Full of Juice

This is an oft-served dessert in Nepal called a Ras Bari (sp?). It is basically a donut hole, completely saturated with sweet, sugary syrup, and floated in a bowl of plain yogurt. The name Ras Bari translates roughly as "juice full"

Name Change, Blog Change

This blog has been a haphazardly tagged slum of quasi chronological updates for its whole life.

Henceforth, it will be a Food, Art and Language blog, based in Nepal, with other tidbits thrown in as I see fit. Since food, language and art (my own and that of others) are the things that excite me, that's what I'll write about and photograph!

I'll review restaurants in Kathmandu, post recipes for awesome Nepali foods and ask for advice on directions to go with my art projects. Sometimes I'll also write about development work, which is what I'm here for, after all.

Visual Peacemaking

 In every photograph, there is an implied comparison. Here to there, then to now, and especially in travel blogs: us to them.

            Howard Zehr, a founder of the Restorative Justice movement and self proclaimed “photographer at the healing edge” wrote in a blog post that “social distance allows us to objectify people, and then we can do all sorts of horrible things to them.”  (See the blog post here http://visualpeacemakers.org/index.php?/blog/entry/photography_at_the_healing_edge/ )
          
In traveling, especially for short lengths of time (anything less than a few months, really), the tendency is for outlandish visual experiences, stuff totally outside my normal range, to jump out and demand to be photographed. When I take these pictures and then post them to my blog and frame them as representations of a particular culture or set of circumstances, I walk a fine line between commenting on the visually striking, and building a wall between myself and what/whom I have photographed.
          
Photography can be used to communicate between people and cultures, but it can also be used to alienate one from another.

            For me, whether or not to photograph the butchering of a goat in my Nepali household was a dilemma. On one hand, it was a unique and visually striking experience for me. There was bright blood, a front yard decapitation and later fried eyeballs to snack on. It was utterly alien to me, and that made it interesting. However, in thinking about the imagery, I realized that not only would it shock some viewers, it would be taken completely out of context on my blog. It would look like a ritual animal sacrifice (which it was), but would be presented without the rich and long cultural heritage and family traditions that have led my host father, who spends workdays at desks and on phones, to be an adept and respectful butcher.

The reason I watched at all was because, eater-of-meat that I am, I was tired of the distance from the butchery process that is built into the American meat distribution/consumption system. I eat meat. I wanted to get real about where it comes from.

            So I didn’t take any pictures, and my itchy shutter finger had to deal with that.

Especially in the developing world, I have many opportunities to take photographs that would increase social distance between the cultures I’m trying to connect. A lot of the photographs would be emotionally impactful and aesthetically ‘good,’ but is their value lost if they alienate me from the people in either culture?

I am going to try to stop “othering” the cultures that I visit. I would rather use my photos in the diminishment of social distance and the promotion of that greatest glue of societies: empathy.

For more resources on the topics of othering and social distance, specifically regarding written and photographic journalism, visit Howard Zehr's Restorative Justice Blog ( http://emu.edu/blog/restorative-justice/2010/08/30/photography-at-the-healing-edge/ )   and the International Guild for Visual Peacemakers ( http://visualpeacemakers.org/index.php?/blog/entry/photography_at_the_healing_edge/ )

P.S. I am aware of the cumbersomeness of using actual URLs rather than just making words in the post into links. Maybe when Google's wonderful "blogger" tools get less stupid, or the internet connection I'm on rises above a whisper of a dream of bandwidth..I'll fix the links.

Illustrated Nepali Flash Cards

First I make a flashcard for an object, then I spell out the name of that object using letter flashcards. The one in the setup is kalam (pen). Hopefully they're all obvious from the illustrations.

This is how I've been studying Nepali lately.  I was getting fed up with not knowing a lot of words that I regularly want to say, as well as not being able to read or write Nepali, and so I made a set of flash cards.

1 card for each consonant
1 card for each vowel and its "consonant modifying symbol" (which I will explain later)
1 illustrated card each for a bunch of nouns I wanted to remember, and to know how to write down.

The Nepali alphabet works like this: There are 36 consonants and 15 vowels, though for practical purposes, you only need to learn 13 of the vowels, because 2 of them are pretty rare.


All of the consonants in Nepali have an implied vowel sound (a, but pronounced 'uh') built into the end of them. Wikipedia tells me the name for consonant sounds that cannot be pronounced without an adjacent vowel is symphona. The 'uh' sound is consistent for every consonant, and always comes at the end (coda) of the syllable (unlike in English, where different standalone consonants are pronounced with different vowels, P= pee, F= eff, etc., which may be at the onset or coda of the syllable).

However, each vowel symbol in Nepali has a companion, smaller symbol that can be fused right onto the body of a consonant, to change the implied 'uh' sound to any other vowel sound.


So each of the 36 consonants ends in an 'uh' sound, and to change that 'uh' sound into a different vowel, you tack on an extra piece to the written letter. Since the symbol used for a lone-standing vowel, or a vowel at the beginning of a sentence, is different from the one tacked onto consonants to modify their ending sound, you basically have 26 symbols to memorize in order to use JUST VOWELS.

Example:

This is the consonant "ka"

and...

This is the vowel "o" (left)  and its consonant-modifying companion symbol

 Combine them and you get...

"ko"

I felt pretty hopeless about learning this written language until I started making flash cards. Making them is so fun, though, that I do it all the time, and am memorizing symbols at a rate of about two per day.  One month and I'll be writing sentences!