Good Morning All,
On The Road and In Your Backyard is a weekday feature spotlighting reader submissions. From the exotic to the familiar, please share your part of the world, whether you’re traveling or just in your locality. Share some photos and a narrative, let us see through your pictures and words. We’re so lucky each and every day to see and appreciate the world around us!
Submissions from commenters are welcome at tools.balloon-juice.com
Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!
Folks, today is the day. Vote like your future depends on it. More importantly, let folks 12-40 who did vote know that, come what may, they were right to be engaged, concerned, and to have voted. Things are not normal and they are to be lauded for having stepped up.
The way I see it: if today doesn’t deliver a brake to the Trump Regime, great horror awaits us all before the fever is broken.
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We’ll be here tomorrow, no matter the result, with some wonderful pictures. Hopefully we’ll be celebrating.
But today is an overdue promise – pictures from Africa.
As someone who was born in Africa, it always pleases me to post pictures and stories from there. And “there” encompasses an immense area of multitudinous nations, groups, tribes, cultures, religions, great histories, and pockets of colonialism and their reverberations. I’ve been blessed to have visited a handful of countries from north to south, but mostly in the east. One of my mother’s unmet wishes was to see the great animals of Africa one more time, and I hope to travel there in the next few years in her stead.
I can’t wait to go back there – in my experience, there is a certain African way of relating to your fellow man that I find so comforting, like something I’m missing when I don’t encounter it often enough. It’s a joy and love for your fellow human that this world could use a lot more of, and I’d like to get some immersion therapy! I’ve not yet been to Niger, but we shall see; these pictures make a compelling case and remind me of something I saw so much when I was young: the energy and bustle of the developing world in an arid edge of civilization.
Part of today’s focus – dirty indoor cooking technology – is a problem that plagues too much of the developing world. India and China are working hard to clean up this most-damaging environmental factor, and so many other countries(many in Southeast Asia or Africa) have developed programs to replace traditional no-ventilation in-house combustion technology. This is the kind of simple, low-tech substitution that can change the trajectory of entire villages, peoples and regions!
Once again I’m amazed at the variety and depth of our community.