Six images Orphan enjoyed in 2012.
Two monks at a wat and The Tree of Life, Luang Prabang, Laos.
On the street - boys and wedding Siem Reap, Cambodia.
Music man plays for an audience of 1, Trabzon, Turkey. Red balloons.
Christmas is coming, Orphan said to Elf.
Tell me about it. I'm getting crazy wish lists from kids around the globe.
Give me an example of some serious needs.
Sure, here's one from a girl in Cambodia.
"Please give me clean drinking water. I have a cell phone. It's great for entertainment but useless when it comes to meeting my real needs. Call me and tell me where I can get the water. And, if it's not too much to ask, could you please give me some medicine? My grandmother is dying of a broken heart."
Whew, that's a tough one, said Orphan. What are you going to do?
Damn the Mekong River and divert a stream of life to her village.
Sounds perfect. What about the medicine?
Will a placebo heal a broken heart?
Take two and call me tomorrow. Tomorrow knows the answer.
“Are you with us?” pleaded a Cambodian land mine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”
She‘s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.
The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.
She’s one of 26,000 men, women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.
It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.
It costs $300–$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years.
Governments spend $200–$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Angola and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.
40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.
She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.
The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked along village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart.
It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy. She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate.
Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land all carried morphine.
Cut the heavy, deep and real shit, said a shaman.
Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.
Fear is ignorance.
Living in China, Leo carried buckets of night soil or shit. It was the price he paid for questioning Authority.
-why, do we have to read Mao’s little red book, it’s mush for pigs, he asked Authority.
-because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.
-this shit stinks.
-here, said Authority. Carry some more.
After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He burned through levels of existence as an exiled ghost. He slept with shamans in cemeteries.
He didn’t suffer from PTSD. He didn’t prowl life’s perimeter at midnight with bandoliers of munitions and Howling Wolf, his M-16 on full automatic. He wasn’t a suicide bomber hijacking ambulances in Gaza or Baghdad or Karachi or Damascus. He wasn’t blowing up cafes in Haifa or Spanish trains of thought watching children and adults fly through the air with the greatest of ease in the Greatest Show on Earth. He did not attend flight training school in Florida on a secret mission of revenge and miraculous destiny.
Being a worthy asset with nonofficial cover he was quieter than a mouse. The second mouse gets the cheese. He disembarked, disabled, distributed, declassified, delineated, discussed, and detonated unconscious trip wires. He was a silent night hymn, a predator practicing silence and cunning with his tantric eye wide open.
I am a camera, he told ice girl. Like you I see the big picture. We are ahead of the future. Wandering storytellers accepted my willingness to walk point. It was the Tao of insight, intuitive friendship and leadership. I don’t sweat the small stuff.
It’s all small stuff, she said. God, the Devil and Allah are in the details. Checkmate, said Death.
In Cadiz a well-dressed bald man with Gypsy blood wearing polished black wing tipped shoes used the financial section of a daily rag proclaiming a 33% unemployed human statistic to collect his dog’s shit off a Roman cobblestone chessboard. He dumped it into a metal trash basket nailed to a postmodern yellow splattered wall.
Five minutes later an obsessive-compulsive cleaning woman in her ground floor flat yelled, “What’s that smell?”
“History.”
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