Tag Archives: people

You could call them Ethiopia’s 0.1%. That is the approximate proportion that the Hamar (or Hamer) people, an agro-pastoralist tribe in the Omo Valley, make up of Ethiopia’s total. Most of these Hamer-speaking people still live a traditional, semi-nomadic lifestyle on their fertile tribal lands in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region (SNNPR) of the country. Care […]

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Barcelona is unique. The second largest city in Spain, Barcelona is touted as one of the world’s leading tourist, economic, trade fair, and cultural centres. It is the capital of the semi-autonomous community of Catalonia, a wealthy area of 7.5 million people with its own language and culture and distinct history. As the regional capitol, […]

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Papua New Guinea is a veritable pastiche of colours and customs, jungle noises and music, tribal warfare and elaborately costumed dance. Creation myths abound, wending their way through oral history and everyday life, so that ancient legends are transformed into marketing strategies, and no one can be sure any longer which is which. That is […]

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‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’ This sense of dislocation – in a positive way – often arises when travelling off the beaten track. In Southern Ethiopia, I was so far off the popular routes that most of the ‘highways’ I was on weren’t paved!  Around the city of Arba Minch – […]

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The earthquake in Nepal in April 2015 killed more than 8,800 people in that country, injured nearly three times that many, and left nearly 3.5 million homeless. As a further blow to the national psyche, numerous precious historical religious buildings were damaged or destroyed. Many of these were contributors to the 1979 UNESCO World-Heritage listing […]

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