machadinha
Not Your Guru Member
Registered: January 2005
Location: yörp
Posts: 11,156
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I wasn't gonna include any personal pictures but this one is just too special to me. This is a good friend of mine together with one of a group of tribal kids we had befriended.
I had noticed the tribals living in the area before. They were hard to miss, particularly when some older stone-age looking men in loincloth, wielding a medieval-looking carbine and holding a dead duck by the neck, showed up in the market.
I later found out they had used to be hunters indeed. Now though, with the forests having been cut down for firewood and to make way for modern developments, their lifestyle was quickly being eroded. They were severely discriminated against in town and most of them lived in tents under horrible conditions by some smelly pond, carefully circumvented by both the tourists and most of the town's inhabitants.
These kids had come up to me begging for money. I had offered to buy them some food instead. They immediately rushed me off to the local convenience store for cookies and bananas. Given the choice between that and a restaurant meal it took some thinking but the brightest of the lot (probably this kid) soon saw the merits of the latter. So off we went to a place where they would never have gotten in by themselves, the staff were all smiles though, they were probably not too high-class themselves and must have enjoyed the scene.
We later took them for a bike ride around town and the countryside (where this photograph originates) and for several more meals, one time I remember in a slightly more up-class restaurant where there were plenty of not-so hidden frowns upon the event.
After the tsunami I can only hope and pray that these people are alive still and have seen their circumstances improve in the meantime hopefully, there was one local pressure group advocating their rights. This young man must be in his early twenties now. My heart is with him.
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