life styles

ERITREA LIFESTYLES AND CULTURE

Religious sites of Asmara (1)

Asmara’s very diverse cultural heritage is obvious: three of the most prominent landmarks in the city are the Catholic Cathedral, the Al Khulafa Al Rashiudin Mosque and the Nda Mariam Coptic Cathedral.

In a world characterized by religious conflict, Christians, Muslims and others have lived peacefully together in Asmara for centuries.

The cathedral of Asmara was build in 1922 in the Lombard-Roma-
nesque style. Its tall Gothic bell tower is visible from everywhere in
the city and is a useful landmark if you ever lose your sense of di-
rection. The cathedral, as well as the primary school, the monaste-
ry and the nunnery, are in the same compound and can be visited.

It is also possible to climb the 52 meter tower of the cathe-
dral (guided tour) to enjoy a view over Asmara. The climbing is
the most spectacular at the whole hours when the bells sound.

Details of the Cathedral compound: (a) interior (b) main entrance
(c) stairs to the bell tower (d) Maria statue in monastery garden.

Al Khulafa Al Rashiudin (Followers of the Right Path) on Peace Street
(near the covered markets), was built in 1938 from Dekemhare tra-
vertine and Carrara marble. There is a square in front of the mosque
paved with blocks of dark stone arranged in geometrical patterns.

Nda Mariam Othodox church – Asmara

Nda Mariam, Asmara’s Orthodox Cathedral is dedicated to St. Mary. The main building is composed of three massive elements, slightly up the hill, which makes it another useful landmark in Asmara. To the left and the right of the main body there are two soaring towers, each supporting a white construction which contain the church bells. On top of these structures, cylinder shaped brickwork supports a concrete tukul. Above the two wooden doors, which have frames of red ceramic tesserae, there is an impressive mosaic structure showing religious scenes done by the Italian painter Nenne Sanguineti Poggi, on request of the clergy, in the 1950s. She is also the creator of several mosaics and frescos around Asmara — see the ones on the front of the old “Liceo” School, those at the Agasien school, and the mosaics in the tabernacle of the Church to St. Mary in Axum. In front of the church are traditional stones which were used as bells. Inside the church, you will find lovely murals of the apostles, scenes from the life of Christ and stories from the Old and New Testament. The saint’s name is celebrated each month by the church congregation, and once a year in a festival.

Details of the Enda Mariam compound: (a) mosaic structure
(b) traditional stones used as bells (c) painting above one of the
side entrances (d) main entrance to the Enda Mariam compound.

Kidane Meheret, principal church of Oriental Christian rite. It has beau-
tiful frescoed walls which feature the Madonna of Perpetual Help and
the nine monks that christianized the highlands of Eritrea, painted in
Italy by a Cappuccino brother. It is situated behind the central market.

The Synagogue of Asmara was built in 1906. It is a beautiful, serene
building just off the main street. The wooden cornices and fittings
are hand carved and the scrolls of the Torah are hand written.

Mar Bin Abdulaziz Mosque – Gaza Banda, Asmara.

St. Michaels Orthodox Church in the Senita area of Asmara.

Seventh Day Adventist Church Asmara.

Yordanos Gidey; Miss Eritrea 2007

Yordanos Gidey; Miss Eritrea 2007 was born to her loving parents Yemane and Asmeret Gidey. She made the long journey to the U.S. and has built a successful life for herself alongside her parents and five siblings. She has been raised in Illinois but despite the distance from Eritrea, her parents still raised her to have a traditional background and to admire and be swollen with pride for her beautiful country.

Yordanos’ hard work and determination in school has brought her to be a current student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN pursuing a degree in communications. In spite of all the time being put into her education, she has made time to stay heavily involved in her community with various non-profit organizations. This includes her involvement in Relay-4-Life for four years which works alongside the American Cancer Society, completing several hours with a local forest preserve to help maintain the beauty of our Earth, as well as participating in many food and clothing drives to help others who are less fortunate and need assistance to take care of their families.

Yordanos believes that God has given her a special gift to have the proper skills to work with young children. With her strong passion for children she has worked as a Sunday school teacher for over three years and currently works with a Christian Outreach Community Center whose goals are to help children have the inspiration and gain the confidence to set goals that will relieve themselves of the hardships in their less privileged communities. Having an identity that ties her to a historic nation full of people who are so prideful, honored, and appreciative of their royal country of Eritrea has made her so proud of her country, her culture, and her people.

WORLD LIFESTYLES AND CULTURE

Obesity levels in China rising fast, study finds

Wed Jul 9, 2008

BEIJING (Reuters)

Obesity levels in China are rising fast, with more than a quarter of the adult population overweight or obese, as people add more meat and dairy products to their diet, causing serious health problems, a new study says.

Of all the developing countries, only in Mexico is the rate of increase in becoming overweight among adults faster than in China, the study, published in the July/August issue of the journal Health Affairs, says.

“What’s happening in China should be seen as a marker for what is going to hit the rest of the developing world if we fail to act,” said study author Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina.

“We need to find the right investments and regulations to encourage people to adopt a healthy lifestyle, or we risk facing higher rates of death, disease, and disability and the related costs,” he added.

Chinese people now derive a far larger proportion of energy from fat and animal-based foods, such as meat and eggs, compared with in the past, the study found.

“The classical Chinese diet — rich in vegetables and carbohydrates with minimal animal-sourced food — no longer exists,” the study said.

“In 2006, fewer than one percent of all Chinese adults consumed a diet with less than 10 percent of energy derived from fat.”

The change in diets and lifestyles, where Chinese less frequently have to engage in physical activity at work, is consequently leading to a rise in cancer and coronary heart disease, the study found.

“Based on fairly conservative assumptions, the total impact of these nutrition-related components of poor diet, inactivity, and obesity on medical costs to treat noncommunicable diseases, labor productivity and national production are very large.”

Peak Oil: Crisis alters lifestyles

Aaron Newton of Concord places a pot of mixed vegetables

into a solar oven as his 2-year-old daughter, Keaton

Newton, watches.

By Morgan Josey Glover
Staff Writer

Sunday, July 06 / 2008

Aaron Newton has a foot in two worlds.

Four days a week, the 33-year-old husband and father of two works as a land planner in Concord.

In his free time, Newton prepares for a time when energy could become unreliable or too expensive for his family.

“I don’t know exactly what is going to happen because I don’t know what that future is going to look like,” Newton said. “It’s important to be flexible.”

Opinions differ among economists, petroleum industry experts and grassroots activists about the challenges that declining oil supplies could present to the American way of life. But across the country, people who believe global oil production will soon peak and go into permanent decline are pushing for a transformation in how we grow food, transport people and build homes.

Newton represents a segment of Americans who now envision their lives in a post-peak world. Below, the Newton family and other North Carolinians share their stories:

Straddling the ages

Jennifer Newton never imagined that at age 35 she would eat out of a dorm-size refrigerator, grow unfamiliar produce in her backyard or discuss electricity-free kitchens with her husband. But now, much of the Newton household revolves around making it less dependent on fossil fuels, especially when it comes to diet.

“I’m not in denial, but I guess part of me thinks it’s not going to be as bad as he thinks it is,” said Jennifer, who has 2-year-old and 4-month-old daughters.

Her husband, Aaron, learned of peak oil from a co-worker about four years ago and grieved the loss of a materially comfortable future as someone grieves the death of a loved one.

Aaron said he even went through a period of depression where he drank more beer than usual and told his wife he “found out how the world is going to end.”

After much research, Aaron gradually accepted the need to change. He insulated his 78-year-old three-bedroom house and now gardens and raises chickens (against city codes). He cooks vegetables in a solar oven and sautés in butter the thick leaves of the lambs quarter weeds growing in his front yard.

“I like it better than spinach,” he said.

Aaron Newton rides his bicycle about 100 miles to and from work during the week and cut his 1988 Toyota Camry’s gasoline consumption by 90 percent from January to October 2007. He also completed a book he co-wrote called “A Nation of Farmers” set for release next year.

Newton longs for the time when the general public acknowledges peak oil, when he can chat about it with a friend at a bar and with art, civic and religious institutions.

“I think that point is a long way off where it’s just matter of fact,” he said. “The idea of just in general being able to talk about doing more with less or having alternative energy sources available … I think that is happening now.”

Fretting in Greensboro

Ask Peter Kauber if he thinks Greensboro has the social and political will to restructure its business, transportation and living patterns and the white-bearded man gives a firm no. In fact, Kauber, 67, can’t explain why the grass-roots sustainability movement he’s been involved with for years has not borne more fruit.

“I’ve been at a loss for the last couple of years,” said Kauber, who coordinates the Guilford Solar Communities program. “I’m doing my own stuff, but I’m not really seeing myself as part of a viable movement that’s actually going to make a difference.”

Kauber gives an example: Four years ago a member of Guilford Solar Communities surveyed more than 100 people who had participated in workshops since 1990 and asked them what they had done in response, such as installing solar panels.

“You know how many people had implemented anything at all?” Kauber said. “Zero. What does that tell you? What does that tell all those poor bastards who organized those presentations and all that stuff for 15 years? It really makes you sit back and say talk really is cheap and there is a huge difference between having a huge curiosity in something and going home and doing something about it.”

Kauber has contemplated Greensboro’s response to peak oil since learning about it five years ago at an expo in western North Carolina. The concept resonated with him because he helped update an accounting system for Marathon Oil in Ohio in 1979, during a second oil shock caused by the Iran hostage crisis. He remembers the price of oil both rising and falling.

“If you had asked me in 1980 or 1981 whether there was going to be an oil shortage I would have said obviously not. All that has to happen is the price has to keep going up and when the price goes up we’ll start attacking sources of oil that up to now have not been economic to develop. Now if you ask me the question, I say there’s no guarantee that throwing money at the problem is going to solve the problem.”

Neither does Kauber believe that biofuels and ethanol as alternative fuels are the answer.

“There’s always the possibility that algae are gonna work and we could have a breakthrough and I could be dead wrong,” said Kauber, who drives a Honda Civic hybrid and powers his lawn equipment through solar energy. “But I don’t want to sit here and put my nickel on technologies that are way out there. If they come through then thank God, we’re lucky, we’re saved.”

Kauber said he thinks Greensboro leaders would be “crazy” to revive the city as a transportation hub based on airplanes and trucks, rather than rail.

He also would like to see residents produce and consume most of their food and goods within the region, instead of importing from thousands of miles away.

“For me, the things that I would do if peak oil were true are the things that should be done anyway,” he said.

Kauber said his wife tells him she’s tired of hearing about the Guilford Solar survey and that “sometimes you plant a seed and maybe it takes 20 or 30 years for that seed to germinate.”

After all, Kauber read his first issue of “Mother Earth News” in 1970 and didn’t do anything significant for decades.

“Problem is, we don’t have 30 years,” he said.

Reshaping education

Gerald Cecil tried to run. To Australia. There, the 54-year-old physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill planned to watch from a safe distance as the United States began its descent down the slope of declining global oil production.

Cecil, of Carrboro, weighed a job offer at a national observatory in Sydney last year, he said, but found the move too inconvenient for his family — and he found that Australians were not that much better prepared than Americans.

So, Cecil changed his plan. He now wants to make peak oil the central theme of education at the university he has taught at since 1989.

“With few exceptions, no one is looking at this, at the scope of the problem and the changes that need to take place,” he said.

Cecil stumbled upon the concept in 2001 while preparing an introductory astrophysics course. At the time, he figured NASA would continue to have a demand for new technologies and equipment to be used in space exploration.

Cecil started to doubt Americans would continue to support NASA’s multibillion dollar budget while struggling to put gasoline in their tanks. So he changed course and began introducing peak oil to his students.

“We are completely unprepared for this transition,” Cecil said. “It takes a long time for people to appreciate the level of change that needs to occur.”

But Cecil sees an opportunity to make higher education more relevant to students who will need a sound understanding of peak oil’s implications so that they can become part of the solution.

He plans to write an energy textbook and meets with five professors to brainstorm a freshman course he hopes will start in the fall of 2009.

He still needs clearance from Chancellor Holden Thorp.

“The basic idea is to blow the hair off the back of the students’ heads and say, ‘Bam! You have no idea,’ ” Cecil said about the course.

As Cecil did, fellow professors might learn they teach in an obsolete field. Cecil expects research funding to dry up in most academic areas as the federal government focuses on practical solutions.

“This is a problem now,” he said. “We have to figure out how to fix this with what we can build now and produce in mass quantities.”

Meanwhile, Cecil mulls a Plan B. He invested money from an inheritance in alternative energy stocks after questioning the viability of the university’s retirement system. He’s exploring secondary career options through start-up companies nearby.

In many ways, Cecil turned on a dime to orient himself to a new future. So must his employer, he said:

“If it continues to teach 20th-century thoughts to people, then I don’t think its future is guaranteed.”

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Ken Wills and Clarence Fernandez)

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