Asakiyume mita

I had my whole today turned yanked sideways by a possible medical emergency that turned out not to be one, for which I'm grateful, but I still needed to drive 45 minutes north in the driving rain and then 45 minutes south in the same rain to see disparately located specialists.

Fortunately I had reading material, Tasha Suri's The Jasmine Throne, which I won in a Goodreads giveaway. It's set in an alt-Indian subcontinent in ancient days, with an empire ruling over many principalities and one conquered people, and there is a mythic forest, an abandoned temple in which a hideous massacre took place and where now an imperial princess is imprisoned, spirit powers and a cursed ailment, and moving through all this, the main protagonist, a serving girl who was once a temple child at the aforementioned temple and who has a special connection with it.

The way into the temple is so steep that you have to hold onto a rope to help you scale it, and in the rain it becomes slippery, and there are chasms you can fall into. I have vivid mental images of it, and went to see if I could find good supporting images from real life--sort of like this:



(though I believe that's actually Angkor Wat in Cambodia, not anyplace on the Indian subcontinent.)

In my search, I found some great temple images from Myanmar, including this wonderful image:



(Source)

The kneeling creature looks to be an elephant, so imagine the size of the hand. And there are devotional flowers--I love it.

This image is very beautiful too, from the same place--the Shwe Inn Thein Pagodas west of Inle Lake in Myanmar.

If you live in Mermaid's Hands, sometimes you walk to the mainland across the mudflats, sometimes you take a dinghy, and sometimes you wade. On September 3, Em and her sister waded:

The water was not quite knee high as we waded over. We had our shoes tied together by their laces and slung around our necks so we didn’t have to try to fit them in our backpacks.

In some communities in the Philippines, kids weren't so lucky as to have dinghies for the days when the tide was high--they would swim-walk a half-mile of open water to get to school, with their books wrapped in plastic and balanced on their head:


Source: Peter Shadbolt, "Yellow boats bring hope and education in the Philippines where the school run can be a swim," CNN, May 20, 2014.

When a Filipino blogger found out about the situation, he established a foundation that provides schoolboats. Now the kids can go by boat to school:



Here, meanwhile, are Em and Tammy, setting out for school. The houses of the kids in the Philippines were on stilts; Em and Tammy's house sits on a raft.



I realize Tammy in this picture looks rather like Em in the icon, whereas Em looks different from how I've drawn her in the past--because her hair is different in this picture ... and because I have very limited ability to make a person recognizably the same from picture to picture if I change cues like hair. (Also, Em in the icon is by Kelsey Soderstrom, a professional artist, whereas I'm a rank amateur.)

Tonle Sap is a lake in Cambodia that expands and contracts dramatically, depending on whether it's the rainy season or the dry season--it goes from being no more than a meter deep and 2,700 square kilometers in area to being 9 meters deep and 16,000 square kilometers in area (says Wikipedia). The floating villages of Siem Reap, on one of its feeder rivers, are well known, but on the lake itself there are also floating villages. When dudeshoes saw this New York Times article ("A Push to Save Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake," by Chris Berdik), about how the lake was threatened, she sent me the link, knowing I'd be interested.


Girl from the floating village of Akol, Cambodia. Photo by Chris Berdik for the New York Times

The article is largely about the creation of a model to try to predict what will happen to the lake and how much influence the various factors have, and about the problems in designing the model, and with the model more generally. I was more interested, though, in other aspects of the story--in the fact that farmers displaced by grants to agribusiness have come to make a living on the lake, in the mysterious statement that "tropical dams typically generate power for just a few decades" (why is that?), in the fact that there are tiny fish there called money fish, and sharks that will fit in the palm of your hand.


The black shark, Labeo chrysophekadion. Photo by Chris Berdik for the New York Times

1.5 million people depend on the Tonle Sap. Climate change, hydro dams, increased population pressures--all these things spell change for the lake. Since change is coming, it's best to be planning for it:

A food-security expert, Dr. Fraser has studied some of history’s worst famines, as well as those prevented by tactics like stockpiling food and distributing drought-resistant seeds. His research suggests that no matter how the Tonle Sap changes in the coming years, the right adaptive strategies could mean the difference between a tolerable transition and a disaster.

“The policy and development challenge is one of managing the transition,” he said. “There’s no way to stop it.”