Toronto, August 15, 2012. The Spadina Avenue corridor from Bloor to King Streets is a brocade of barriers, hard hats, steel beams and jackhammers, as the TTC’s construction teams retool the streetcar infrastructure to conform to the new trams arriving next year.
Now that self-made humanitarian and “stones-into-schools” false prophet Greg Mortenson has been ordered to repay more than $1-million to the charity he founded, exploited and financially mismanaged, it’s as good a time as any to assess the disgraced Three Cups of Tea author and his crumbling empire of goodness.
Here’s a quick recap of Mortenson’s (true) journey:
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis — the Israeli actor and co-founder of Palestine’s Freedom Theatre — who died in ahail of gunfire from still-unknown assailants on April 4, 2011, just a few steps from the door of his beloved children’s drama centre in the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin.
Juliano’s murder has been blamed on radical Islamists who may have opposed the Freedom Theatre’s co-educational curriculum of dance, drama, street art and photography, and the elements of cooperation and non-violent peace-building inherent in the joint Palestinian-Israeli, grassroots project.
Continue reading “Jenin’s Freedom Theatre marks anniversary of founder’s murder”
Last week I received an envelope in the mail from the Foundation for International Community Assistance, or FINCA, which consisted of three photographs of women presenting a form of livelihood to the camera, and a letter from FINCA president and CEO Rupert W. Scofield informing me about “micro-entrepreneurship,” “village banks,” and how my “donation of $50 or more” can empower poor women like “Dominga” and “Robinah” (not pictured), whose brief tales of former woe and current hope are offered up as proof of FINCA’s commitment and success.
As an experienced communications manager and advisor in the non-profit/NGO sector, I’m very curious about these kinds of promotions. When I see something like this, there are 5 things that immediately come to mind:
1) Who are the women (and the child) in the photographs?
2) Who is the photographer(s)?
3) Under what circumstances were the photographs taken?
4) Does the letter inform me of how my donation is managed/governed?
5) Am I encouraged to seek out more information before becoming a donor?
So how did FINCA do with respect to these five benchmarks?
Continue reading “FINCA: Exploitative Fundraising or Successful Direct Marketing?”
Nine years ago this month I dropped anchor in Tunisia for a six-month contract teaching English at a school in the seaside city of Sousse, packing along with me little besides my old Canon single lens reflex, an 18mm wide-angle lens and a few dozen rolls of Ilford FP4.
I worked six days a week, so when that seventh day came round I was on a bus or a train somewhere into countryside as far as I could get. But it wasn’t till shortly before my departure that I was able to devote an entire week to a voyage into the Sahara, at least to its border towns and not-too-distant oases.
It was a hermetic experience: late May in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, the Chott el-Djerid salt flats, and beyond them the Sahara — with their mirages, siestas, scorpions and utter lack of tourists — is conducive to isolation and meditation, and I found myself subsisting on a diet of bread, water, the kindness of strangers and contemplations of photography.
Continue reading “Adventures in Advenience: The Return of a Photographic Moment”
It is possible that the most garrulous person in all of Iceland is a man who spends most of his day alone on a mountain ridge between two volcanoes. Sigurður Sigurðursson is a seasonal warden of a lonely trekkers hut at a place called Fimmvörðuháls, and if you think you can hike up to his domain for a cozy night underneath the aurora borealis without learning how to pronounce Fimmvörðuháls–and without developing an affinity for the Icelandic language–you are sorely mistaken.
It’s simple when you chop it down to the roots, he says (and given the lunar landscape of his realm he’s certainly not talking about trees). Fimm is five. Vörð (pronounced vordh) is cairn. Háls is neck. The Neck of the Five Cairns. That’s where we are.*
Continue reading “101 Icelandic: A Thorough Tongue-Twisting Trek Through a Thwarting Language”
It had to be high on the list of places to visit in Iceland: Eyjafjallajökull, the ice cap and eponymous volcano that just a year ago erupted with more fury than a stampede of sheep, spewing clouds of ash across Europe and sending air-traffic controllers on a long-sought holiday (by train, of course).
How could one visit the land of jökulls and not deposit a soft, black footprint on the slopes of this tongue twister (“aye, if yet, la yokel”), if only to ensure that, at least at one particular moment, nature has relaxed its cycle of self-correction long enough for us humans to venture out of our caves?
In Iceland the natural world certainly has a way of reminding us not to take it for granted. Maybe it’s the way the sun always seems so distant, at a languid low angle, as though Terrence Malick is in control of the lighting. Maybe it’s in the wind, which blows up, down, warm, cold, east and west, seemingly all at once. Maybe it’s the absence of trees, a taut lesson that what goes down doesn’t always come back up.*
Or maybe it’s the way those infamous volcanoes keep all but the most brennevín-sodden of Icelanders (and the rest of us) continually on their toes.
Thus, climbing up and setting foot on Eyjafjallajökull is sort of the human way of letting nature know that, hey, point taken.
Continue reading “I, uh, Felt a Jokull (and other Icelandic things)”
Iceland’s Ring Road: Ten days, 1339 kilometres, piles of bitafiskur and skyr, and one red VW Jetta.
View the complete photo gallery
Related Posts:
101 Icelandic: A Thorough Tongue-Twisting Trek Through a Thwarting Language
I, uh, Felt a Jokull (and other Icelandic things)
When Samuel Champlain paddled down the Restoule River with a party of Ottawa nation aboriginals in the early seventeenth century, he believed he was beating a trail of discovery to a great, westward river that would lead to the mer de l’ouest, the ocean on the far side of what was, to Europeans, a new found land.
In the Canada of Champlain’s peers, the frontier emerged from obscurity beneath each footstep and paddle stroke of he and his men. What became known as the French River was the first of many underestimations of Champlain, who was by all evidence one of the more gifted of the early European explorers of North America.
Champlain stood at the confluence of the Restoule and French Rivers and believed the latter flowed over the western horizon to the salted sea. (No doubt his indigenous guides, who may never have come across anything but fresh water during their inland lives, struggled in translation with this alien concept of saltwater.)
Champlain was wrong. But in his wrongness, he made if not a discovery then at least a revelation.
Continue reading “Discovery with a Paddle: Canoeing the Restoule and French Rivers”
In India I learned most of the local language at the School of Hard Knocks, otherwise known as the vegetable market. Elbowing my way through the horde of pickers, it was:
“I’ll take that one, what do you call it?”
Brinjal.
“Ach-cha, I’ll take chaari.”*
What do they call them in your country?
“Aubergine. Or sometimes eggplant.”
Egg. Plant?
The vegetable in question is native to southern India, where it was originally known as vatinganah (in Sanskrit). Legend holds that this word, broken up, literally means “fart, go away!” But this ain’t true.
From India the purple perennial travelled west and became badinjāna (Persian) and الباذنجان (al-badhinjān; Arabic). In the 11th century Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna) observed that the badhinjān generates melancholy and obstructions.
In some modern Arabic dialects the word passes the ears as baydhinjān, which sounds like it derives from “egg” (baydh) or “house” (bayt) “of the devil” (ad-djinn).**
The veggie encroached upon Europe from two sides. In the west, Arabic influence led to the Spanish berenjenafrom whence came albergínia (Catalan) and aubergine (Middle French).
Richard Alexander Johnson