Sue > Recent Status Updates

The land agent-“The weather being hot, he had no cravat, and wore his shirt collar wide open; so that every time he spoke something was seen to twitch and jerk up in his throat, like the little hammers in a harpsichord when the notes are struck. Perhaps it was the Truth feebly endeavoring to leap to his lips. If so, it never reached them.”

The four hearse-horses especially, reared and pranced, and showed their highest action, as if they knew a man was dead, and triumphed in it. “They break us, drive us, ride us; ill treat, abuse and maim us for their pleasure—But they die; Hurrah, they die!”

There were English..Irish..Welsh..and Scotch people there; all with their little store of coarse food and shabby clothes; and nearly all, with their families of children. There were children of all ages; from the baby at the breast to the.. girl..as much grown as her mother. Every kind of domestic suffering that is bred in poverty…and long travel..and yet infinitely less complaint…infinitely..more kindness

What a fascinating, exciting reading experience. I’ve never read anything like this before.

“Nothing in our own surroundings was permitted to define us. Instead, we pledged allegiance to an island thousands of miles away where they had queens and castles and princes, an island we were required to build in our imaginations. Never Never Land” (I wonder as I read this if my mother and her family ever felt this way as her largely Irish family grew up in Canada as does this character.)

I’ve read “Water”, “Earth”, and “Fire” and about to begin the final section “Air”. The primary character of each of these subtly interconnected stories has suffered some soul damaging insult from someone or more others close to them. With his usual wonderful prose, John Boyne etches the fine details of each of their lives.

Industrial mining is…by design a blunt force, low-yield, high-volume business. … This is the primary reason that many industrial copper-cobalt mines in the DRC informally allow artisanal mining to take place on their concessions, and it is also why they tend to supplement industrial production by purchasing high grade artisanal ore from depots.

Why would children be handpicking stones outside a giant, Chinese-owned copper-cobalt concession? The best way to understand..is to examine the difference between industrial and artisanal mining.
Industrial mining is like doing surgery with a shovel artisanal mining is like doing it with a scalpel… Artisanal miners..can ..dig or tunnel for high grade deposits.. Or, like the children..handpick stones of value.

Villages along the road are coated in airborne debris. Children scamper between huts like balls of dust. There are no flowers to be found. No birds in the sky. No placid streams. No pleasant breezes. The ornaments of nature are gone. All color seems pale and unformed. Only the fragments of life remain.
This is Lualaba Province, where cobalt is king.

To this day, the official national identification cards used by every citizen in the DRC…have not been updated since 1997, when the country was called Zaire. As a result, most people use their voter registration cards as a substitute… Why are the Congolese people still using their Zaire.. ID cards from 1997? Because new..cards require that the government conduct a new census..the last one was..in 1984.

Philippe: If you really want to understand what is happening in the Congo’s mining sector, you must..understand our history. After independence, the mines were managed by the Belgians. They took all the money, and there was no benefit for the people. After the Belgians, we had “Africanization” with Mobutu. He nationalized the mines, but…only benefited the government, not the people. With…Kibala, (cont)

I’m already feeling angry and I’ve barely begun reading. So many millionaires, actually billionaires, have blood on their corporate hands.

The source of the Congo River was the final great mystery of African geography, and the drive by European explorers to solve this mystery tragically altered the fate of the Congo and made possible all the suffering taking place in the mining provinces today.

The ways that we understand Pepys’s diary today are shaped by the versions that we encounter and by popular traditions of reception, especially since many people know about Pepys largely by reputation rather than by reading his diary themselves. Pepys is famous as an unusually frank and detailed diarist, and as a quirky, naughty one.