OTHER SHIT I LIKE @othershitilike-blog - Tumblr Blog

“There is a verse in the Bible, Hebrews Chapter 11:4 which says; “even though he has died he speaks”. I know those gallant sons and daughters who died in our struggle and even those living, whisper to you at night. I would love to know how you answer those whispers. Of course for the record, betrayal never goes unpunished. It may not be you who may suffer but it surely comes to visit at its own time.”

-Open letter from General Sejusa to Museveni leadership, 2013

#Uganda

Abner Jay is unfuckingbelieveably amazing.

#Abner Jay #Music #Musica #Blues

The deep soul wonder of Lee Moses. One of my favorite tracks of all time.

#Lee Moses #Music #Musica

Evening light, a walk with the Doctor.

Filda Jackson, Poolside

What words I stole from you I gave back. Set them delicately on a lilly pad with the current drifting in your direction. If it doesn’t rain you’ll have no cause to contact me. If it does, I’ll repackage them all in a bottle with a cork stopper and send them DHL to you. Even DHL reaches my tiny remote patch of desert. I’ve camouflaged the town with the rainy season, which makes everything so verdant the snakes and the people and the cows are grateful. And you can’t find me here with the flashy spy satellites. Not like this, not in this season, not unless someone gave you the coordinates and all the busybodies promised they wouldn’t.

Give you the coordinates, that is.

The only things missing here are pizza napolitana and a man’s touch. More of a minor bother than a sacrifice. Ahh, and good whiskey.

Calling what we have here alcohol is blasphemous in all but the technical sense.

Someone mentioned back in the days of Father Mantovani a Mexican woman lived (in sin? It depends if you asked the Father…) with her Tanzanian partner and their four home schooled children. I sometimes wonder if the ghosts of their education linger in the town air. Did they learn anything? Did they need to? If it is all fine nothing will linger, but if there is unfinished business their academic souls may sink into my lungs with every breath. I would need a wizard to be able to tell either way. Don’t want to see naked parts if I can avoid it--- so I’ll let it stay a mystery.

Anyway, you don’t get to wonder about these things anymore. You’ve left and therefor have no claim to this specialized curiousity anymore. If DHL doesn’t work I’ll burn your words into a million particles of ash and then feed them to a cow to disappear forever. These early efforts with the words are just a formality. From what I remember, and I remember EVERYTHING, we have nothing left to say to each other.

#FildaJ

vatandasinbiri-deactivated20150

awkwardsituationist

someone in the world is maimed or killed by a landmine every hour. apopo is a not for profit ngo that has spent the last twenty years developing and implementing “hero rats” to clear affected areas of their landmines - over 1500 in tanzania, where apopo is headquartered, 2,728 in mozambique, and 657 in thailand. there also ongoing operations in angola and cambodia.

rats are known to be amongst the most sensitive animals when it comes to smell, with more functional genes for their olfactory system than any other mammal. a rat’s nose is constantly active and moving, and is always close to ground where vapour concentrations are highest and wind speeds are lowest.

the african giant pouched rat, being highly sociable and native to sub saharan africa, is specifically trained to detect tnt and mine casing minerals. using a combination of click training and food rewarding that begins shortly after birth and lasts nine months, the rats are able to cover 100 square metres of land in 20 minutes - something a human would need an entire day to do.

weighing just over a kilogram, the rats are too light to set off a landmine, and not one has died from the work. apopo adheres to very strict animal welfare protocols, and the rats are treated with the greatest of care and attention, with most meeting their expected eight years of life.

photos by sylvain piraux. consider adopting a rat, where you’ll get real time updates on your rat’s training and life saving work. you can also chose to instead have your rat trained to sniff out tuberculosis in sub saharan african villages (apopo has trained rats to do in ten minutes what it takes lab technicians a day to detect)

#NGO #development #innovation

ourspaceislove

"The man in the green suit said a woman is for loving. If you love a woman enough she will unburden herself. That is the sweetest woman there is, a woman who has been loved well enough. This was the truest woman there was and a man could live a happy life. He looked at her directly and spoke to her alone. She looked away. She wanted to raise her voice loud and say that it was not like that at all, it was that a woman must love herself enough. A woman like that is the sweetest woman there is. She believed this but could not say it. What kept her quiet was that she remained puzzled by one aspect of her belief, the question she could not answer was how a woman got to do that, how she got to love her own knees, and kiss her own elbows, how she got to feel she was all breeze there is and all the mornings there are and all the loving there could be. And then seek something more which perhaps only another can provide, and love a man simply because she could, and indeed something in him made her heart beat, and yes, her knees weak with the flow of his tender caress. Finding herself, that was it.”

- the late and amazing Zimbabwean feminist Yvonne Vera, from her book Butterfly Burning (via ourspaceislove)