Greetings,
May Day. May all the world's workers find their freedom. Create with machines, toil the soil.
A textile factory worker. A carpet weaver and son. Trash collectors. A farmer.
Peace.
Greetings,
I work with my hands. They are my tools. I make balconies and beautiful iron and steel structures. This is my life. This is my job, my work, my passion.
I work in an area of town filled with friends, voices and hammers. Do you remember the ancient dying art of blacksmithing? I come from a long line of blacksmiths. My working environment is filled with the daily music of hammers on metal. Listen carefully to the forging of metal.
Peace.
He saw her through a window when the metro pulled in.
Alone and cold, she waited for the green metro door to open.
It was late. She wore a thin black sweater and long gray skirt.
She was slight...olive pale skin, black hair pulled back, around 45.
She limped into the car dragging her right foot. Her left foot was normal. Her right foot looked like a case of elephantiasis. She sat twenty feet away.
She bent over and slowly raised her skirt from around her ankles. The burned and bloody skin damage ran three inches across and ten inches high. Either first or second degree burns. A layer of skin was exposed, red, lined with white. Bare and exposed. She needed medical attention.
Two men across from her stared and diverted their eyes.
She sat, fingered a phone and grimaced. No tears, just a stoic face.
The metro rolled through night. It passed a river, a neon bright Everest furniture store, fast food emptiness and an expensive private hospital filled with antiseptics, bandages, lotions and potions and patients with money.
She inspected her ankle, touching an edge of fried skin with a white tissue. Clear cold air sent shivers through her central nervous system shutting down pain receptors.
Peace.
Reports say the hard line Chinese #1 and his Tibetan co-leader visited the Jokhang monastery in Lhasa. They didn't go there to pray for peace.
They went there to tell the monks they would increase "patriotic education" classes in all the monasteries. Re-education through reform, ideology, propaganda and control. It's about control.
Historically, the Chinese, after destroying and looting monasteries in Tibet and in mainland China during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, restricted the number of monks at the three major Lhasa monasteries, Sera, Drepung and Ganden.
They recruited some Tibetans to live and work in the monasteries as spies and informers. This system had proved effective during the Cultural Revolution when family members reported on each other, neighbors and wild capitalist running dogs. It was a practical "peoples" campaign of fear and suspicion to create paranoia and ideological control.
Monks and nuns allowed to live and practice in the monasteries who resist or question this form of subtle "patriotic education" risk imprisonment, torture and death. They well know what has and continues to happen to monks and nuns at the notorious Drapchi prison outside Lhasa.
Peace.
The sky is overcast. Everyone is sleeping. You get up early and take the green metro into town. The odd worker, an old man, a young girl going somewhere, perhaps to a factory shift rides the rails.
You are ready to disappear into nothing, looking for visual moments trapped in time. It is a walking meditation.
All the shops, stores and businesses are closed. Steel shutters and bars protect invisible interiors filled with foods and fabrics. Dead quiet. This reality reminds you of any other town, village or place on a Sunday. Quiet and deserted. Only a guy with a camera, a few early shopkeepers laying out board tables and cats. Lots of felines, prowling for garbage and mates.
Among some new people you meet are a group of musicians in a small cafe off a series of narrow alleys near a bookseller.
The men play, a woman sings. Drinking brown tea you absorb sharp clear string notes and her voice. It is a lament, a sad strong sorrowful love song from her heart, her lips, her life.
Peace.
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