Foot and Fire

Belarussian journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievich's body of work consists of nonfiction but she specifically got this year's Nobel Prize for her book, Voices from Chernobyl. Originally written in Russian which follows her country's oral tradition, the book gave voices to the victims of the largest technical disaster of the twentieth century. I was able to read a short but already riveting portion of the book in Paris Review, and I quote here the portion which I believe can represent the pain of 2.1 million people: I was twenty-three. Two months later I went back to Moscow. From the train station straight to the cemetery. To him! And at the cemetery I started going into labor. Just as I started talking to him—they called the ambulance. It was two weeks before I was due. They showed her to me—a girl. “Natashenka,” I called out. “Your father named you Natashenka.” She looked healthy. Arms, legs. But she had cirrhosis of the liver. Her liver had twenty-eight ...

Submersion of Panay Bukidnons: A Call for Salvage Aside from the imminent fact that the Jalaur River Dam shall submerge portions of their ancestral domain, the Panay Bukidnon's cultural heritage also faces submersion Sunburn, scratches from blades of grasses, and scars from insect bites are among the souvenirs I and a friend got from our three-day immersion with the Panay Bukidnons of Brgy. Garangan, Calinog, Iloilo. We slept and lived with them in order to hear stories about stars and gather recipes of their traditional cooking but we ended up hearing more pressing matters, about the dam project and the struggle to keep the heritage vis-a-vis the daily needs for survival. On our second morning, we traversed the mountainside planted among others with coffee and cacao trees owned by our host family, with the end of reaching Jalaur River where a megadam project is to be implemented. Along the way, we traversed at least ten live streams including Karangayan and Bukay Ng...