Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • Renown ice climber Marco Prezelj tackles an ice candle in Triglav National Park, Slovenia's only national park in the Alps. Frozen waterfalls are a technical challenge and Prezelj explained he listens to the pitch of sound of ice cracking to plan the safest route.
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  • Cover of the June 2000 issue of National Geographic Magazine.
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  • A child plays the piano while a woman instructs in the living room of an apartment.<br />
<br />
From Leslie Chang’s story that accompanied these photographs in National Geographic Magazine:<br />
<br />
By the time she was ten, Bella lived a life that was rich with possibility and as regimented as a drill sergeant’s. After school she did homework unsupervised until her parents got home. Then came dinner, bath, piano practice. Sometimes she was permitted television, but only the news. On Saturdays she took a private essay class followed by Math Olympics, and on Sundays a prep class for the middle-school entrance exam and piano lessons. The best moment of the week was Friday afternoon, when school let out early. Bella might take a deep breath and look around, like a man who discovers a glimpse of blue sky from the confines of the prison yard.
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  • A man walks down the road in Tom Biggs Hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, while his great grandchildren play nearby.<br />
Lucious Thompson joined Kentuckians for the Commonwealth when he found his land disrupted from mining above them. “There’s good mining and there’s bad mining,” Mr. Thompson said. “Mountaintop removal takes the coal quick, 24 hours every day, making my streams disappear, with the blasting knocking a person out of bed and the giant ‘dozers beep-beeping all night so you cannot sleep.”<br />
<br />
Mr. Thompson spoke with the authority of a retired underground miner. Underground miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh, deep workplaces that were far out of sight. Now, the hollow dwellers have become witnesses more than miners as a fast-moving, high-volume process uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills.<br />
<br />
“They make monster funnels of our villages,” said Carroll Smith, judge-executive, the top elected official, here in Letcher County, the location of some of the worst flooded hollows adjoining mountaintop removal sites. “They haven’t been a real good neighbor at all.”<br />
<br />
With underground mining, coal miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh workplaces deep in the ground and far out of sight. With mountaintop removal, a fast, high-volume process that uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills that help define the hollows, the residents have become witnesses more than miners.<br />
<br />
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/national/11MINE.html
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  • Passengers gaze out the windows of a bus in Shanghai. <br />
<br />
This easy migration of people from city to city is still hard for me to get used to. Seventeen years ago when I was traveling between Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, they all had a ring of policemen around them checking identity papers. I was in China trying to get through those rings of security during the Tiananmen Square uprising. I remember traveling with wire service photographers and driving through those checkpoints at 90 mph and seeing the policeman jump up and down on the dais—literally hopping mad—but there was nothing they could do because they did not have guns or radios. After being absent 17 years, I made (technically) five trips to China in about a one-year period. The growth is so fast paced I could feel the energy and the stress on the street. It makes you realize that our empire is over, but you can’t really understand that without being there. Even though the NYT has multiple stories, every day, on the growth and complexity of the Chinese economy, the average American has little idea what this means other than a fear that increased Chinese fuel consumption will somehow affect what they put in the tank of their SUV. Robert Frank photographed twentieth-century America, recording our coming of age—the baby boom, the start of television, car culture, modular housing, and relative wealth distributed throughout the middle class. His photographs are of progress, technology, plenty, but also the weary faces of waitresses and elevator operators who were desperately trying to join the economic party. Those 1950s faces remind me of a line in Leslie Chang’s story about modern China: “What looks like freedom just feels like pressure.”
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  • A young girl sits with her parents at the dinner table in their home. This is from Leslie Chang’s story that accompanied these photographs in National Geographic Magazine:<br />
<br />
"By the time she was ten, Bella lived a life that was rich with possibility and as regimented as a drill sergeant’s. After school she did homework unsupervised until her parents got home. Then came dinner, bath, piano practice. Sometimes she was permitted television, but only the news. On Saturdays she took a private essay class followed by Math Olympics, and on Sundays a prep class for the middle-school entrance exam and piano lessons. The best moment of the week was Friday afternoon, when school let out early. Bella might take a deep breath and look around, like a man who discovers a glimpse of blue sky from the confines of the prison yard."
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1143438.TIF
  • Women from the rural countryside learn skills to work as maids for the newly wealthy class. They are trained to cook and iron at the Fuping Vocational Skills Training School. Li reacts to flying grease in one of the cooking classes.<br />
<br />
Since opening up its economy in 1978 and moving toward a market economy, China has lifted about 400 million people out of poverty, according to the World Bank. But this has led to wide income inequalities that the Communist Party is trying to address through its notion of a “harmonious society” that has a more even distribution of the benefits of recent decades of speedy economic growth. <br />
<br />
Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who go to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. In some cities, the migrants nearly outnumber the residents. One young girl told National Geographic, “All the young people leave our village. I’m not going back. Many can’t even afford a bus ticket and hitchhike to Beijing.” Overall, the Chinese government has tacitly supported migration as means of transforming China from a rural-based economy to an urban-based one.
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  • A crowd of people in a walkway.
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  • Young people enjoying drinks and conversation in a crowded bar.
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  • Kids posing with people in Cultural Revolution costumes at a car show.
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  • People on a pedestrian escalator and walkway.
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  • People watching a video of their dog on a computer.
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  • People shopping at a mall with cheap goods.
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  • People on the 236 bus in Guangzhou.
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  • People near the statue of Deng Xiao Ping in Shenzhen park.
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  • A Mbuti Pygmy child crying as he receives an innoculation as part of medical care for the indigenous peoples.
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  • Randy Olson, a photographer on assignment for National Geographic at a gold mine in Ghana.
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  • A group of Umbero people look with wonder at a polaroid photograph seeing their image for the first time.
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  • A family meal in Gandiol. Senegal’s national dish is thieboudienne.  Eaten from the salty coast to the arid heartland, thieboudienne literally means rice & fish and is a staple.  For a country known to produce some of the tallest and strongest people on earth, fish is an essential source of protein.
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  • This Mexican photographer has been selling Polaroid instant color photographs to tourists at the base of Cascada Cola de Caballo, Horsetail Falls, for 50 of his 73 years. The waterfall makes a dramatic 75-foot drop through Cumbres de Monterrey in Las Cumbres National Park south of Monterrey.  The falls and surrounding park are a draw for Mexican families for picnics.
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  • A white-gloved military parade takes over a street through the downtown Santiago.<br />
Carabineros de Chile are the uniformed Chilean national police force and gendarmery created on April 27, 1927. Their mission is to maintain order and create public respect for the laws of the country.<br />
They also re-establish order and security in Chilean society through civic education, service to the community, police work, and in a war situation, to act as a paramilitary force (all their members have military training).
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  • Cowboys from central Utah wait for a signal to begin branding young calves and an errant dog finds his way back to safety. Separated when they were moving cattle, the dog jumped up into the saddle upon seeing his owner. The ranch is surrounded by federal land of the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Canyonlands National Park with spectacular views or the orange walls surrounding Indian Creek.
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  • Hausos or Chilean cowboys topped with white Andalusian hats watch a rodeo competition. Huasos ride horses wearing the traditional straw, flat-brimmed sombrero called a chupalla.  A growing popularity of the rodeo as national sport is found near Santiago and all around central and southern Chile.
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  • Millenium Village, an experimental village run by the United Nations.
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  • Restored Colonial colonnades edge Lima's Plaza de Armas, bringing many people into the streets of Peru's capital city. The era when the City of Kings was founded by conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1535, established it as the showplace of Spanish South America.
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  • Pilgrims and local people bathe in the sacred Ganges River.
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  • People bathing in the sacred Ganges River in Varanasi.
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  • A truck stuck in a muddy road with people standing about watching.
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  • Resettled people in a community neighboring a gold mine plant a garden for food.
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  • A street scene of Pontic Greek people
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  • Local people try to extract their truck stuck in the monsoon mud.
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  • A street scene of Pontic Greek people is reflected in a window.
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  • People ignore the monsoon rain while strolling the streets on Christmas eve.
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  • A street scene of Pontic Greek people is reflected in a window.
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  • Two men sit outside a shop on a street that is known for wedding attire where dresses at the doorway lure shoppers inside.  <br />
<br />
Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who move to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at over 120 million. China is experiencing the largest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in history with an estimated 400 million by 2025. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories.
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  • Uniformed restaurant workers carry baskets of food from the kitchen for diners. They pass under a canvas sheet that shows a restaurant with people eating.<br />
<br />
All over China, young architects design buildings that are just experiments: throw in a bit of classical modern, a little Prairie style, a few Roman columns. This restaurant feels like you are sitting inside the restaurant – inside the restaurant.
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  • Young people dance under neon lights in the Armani Club in the Liu lin Road area. Bars are a little crazier in south China where there is an abundance of new wealth.
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  • A worker repairs electrical power lines above pedestrians. <br />
<br />
The need for electrical power is great in Shanghai and migrant workers are hired to hook up cables by strapping a high voltage wire around their waist walking on the actual wires that bring the electricity.  <br />
<br />
A coal-fired power plant comes online every four to five days in China that can power a city the size of San Diego. One hundred cities with populations over 1 million faced extreme water shortages. China’s survival has always been built on the notion of a vastly powerful, infallible center. And yet, air pollution contributed by these plants kills 400,000 people prematurely every year.
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  • A woman and children inspect new products that bombard Chinese consumers daily. Just keeping up with the new air freshener and portable camera can be overwhelming. They are sitting in a city park, Being Hai Park in Beijing where people ride on paddle boats on the lake.
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  • Young people converge nearby an American chain coffee-house in the Xintiandi mall area.
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  • People stop to read the profiles on display at blind date event organized by a dating agency.
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  • A model dressed in white shorts and tall boots sits on a hood of a car while a man admires the headlight at China (Guangzhou) International Automobile Exhibition. It began in 2003 and is one of the largest international auto shows in China. <br />
<br />
This event has an exhibition ground measuring 85,000 square meters and it filled eight exhibition halls. Over 370 exhibitors from 20 other countries and regions, took part in this exhibition, which was covered by more than 1,600 news reporters representing upwards of 510 TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and online media at home and abroad. 120,000 people attended.
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  • The need for electrical power is so great in Shanghai that migrant workers are hired to hook high voltage wires. They strap one around their waist and pull it across an already stressed grid by walking on the actual wires that bring the electricity.  <br />
<br />
A (dirty) coal power plant comes online every four to five days in China that can power a city the size of San Diego.  Air pollution contributed by these plants kills 400,000 people prematurely every year.
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  • Guang Hui Plaza | Shanghai, China  in the west part of Shanghai–Xugiahui area. Public displays of affection are rare, but these two young people are comfortable sitting close to each other and watching the world go by.
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  • A couple walks hand in hand on a pedestrian escalator and walkway.
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  • Women from the rural countryside learn skills like ironing at the Fuping Vocational Skills Training School to be maids for the newly wealthy comfort class. <br />
<br />
Migrant workers in China come from impoverished regions to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. <br />
Since opening up its economy in 1978 and moving toward a market economy, China has lifted about 400 million people out of poverty, which has led to wide income inequalities. The Communist Party is addressing this through a “harmonious society” that calls for more even distribution of benefits from recent economic growth. <br />
<br />
China has experienced the largest mass migration  from rural to city in history. Perhaps 400 million will have migrated by 2025. Many are farmers and workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories. Overall, the Chinese government has tacitly supported migration as means of transforming China from a rural-based economy to an urban-based one.
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  • A group of Congolese women and children in a waiting room for medical care to the Pygmy tribes people.
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  • Mbuti Pygmy tribespeople with hunting net and baby in sling in forest as the semi-nomadic people make their way to a hunting camp in the Ituri Forest.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7209_1001229.JPG
  • Two Ladin women dress in traditional clothing that is often worn on Sundays and for ceremonial occasions linked to the ancient customs. Ladins in the small village in the Dolomites divided from other ethnic relatives to the far reaches of the mountains further away from German influences. The people living here speak Italian and German, but Ladin in their first language.
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  • A diner watches people cross El Zócalo, Mexico City's grandiose main square, from the elegant Gran Hotel's rooftop restaurant. Built atop ruins of the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, the zócalo is now surrounded by sprawling Spanish colonial architecture, the most prominent being the Metropolitan Cathedral.
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  • Residents of a remote village  in Kamchatka rush to meet the supply helicopter. Original inhabitants Khailino are indigenous. Dogs run wild in the street and locals on board a motorcycle race to try to get a woman on board to be taken where she can get medical attention. <br />
<br />
In Northern Kamchatka, indigenous Koryak people and Russians came for “Northern money” when the Soviet Union wanted to tame the area. Income paid was eight times more than a similar job in Moscow, so some people figured out how to get all the necessary permits to work. When default happened, no one in the remote outposts received salaries.  People made a living from salmon caviar and created fishing brigades with distribution systems. Living in a very small community of 700 residents, and the temperatures drop to –40° in the winter, everyone works hard to merely survive and are kind to each other.
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  • A Koryak man dries fish in his summer camp that will feed his family through the winter. Koryaks are an indigenous people of Kamchatka Krai in the Russian Far East, who inhabit the coastlands of the Bering Sea to the south of the Anadyr basin and the country to the immediate north of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The koryak are typically split into two groups. The coastal people Nemelan (or Nymylan) meaning ‘village dwellers’ due to their sedentary fishing habits and the inland Koryaks, reindeer herders called Chauchen (or Chauchven) meaning ‘rich in reindeer’ who are more nomadic.
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  • In villages between Lake Victoria and the Serengeti Ecosystem, truckloads of rotting fish carcasses are driven to the local markets and sold. <br />
<br />
The filets were cut off in the processing plants in Musoma and shipped to Europe overnight, and Africans get only the bones. <br />
<br />
This is a cotton production region and these people have just sold their crops.  They have money to buy good food, but don’t have the option to buy their own fish from their own lakes.
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  • A Ghanian chief protected by guards with gold handled swords at a festival. He is surrounded by the people of his community.
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  • Families gather outside a small, white-painted church for a ramps dinner. Allium tricoccum, wild leek, wild onion, spring tonic, or most commonly, the ramp is a wild plant that grows in the mountains of Appalachia. It resembles a scallion and tastes like a cross between an onion and garlic and dinners are a long-standing community tradition.
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  • Wearing a black hat, a sister waits while her brother unhooks a horse from a sled. Some Ladinos choose a simple life in LaVal the Dolomites, a village so isolated that the people there have their own language. In small villages, population continues to drop and older people go unmarried.
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  • Men and boys dress in white sheep's fur costumes to celebrate Slovenia's traditional version of Carnival. In Ptuj, the oldest town in the Slovenia, they parade ringing bells to scare off evil spirits and chase away winter believed to bring spring and abundance to the land. Kurent is a mythological god of joy and wine and sometimes a creature with a magical instrument who persuades people to dance.
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  • A Ladin funeral procession seen trough a lace curtained window in a small village of LaVal in the Alps where the people are isolated and speak German and Italian but also Ladin, their own ethnic language.
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  • A farm family heads home after working in the fields in LaVal under the vista of the Dolomites.  The mountain cliffs are so steep that no glaciers formed on them. The Alps thrust up when tectonic plates collided between Africa and Eurasia.  The Ladin people living in the mountain region have a close bond with nature and the outdoors.
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  • The grooms antics amuse the bride during a wedding reception in Khailino in Kamchatka, Russia. It is important to note that some of the theater of this wedding happened because it is Russian tradition. The community has endured great hardship and a people who have adjusted to being really kind to each other to all survive together.
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  • A bride's father supplies caviar from his fishing camp. He got enough caviar to feed 200 people at his daughter’s wedding. <br />
<br />
The bride is one quarter indigenous—there is, however, an easy mix between indigenous and white Russians. This family decided to have a wedding although the bride is seven months pregnant. Common-law marriages are the norm among the indigenous people, so the entire town prepared for almost a year for this event.  Most of the decorations were brought in by MI-8 helicopter.  <br />
<br />
Russia wanted to “tame” the salmon zones in Kamchatka, so some moved to the northern communities that were technically war zones with the United States.  To do so, they had to have connections and get permits, then move to where they make eight times what they can in Moscow in government wages. When default happened and their state-subsidized salaries disappeared, all they were left with was the resource—salmon.
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  • Women dance in a Petropavlovsk nightclub, Nebo Night Club. This club is possible in Yelizovo because the owner owns a fish processing plant and enjoys having his own club where young people like to congregate.
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  • Young girls are dressed in their finest for a wedding celebration in a remote village. Their families are some of the industrious people who came to Kamchatka for “northern money” had to scramble when default happened, and they survived with no state money.  Highly valued Russian caviar was their only resource between 1995 and 2005.
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  • A Ladin farmer drives a horse-drawn sled on steep hills with small patches of melting snow outside the Dolomites. The community of LaVal remains isolated by geography and the people retained their own ethnic language although they also speak German and Italian.
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  • A farm woman takes a break from baking biscuits and taps on a window to get the attention of her nephew. Ladin village of LaVal is small and the people speak their own ethnic language in this isolated region of the Dolomites. They also speak German and Italian.
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  • Hauling in salmon from their boats at a fishing camp, coastal people called Nymylan are village dwellers and hang the catch to dry on racks for winter.
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  • Boatloads of Senegalese fishermen return from setting nets all night.The nation’s fleet of small boats, unregulated until recently, hauls in 80 percent of the catch and supplies about 60 percent of the export market. Senegal’s commercial vessels, foreign fleets from Europe and Asia, and pirate fishing boats add to the pressure; the country’s annual harvest declined.
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  • A young Zapotec woman adorned in a flower wreath sits in the shadows during a wedding celebration in the Chagigo neighborhood of Juchitan. Wedding celebrations happen on weekends in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where traditional culture is strong.  Women take leading roles in business and government in the town with the population of approximately 70,000 people.  The Mexican Isthmus never became part of the Aztec Empire, as resistance to the Spanish was strong in the mid-1500s.
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  • In the ancient Tombos quarry villagers skirt a statue from the seventh century B.C. when their Nubian ancestors ruled all of Egypt. Today, Sudan’s government does not control the whole country. Since independence from Britain in 1956, the nation’s northern leaders have fought to extend their power throughout the south in a search for resources.
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  • Dressed up in a suit and bow tie, a young boy patiently waits for cake to be offered while attending a wedding reception in the restored Colonial colonnades edge of Lima's Plaza de Armas.  Well dressed guests mingle at the party towering over the youth.
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  • Models walk down a runway and across stage lights for a high fashion bridal show featuring designer gowns. The cosmopolitan city of Monterrey is modern and industrial attracting young people with money to spend.
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  • A young woman wanders through a resettlement village where a gold mining company took over the land, then built houses and moved people into the new community. The problem is there is no work, food or wate.
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  • Dried shark fins sold at the Guangzhou Fish Market.<br />
Shark fins are used to make shark fin soup, a delicacy once prepared exclusively for the Chinese emperors and nobility. The cartilage from the fin is carefully dried and prepared, and used as an ingredient in a soup flavored with seafood or chicken broth and herbs.<br />
<br />
The demand for shark-fin soup has rocketed. It is still associated with privilege and social rank - a bowl of soup can cost up to US$100 - but the explosive growth in the Chinese economy means that hundreds of millions of people can now afford this luxury. Many consider it de rigueur at important events such as weddings, birthdays, business banquets and during Chinese New Year celebrations.
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  • Hindus worship a golden deity during the nine day Tirupati Temple Festival. The diety is taken out on colourful processions around the city with hundreds of people following it. People perform Sevas, meaning they offer flowers, fruits, and food to the diety in order to make their lord happy and seek blessings.
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  • Maternity Ward at Mulago Hospital in Kampala.  Head of OB/GYN was taught by Jotham Musinguzi who became head of Population and Development Dept. for the government.  Jotham recently retired because he did not agree with the current president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. Museveni has a military background and just wants to get BOOTS ON THE GROUND. Jotham said he wants to bump Uganda's population up to 60M before he even starts to worry about infrastructure for all these people. Uganda is about 30M now.  About half of Uganda's population is under 15 and life expectancy is about 50.  Population has doubled from 1990 to now.
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  • Beloved icons, St. Bernard dogs were once indispensable for their abilities to save people buried by avalanches. Although replaced by modern equipment, traditions die hard and the dogs are maintained as a tourist attraction.  200 years ago St Bernard dogs saved 45 of Napoleon’s soldiers buried in an avalanche—the dog was bayoneted to death when one soldier thought he was being attacked by a bear.  St. Bernards are cared for by a foundation in Martigny, France.
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  • Hindus worship a golden deity during the nine day Tirupati Temple Festival. The diety is taken out on colourful processions around the city with hundreds of people following it. People perform Sevas, meaning they offer flowers, fruits, and food to the diety in order to make their lord happy and seek blessings.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7339_1223045.JPG
  • Hindus worship a golden deity during the nine day Tirupati Temple Festival. The diety is taken out on colourful processions around the city with hundreds of people following it. People perform Sevas, meaning they offer flowers, fruits, and food to the diety in order to make their lord happy and seek blessings.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7339_1223043.JPG
  • New Yorkers enjoy Drummer's Grove who have gathered informally in a corner of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park every Sunday afternoon since 1968. The mix of dancers, musicians, and others who listen and participate in the celebratory atmosphere.<br />
<br />
Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted did not envision Drummers Grove in the 1860s when he and Calvert Vaux planned an urban space of meadows, woodlands, and pastoral views to help people connect with nature in New York.
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  • Women process fish on shore at Karountine, northwest of Ziguinchor. <br />
<br />
People in the beach community in Saint Louis, Senegal refused to leave although they are pressured to move by authorities.
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  • Workers at Rajesh Exports, the largest gold exporter in the world.  A thousand people work in a huge building that resembles a prison. 95 percent of them also live in company housing.
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  • Billboards advertising gold jewelry in the main street where people are reminded of the value in gold that is highly valued and often part of a dowry in the Indian wedding season.
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  • Resettled families gather in a community neighboring a gold mine in Ghana..
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  • Living below an encroaching mine, residents find their clear running stream muddy. They walk up the creek looking for the source of the sediment spoiling drinking water in the holler.
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  • A woman arranges items on a car to sell at a roadside flea market. West Virginians have always lived with the backdrop of the coal train passing by and money has gone out of town on that train—it is no coincidence that some of the poorest people in the US live in coal country. <br />
One of the main poverty issues of Appalachia stems from the fact that the employed population makes less money that others in the U.S. which was a trade off for other assets like a rich family life.
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  • Attorney Brian Glasser briefs some of the 152 frustrated Sylvester, West Virginia citizens who banded together in a lawsuit in an effort to halt the assault on their air. Armed with video taped evidence, photographs, and testimony, the residents proved that black dust blanketed their town from a coal stockpile and preparation plant.<br />
They won but little has changed (the company bought a street sweeper for the community) but it was a moral victory for a group of people who saw property values plummet in the black cloud that hung over their town. None of the 152 mostly retirees had ever been involved in a lawsuit.
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  • New houses built by Newmont Ghana Gold Limited. Communities of people moved into new homes when the mining company took over land where their villages were located. The struggle is to have work, food and water since they were farmers.
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  • A farmer herds his cows off the steep hillside back to return to the barn for a morning milking. Some alpine farms attract young people who desire a simple and rustic lifestyle.
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  • Bachelors in a small rural village of 65 people make a small parade as they continue the region's traditional Carnival celebration. Dressing for a Pagan wedding, unmarried men march ceremoniously from house to house, then families invite them inside for food and spirits as they celebrate the end of winter.
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  • A Laufarija carnival festival participant, Daisy, holds her mask carved from Linden wood. She is one of 25 characters that symbolize the features and weaknesses of particular groups of people. The cultural tradition is an annual play held in the streets to celebrate the coming of spring to Slovenia.
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  • Fur-costumed revelers at a spring festival surround a woman during their parade through the streets.  Men dressed in white sheep's fur don tall hats to celebrate Slovenia's version of Carnival. In Ptuj, the oldest town in the Slovenia, they ring bells to scare off evil spirits and to chase away winter which brings spring and abundance to the land. Kurent is a mythological god of joy and wine and sometimes a creature with a magical instrument who persuades people to dance.
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  • Century Park on a crowded Sunday.
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  • A fish tank separates patrons from the kitchen at a restaurant on East Nanjing Road | Shanghai, China
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  • A family eating dinner together.
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  • With food ready on the table, a woman sweeps the floor cleaning an apartment before dinner while her husband watches their young child.
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  • A portrait of a man and his daughter.
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  • A family interacting at dinnertime.
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  • A teenage schoolgirl adjusts her uniform at a desk with a computer. Her portrait hangs on the wall above her.
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  • A family siting in the kitchen of their apartment has a complicated family life. The grandparents were farmers and lost the land and their occupations to development. If the grandparents did not have a child they would be homeless. Ironically, the same development that took his home now supports their daughter, Ding, who works in the industrial park occupying the land that was once the father’s farm.
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  • A teenage girl checks her cell phone commuting to school in a car.
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