Sunset Slippers

If you’ve seen a picture or a postcard of the Taj Mahal, then you’ve seen the Taj Mahal. You’ve even seen it in its prime.

If you were to see it with your own eyes, it would be much like the postcards that I sent out from India, except the postcards don’t have masses of people in them. Thousands of people walk around barefoot or cover their shoes with gauzy bags to protect this notorious space from their tread. Some of them kneel to pray, and others kneel to get the right camera angles. The immaculate tiled walkways are swarmed with tourists and tour guides, lovers and families, the old and the young. Even with chatter and camera flashes in the background, the scene seems to go silent at sunset just when the planet aligns with the sun to cast a orange glow on the grandiose structure. The orange becomes purple as the sun softens into horizon. And it is brilliant.

So it’s possible to see the Taj in its prime via postcard, but that piece of paper could never allow you to feel it. Standing on that brick is humbling; it makes you fell small, and young. Gazing at those colors and that design is perplexing. And wearing those slippers is itchy, but certainly completes the dazzling experience.

The experience is one inspired by Mumtaz Mahal, the wife of emperor Shah Jahan. As the love story goes, the emperor told the empress on her deathbed that he would build a structure symbolic of their love. One year later, the devoted widower began designing the marble tomb with patterned gemstones.

Maybe it’s the massive headcount on the premises, or perhaps it’s the charming origin that creates the Taj’s majesty. There’s a power about that place that no camera could capture. But it makes sense that we’d all like to take a little sliver of it home... I brought the booties. 

Lion Hunting

I rode in a safari jeep for nearly 12 hours through Kruger National Park, eyes peeled for a fierce, majestic wildcat...

I finally spotted one behind a sheet of glass at the MGM Hotel
in Las Vegas.

I'm still not quite sure how I feel about all this. At least safari made for some good photo opps.

 

Kiddos

They are curiously charming, and charmingly curious.
They are collectively chaotic, consistently capricious and candidly cheerful.

They are children. They are kiddos, adolescents, bambinos, bambinas innocents, cherubs, crianças, niños pequeños, infants, enfants… No matter what we call them, they are representatives of youth, and sweet immaturity. They remind us fondly of our own naivety. And they remind us how to play,

The squirts I spent time with in Sea Wind, South Africa are dancers and singers.

They play dress-up.

And they fall asleep in your arms when they’ve had enough.

These little lambs were especially tired on this day because a slew of new playmates from Semester at Sea crowded their classroom. We were there to take data for the school’s nutrition surveillance program sponsored by Operation Hunger, a local nonprofit.

We took each of the 86 students’ weight, height and arm circumference measurement and graphed their nutritional intake as a bell graph. The top of the curve represented ideal weight, which most of the girls reached. Most of the boys, however, fell below the curve. One program volunteer explained that boys are often more malnourished than girls because they have more freedom throughout the day to go out and play with friends. Girls are required to stay home and help their mothers with household chores, thus they have greater access to food.

Most of the children suffering from malnutrition in the school are experiencing Kwashiorkor malnutrition, a condition attributed to older siblings receiving more food within families and characterized by gaunt arms and legs, and bloated bellies.

30 million children in Africa are undernourished. To learn more about Operation Hunger’s attempt to combat this statistic, go to http://www.operationhunger.co.za/index.html.