Simply stealing art of destroying national identity?

 

                                    http://www.randafricanart.com/Benin_hip_masks.html

    Is stealing art objects during the colonization of another country aims only for making the profit? Or does it also have a bigger political goal of ripping people off their history and cultural heritage so that they have nothing to hold on to when you will enslave and exploit them and their country? 

    Deutsche Welle documentary ‘Africa’s looted art’ raises this crucial question about the significance of the stolen by Europeans art and cultural objects for modern African people, especially the young generations. Even now, in the 21^st century, despite of the numerous calls and some attempts for the revision of the colonialist history and its socio-economic impact on the African continent, stolen cultural and historic heritage sitting in European museums (often not even displayed to the public) allows Europe to look down at Africa and provide euro-centric education, books, and to claim that African culture is only ‘tribal’ and ‘primitive’. 

    So, I can’t help but think that this campaign of getting as many valuable art and cultural objects as possible out of Africa and bringing them to Europe was a very well thought-through political action. First, you deny people their cultural heritage, anything that can link them to their land and their ancestors and make them proud of that link, you basically break their national pride. Secondly, you tell them that you know better, you are more civilized, more educated, more ‘cultural’, so they have to obey you and look at you with admiration trying to become like you. And finally, you rewrite their history teaching little kids that before you there was nothing but trees and monkeys. This is how you destroy the nation as a concept, and colonize not only land and people but also people’s minds.

Now, the next interesting discussion stirred up in the film is the possible remedy.

How should the repatriations be done? All at once at the political level? But many artifacts belonged to concrete families who are now claiming their right to heritage.

Will these ancient artifacts be sufficiently preserved back at home, especially in some countries that are still torn by war and poverty? After all, this is a world cultural heritage. But then, who is Europe to decide what happens to something that never belonged to it in the first place?

Is it enough to just return these art and cultural objects to remedy the damage done by colonization? Shouldn’t the priorities be repairing economic consequences or education? Well, maybe, it would be already a significant step forward if kids in African countries started learning about the history, crafts and traditions of their people and their country (which does not start from colonization) while looking at the real objects instead of pictures in the book and feeling the value and significance of these artifacts for their own identity.  

This is what I love about DW documentaries: they leave more questions in your head than answers.

To be or not to be: Does taking your job personally lead to a career success?

https://www.hypnosisdownloads.com/job-skills/workaholic

Let me be clear from the beginning – this post does not contain a definite respond to the question in its title. And neither is helpful any search in 'career advice/inspiration/I’ll-tell-you-how-to-live-your-life’ literature. There is a more or less equal number of articles providing practical ways of “how to stop taking your job personally” and explaining ”why ‘don’t take it personally’ is terrible work advice”. One side references all the burn-out and over-stressed consequences, together with inability to separate your work-self from your-self. The other side responds with million examples of successful people who stayed focused, creative and full of ideas because they were personally and emotionally invested in their work.

Indeed, the more I think of it, the more paradoxical it sounds. It is quite difficult to imagine how someone can quickly and successfully progress in a career without being highly motivated to do his/her job, looking for more tasks than required, or spending more time than required trying to come up with innovative and creative solutions. Does a worker who shuts his/her computer down exactly at 5 pm and does not even think about his/her work until the next day 9 am (hello, the perfect ‘work-life’ balance!) get a significant career success?

On the other hand, ‘my job is my life’ actually works well only in the circumstances of the private businesses or small start-ups with a high degree of flexibility and freedom where the aforementioned innovative and creative solutions are welcomed. It does not work so perfectly when a worker is a small pawn in the company with many more managers/bosses above him/her who do not share his/her creative or innovative views and who prefer him/her to simply follow the long-established rules and do what he/she is asked to do. It does not work so well in - let’s be honest – most of public companies/organisations where a ‘personally invested’ worker gets frustrated and tired of banging his/her head against a brick wall and yields to ‘it’s just a job that brings me money and social security’ mantra.      

Among many articles and books advising either one or another and not solving the paradox, I have found only one that actually seemed to come up with a compromise. The author points out that the key to career success is not how personally invested a worker is in his/her job: it is worker’s self-determination. It means that regardless if what job position it is and what type of company, a worker him/herself decides what to take from it and where to go with what he/she takes:

Career self-determination doesn't require you to start your own business. My friend Mike has been insanely successful in his career working for well-known employers. What makes Mike successful is that he decides what he wants to do next rather than letting the job ads or inertia decide for him. When one job has given Mike all it's got to give, he moves on. He doesn't really care what his boss thinks about his performance. He cares what impact he's making at work -- impact that he can talk about later, with other employers, when it's time to move on! […]

Mike is self-employed in his own mind, although he works for other people. He loves his career, has plenty of time off, gets paid very well and best of all, is healthy and happy. Mike is not a suck-up or someone who needs to get external approval to feel good about himself. He simply knows what kinds of Business Pain he solves for employers, and that knowledge makes him very valuable as well as content in his own skin.

 Liz Ryan Hard Work Won't Make You Successful -- But Doing This Will, Forbes

I guess the solution proposed here is this: in order to succeed in career, it is not necessary to take one’s own job personally, but it is essential to be personally and emotionally invested in one’s own career plan and vision. In short, the personal career plan is the determining factor of deciding where and how much to invest personally in the current job tasks. And if one or another job task doesn’t contribute to the career plan, why take it personally?

Useful (and not so much) resources: Duncan Coombe “Don’t Take It Personally” Is Terrible Work Advice, Harvard Business Review; How Liking Your Job Will Help You Succeed, University of Southern California, Online Master of Science in Applied Psychology; John Rampton 15 Behaviors Blocking Your Success; John Fawkes 10 things you must stop doing if you want to be successful, Medium; Becky Hagle 5 Things That Happen When You Take Your Job Too Seriously, Odyssey; Liz Ryan Hard Work Won't Make You Successful -- But Doing This Will, Forbes.

Living in more than one language – a blessing or a curse?

http://www.theswcsun.com/bilingualism-is-a-benefit-in-more-ways-than-one/

A couple of days ago, I’ve seen a very nicely explained summary of what I’ve learned in my linguistics classes back at the Moscow State University: our language reflects precisely the way we see the world and the way we think. The only problem I had with this TED talk was that many given great examples showed how the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of various languages is linked to our perception of the world (clear distinction of light and dark blue in Russian, everything measured by geographical position in some Australian tribe’s language, etc.), but did not give any proof to speaker’s main thesis – that it is also the other way around and our language shapes the way we think and see the world around. Personally, I am even more interested in the further question: when you learn a new language (and by ‘learn’ I mean you speak it quite fluently), does the reality in your head changes accordingly? Does the brain of a native English-speaking person who acquired a high proficiency in Russian, distinguishes light blue from dark blue much faster than the brain of a native English speaker who does not know Russian? Or is it necessary for him/her to leave in a Russian speaking environment for his/her brain to change its ‘vision’? Does your perception of the world broadens when you speak more than one language or do you lose one of the ‘visions’?

 A quick search for answers on the Internet revealed the following. Firstly, there is not yet enough data and research evidence of how (and if) human brain and human perception of the world changes when a person becomes bilingual or even multilingual. Secondly, the studies that do exist show that people who speak more than one language actually alternate their ‘language-formed’ perceptions according to the situation and environment around. Moreover, some scientists claim that it is very healthy and handy for your brain: the brain muscles have to work out hard every time you need to express yourself and you will not get dementia or Alzheimer’s disease when older. In fact, it is easier for bilinguals to just mix up two languages in their speech as this way, the brain does not have to put so much effort into analyzing what word and what perception to use in each situation.

Being bilingual Russian-English myself (though, not being brought up as bilingual) I must admit that having more than one ‘language’ universe does broaden my perception of the world. The simplest example is the concept ‘awkward’ which I learned only when I moved to the United States. I can find a dozen of Russian translations but each of them would express the English concept only partially, depending on the situation. However, in my everyday perception there exists a whole concept of someone or something being ‘awkward’ as one full picture regardless of the situation. So, in case of something existing in one ‘language universe’ and not in another, speaking fluently more than one language does fill the holes.  

But nothing comes without a price. I sadly admit that being bilingual limits my creative writing abilities. According to several studies (and supported by my experience), bilingual people tend to have weaker verbal skills (all of us living abroad had these painful moments on not being able to remember this one word in our own language) and not only on the lexical but also grammatical level. I noticed it when I took creative writing classes in my American college. English is very much action-oriented language with a lot of active verbal constructions and shorter sentences, while Russian is more object/description-oriented language with a lot of adjectives, adverbs and longer syntactic structures. Writing my pieces for the class, I realized with a despair that even though I have a good English, I sound absolutely Russian with all these endless actionless descriptions and unreadable pyramids of adjectives. The problem was that what I could have expressed in few compact Russian words demanded long detailed English explanations in order to capture my thought. The worst came when few months later, I decided to try writing some novels in Russian. It was a disaster – my language felt handicapped to me with dry sentences and tenuous scenes. Being bilingual, which was supposed to enrich my language expression abilities, was killing me as a writer…

To summarize, I can’t wait to see more studies that would shed some light on what is happening in time with our brain and our perception of the world when we start living in more than one language. So far, it seems like I will not die from dementia but I will not become a brilliant writer in neither of my languages…   

Resources: 

TED Talk by Lera Boroditsky 'How language shapes the way we think'; Miguel Angel Muñoz 'Does being bilingual makes you smarter?'; Gollan, T.H., Montoya, R.I., & Werner, G.A. 'Semantic and letter fluency in Spanish-English bilinguals';   Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I.M. Craik, Gigi Luk 'Bilingualism: consequences for mind and brain'; Gaia Vince 'Why being bilingual works wonders for your brain'; Nicholas Weiler 'Speaking a second language may change how you see the world'. 

Email the author Ellen Bialysto, 

Fergus I.M. Craik

Gigi Luk

Library of Curious Facts. When mom’s lullaby saves your life.

Kadek was 12 when the Smong came to his village. He was doing his school homework when the table started shaking and suddenly everything was moving. There was no one else in the house: his aunt went to buy some vegetables and his uncle was at work. Kadek, scared to death, ran downstairs with some unconscious instincts whispering to him to get out of the house. And suddenly, in the chaos of moving chairs and flying books he saw like it was real, his mom’s deep dark eyes looking at him from above the cradle and heard her soothing voice singing his favorite lullaby:

 Please listen to this story

one day in the past

a village was sinking

that what have been told

starting with earthquakes

following by giant wave

whole the country was sinking

immediately

if the strong earthquake

followed by the lowering of sea water

please find in hurry

a higher place

it is called “Smong”

a history of our ancestor

please always remember

the message and instruction…

Kadek saw other villagers running towards the hills behind the village and yelling ‘Smong! Smong is coming! The sea went away! Smong is coming!’ ‘Hurry to a higher place...’, - whispered mom’s voice. And little Kadek started running towards life-saving hills with all his might…

Smong is your bath

Earthquakes is your swing bed

thunderstorm is your music

thunderlight is your lamp

On 26 December 2004 an earthquake of 9.1 M caused tsunami in Indian Ocean that destroyed many places in Asian and African countries. Aceh Province of Indonesia was one of the most devastated areas with death toll reaching 200,000 people. However, an Simeulue Island in this province with the overall population of around 78,000 people had only 7 victims. As soon as the earthquake hit the island and local villagers noticed that the sea level was falling, they all left their houses as they were and started running to the highest point of the island. They had only 15 minutes until the tsunami crushed on their shore but that was enough because everyone knew exactly what to do when Smong (means “tsunami in” Devayan Language) comes. After a deadly tsunami in 1907 that took away a lot of Simeulueans, a simple instruction ‘when the sea is going away and the ground shakes, don’t waste time - run uphill’ was passed from generation to generation in songs, short poems, lullabies and stories. To save Simeulueans in 2004.

Resources: https://medium.com/@jacopopasotti/the-smong-story-feaeb6a45e10 (English translation of the lullaby)

Syafwina, S. "Recognizing indigenous knowledge for disaster management: Smong, early warning system from Simeulue Island, Aceh." Procedia Environ Sci 20 (2014): 573-582. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878029614000711)

Train strategy

I’m a huge fan of New Year resolutions: in 2013, I had 50 (yes, you read it right – 50!) resolutions, in 2015, it was 18, and this year, it’s only 15. So, I can say I’m moving towards more concise and focused goals in life.

In fact, these resolutions are rather practical steps that I need to take to reach my goals. However, the biggest general conclusion of 2017 and inspiration for 2018 is only one: I must learn how to not let people and circumstances stress me too much, especially when these people and circumstances are not important for me. In 2017, I experienced the biggest number of headaches in my life, I had taken the biggest amount of various medicines, I had got a nervous habit of biting lips, and I spent most of my free time (at least during the last 4 months) on the couch feeling exhausted and energy-less. All that happening not because of stress, but because of myself letting the stress to take over my mind and my body, to block my thinking, and to suck out all the energy and creativity I had; because of letting the stress to make me weak and to distract me from my actual goals…

Just before the New Year we bought a board game that we liked a lot some time ago at our friends’ in Budapest. It’s called Ticket to Ride (in English version) and the idea of the game is to build a railroad to connect the destination points of your mission. That game taught me one important thing – there is always another road, there is always a way around the troubles. Instead of getting stressed because some other player blocked your path, you go around the blockage and you still reach your destination. The funny fact is that rather often the ‘way around’ wins you the game – the longer your road is, more points you get!

That train strategy reminds me of our life. Yes, there can happen a lot of annoying things that significantly contribute to a discomfort in your life: loud neighbors, grumpy bus drivers, constant rain and heavy clouds, illogical requests at work, dishonest people and ridiculous laws, etc. But do these people and circumstances really stop you for reaching your goals? In most situations, not. Then why even care? Keep your missions in front of your eyes and don’t waste your efforts and your energy on people and circumstance that don’t deserve it. And always remember - the longer way might be the winning one.

Happy New 2018 where I’m not going to care for things that are not vital for my mission and my train! Happy New 2018 where I focus my energy on things that I like and I want to do!

Weakened by the comfort.

Pontius Pilate sufferig from migraine in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (movie)

I happen to suffer from migraines: pretty much every weekend (either Saturday, or Sunday, or even both days) I want to kill myself. I can’t think, I can’t concentrate, I can’t even watch some stupid TV-show, I spend most of my day sleeping and actively suffering. Also, I take tons of painkillers that don’t help anyway until the day is over.

Feeling really upset about wasting my weekends like this (in bed and almost crying), I started asking myself a question: how did other people deal with migraines in the past? In fact, many famous scientists, writers, artists, and world leaders had this kind of unbearable headache throughout their life: Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Edgar Poe, Charles Darwin, Ludwig van Beethoven, Karl Marx, Alfred Nobel, etc. Despite of severe pain and obstructed vision that it caused, these people succeeded to change the world’s views, to rule the empire, to create genius books and most beautiful music. It’s known for a fact that even while having strong migraines, Michael Bulgakov was not only writing his novels but even created the most colorful and accurate description of the migraine spasm in his famous novel ‘Master and Margarita’. Vincent van Gogh created some of his most outstanding masterpieces exactly during his schizophrenic attacks. Ludwig van Beethoven couldn’t hear a sound, but kept writing his stunning music full of harmony and love. These people transformed their diseases into the art!

How strong do you need to be psychologically to not only overcome the pulsating pain and physical exhaustion, but to create something so beautiful and genius? Okay, you might say – come on, these people didn’t have this crazy technological progress and world swirling around in the unbearably fast pace, that puts so much stress and pressure on us today. But on the other hand, many famous artists lived in a total poverty, without being able to sell or have their works recognized. That’s quite a pressure when you have nothing to eat, isn’t it? 

Maybe, that is actually the root of the problem. In their time, there wasn’t many ways to fight the disease: you either ‘suck it up’ and keep doing your work, or you die. Nowadays, we have many painkillers to shut up the disease, spa and psychiatrists to relief the stress, and so much pity for ourselves that we give up on creating something meaningful as soon as we start feeling a little ‘under weather’. In spite of having all these means, we suffer from mild depressions, stress-caused headaches, problems with sleeping and eating, but most importantly, from being weakened by the comfort of the new world.

How do we get strong, determined and effective again, to be able to change the world to better even when our world is full of pain? How do we stop being constantly tired and start creating? 

Paper balls of words

A week ago, I was asked by our friends whose young daughter is applying for colleges, to have a look at her personal essay for college applications. The very first paragraph absolutely conquered my heart: it was a true piece of very creative and realistic writing, describing her calming down a new-born baby as a volunteer in the children’s hospital. The writing reflected her personal perception of the situation so well that you almost felt like being in the hospital hall yourself. The rest of the essay had the same vivid and powerful “visual” approach of the writing. And as a writer I absolutely loved it.

However, the second thought after “I love this” was “is it appropriate for the college application?” I have never been a high school student in the US applying for a BA degree in the liberal arts college, so I’m not entirely sure what are the expectations. But when I was applying for a Master degree in American college, I had a very strict and clear idea of how my essay should be structured: stating your experience and explaining how this experience makes you want to apply for the program. There was no question of being “creative”: you know what they expect from you and you are trying to make your candidature sound as strong as possible. Having that in mind, I recommended my friends’ daughter to keep the originality of the personal situations but add explanations of what each situation taught her, how did it make her want to go to the college, and in which way this situation influenced her perception of her own future.

No doubt, I wanted my friends’ daughter to get to the college she dreamed about, I wanted her essay to be strong and persuasive. But somewhere at the back of my mind itched a question: why do we consider things to be “appropriate” only if they follow the well-established, traditional scheme or structure? Yes, these are very important and serious things such as college applications, graduation thesis, scholarly papers, job CVs, and official statements. And of course, it is easier to check thousands of essays or CVs when they follow the well-established templates. So, we teach these templates at school, at the career and academic centers, we correct students’ papers according to these templates, we write press releases following the template, and we start leaving by these templates. We start expecting everyone around to behave according to these templates: what to say at your job interview, how to talk to your boss, how to behave with the clients, how is the shop assistant supposed to address you, etc. etc. etc. When someone’s behavior suddenly does not confirm to our “templates” we feel uncomfortable, we think that the person is at best “funny” and “a little strange”, at worst “creepy” and “dangerous”.

There is a very clear distinction in the academic world between “academic” and “creative”. If you don’t follow a long manual of requirements on how to write an academic paper, your paper will be returned to you for correction. If you want to be creative, go for arts and creative writing, which is not considered “very academic” disciplines in the society. I have to write quite a lot for my work – mostly position paper, statements for lobbying the European institutions and national governments, sometimes informative news items. Luckily for me, there are templates to follow for all of these papers: I don’t need to spend much time deciding how to structure my writing. Unluckily for me, I see how superficial and ‘inhuman’ my words are as I myself get sometimes bored from my writing. And I know that if you’d risk writing something unusual, something from a personal perspective, something with human passions and human feelings, it would not even be considered neither by my organisation, nor by governments we are addressing. It is as if the words don’t actually mean anything: officials already know what we are asking for, we know that they don’t want to do it so we keep demanding. The actual wording doesn’t matter, they don’t even read it, they highlight the important words, “investments”, “working conditions”, “professional needs”. It would have had the same effect if we threw paper balls at people in the governments to remind them about our demands. The words became the paper balls in our world. They are only signs signifying what category the paper belongs to: academic work, political statement, or a piece of art.

There is no place or time for creativity and unusual in the modern world of effective service, profitable business, effective politics, and serious science because it takes time and effort to perceive and understand it, it brings uncomfortable and unknown, and you can’t respond to it with an email template “Dear XXX, Thank you for your message. I’m looking forward to seeing you soon. Best regards, XXX”. 

Doctor Lisa: fighting windmills

Somehow my last couple of days are full of stories about extraordinary people living in our time. Yesterday, it was Shavarsh Karapetyan (http://www.peopleofar.com/2014/02/08/true-story-of-a-real-life-superhero-shavarsh-karapetyan/) who made invaluable sacrifices to fight the death.

Today, the story is different: Elizaveta Glinka (more famous as Doctor Lisa) fights the death of those who are destined to die. She builds hospices for incurable patients and organizes medical and psychological help for people dying at home. Many in Russia don’t understand palliative therapy (mitigating the pain and psychological tension of incurable patients) and call it pure quixotism: why waste expensive drugs and doctors’ time on fatal cases?

That’s why in Russia many incurable patients become “outcast”: hospitals refuse to take them and hospices are rare animals in the government system. At best, these people are left to die in arms of their relatives who neither have appropriate medical equipment at home, nor got specific psychological training.

For Doctor Lisa, everything started from her mother being in coma for two months before she died in Moscow. Elizaveta, who studied palliative therapy in the US and already organized her first hospice in Kiev, experienced this negative attitude to incurable patients in Russia in full. In 2007, she established a tiny fund Just Help that just helps everyone who wouldn’t get support from anywhere else.

That was the moment when Elizaveta Glinka turned into Doctor Lisa and started a blog that soon became a link between people from all around Russia who wanted to help and those who needed this help. People started donating small sums of money, clothes, toys for kids, pampers, medicines, etc. Doctor Lisa posts not only list of needed things, but also pictures of her patients, their letters and stories. 

Doctor Lisa often says I’m not a journalists, I’m a doctor. But in fact, she is more than a doctor: she is a master of last wishes. Listen to favorite music, write a letter to the president and get a response, smoke a last cigarette, dress up very nicely – she always finds the way to make patient’s last days the happiest ones. One man with cancer used to live in a village and really missed his farm: Doctor Lisa brought a real kid to his ward. He was stroking the kid and crying from happiness… He died in a week.

Glinka helps not only dying people: those living but helpless are all her patients. Her fund gives food and medical help to homeless and other people in need every Wednesday near one of Moscow train stations. And every Friday these people can come to a tiny, basement office of Just Help and have a real party with food, poems, songs, and stories. Doctor Lisa has volunteers to share many responsibilities but she still personally bandages up dozens of drug attics, alcoholics, and ex-criminals at Paveletskyaya Square. She knows them by names, nicknames, and their stories: “amorous” Carmen who often gets bruised by her lovers, mentally disabled Maxim who helps Doctor Lisa to distribute food, Chechnya war veteran who dreams about writing a book, and many others.

Since last summer Doctor Lisa, doesn’t get much time to write in her blog: she transports sick and injured children away from the war zone in Eastern Ukraine and brings humanitarian aid to kids who are left behind. Doctor refuses to make any political statements. It doesn’t matter for her to which side she brings rescued kids: she just believes that children should never see a war. So, every time she succeeds to negotiate a short ceasefire, she takes a driver with her and hurries to those who are waiting for help.

Maybe, Doctor Lisa does fight the windmills and her patients will die sooner or later either from incurable disease or from harsh Moscow winter and off-grade alcohol. Even from the war, she can save maximum 5-10 children every raid… And still, Doctor Lisa kills a fear of death: she gives hope and love to people who were left alone face-to-face with their merciless destiny. 

Orphans "off-the-books": Children of labor migrants

Children wait in line in the dining room of Straseni's orphanage (Moldova). From the project "Behind the Absence".

They are average kids, they have mother and father who love them endlessly. But they see their parents at best once a year. “Mom is at work” describes their everyday life. They are called “social orphans” and their parents are labor migrants.

From the project "One Family, Two Places".

Zhang Jianfang and his wife (on the picture: photo project One Family, Two Places) moved to Shenzhen ten years ago to seek work. They left behind two children, and have only been back four times since then.

The situation is typical not only for China: according to research conducted by My Family, a UNICEF-funded NGO in Bishkek, only 6% of the 11,000 children in Kyrgyzstan orphanages are there because they have no living parents. The number of children growing up without parents in many countries around the world increases every month: 58 million children are left behind in China, 9 million in the Philippines, 1 million in Sri Lanka. 

These parents are not egoists who left their countries for beautiful life abroad. They save every penny to send back to their children and try to give as much love as they can on rare occasions of being home. They would go through any hardships with visas or finding the place to live, but often they are barred from bringing their families with them by their employers or by registration rules.

So, orphanages sometimes become the only option: especially, in countries like Kyrgyzstan where government uses most of its funds to finance children’s homes instead of low-income families. “It turns out that needy families cannot compete with the government, and they are forced to take their children to orphanages”, says Nazgul Turdubekova, the director of Bishkek-based League for the Rights of the Child, an NGO.

Grandparents seem a better option only at first: they are getting older and sicker every year. Children often become breadwinners and caregivers themselves, exchanging happy childhood for early adulthood. Not to mention a huge generation gap when children don’t find any common language with their grandparents and just retire into their shell. 

From the project ”Behind the Absence”.

Iulia from Moldova (on the picture), 10 years old, lives with her grandmother who takes care of a girl and her two brothers while their mother is working in Germany. A year ago, this elderly woman was diagnosed with uterine cancer and it’s getting harder and harder to look after three grandchildren when having constant pain.

Nowadays, it is still only Human Rights organizations that raise an alarm about millions of children who don’t get to be children. Some Chinese NGO created parent-to-child telephone cards, or 'love cards', to help regular communication between migrant workers and their children. But how can telephone calls possibly make up for warmth of a real parent?

These are just drops in the ocean without crucial changes in the system of legal and social protection of labor migrants, as well as without some improvements of economic situations in their home countries.

These kids might not die from starvation, but they face a keen hunger for parental love. 

5 reasons why I want to be broadcast journalist (rather than write for papers or magazines)

Reason #1.

Visualization vs just verbalization: anything hits you much stronger when you see and hear about it than if you read it from the lifeless piece of paper. Even a photo captures only single moment of the event or emotion: it cannot express the whole range of life’s nuances. You can say so much more with just five seconds shot than you would read in a whole-page article.

As a public, we feel it deeper when we see something with our own eyes, we “believe” in it. The Ethiopian famine of the early 1980s was written about in newspapers at length for some time, but with little reaction. Only when BBC Television beamed the horrors of starvation to the West’s meal tables did the public sit up and take notice.

Reason #2.  

Moreover, there is so much more for creativity and originality in the playful combination of words, moving pictures and sounds. Got bored with dull news you have to report? Create your own masterpiece by mixing up the words with controversial picture or getting a shot from an interesting angle. I noticed it when interning with a TV news station: even the most tiresome piece can be transformed into Mona Lisa with a nice flow of information and beautiful close-ups.

Reason #3.  

Newsroom is a huge family living under one roof and intercommunicating every spare second. Recommendations, rumors, dramas, jokes, pranks – you can find anything in the electrified atmosphere of a TV newsroom. People are bond to work together as their final piece is a result of a team work: it takes at least, a reporter, a photographer, and a producer. In short words, communication and relationships are vital components of broadcasting which brings us to …

Reason #4.

 99% of the broadcasting employees are naturally positive and energetic. Thousands of people watch you on their screens every day: you got to be cheerful and easy-going. Even if you are behind the scene, how can you be down in the crowd of smiling reporters and anchors? Every time I would enter a newsroom in a horrible mood, two minutes later my gloomy look would disappear without a trace. I still miss all the jokes and pranks of our photographers (you can’t survive at this profession without some sarcasm in your blood) and shining eyes of our reporters when found a great “pitch”.

Reason #5.  

Just one word. Adrenaline. None of the breathtaking stories and investigations to write about for newspaper can compare with racing to catch the police speaker-man making a statement about the “just-happened” murder and to manage to put him on air before any other station. Or this moment when a kidnapped girl was returned to her parents just 2 minutes before 5pm show right in front of the reporter to be on air.

Job where you never know what’s going to happen in the next minute. For me, that’s a description of perfect job.

National peculiarities.

I’m a big fan of French cinema with its vagueness, mystery, and open ends. First, I like when the movie makes me think and get to my own conclusions without explaining me what and why. Secondly, I like when the life is shown as beautiful, dramatic and complicated as it is, instead of the world of special Hollywood effects. However, even French cinema sometimes contains way too explicit stories.

Movie “L’enfant” (Baby) is a banal story of two careless teenagers who don’t really care about money and where to sleep, until the girl got pregnant and they get a 9-days-old baby. She comes back to her boyfriend, irresponsible petty criminal, who at some point decides to sell the baby for adoption without even telling his girlfriend. He explains that they “will get another baby” if they want. In short words, the whole idea of the movie is that this guy is actually a baby.

Now, something more interesting. I wouldn’t think of that movie if just a day after I didn’t read an article about similar story happened to two teenagers in Russian orphanage. A 14-year-old girl and a 15-year-old guy, living in the orphanage where they started dating, decided that they wanted to keep the baby from the accidental pregnancy. The story itself is fascinating because in the most Russian orphanages teenage pregnancy is a subject to hide from the authorities to avoid the scandal: girls usually are persuaded to do the abortion.

Somehow, in this case both parents insisted on keeping the baby. However, the hardest part was to decide what to do with a young family after the birth: they can’t stay in the orphanage and they can’t be left alone in the outside world. Luckily, local media started talking about this story and just a month before the delivery they found a host family, a woman who agreed to be their guardian. She already has 7 adopted kids, four of whom are adults and live separately. 
Now, I don’t know what will be the end of the movie, but young parents and their new host mom look happy on the pictures. 

International Law and Pathetic Me

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Story of my life :) 

I was so sincerely excited and inspired to learn about human rights in the world, especially, considering that in my home county they are not very much worshipped by people. You don’t touch the law and the law hopefully will forget about you – the mainstream ideology in Russia.

In my pathetic world, human rights were represented by a nice, beautiful girl with a kind face and a big red cross on the T-shirt feeding skinny, scared African children. Nice, beautiful people and skinny African children were preserved: I guess, just to make me happy. And these nice, beautiful people created nicely sounding words about human dignity and equality; words that ended up being a political project to avoid talks about decolonization and to replace them with less harmful ideals of liberal democracy. And Red Cross in many African cities became known for being corrupted and having certain hierarchy.

However, let’s not spoil my childhood dream: my last hope was humanitarian law with a kind girl still looming somewhere at the horizon. The girl was killed by single professional shot at her back and the sniper calmly explained to me that the girl needed to be killed in order to achieve the military advantage; that it was proportional to the number of casualties required for getting that land. And I shut up, because according to jus in bello he was right to act that way, because there is no standards that say precisely how many people need to be killed to get this land. Someone might say 10, someone might say 15, and it’s completely random choice: who will be among these lucky 5 and among these unlucky 10. And technically, there should be a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, but who knows, who knows, maybe, the girl was diversionist dressed up as a civilian…

Reasonable me still agrees that bad laws are better than no laws and they might be useful to stop armies from destroying the whole land of their enemy. Pathetic me starts thinking that laws in the ancient times were actually more fair: you steal something, people saw you stealing, your arm is cut off, others who watched will rather die from hunger than steal. Simple morality.

Nowadays, with a help of beautiful, incomprehensible for average people words lawyers (and certain amount of money and power behind them) can prove that you were saving the world by killing thousands of people. It’s called progressive humanism.

P.S. Still didn’t give up to find the reason why I should like the law.

Be yourself.

Let me share my personal frustration. Almost every book, every movie, every website about personal development and search for happiness (which already make me throw up) says Step one: be yourself. Apparently, that’s the quickest way of finding the desired harmony in life, and blah-blah-blah. There is one small problem, though. Nobody says what is Yourself.

The truth is, there is no such thing as Being yourself. This yourself-puzzle is made of your parents’ bringing up system; your nationality background; of the way people behaved around you when you were a teen and the way they behave around you now; of these TV show actors that you secretly worshiped; of these book characters that you were reading at night hiding from your parents under the blanket; of these family friends that you fell in love with; of your basketball couch who was extremely successful in your eyes; of this stranger in the subway who looked so decent and elegant that you thought “I should cross legs the same way when I sit, it looks very refined”.

Every single gesture of yours, not talking about the decisions you make every day, is  somebody else’s gesture that once matched with your preferences and principles (that actually were also grown up in you by your family and your community) so that you decided to borrow it. Every one of us is an amazing actor, playing his role spontaneously, thinking that it is himself, that it is what he actually is. But in fact, it’s what he wants to be because he finds it attractive in other people. She is extremely nice and cheerful person because she thinks that is what a woman should be, because that is what her beloved mother was or that is how Kate Middleton looks like. He is a charming asshole because that is what his uncle was (and all the women were crazy about him) or that is how Doctor House behaves and nobody fires him.

Our I was myself / I wasn’t myself, I had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t are based on what we find the most attractive in other people. We borrow features from each other adapting them till they become unconscious and call them myself. Meanwhile, the category Pretending includes features that we don’t like in others or we liked for a while but they are not fun anymore. However, this awesome mechanism helps us to avoid thinking too much of what is myself and what is that’s not me! and exploding our minds every time we need to make a step.

In short words enjoy your life and stop feeling obliged to be yourself! It’s a made up creature :)

Cinema, women and magic

What does it take to make a good movie? Talent, passion, creativity, strong personality? Well, it seems that gender also plays important role in American film industry.

 According to recent researches in 2013, women made up only 16% of all directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors. Only four female filmmakers have ever been nominated for an Academy Award for best director and Kathryn Bigelow is the only female director that has taken home an Oscar so far. Crazy, right?

Three brave and talented women from Minneapolis took a risk to show the world that cinema doesn’t have gender limitations. Cara Green Epstein, Maribeth Romslo and Mim Epstein made Dragonfly, a movie where screenwriter, directors, executive producers, three main characters, production designers, animator, and storyboard artist are all women.

“It wasn’t intentional, - says Maribeth. - Once we decided to make our ideas come true, we suddenly realized a really cool thing: we were three women at the helm of a feature film, something that almost never happens”.

Dragonfly is not about women. It’s about family, relations and some magic in our everyday life. It tells the story of one Minnesota family divided by divorce and illness. Young, but talented Abby Fry plays a little girl who struggles to understand her mom and herself while solving a mystery of the magical “dragonfly” mailbox.

Dragonfly is still at the stage of production, but its creators are very excited and passionate about it. They repeat after Kathryn Bigelow: “It’s irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don’t”. 

Exploring a woman.

One of the perks in working for news broadcasting is that you read tons of great articles from different media every day. Most of it is just to check if there is something big happening in your region or in the world. However, some articles truly catch your eye. And you start digging deeper.

I’m usually copying the links to the articles that looked interesting for me to my special “treasure file” to check it later more attentively. It turned out that all three stories that I picked during my first week of internship at the TV News are about women. Well, I guess, I really can’t avoid that topic in my writing….

These stories about women choosing their paths made me wondering what feelings and thoughts they had while taking certain directions in life. If I were them, why would I decide to become what they became? Would I understand them as a woman?

Instead of yelling about feminism while living myself in a world with a great number of options and without tough decisions, I’d rather try to understand those women who don’t have that luxury; to be able to help instead of blindly imposing my beliefs on them.

A 7-years-old girl in El Salvador ran away from home because nobody really cared about her and her uncle physically abused her every day. A 16-years-old member of the Mara Salvatrucha, or the MS13, one of the largest Salvadoran gangs, got arrested for having killed six children from the other street gang. Who do we sympathize more? The answer is obvious. However, it’s the same person. Article call these people “victims and perpetrators”.

What happened during these 9 years with the brave, little girl? Life happened. Her brother, who helped her when she ran away, was killed by the other street gang while she was raped by the age of 8.

The story doesn’t end there. In prison she participated in a creative writing program and now leaving the prison at her 21, she is looking for a different life. Did she really have a choice for her way in life? I’m not sure. Did she ever think about “choosing” some direction? When you just need to survive, I don’t think you ask such questions.

Another story about the meaning of life. 7,000 volunteer soldiers have joined the Women’s Protection Unit, or YPJ, which grew out of the wider Kurdish resistance movement. Most of these girls are at the age of 18-24. They wake up at 4 am; they sleep with their guns at arm’s length; they eat whatever food the locals donate. Meanwhile, they braid their hair, they pluck their eyebrows; they laugh and make a girls-like friendship. And sometimes they bury their sister-soldiers.

Don’t they want a normal life like dressing up, going out for dates, having children? People say war is guys’ business. However, these girls know that every day they safe people of their country, their neighbors and relatives. They know that they are more than just young, fragile girls – they are solders defending their land. They liberate hundreds of women and children strained in the mountains after ISIS attacked their village.

These girls had a choice of life paths, and they chose the one that seemed to be the most meaningful for them. The question “why do you do that?” is ridiculous for them.

Somewhere in South Korea there is a US Army garrison, surrounded by old shacks. There lived about 70 aging women who worked their whole life as “comfort women” for American soldiers. They are old and sick, and they don’t have any support from the government because they are “prostitutes”.

It’s not that kind of profession that people would respect, right? It’s not even a legal work, people would say. Nevertheless, in the 50es Korean government deeply dependent on the U.S. military was so confident about this “profession” that it formalized the camptowns as "special tourism districts" with legalized prostitution.

More than 20 000 women were persuaded that they are helping their country by sleeping with American soldiers. I always wondered what would make a woman sleep with strangers for money. Apparently, patriotism might be enough reason. And after you just can’t quit because that is all you know to do for work.

The saddest thing here is that a country these women donated their bodies for doesn’t really care about them. They became old and sick and everything that Korean government and Korean people remember about these women is a label “prostitute”. These women thought that made a right choice…