street portrait

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coming from a city where the average age is almost 50 years, china at first sight is a country of young people. but in the quieter places you can see the interesting faces of the elderly, taking a walk, doing tai-chi in the parks or simply walking backwards for training purposes. the latter is not a joke, as i had thought at first, but writing reminds me that i have to take a picture of this.

walking the bird is another habit unknown in western countries but frequent to see here in china. in zonghuamen here in nanjing people gather with their birds in cages so that the singing out of one cage stimulates the other birds to do the same. the whole thing for sure is not without problems as the cages are probably too small and many of the birds are captured from the wild.

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Tsunami Traces II

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the tsunami devastated Sri Lanka more than 3.5 years ago. it's traces can still be seen in the faces of the people. that man to the right, probably 15 years younger than me, lives and works next to the place he lost his family, barely 50m away from the shoreline. conversation was difficult, so he silently offered me a glass of tea and we stood there closemouthed in a place where i was already short after tsunami, covered in the smell of decaying corpses under collapsed houses.

the west and south of sri lanka got rebuilt pretty fast and well, as this is where the singhalese majority leaves. the east with the muslims and tamils was always neglected and still is. or could you imagine a city of 100.000+ inhabitants not having a single loader and truck? hospitals not sporting a toilet for the men's ward? and still a number of tsunami affected families live in temporary shelters. as do the sometimes 180.000+ internally displaced persons (an excellent euphemism for war refugees) alone in this region. those war refugees get no compensation, in the camps they wait to be allowed returning to the shattered remainders of their villages after one or the other army was there. and racism shows its ugly face everywhere, making tamils fight muslims, tamils kill tamils, singalese fight tamils without end.

this photo on flickr.

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