Absurdity, Allegory and China

Below find several photos from my good friend, Karamibu, who has traveled back to Jiegu (Gyegu, Jyekundu). Click on the photos for a larger version. I would encourage you to also check out the Yushu Earthquake Response team, a coalition of Tibetan NGOs who are frantically busy on the ground in Yushu and coordinating relief [...]

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I have a television, but it stopped working a year ago, and it had probably stopped working long before that. I wouldn’t have known since I’d rarely turned it on. Discovering that it was broken was a mei banfa (what are you gonna do!) moment, the thought of getting it fixed never considered. I am [...]

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Now that the media have their story in Jyekundu (aka Jiegu and Gyegu), the county seat of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAR), the real work of material relief, emotional support and infrastructure rebuilding is shifting into gear. This is the hard, everyday grind of post-disaster work, which is usually not deemed newsworthy unless it involves [...]

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I have a good friend, a young Tibetan man, who has traveled to Jyekundu (Jiegu) – the center of the Yushu earthquake devastation – to distribute relief aid. He is also a fair hand with a camera. His photos are starting to come in now, and they can be found at Karamibu’s Flickr site. He [...]

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Over the past day I have read several blogs, tweets and comments addressing, once again, the collapse of schools in an earthquake, the latest in the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAP) in Qinghai province. We still have no idea of the numbers of students killed or injured by crumbling schools, though if we can draw [...]

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Over the last 24-hours I have been contacted several times by friends who are aware of my work in Qinghai province, asking if I have any more information than is available through the news orgs. Unfortunately, I do not. Though I know several people from the Yushu area, my involvement is in a Tibetan area [...]

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