Celebrating the Year of the Dragon (2012), Bangkok.
A new white dress, chains of gold jewelry sparkling brightly and more attention than this 13-year-old girl had ever received before: It was like playing dress-up, but better, for Zainab Hussein.
“I’m a bride and I’m getting married!” she bragged to her friend, showing off her new jewelry.
“Sanaa it must be, however long the journey, though the hardy camel droop, legworn on the way,” goes a traditional Arab saying, cited by Al-Hassan Al-Hamdani in the 10th century AD.
According to legend, the Yemeni capital was established after just such a leg-wearing, camel-drooping journey.
Hundreds of protesters demonstrated in front of Yemen’s Parliament on Tuesday in favor of a draft law that sets the minimum legal marriage age for women to 17 years old. The demonstration came just two days after a larger rally held on Sunday in protest against the proposed law.
Yemenis are divided on the issue of child marriage, which has become politicized.
“There were some heartbreaking moments because there are children in the therapeutic feeding center who we know will not live longer than a few days, irrespective of our efforts, because it’s just too late. And what we have to remember sadly is that they didn’t reach this severe state of malnutrition only because of the crisis. They were extremely weak and vulnerable since before the onset of the latest crisis. The mothers are malnourished, feeding practices are poor, and a lot of children have never been to school.”
Yemen’s Socotra Archipelago is the Arab world’s equivalent of the Galapagos Islands in its biodiversity. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it boasts of indigenous species of flora and fauna found nowhere else in the world.
But the inhabitants of this unique island, already struggling with poverty, are suffering further this year.
Asian youth pose creatively in front of a depiction of the Great Battle of Yuthahathi, with warriors riding elephants, in Muang Boran, Thailand.
Members of the Mon tribe are contracted from Burma to work in Thailand. The video shows clips of a Mon dance performance in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. This is the most interesting music I’ve heard in recent years! Look out for the little girl’s dance with lit candles in her hand, the drummer’s “flying” hair and the jester’s head movements. A must-see!
Celebrating the Year of the Dragon (2012), Bangkok.
The Arabic word for “crazy”, majnoon, has the word “jinn” as its root. In Islamic teachings, jinn are spirits that live in a parallel realm and can be good or evil. Therefore, perhaps a lost meaning of the Arabic word for insane is “with jinn”.
And it was spirits that we were seeking on the trip to Radaa, one of Yemen’s least safe places to be due to constant tribal battles.
Gunshots rang out in the distance. A wedding? It was an odd time for a wedding.
After lunch at a restaurant, where Yemeni men with wild Jimi Hendrix hair and bandanas casually kept their Kalashnikovs very close to them, it was time to go meet al-Obali, one of Yemen’s famed exorcists whose reputation had spread to other Arab countries.
He received “patients” at his Yemeni-style home.
