Brother – Poem JKLeahy ©
In her blood – I she bore
The umbilical cord, your core
A chance life, you survived
I called you brother
Independence gained you
And took you a long mile
Long enough to hide your smile
The umbilical cord severed
The distance held you prisoner
But kept you alive in memory
When I called out – “brother!”
Wind chimed in wide yonder
You found family in strangers
Where freedom was faltered
Death sought your surrender
Our hearts mangled forever
( On your 40th Rivona)
The coconut is one of the most valuable trees in the islands across the Pacific, Asia, Latin America and Africa. The coconut tree has many uses. The nut, its husk and shells, the trunk, leaves, even the bone of a single leaf is used. Children use the leaf for toys and women weave and cook rice in the leaves. Hats, baskets, mats and many other useful items are also made from the coconut leaves.
The coconut juice, coconut oil and coconut cream have become a recent rage in nutrition and diets in the western world. Ask abungac (grandpa) Google about the many uses of the coconut.
What happens when you destroy the tree that gives life?
Watch this story in “Kinabuhi“, a Vimeo video made by Kapuluan.
This is a unique flash fiction challenge where Barbara W. Beacham provides a new photo and the first sentence of a story each week. The challenge is to finish the story using 100-150 words. This challenge runs from Monday to Sunday.
The Looming JK.Leahy short story ©
The petroglyphs told the story of an unusual event.
The old man’s eyes widened. He blinked from the petroglyphs and stared into the sky. The interpretation led to the present. Something was happening. Yawing, seven, could sense the fear in his grandfather’s voice.
Yawing followed Old Manu’s eyes; the clouds gathered into a thick dark cover.
“What is it, grandpa?”
“There’s no time”
“No time for what?”
“Go! Get your mother!” Old Manu ordered Yawing. “We need to move quickly. It is coming for us”.
“What is coming for us?”, Yawing asked, wide-eyed. He reversed to the door.
“Go!”
Yawing quickly turned and ran to find his mother among the women at the river. He tripped and fell.
“Mother! We must leave, now”, Yawing shouted with a mouthful of sand. He spat.
“They are coming for us!”
Yawing’s alarmed voice chilled into silence, his three little sisters, playing outside their house. As they watched, he ran to their mother.
When you are growing up, and as a child, it is not always clear what your parents tell you, and often, you end up learning the lesson the hard way. How To Catch a Bird is one of those tough lessons Vera van Wolferen learnt as a child.
In Vera van Wolferen‘s own words: “How To Catch a Bird is a stop motion short film based on a childhood memory. It’s the graduation film I made for my masters in animation at AKV St. Joost Breda. When I was eight; my dad taught me how to fish. He told me to take the worm off the hook after fishing, but I had no idea why. After fishing I forgot about the worm and left it dangling on the hook. If I only knew then what the consequence of this action would be.”
Animation by Vera van Wolferen
Music by Gerard van Wolferen
Culture and Heritage
The green beetle is one of my favourites and the insect possesses a beautiful rainbow shine. The beetles come out in millions during fruit seasons. In Papua New Guinea beetles are eaten as food, but the green beetle is so beautiful that tribal dancers use the insect as part of their fashion. The fashion or their traditional dress, especially headbands and headdresses are worn in singsings. A singsing is a performance of song and dance by a group and it is one of many living rituals, handed down through generations.
I have seen the beetles myself in Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province and found these ones on headdresses in Simbai, Madang Province, which prompted this post.
Like some of the more unusual legal tender in other cultures of the world, the stone money from Yap is quite unique, and grand.
This is not your typical gold coin or silver coin you could flip. You would need all your friends to help you flip it and I would not wait to catch it coming down.
To continue from my post about the giant Easter Islands Monuments and this is my own theory; I’m speculating that the people who build the giant statues of the earlier post on this blog were part of the same (tribe of) people who manufactured the Rai or the giant stone coins of the Micronesian islands of Yap and Palau. My reason for thinking there may be a connection is because of what I have seen in Palau and Northern Marianas. There are giant statues all over the world and I am no archeologist. The Micronesians also have giant stone monoliths and statues. Yap became part of this ring of exchange and sharing giant objects when they brought the coins from Palau into Yap.
Yap is one of four states of the Micronesia. The large coins pictured above and below were made from limestone disks and each represent wealth in a family group. There is a lot of reading in the history of all these large objects and studies are still being carried out on the mystery that surrounds the objects.
Why did the Yapese take to this new kind of money?
John Tharngan, historical preservation officer of Yap explained that the coins were invented during a period when the chiefs on Yap were struggling for power.
“In those days all sorts of commodities were being used as valuables, including shells and turmeric and so the concept of bringing something in from outside, that didn’t exist on Yap, was very attractive. So when they brought this piece home and called it money, it encouraged other people to make the journey and bring stones back. So they went and brought more, this time in the shape of a full moon with a hole in the middle, for ease of transportation, like the ones you can see here on Yap”, Tharngan said.
The value of the stone coins is determined by the number of lives lost during the process of transportation and the workmanship on each stone. They are used for buying land and bride price.
I first saw the Rai at the National Museum of Palau in 2008. I asked many questions and got bemused looks from locals, to say that these coins were part of everyday trades, an undying culture passed through generations. I could not imagine a piece of coin carried by six adult male compared to a dollar you could pull out of your pocket and flick in the air, and in Papua New Guinea, we mostly used shells as our legal tender. Perhaps at one point, we also used stones.
Yap is about 100 square kilometres and home to 12,000 people. The island of Yap has no precious material like gold or silver instead, they use these giant disks of limestone called Rai as currency for large trades and still use them as small as seven to eight centimetres in diameter to trade with. The larger ones stand as high as 3.65metres (12 feet tall) and weigh five tonne. Many of the Yapese coins were carved in Palau and shipped 400 metres to Yap. There was a story that once a large Rai was transported across the water between the Yapese and it tipped the canoe and sank. This coin was always remembered and its value (for the family that owned that coin) was continued to be used in the trades. Read more on the Yap’s coins on the links below.
Most unusual money in the world – what a wonderful life blog also has an article about money from other cultures.
A Report from Radio New Zealand International’s Johnny Blades.
Papua New Guinea is at a juncture, experiencing unprecedented economic growth but still mired by poverty, tribalism and parlous human development outcomes. Exxon Mobil’s $US19 billion Liquefied Natural Gas project in PNG began exports last year, marking a major milestone in the country’s development as a foreign investment destination and energy hub.
Yet the benefits from development of PNG’s abundant natural resources – mineral, oil, forestry, fisheries and others – appear mainly confined to a tiny part of the population.
RNZI’s Johnny Blades travelled to PNG and, in this video report, he asks if PNG can convert its significant resources wealth into tangible gains for its burgeoning population.
Unsolved Mysteries: The secret of Easter Island. YouTube.
In the most isolated place on Earth a tiny society built world-class monuments. Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is 1,000 miles from the nearest Pacific island, 3,000 miles from the nearest continent. It is just six by ten miles in size, with no running streams, terrible soil, occasional droughts, and a relatively barren ocean. Yet there are 900 of the famous statues (moai), weighing up to 75 tons and 40 feet high. Four hundred of them were moved many miles from where they were quarried to massive platforms along the shores.
Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began their archeological work on Easter Island in 2001 expecting to do no more than add details to the standard morality tale of the collapse of the island’s ecology and society—Polynesians discovered Rapa Nui around 400-800AD and soon overpopulated the place (30,000 people on an island the size of San Francisco); competing elites cut down the last trees to move hundreds of enormous statues; after excesses of “moai madness” the elites descend into warfare and cannibalism, and the ecology collapses; Europeans show up in 1722. The obvious lesson is that Easter Island, “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself“ (Jared Diamond), is a warning of what could happen to Earth unless we learn to live with limits.
A completely different story emerged from Hunt and Lipo’s archaeology. Polynesians first arrived as late as 1200AD. There are no signs of violence—none of the fortifications common on other Pacific islands, no weapons, no traumatized skeletons. The palm trees that originally covered the island succumbed mainly to rats that arrived with the Polynesians and ate all the nuts. The natives burned what remained to enrich the poor soil and then engineered the whole island with small rocks (“lithic mulch”) to grow taro and sweet potatoes. The population stabilized around 4,000 and kept itself in balance with its resources for 500 years until it was totally destroyed in the 18th century by European diseases and enslavement. (It wasn’t Collapse; it was Guns, Germs, and Steel.)
The world-class monuments of Rapa Nui
What was up with the statues? How were they moved? Did they have a role in the sustainable balance the islanders achieved? Hunt and Lipo closely studied the statues found along the moai roads from the quarry. They had D-shaped beveled bottoms (unlike the flat bottoms of the platform statues) angled 14 ° forward. The ones on down slopes had fallen on their face; on up slopes they were on their back. The archeologists concluded they must have been moved upright—”walked,” just as Rapa Nuians long had said. No tree logs were required. Standard Polynesian skill with ropes would suffice.
Archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo attempt to solve the mystery in this documentary. Easter Island is also called Rapa Nui.
Read more here:
Fantastic Christoph! Great post.
The wait is over:
“You’re Not Alone” an anthology in aid of MacMillan Cancer Care has been released. A paperback version is also available! Get your copy now!
Twenty-seven writers from around the world, including myself have entered an assortment of short stories for your pleasure, show your support by liking the new page on Facebook and expressing an interest in buying the book.
100% of the royalties earned or accrued in the purchase of this book, in all formats, will go to the Pamela Winton tribute fund, which is in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support.
An anthology, themed on relationships, of more than 20 authors
from around the world – from urban fantasy to stories that bring tears to the…
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Cool stuff – The KREOD
The Cool Stuff this week is a multi-functional exhibition space called Kreod Pavilion. Inspired by nature and organic in its form, this beautiful space was designed by London Architect Chun Qing Li.
Environmentally friendly the Kreod pavilion combines three 20 m² capsules in a variety of spatial configurations. The hexagonal structure is based on a simple recurrent joint connection detail as seen in Chun Qing Li’s sketches below.
Architect: Chun Qing Li & Pavilion Architecture
Location: Greenwich Peninsula, GB-London SE10 0PE (until early 2013)
Kreod is a multi-functional pavilion – its three pods can be combined in a variety of configurations or installed as free-standing forms. It is portable and easily demountable. The wooden structure of KREOD is made of Kebony, a certified sustainable alternative to tropical hardwood. The product is dark, acquiring a silver-grey patina over time if left untreated.
The wood was impregnated with a liquid produced from crop biowaste. The treatment with furfuryl alcohol forms stable furan polymers, which are locked in the wood cell walls and increase the dimensional stability as well as durability and hardness of the wood, giving exceptionally good decay resistance and long life span was obtained after kebonization. This durability was achieved without the disadvantages of traditional impregnation methods using toxic chemicals.
Tribalmystic Stories 