so Part One of my little jaunt had me stuck inside a National Geographic with a few cut-outs from Asterix stories for good measure. These people are nomadic goat herders and have recently arrived at their winter camp.
Here in a rare display of cohabitation you see men and women appearing to be having a wee chat. Of course the men are having a chat. And the women are having a chat. And I certainly didn't take this picture cause it would have been quite inappropriate to even Look at a women. You see its a bit like New Zealand breasts. I'll explain. In New Zealand you can have a nice set somewhere in your field of vision no problem. They're just part of life. It gets awkward when you find yourself looking at breasts. You've got maybe 0.4secs to nonchalantly look elsewhere before you find "filthy perv" stuck on your nametag. Its the same with women in Pakistan. You need to be real clever to get a photo like these ones.
Anyway I ate and slept in these tents for a while.
roti and curry. bowl of salt. bowl for bone fragments. breakfast. lunch. dinner. hold roti in left hand. eat with right.
foot disease, tea, pus, wounds, ticks, tea, minor surgery, how about a cup of tea now
scribbling furiously. except I wasn't furious. or scribbling. listening and writing rather.
Then after I'd learnt a bunch about what nomadic goat herders are good at and lousy at, a nice big seminar. One time me and Steve Chitty went to Toastmasters. We both qualified as "Competent Toast Masters".
Mr Chitty went on to become the Bourgeoisie. I used my skills for the workers in their daily struggle of their means of production.
Kinda looks like AD 200 don't you think? Except the powerlines (bourgeois piece of shit electricity).
Cool how I discovered the "large" option for pictures.
and this is where i hung out for the second part of the trip.
If this piece of hill was in NZ it might be like 10% of a farm. So imagine how weird it is when there are I dunno like 30 houses and 30 families all trying to live off it.
This was where the earthquake made a really big mess a couple of years ago and the NGO I was with donated hundreds of cows and buffalo to people who had lost theirs (like dead, not misplaced). This is an archieve photos so I can neither confirm nor deny whether that is Cannabis sativa behind the said buffalo. Certainly in November the miriad of pot plants are drying up and ready to roll straight from the plant.
a whole bunch of sticking stethoscopes on thoraxes. And also some other things. Lots of houses around here still look like this from after the earthquake: just the lower walls and some reinforcing steel. Sucks when in December the snows come.
this is my translator explaining something to an old dude.
