Etude
>Life is unfolding exactly the way it is meant to
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| Ronald Ceuppens @ Paper Darts/ |
Scott Tucker recounts the everyday encounters in Guinea, West Africa @ Etude.
The sound of the boys crying out in pain is new. The other sounds are the same. The bat wings, quick and rubbery, flitting overhead in a haze of mango leaves and wood smoke. The old counterfeiter, sitting outside his front door, talking quietly with visitors in threadbare suits.
The children sing a school song in French outside in the dark, then start up a game of “de donc/dernier,” Simon Says, jumping forward and backward over a circle drawn in the dirt. They cheer noisily out of habit when the electricity comes on, although they continue playing the same games electricity or not. There are no vehicles again tonight on the main road, due to a military curfew that’s been in place since the near-assassination of President Dadis Camara more than a month ago. A dundunba party carries on, however, past 11 p.m. in a neighbor’s yard, with drumming and dancing and excited announcements coming over a microphone. C’est normal. C’est Conakry.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I have come to Guinea, West Africa, at a time when the U.S. embassy is closed and all Americans have been urged to leave the country. I have left the comforts of Seattle, Washington for this, to remind myself that there is power in ordinary people, even the world’s poorest people, going about living their daily lives. These people can save a nation. They can make a nation worth saving. They can turn around your thinking. I know only one person “on the ground,” Karim Koumbassa, my drum and dance teacher in Seattle, and a native of Guinea. He is, like most men in Conakry, strong and pliant from years of physical labor in the equatorial heat. He is 33 years old, best guess, although age is happily unimportant here. Dates of birth are routinely invented on official paperwork.
>Her long hair drifts like seaweed
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| Elizabeth Soule @ DeepSleep/ |
Chris Wiewiora on the tragedies of captured orcas @ Etude.
Dawn Brancheau will drown during a clear, sunny afternoon toward the end of the “Believe” orca show at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. It’s Wednesday, February 24, 2010, and the water is cold, even though the high for the day is 70 degrees. Some of the audience finishes a late lunch at Dine with Shamu—a buffet-style restaurant with a viewing window of the whale tank. The diners who have finished their meals are starting on the assorted cookie platter. In the stadium are children holding onto their parents while dripping orca-shaped, black and white, ice cream Shamu bars on their hands. The families have jackets with them, the sleeves tied around their waists if they are not under the awning’s shade.
The surface of the water is slightly choppy with 10 mph winds. A little before 2 p.m., Tilkium (nicknamed Tilly)—a bull and the largest captive whale at SeaWorld—will grab Dawn, a trainer for 14 years, in his mouth and pull her into and then under the water. The autopsy released the next day will report Dawn died from “multiple traumatic injuries and drowning.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Dawn is one of only a few trainers allowed to work with Tilly. During the show, she has been using ice cubes as markers for Tilly, so he knows where he is supposed to surface. On the stage’s poolside deck, Dawn has been shuffling side to side with Tilly mimicking her by doing a sort of dance, while the audience listens to factoids: “Did you know SeaWorld’s killer whales have their teeth brushed everyday? Why? Because dental problems are the single biggest cause of orca fatalities in the wild.”
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