Tag Archives: environmental portrait Family. A word that entered into English in the early 1400s, meaning “servants of a household,” from the Latin familia “family servants, domestics collectively, the servants in a household.” The original definition includes the estate, the property; the staff, and any relatives. How things change! When I was growing up, “family” generally meant a nuclear family of two […]  In Bali, rice is synonymous with food. The word nasi (rice) also means “meal” in Bahasa Indonesia, the lingua franca of the region. But, rice is so much more than that: it is an integral part of the Balinese culture. This little Indonesian island has been inhabited by Southeast Asian Austronesian people since at least 2000 BCE. From around the 1st century CE., […]  It is hard to know what to say about a day on which one of the high points is a rough-hewn three-sided toilet shelter. For most of our bumpy drive across the Mongolian steppes, we made do with rocks to squat behind. Cross-country travel in Mongolia is not for the faint-hearted – or for those who are weak of […]  I had a map and a plan. Turns out, I needn’t have bothered! We were headed into Đà Nẵng for a February afternoon, and I had done my homework. But, as soon as my husband and I alighted from our resort shuttle bus, we were greeted by a smiling pedicab driver who cheerfully persuaded us we […]  “I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them […] |
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