Tag Archives: environmental portrait

“And King Solomon gave the queen of Sheba all that she desired, whatever she asked besides what was given her by the bounty of King Solomon. So she turned and went back to her own land with her servants.” – 1 Kings 10:13 Ethiopia – and its capital Addis Ababa – is the quintessential paradox. […]

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Incredible India! That’s how the Government of India has marketed its tourism campaigns since 2002, and it is not wrong. Incredible! Defined as: 1) impossible to believe, improbable, inconceivable, preposterous, implausible, unimaginable, or 2) difficult to believe; extraordinary, wonderful, marvellous, amazing, astonishing, astounding, awe-inspiring, awesome, extraordinary, fabulous. I think the campaign was intended to build […]

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If you are like me – or, indeed, like the majority of people in the modern world – you spent most of your childhood in a standardised classroom. Schools are so “alike” all around the world that it is hard to remember that it wasn’t always this way:  for hundreds of thousands of years, children […]

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If I had to choose one word to describe the Mursi people of Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, I’d have to say “proud”. There are roughly 7,500 pastoralist Nilo-Saharan Mursi living across approximately 1900 square kilometres of semi-arid land in an isolated corner of southwestern Ethiopia, close to the border with South Sudan. A tall, good-looking people, […]

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Today is Holi: the much-loved Hindu ‘festival of colours’. In India and Nepal, Holi is celebrated for a night and a day: starting on the full-moon evening of the month of Phalguna or Phalgun on the Hindu calendar. This usually falls somewhere between the end of February and the middle of March, according to the […]

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