunkered against each other in fetal positions like eggs incubating in a carton. Pickpockets, con men, goat rustlers, two street kids, and a lunatic took turns pissing out the barred door.



This was at the civilian police station, our second place of internment in El Fasher.



The cell’s interior walls were polished black with human grease from the backs of sitting men. Above this wainscoting of grime rose thousands of scrawled names. And some of them were ours.



Timbuktu, Mali



In Mali I took a ferry up the Niger River to see the Sahel’s most fabled backwater.



Timbuktu started as a nomads’ watering hole, grew by the 16th century into the Oxford of the Islamic world (25,000 scholars once resided there), and has faded back into a geographic coma. Its sand alleys were like solar ovens. Goats jaywalked on the main street, and dehydrated tourists sent letters postmarked from a town synonymous with the uttermost end of the Earth. I ducked into the shade of the Imam Ben Essayouti library for a glimpse of a golden age.



Banzoumana Traore was a Malian albino with hazel eyes and a loose cotton suit ablaze with blue and yellow polka dots. I looked again and saw that the dots were antimalaria capsules. Traore was the archivist at the library, which housed a remnant of Timbuktu’s priceless trove of medieval manuscripts. With money from South Africa, the U.S., Arab countries, and Europe, small private libraries like this one were popping up all over Timbuktu. They held the Sahel’s most astonishing intellectual legacy: tens of thousands of hand-lettered manuscripts, some stored in caves and household cupboards since the city’s fall to the Moroccans in 1591. There was love poetry composed in Moorish Spain. There were tracts on Islamic jurisprudence and centuries-old essays on, among other subjects, astronomy, optics, medicine, ethics, and botany. Gazing on these fragile treasures, it was hard not to lament the dearth of book learning in the Arabic-speaking world. A recent UN study found that only 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic over the past 1,200 years—barely equivalent to the number of books Spain translates every year.



Traore’s bright pink index finger slid across inks concocted from lampblack. He read aloud of a slave girl in ninth-century Baghdad who shamed the caliph’s advisers in a contest of wits (a lesson on women’s worth), of a discourse on the Islamic propriety of smoking tobacco (the 223-year-old conclusion was positive), and of an antique memory aid for learning algebra (by matching certain tones to numbers, students could sing out equations).



Timbuktu had been ruled by the kings of Mali and Songhai, by the Moroccans and the colonial French. “Local families guarded the manuscripts through it all,” a proud Traore said.



When I arrived, yet another empire was eyeing desolate Timbuktu.



U.S. Special Forces bucked through town in dusty Humvees. Having learned a lesson from Afghanistan—ignorance isn’t bliss, and ruinscapes of poverty, violence, and neglect incubate a murderous rage—Washington was taking a renewed interest in Muslim black Africa. The Pentagon was spending a hundred million dollars a year to train impoverished Sahelian armies in antiterror tactics. A brand-new Africa command center, AFRICOM, would come on line in October 2008, though few African countries wished to host it.



This murky front in the global war on terrorism was yet another invisible line in the Sahel.



It zigzagged across the dunes north of Timbuktu where Green Berets taught Malian soldiers how to ambush Algeria-based jihadists. The Malians were underfed, hyper-courteous, and lacked even the most basic equipment. Some were deaf. Others needed eyeglasses. “They shoot into the sand,” drawled a U.S. master sergeant. The world’s elite soldiers swooped down on outlying villages like well-toned aid workers, vaccinating babies, filling cavities, and deworming bony nomad cattle. But the most effective hearts-and-minds operation I saw was illicit.



His name was David. His shaved head was burned puce by the sun, his eyes glittered with resolve, and he was a 16-year U.S. Army veteran. He had been deployed to Africa before and wished to convert to Islam, which shows that there is no occupation without counteroccupation. He slipped out of the Special Forces compound at 9 p.m. and drove to the mud-brick palace of Timbuktu’s imam. “My gun—I forgot about my gun,” he said, realizing he couldn’t very well take his pistol to a conversion ceremony. He stashed the weapon under the SUV seat.



The imam was round and jolly and sat cross-legged under a whirring ceiling fan. A television muttered the latest soccer score between Lyon and Real Madrid. The imam instructed David to repeat the shahadah three times and lectured him at length on the five pillars of faith, in both Songhai and French.



“I missed some of that,” David said.



A half dozen Malian youths took pictures with their cell phones. They were trembling with excitement. A modern centurion embracing Allah in exotic Timbuktu was a once-in-a-lifetime sight. It made almost anything seem possible. David would later be reprimanded for violating security procedures. But for a few electric minutes amid the tan dunes of Africa, the shadows of Abu Ghraib receded.



“Fin du cérémonie!” declared the imam, clapping his hands. He added for David’s sake, “Mission accomplished!” I liked the imam immensely. He was dying to catch the end of the soccer match.



Darfur—judiciary prison



Thursdays were judgment day in El Fasher.



At our third jail, a concrete cellblock outside the local courthouse, Sudanese magistrates in pale blue leisure suits rendered their verdicts according to hudud, the Islamic punitive code, and police meted out sentences on the spot with an oxhide whip. I had never seen anyone flogged before. They forced us to watch.



The whip landed with a muffled pop on the backs, buttocks, and legs of prisoners. It was astonishing: How could human beings sweat so much—so fast? After ten blows the prisoners were wet as swimmers. At twenty, the courtyard wall behind the whipping post was spattered with their sweat. The men’s muscles spasmed. Their torsos writhed like trees in a gale. But their grit beggared belief. One middle-aged convict, a Darfuri with the respectable, middle-class look of a schoolteacher, took a hundred lashes without crying out. When it was done, he walked with great purpose across the yard, as if on some errand, and toppled facedown in the dust. He was an adulterer.



The chief whip man was Corporal Salah.



He was built square as a butcher’s block, and at age 30, his hair was leached of color. Near the end of our imprisonment, on the days when I was feeling bright, I accepted his challenges to play chess. He almost always won. He was a student of the aggressive moves of Bobby Fischer. When he spoke, it was usually in the immature certainties of jihad—“once the world converts to Islam”—but his frequent sighs told a story of repressed ambition. At night he pored over textbooks on microbiology. He dreamed of laying his big, blunt-fingered hands on the brows of patients in hospital wards. He saw himself clad in the snowy whites of a doctor, not the coarse fatigues of a cop.



Will you believe me when I tell you that there was gentleness in Corporal Salah’s heart? That he spoke to his victims tenderly, urging them not to be afraid, even as he scourged the hide on their backs?



By this time our whereabouts had become known. An American Air Force lieutenant colonel and a Marine major brought us Cheez Whiz and every other thing, and an American diplomat brought me Faulkner. Eventually Bill Richardson, governor of my home state of New Mexico, intervened. Daoud and Idriss returned to Chad, to the high wire of the Sahel. I tumbled 20 hours across the Earth in the governor’s borrowed jet.



I was doing laundry two months later when the telephone rang. It took me a moment to connect the wiry voice of the caller to certain muscular hands—the fingers clamped on men’s shoulders, guiding them firmly to a wall flecked with sweat.



“Hello my friend,” Corporal Salah bellowed.



He was shouting over a poor connection. He was in Khartoum, he said, where he’d been transferred, unhappily, to a bigger prison. He asked after my health. But what he really wanted to talk about was the U.S. visa lottery.



Saint-Louis, Senegal



The last line in the Sahel was the Atlantic.



The Senegalese capital of Dakar had the fevered feel of an embarkation point—a maritime city of pushy touts, whores for every pocketbook, and scraps of cardboard flattened on sidewalks where visa hunters camped in lines outside European embassies. A reverse trickle of European youngsters, tattooed, puffing cigarettes, self-conscious in their skins, strolled the waterfront. They rode ferries to Île de Gorée, to see the famous “doorway of no return” for slaves bound for the Americas and Europe. (In truth, few of the estimated 10 to 28 million Africans sold into bondage in the New World ever passed that way.) Senegalese papers told lurid tales of a new exodus: African migrants dying en masse while trying to reach the Canary Islands, an outpost of Europe, in motorized canoes.



For me the Sahel ended at the door of Didier, the captain of one of these boats. I met him in Saint-Louis.



He lived on the beach in a shack above the high-tide mark. He agreed reluctantly to talk. What he was doing was illegal. He had already steered two shiploads of Senegalese, Malians, Guineans, Nigerians, and Burkinabes to the Canaries. All had hocked their bicycles, their wives’ treadle sewing machines, their parents’ barren farms, their slum shacks—everything they owned to make the $900 passage to a Sahelian’s version of El Dorado: washing dishes in Valencia or hustling leatherware in the piazzas of Rome. Twelve paying customers had died on him. They had gone out of their heads, Didier explained. They guzzled seawater on the five-day, 800-nautical-mile journey through the Atlantic’s swells.



“We read the Koran over them and threw them over,” he said. “Otherwise they start to stink.”



Didier was leaving that evening with another canoe. He would earn a small fortune, a thousand dollars (a good year’s wages) in a week. He was beautifully muscled. Yet despite his virile swagger in brand-new jeans and red T-shirt, his glances collapsed inward with fear. He was a man poised on a gangplank. Ambulances were wailing that entire afternoon in Saint-Louis. An emigrant canoe had foundered offshore. Bodies washed up with all the skin abraded from their arms where they had clung to the doomed boat’s gunwales. More than a hundred people were missing.



Tens of thousands attempt this passage every year. Hundreds die. The Europeans were sending naval vessels to try to stop them.



What was going on here could just as well be called the mass evacuation of Africa as much as “illegal migration.” It was a desperate flight from a way we’ll never be. An underpaid schoolteacher in North America or Europe earns not ten times, not twenty times, but a hundred times more than millions of Sahelians. To think such ravening disparity will somehow never touch you is foolish. In the teeming fishermen’s quarter of Saint-Louis, among the shanties where battered TVs disgorged idiotic French reality shows, and in the sand alleyways speckled with goat droppings, there was talk of bigger canoes, of more barrels of diesel fuel crammed into holds—reenacting the old slave crossing to the Caribbean, to America.



I watched Didier leave at sunset.



I last saw him standing stiffly at the tiller of his boat, wearing a red slicker, nosing out of the harbor amid a screen of other fishing smacks. He did not acknowledge my wave. A little girl did cartwheels on the beach among piles of human waste. Impossibly clean white birds pecked at things. Didier’s canoe diminished into a darkening sea that seem sketched in charcoal. I was secretly with them. I saw myself huddled in that plank boat. But even if we all survived, I wasn’t sure we would ever truly escape the Sahel.



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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Jokes: The World's Funniest Jokes from Readers' Digest 2009

The World's Funniest Jokes
Readers' Digest 2009

Argentina
An elderly couple goes to Burger King, where they carefully split a burger and fries. A trucker takes pity on them and offers to buy the wife her own meal.''It's all right,'' says the husband. ''We share everything.''A few minutes later, the trucker notices that the wife hasn't taken a bite. ''I really wouldn't mind buying your wife her own meal,'' he insists.''She'll eat,'' the husband assures him. ''We share everything.''Unconvinced, the trucker implores the wife, ''Why aren't you eating?''The wife snaps, ''Because I'm waiting for the teeth!''

Australia
A polar bear walks into a bar and says, ''Give me a scotch and . . . Coke.''''Why the long pause?'' asks the bartender.''I don't know,'' says the bear. ''I've always had them.''BrazilTired of waiting at the back of the line to get on Noah's Ark, a flea jumps from one animal to another as she moves closer to the front. She leaps and leaps until she lands on the back of an elephant. The pachyderm turns to its mate and says testily, ''I knew it! Here they go with the pushing and shoving!''

Canada
A man says to a friend, ''My wife is on a three-week diet.'' ''Oh, yeah? How much has she lost so far?'' ''Two weeks.''

China
My cousin always ''borrows'' money from her older brother's piggy bank, which drives him crazy. One day, she found the piggy in, of all places, the refrigerator. Inside was this note: ''Dear sister, I hope you'll understand, but my capital has been frozen.''

Croatia
A concerned police officer approaches a boy crying in front of a newsstand.''What's wrong?'' he asks.''Superman isn't out yet!''''I'll handle it,'' the cop assures him. ''Hey, Superman!'' he shouts. ''Come on out! We won't hurt you!''

Czech Republic
A man calls a radio deejay and says, ''I've found a wallet with a hundred thousand koruny inside. There's also a card that says ‘Jan Ziegler, Seifert Street 3, Prague.' ''''So?'' says the deejay. ''What do you want us to do? '' ''Would you be so kind as to play the man a song?''

Finland
Hannu wants everything to be perfect for his anniversary trip to the hotel where he and his wife honeymooned 30 years earlier. So he gets there a day early to make all the arrangements. That night, he e-mails her but misspells the address and it goes to a recent widow.The next day, the widow's son finds his mother passed out in front of her computer. On the screen is this e-mail: ''My darling wife, I've just gotten here and everything's set for your arrival tomorrow. I hope your trip down here will be as pleasant as mine. P.S. It's really hot!''

France
President Sarkozy visits a steel factory. To the boss's surprise, the president greets an employee, Morton, with a warm hug. The same thing happens when Barack Obama visits, and again during Vladimir Putin's tour.Unimpressed, the boss says to Morton, ''I bet you don't know the pope.''Morton shrugs. ''We play golf together.''The gauntlet has been tossed, and the boss pays their way to the Vatican. During the Benediction, Morton slips away. Sure enough, he reappears – side by side with the pope.Two Chinese tourists tap the boss on the shoulder and ask, ''Who's the guy in white standing with Morton?''

Germany
Wandering around a fairground, a man enters a fortune-teller's tent for a laugh. ''I see you're the father of two,'' says the seer, gazing into her crystal ball.''Ha! That's what you think,'' says the man scornfully. ''I'm the father of three.''''Ha!'' says the fortune-teller. ''That's what you think.''
HungaryDoctor: Have you taken my advice and slept with the window open?Patient: Yes.Doctor: So your asthma disappeared completely?Patient: No, but my watch, TV, iPod and laptop have.

India
A business executive visits his dear Chinese friend in the hospital. ''Li kai yang qi guan,'' says the sick man feebly. The executive desperately wants to help him, but he doesn't speak Mandarin. ''Li kai yang qi guan!'' says the patient, as he draws his last breath. Later that year, the executive is in Shanghai on business when he finally learns the meaning of the phrase Li kai yang qi guan: Get off my oxygen tube.

Korea
A fortune-teller advised me, ''Do everything your boss says.'' Sage advice, I thought, as I was working on an important project.As if I needed more proof of just how good the psychic was, that night, as I read the newspaper, I noticed my horoscope: ''Do everything your boss says.''

Mexico
Indians ask their new chief whether the winter will be cold or mild. Since the young chief never learned the ways of his ancestors, he tells them to collect firewood, then he goes off and calls the National Weather Service.''Will the winter be bad?'' he asks.''Looks like it,'' is the answer.So the chief tells his people to gather more firewood. A week later, he calls again. ''Are you positive the winter will be very cold?''''Absolutely.''The chief tells his people to gather even more firewood, then calls the Weather Service again: ''Are you sure?''''I'm telling you, it's going to be the coldest winter on record.''''How do you know?''''Because the Indians are gathering firewood like crazy!''

The Netherlands
A starlet is seated next to a lawyer on a long flight. She craves her sleep, but he keeps waking her up. ''Let's play a trivia game,'' he suggests. ''If I answer wrong, I'll pay you $50. If you answer wrong, you owe me $5.''The starlet agrees, and the lawyer goes first. ''What's the distance between the earth and the moon?''The starlet hands the lawyer $5. Now it's her turn. ''What goes up a mountain on three legs and comes down on four?''The lawyer is dumbstruck. He scans the internet, flips through his pocket encyclopedia, and texts every scientist he can find. No dice. Hours later, he wakes up the starlet, hands her $50, and asks, ''So what's the answer?''Without a word, she hands him $5 and goes back to sleep.

Norway
A woman rubs a lamp and out pops a genie. ''You're a kind lady, so I'll grant you one wish,'' the genie tells her.''See this cat? I'd rather have a strong, handsome man,'' she says.The genie agrees and – poof! – the cat turns into a Brad Pitt clone. The woman leaps into his lap.''Do you have anything to say before we make love?'' she asks.''Yes,'' he says. ''I bet you wish you hadn't had me neutered last week.''

Philippines
Joe, Mike, Mary and Tom were talking about their dream jobs. ''I want to be a lawyer,'' Joe began, ''so that I can defend my countrymen.''''I want to be a congressman,'' said Mike, ''so I can draft laws to benefit my countrymen.''''I want to be a doctor,'' said Mary, ''so that I can cure my countrymen.''''How about you, Tom? What would you like to be?'' asked Joe.Tom thought a moment and replied, ''I'd like to be a countryman.'' Submitted by John Carlo B. PortugalA man is visiting an old friend when a little girl races through the room.''Diploma,'' the friend calls after her, ''bring us two cups of coffee.''''Diploma? What an odd name,'' says the visitor. ''How did she get it?''The friend sighs. ''I sent my daughter to study at the university in Lisbon, and that's what she came back with.''

Romania
Vlad gets pulled over after a high-speed car chase. ''I'm going to help you out,'' says the police officer. ''Give me a good excuse and I won't write you a ticket.''''Three weeks ago, my wife left me for a cop,'' Vlad explains. ''So when I saw your car coming, I thought you were trying to bring her back.''

Russia
Due to the recession, to save on energy costs, the light at the end of the tunnel will be turned off. – God

Serbia
A neighbour finds a young boy sitting on the stairs crying. ''What's the matter, honey?'' she asks him.''It's my father,'' the boy sobs. ''He hit his finger with a hammer.''''Then why are you crying?''''Because first I laughed!''

Slovenia
As they leave the courthouse, a lawyer turns to his grim-looking client and says, ''Janez, what's wrong? You were acquitted.''''I know, but now I'm really in trouble,'' says Janez. ''I just rented out my apartment for three years.''

Sweden
Visiting the countryside on a hunting trip, the well-dressed man from Stockholm takes aim and shoots a duck. But the fowl drops into a farmer's field, and the farmer claims it.Since both want it, the farmer suggests settling the dispute with an old fashioned hick-kick. ''I kick you as hard as I can in the crotch, then you do the same to me,'' he explains. ''Whoever screams the least gets the bird.''The city man agrees. So the farmer winds up and delivers a crushing blow to the man's privates, and he collapses to the ground. Twenty minutes later, when he finally manages to stand, he gasps, ''My turn.''''Nah,'' says the farmer, turning away. ''You can keep the duck.''

Switzerland
Wife: Honey, did you notice? I bought a new toilet brush.
Husband: Yes, I did. But I still prefer the paper.

Spain
A beggar approaches a grandmother at the beach with his hands out. ''Please, señora,'' the poor man pleads, ''I haven't eaten all day.''''Good,'' says the grandmother. ''Now you won't have to worry about cramps when you go for a swim.''

Taiwan
Papa Turtle is telling his son a bedtime story. ''Once upon a time, there was a white bunny.''''Aw, c'mon, Dad,'' says the boy. ''That's kid stuff. What about some science fiction?''''All right. Once upon a time, there was a bunny in outer space . . .''''Dad! Make it more grown-up.''''OK, OK. Promise you won't tell Mum.''''I swear.''''Once upon a time, there was a naked bunny . . .''

Thailand
''Hurry up or we'll be late!'' shouts a teacher to her kindergarten class.''What's the rush?'' a tot asks coolly. ''If we're late, we'll miss your next class!'' the teacher reminds him. The kid shrugs. ''If you're in such a hurry, go on without us.''

United Kingdom
''About a month before he died, my grandmother covered my grandfather's back with lard. After that, he went downhill very quickly.'' United StatesA priest, a minister and a rabbi want to see who's best at his job. So they each go into the woods, find a bear, and attempt to convert it. Later they get together. The priest begins: ''When I found the bear, I read to him from the Catechism and sprinkled him with holy water. Next week is his First Communion.''''I found a bear by the stream,'' says the minister, ''and preached God's Holy Word. The bear was so mesmerised that he let me baptise him.''They both look down at the rabbi, who is lying on a gurney in a body cast. ''Looking back,'' he says, ''maybe I shouldn't have started with the circumcision.''

Article: The Grand in Grandmother, Readers' Digest, Nov 2008

The Grand in Grandmother

She was eccentric, sharp-tongued and sometimes a tyrant, but she never let me forget what was really important

By Rhen C. Tayangona
November 2008

When I was growing up, my parents took teaching jobs in a remote town in Quezon Province, Philippines, leaving me and my younger sister and two younger brothers in the care of my grand-parents in the town of Sampaloc.

Nanay, as we called my grandmother, did not hug or kiss children. Her tongue was sharp and her words make the heart bleed. She was a tyrant, but she was there. We saw our parents only a few times a year, but as early as I could remember, Nanay had always been a part of my life. I believed grandmothers lived forever.

She taught me many lessons, though I often ignored them. “When you get married, get custom-made furniture to give dignity to your house, never those bought in stores,” she once declared. To my nine-year-old ears, it didn’t make much sense.

Nanay urged me never to accept second-best. For her, “good enough” was never enough, from the grades you bring home from school to the service you receive in fast-food restaurants. She taught me that my happiness comes first, because in the end you will be alone, and if you die sad you only have yourself to blame.

Still, she had her weaknesses. When we were little she adopted orphaned cats that slept on the sofa with her and left so much hair on the beds they made me sneeze. The cats defecated inside the house and it stank to high heavens, but Nanay did not have the heart to punish them.

It was a different story with her grandchildren. When we displeased her, she threatened to die and haunt us. My grandfather was a submissive, quiet man who never interfered when Nanay spewed the curses that would befall us if we did not behave. As a result, I never feared anything like ghosts or vampires because I lived with the “Real Thing” and she could terrorise both young children and old men.

When I was 13, Nanay sent me to Manila to attend high school, and I stayed there for university. I came back each summer, but after I got married the visits became less frequent. Soon all of her grandchildren had moved out. After my grandfather died, Nanay was left on her own. In her letters to me, she wrote of how lonely she was, but I never made the effort to spend more time with her.

Nanay died last year after suffering a stroke. She was 83. After the funeral, I went to our old house and helped sort through her possessions. My grandmother had kept so many things from my childhood: the kitten-pattern shorts I sewed as a high school project that I could not wear because they were too tight; the cross-stitched “Home Sweet Home” wall décor I made in Primary Five that she had framed; the letters I wrote home in my high school and university years, either asking for more rice or thanking her for sending fruit. Photos of her grandchildren were on display in the living room.

Nanay’s room looked the same. She was fond of umbrellas, and there were four new ones hanging behind the door. She liked to take apart old dresses and put the pieces back together in different outfits, mixing and matching sleeves, collars, belts, appliqués and skirts. In her closet I found scraps of Spanish lace and embroidered collars, waiting for her patient hands to turn them into some fashion statement, along with towels individually wrapped in plastic, reserved for when guests would arrive.

I came across an old set of white crocheted curtains that she had made. I hadn’t seen them in years, after my grandmother gave in to the modern times and ordered curtains made of yellow-gold satin and cream lace. It was delicate, and in places the crochet had unravelled. As I admired the hard work in the pattern, I realised I could repair the piece – using the crochet skills Nanay had taught me – and turn it into a tablecloth.

When I visited her grave, I was filled with sorrow as I reflected on all the birthdays I had allowed to pass. I thought about all the stories she never got a chance to tell me, about her life, about the girl she once had been, about the town I left behind. It occurred to me that perhaps she did not know how to tell me because I did not know how to ask.

Although I vowed never to be like her, I too married a quiet man who doesn’t like to fight. My seven-year-old daughter Elize can be silenced with one look from me, and I am notorious for terrorising call centre agents, customer service staff and beauticians.

And now I see Elize, so attached to my mother-in-law that she asks if she could live in her grandmother’s house. When at bedtime Elize asks for a nightlight and a little gas lamp, her grandmother obliges. Her grandmother cuts her hair, allows her to play in the sand and shows her how to save money for a new doll. Tyrant or not, there are things that only grandmothers can teach.

When the crocheted curtain-turned-tablecloth is complete, I will try something else. Maybe I will cook sweetened sticky rice or make a patchwork blanket from scrap cloth. The way Nanay taught me, the way I remember. I was right all along. Grandmothers live forever. They are in their granddaughters’ hearts.

WEBSITES on Environment -from National Geographic Channel

Websites on Environment – From National Geographic Channel

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090609-future-food-sustainable.html

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/sustainable-agriculture

Global warming
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/gw-effects.html

Deforestation
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/deforestation-overview.html
Ozone depletion
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/ozone-depletion-overview.html

Hydropower
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/hydropower-profile.html

Biofuels
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/biofuel-profile.html

NATURAL DISASTERS

Earthquakes
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/earthquake-profile.html

Hurricanes
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/hurricane-profile.html

Tsunamis
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/tsunami-profile.html

Wildfires, haze
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/wildfires.html

Article: A Visit to the Elephant Sanctuary, Readers' Digest, Sept 2007

A Visit to the Elephant Sanctuary
Readers' Digest Sept 2007

When two abused elephants are reunited after 23 years, their joy is trumpeted throughout the colony.
By Andy Simmons
From Reader's Digest

Theme: Freedom and Friends


To enter the Elephant Sanctuary, you have to pass through a massive gate, part of the thick, cabled fencing that surrounds the perimeter. It’s the kind of fence that kept the dinosaurs locked inside Jurassic Park. Inside, small birds flit in the grass, and there’s an unusual stillness for a place that’s home to the world’s largest land animals.
Travel farther down the almost impassable packed dirt that acts as a major boulevard, and the sanctuary continues to surprise. It’s a banquet table of subtropical landscaping. Lush forests of sweet gum trees and maples give way to brush that seamlessly becomes hilly terrain, then opens up to savanna-like plains. It’s a perfect spot for elephants. Surprising, since we’re in Hohenwald, Tennessee, and not Burma or Africa as it might seem. The sanctuary was started in 1995 by Carol Buckley and Scott Blaise. The two former elephant trainers had seen enough abuse and neglect at circuses and zoos to inspire them to create a haven where elephants could live out their lives. The sanctuary would offer what Buckley considers the three staples for a happy elephant: freedom from dominance, room to roam and lots of other elephants. At the 2,700-acre preserve, the 19 African and Asian elephants in residence are allowed to exist as they would in the wild. Elephants in zoos and circuses are typically moved with a tool called an ankus, a nasty-looking wooden shaft with a metal hook protruding from the top. It’s banned at the sanctuary. Instead, “we created a system where dominance does not exist at all,” says Buckley. “We give them the option to say no.” Our photographer saw this firsthand. Buckley and Blaise would not bring us to the elephants, nor would they scatter hay in order to draw them out. Instead they gave the elephants the option to come to us. Luckily, two elephants, Shirley and Bunny, eventually did appear. And in a sweetly affectionate gesture, they even held trunks. Yes, Buckley confirms, just as we’ve read in National Geographic and seen on the Discovery Channel, elephants show great compassion toward one another. Because the elephants she works with have suffered neglect and abuse, Buckley sees this empathy demonstrated in some unforgettable scenes, including this remarkable story. A circus refugee, Jenny had often been tied up for 23 hours a day or crammed into small train cars traveling from one city to the next. After suffering a crippling leg injury, she was dumped at a dog-and-cat shelter, which was ill-equipped to care for an elephant, let alone an ailing one. An animal rights activist contacted Buckley, who brought Jenny to Hohenwald.
Side by Side
Freedom’s a wonderful thing, and Jenny was eager to experience it. She was kept alone in a yard for one day due to injury, but that proved stressful for her. So she was let out with the rest of the herd. And that’s when she stumbled on a friend from the past. Jenny was still a calf when she and Shirley first met years before, toiling together at a circus. Although they’d spent only a few weeks with each other, Shirley assumed the role of surrogate mother to Jenny before they were separated. But that was 23 years earlier—would they remember? Jenny knew right away who Shirley was. Soon Hohenwald was rocking as the two greeted each other with trumpeting and celebratory bumping. Shirley and Jenny instantly fell into their old routine, wandering the sanctuary side by side. The good times had lasted only a few years when Jenny became ill, the result of her previous leg injury. When she grew too weak to roam the hills and hollows, Jenny trundled toward a shady valley, found some soft, beaten-down underbrush, and lay down. Shirley stood vigil night and day, using her trunk to help her friend to rise and even shift her weight. Also by Jenny’s side were two other sanctuary friends, Tarra and Bunny. At one point, the four spent three hours vocalizing and trumpeting—the vibrations felt by every living being in the sanctuary. In all her years of working with animals, Buckley had never seen anything like this joy-filled celebration of Jenny’s life. The next day, October 17, 2006, the great animals continued their vocalizing. There was nothing urgent in their song. It was soothing. Still, it was too much for Shirley. About to lose Jenny for the second time, she retreated to a nearby hill to grieve alone. In her absence, Bunny and Tarra comforted Jenny by stroking her. They rested like that for some time, Bunny calmly answering each of Jenny’s rumbles with a crescendo trumpet, while Tarra accompanied the duo with high-pitched chirps. That evening, at the age of 36—young for an elephant—Jenny died. Tarra and Bunny stayed at her side through the night. But whereas Jenny’s suffering had ended, Shirley’s began. Elephants wear their hearts on their trunks, as it were, so it was easy to tell that Shirley was not coping well with Jenny’s death—her shoulders slumped, her eyes were half shut and her trunk dragged on the ground. She wasn’t eating or vocalizing. She was depressed. Bunny followed her to the hill, where the two stayed for days before finally returning to the barn. There, a new arrival had made her presence felt. Another circus outcast, Misty is a gregarious bundle of energy who literally jumps for joy. Even Shirley couldn’t ignore her raucous spinning and loud, jubilant trumpeting. With her spirits restored, Shirley, the oldest and largest elephant at the sanctuary, began to eat and play, and even picked her trunk off the ground. She was back with the herd, where she belonged. Watch an elephant walk on its hind legs or perform a hula dance at a circus and it’s easy to forget that these are sensitive, intelligent creatures for whom the family unit is everything. Luckily for them, there’s a place in Tennessee that hasn’t.

ARTICLE: Our Favourite Toy, Readers' Digest, December 2008

Our Favourite Toy
Readers' Digest
December 2008

As soon as we saw that battery-operated car in the toy shop, my brother and I talked of little else. Could our struggling parents afford it?by Aung KhineDecember 2008The tropical sun blazed from above the toddy trees and a mirage danced on the horizon. It seemed as if Hell itself were boiling up from underneath the ground.Father sighed quietly as he looked across his fields. The cotton-wool plants were starting to shrivel in the heat. He had done everything he could to salvage his crop, but it seemed there was nothing more he could do.Both my parents were from Myingyan, a Burmese district town 100 kilometres south of Mandalay. But Ko Kyaw Zin, my elder brother, and I were raised as "country kids" in a small village near Myingyan, where Mother was a high school teacher. Father also had a bachelor's degree in education, but he had trouble finding a job. So he bought a few acres of land near the village and tried to make a living as a farmer. Unfortunately, the country's struggling economy and the region's harsh weather never favoured him. Mother's salary was not enough to support a family, and they struggled to make ends meet.Father had to labour all day long under the scorching sun. Mother also worked on the farm on weekends to save the expense of another worker. Most of the money they earned at harvest time was used to repay loan sharks.Despite their hardships, I never heard them complaining. They were happy and believed that their sons would someday become great men.When Ko Kyaw Zin was nine and I was eight, we spent our summer holidays with our grandparents in Myingyan. During a visit to the Twin Cats Store, we spotted a red battery-operated car. It had real headlights and flickering tail-lights. To our eyes it was an angel in the world of all toys.Infatuated as we were, we did not enquire about the price. Why bother when it was obviously too expensive for us? We had never owned real toys - all of our playthings were make-dos built from cardboard boxes and broken housewares.Still, Ko Kyaw Zin and I often talked enthusiastically about that beautiful car. Later, our parents joined us in Myingyan, and when Father heard about the car, he announced that if we loved it that much he would buy it for us. When he had enough money we would go to the store and get it. We were elated. From that day on, we never stopped talking about our big plans for our car. We even prepared a bamboo box with a lock to keep it in. The summer holidays were almost over; we would have to go back to our village soon. Then the big day came. Father said we could buy the car.During the ten-minute walk to the Twin Cats Store, my brother and I giggled and hopped and bounced along beside Father. When we arrived, I walked straight up to the display case and pointed to the elegant little car.The store clerk glanced at us and hesitatingly took it out. No doubt she thought that a weary-looking man and his sons in worn-out clothes could only be annoying window shoppers."It's 370 Kyats," she told us in a monotone. That's about $57 now.I stood there, holding the car and waiting for Father to pay. He smiled at us and said in a soft voice, "Ah, Sons, that's a little bit more than what I've got in my pocket at the moment. We'll have to come back later."There was a silence. We might have been young but we understood. Then Father pointed to another toy car and asked the clerk, "How about that one?""That is more expensive." She wasn't even looking at us.Father had always been a brave man, but I wonder how much courage he needed to face his boys as he took their hands and retreated from the store.We walked back to our grandparents' house in silence. "Well, with 370, your mother can buy a new uniform," Father said as if talking to himself. We knew mother had only one school uniform, which she had to wash each day after school and wear again the next day. Ko Kyaw Zin and I never spoke about the toy car again.Years passed and my parents decided there was no future for us in the village. We moved to Myingyan and Father started giving private tuition classes to matriculation students. It turned out to be a lucrative job. We no longer struggled to get by.My brother and I attended the Mandalay University of Medicine, and we only saw our parents on holidays. One day when I was back home, I saw Father counting his money after evening classes. Holding a stack of notes, he said to Mother, "What do you think I'd like to do with all this money?""No idea," said Mother."I want to buy a car from the Twin Cats Store."Mother only smiled. At first I was astonished they had remembered such a small thing after a decade. Then I realised how stupid I was to have thought it was just an unimportant incident in their lives. I pretended not to have a clue what they were talking about. Why would I let them know that their little boy, too, could not forget his favourite toy, the one he couldn't have?