Translation of an Indian Prayer

This reminded me of what the nuns at my Catholic primary School were trying to instill in us - guess some things are universal.

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O Lord Thou art the ultimate creator of all things.� I respect your power.

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Lord Thou hast given me this unique and wonderful body.

Grant me the power to use it for the good of all mankind.

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Lord this incomparable intellect that Thou hast bestowed on me, grant me the power to use it always in the best possible way.

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Lord there is no way to count the gifts Thou hast bestowed on me so I bow my head in all humility with gratefulness.

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Grant me the power to do what is right and keep everyone in this world happy,healthy and prosperous.

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Let there be peace all around

Fishies...

Thanks to the Government's far-reaching and well-thought-out scheme (sic) I'm sitting in my office with no business apart from the dreaded Paperwork which I am happy to shelve at a moment's notice to go and see the fishies on a boat just in from a Fishing Trip.

 The cages are funnelled interiorly to prevent the fishes from swimming out and as my receptionist said-- stupid fish-- why did they swim in in the first place!?
Cages marked by buoys on the ocean floor are winched up, the catch sorted and frozen down in the Hold.
Fairly low-tech way of sorting, loading the baskets, weighing and then loading the trucks!

Very pretty fish but the shark sadly lost his face and fins in quick time!
With the declining fish stocks the Fish market is booming but not too sure if we can protect our stocks from the High-Tech countries where the demand is ever-growing!

Grunt

Angel Fish

Plate-sized Red Snapper

Great Learning happens in Groups

An anti-establishment teacher frustrated with 'system' and also with a huge ego problem, has been- quite rightly- asking what's wrong with our Education System. I could tell her in a short answer-- lack of adequate funds to pay for quality education... like a lot of things.. the horrible 'slave' mentality of someone else providing the grunt work and paying the locals to 'work' raises it's ugly head. Unlike Singapore which identified early-on that the way ahead for a small nation was to be highly educated and luckily for them - their investment paid off as technology boomed.
So I digress- this is an interesting video by an Educator looking at what's wrong with the system-- however he hasn't put forward any alternatives-- suggestions anyone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=youtu.be

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

A thought-provoking book on the whole meaning of Life.
A sensitive 15yr old gets initiated into sex by a secretive older woman. Although we later learn that she is illiterate, she makes a life-time impression on him as they connect mentally also but she always retains the 'upper-hand' in the relationship, keeping him constantly on the defensive. He is fairly devastated just when he's beginning to step-out on his own, she leaves without any clues when she's going. He internalises this, not knowing that in fact, she's running from the shame of possible discovery that she's illiterate. This idea seems rather dated in current Guyana, as people manage just fine, but I liked the line in the book--pg 188:  'Illiteracy is dependence.' It reinforces the Keats' line 'Much have I travelled in the realms of gold...'

The second part of the book has Michael as a student lawyer observing the trial of Hanna, where he realises that she's illiterate, but for various convoluted reasons, the main one being his philosopher-father's - that one should respect another's boundary- he elects to do nothing. I felt it was cowardly of him and eight years later, after the break-up of a rather cold marriage, he begins to send Hanna tape-recordings of various books. She uses these to teach herself to read and after writing him Thank-you notes, yearns for further contact but he is trapped in the shield he has put up to prevent further hurt after his encounter with her! It's a sad,vicious circle of missed opportunity- as in Life.
I liked the sub-storyline of the next generation coping with the awful truth of what roles their parents played during the war from a German angst-ridden point of view, having being exposed to an unrepentant viewpoint that the Jews deserved all they got and the media never missing an opportunity to pound the awful things done to the Jews while totally missing that Jews are doing the same unrepentantly to the Palestinians. It's a funny old world.

Macushi Lecture

Interesting snippets of information given  by a Brazilian student about the Macushi (one of the nine indigenous tribes of Guyana)- shame it couldn't have been a Guyanese student, but the anthropology associate course at UG doesn't look like it'll even get off the ground.
He started by giving the historical background that Montaigne so detested-- 16th century Europeans considering the lands occupied by the Indians as vacant as only Christians were considered legitimate people. Spain and Portugal created a treaty to divvy-up the world including the northern part of South American. Thanks to the machinations of the English, who moved their Protestant missionaries in, we were able to claim part of Roraima as Guiana in front of Italian judges back in the day.
The Macushi's legend of their formation is that Makonaima, the first being, noticed a forest animal sleeping with the remains of strange fruits in his mouth. So he follows it secretly to the Tree of Life which has all the  fruits growing on it limbs-- sort of Magic Far-away tree (see Enid Blyton). And what do you think he does next?? --- bearing in mind this is back in the day when men were macho alpha dogs, not the namby-pamby, save-the-tree, look-I'm-a-New-Man-but I'm-not-doing-any-Housework-being --- yep-- chops it down! So THAT's why boys and girls Mount Roraima looks like a tree stump and the area above the Rupununi is so forested cos it represents the canopy of the 'tree'.  After wukkin' up an appetite, he then makes a 'clay' woman, but unlike the Japanese blow-up 'comfort' doll, this one produces the Macushi tribe.  Are we sure we want to hand over Forest Management to these people?
I was amused that the student reported that they looked down on the White Man as being physically weaker, but with stronger weapons (see Guns, Germs and Steel) and where the Macushi take poisoned food and turn it edible, White People( and I suppose the others aping him) take edible food and turn it to poison! Very apt considering my previous Blog.

Food Foolishness

The current E.coli outbreak in Germany and subsequent destruction of beleaguered Spain's fruits and vegetables only goes to show how increasingly fragile the food chain is getting. Contrary to the multi-national Food Giants, there should be an argument for countries to provide at least 50% of their food requirements! Both from a health point of view (fresh produce retain more of the 'good stuff') and an economic one if one were to factor in the true transport costs. Granted most things can be produced cheaper on a larger scale, from a point of view of soil exhaustion surely that cannot be a good thing in the long run?
As a child growing up in the urban area of Guyana, most houses had land for one or two fruit trees - the idea of fresh and organic was not even an issue! We have now moved completely away from that. The markets are inundated with over-priced foreign mass-produced stuff-- wax-coated apples which turn soft if left unrefrigerated overnight. An American friend complained about the tasteless carrots imported from the US that are available here  - I told him I was puzzled that we didn't import/smuggle  from Venezuela as I remembered how good their locally-grown fruits and vegetables were! A local company started growing vegetables in a large scale for the Export market but due to transport costs they had to stop. Trinidad apparently would be willing to buy tomatoes but found our varying quantities and qualities too difficult to deal with! While in a stop-over to NY I was astonished that Trinidad was exporting what seemed like a container of large-leafed spinach - and we have more land in Guyana but can't organise that?
An article in an English newspaper ( http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-its-not-just-dominique-strausskahn-the-imf-itself-should-be-on-trial-229227) notes that the IMF had prevailed on Malawi to sell their stockpile of food to private companies and when the crops failed the following year, partially because the IMF then insisted on removing the subsidies on fertilisers to the farmers, it precipitated a huge Famine.
Then too, it's education - our Amerindian people have to work very hard to get produce from the land in some instances and with lots of time on their hands - make their traditional foods. The younger generation don't have time for THAT- neither back-breaking farming work or producing the traditional foods so their diet is changing/has changed. Sadly they seem to be in no-man's land - a few reaching the dizzyingly heights of urban Georgetown  but most seeing their opportunity doing a few short-term stints working in a mining camp, with no long-term goal in sight. As in Berbice, the children of farmers do not want to be farmers but then don't have the education or discipline to settle down to being employed by a larger concern.
 A friend who has land with many fruit trees said that it was too much trouble to employ youngsters or indeed find reliable people so he preferred to let it all rot! I hope he was just winding me up!

No Difference between Countries!

Interesting program on Al-Jazeera, thanks to improved technology: http://stream.aljazeera.com/episode/5216 , after the first 13 minutes.

I really admired the thoughts and analysis of the young female journalist, Sana Saleem who commented that there was lack of clarity and coherence in the Public Discourse between the difference factions on the way ahead. I think this has been the problem of all Third World countries and not helped by continual interference by other countries with their own agendas!
It's interesting the panel discussing this problem noted that the Leaderless revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt have been hijacked and really evolution is always more preferable and the ultimate losers are the regular Public!