Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • Visitors view an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry.
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  • Mariachis musicians gather a street-side crowd of both Mexicans and gringo tourists for nightly serenading. Plaza Garibaldi is where mariachi bands dressed in sharply, matching suits, have gathered since the 1920s, to play traditional heartfelt ballads for a few pesos.
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  • An overlook viewing modern downtown Santiago, Chile's capital city. Approximately three decades of uninterrupted economic growth have transformed Santiago into one of Latin America's most sophisticated metropolitan areas, with extensive suburban development, dozens of shopping malls, and impressive high-rise architecture.
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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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  • At the A Fun Ti Carnival Restaurant, ethnic dancers, wait staff, performers are all from Xinjiang Province in North West China.
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  • A fountain on the newly designed Riverwalk along the Detroit River.
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  • A baby in a stroller and two women in an apartment.
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  • Young staff around computers in a dot-com office.
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  • Yvonne’s boutique spas in Shanghai offer 13 types of facials, plus a chocolate pedicure for $48. Her father escaped China in 1949 with his family and two of his siblings died in the crossing (there were ten children, his father had multiple wives). Yvonne’s family is typical of the Chinese who were smart enough to get out when it was bad and smart enough to get back in when things were improving. Diva Life is set up for two types of clients; the ex-pat tai tai wives of diplomats and the wannabe Chinese who follow that crowd into Yvonne’s spa. Yvonne has the Diva life. She designs her own furniture, spa, and clothes. She spends the morning at the fabric market and meeting with her tailor, and then goes to her office. But the main reason she started the spa is so that she can have a couple hours of spa treatment any day she likes.
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  • Backlighting through yellow curtains at a restaurant in Shanghai.
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  • A resident exits a villa in the Palais de Fortune development.
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  • Tourists walk through the ruins of Monte Alban, a Zapotec capital in the Valley of Oaxaca. Inhabited over a period of 1,500 years by a succession of peoples – Olmecs, Zapotecs and Mixtecs – the terraces, dams, canals, pyramids and artificial mounds of Monte Albán were literally carved out of the mountain and are the symbols of a sacred topography. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with unique architecture.
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  • During October Festival of Bullfighting for the Lord of the Miracles, hundreds of spectators gather to critique the finesse of both red-caped matadors and bovine competitors. Plaza de Acho is Peru's oldest bull ring is located in a Lima suburb under the towering Cerro San Cristóbal mountain.
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  • A curious camel.
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  • A young woman with a camera inside a shopping mall.
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  • A bride checks out a dining room for her reception.
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  • Bridesmaids prepare for a wedding.
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  • A bride prepares for her wedding.
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  • Singers and actresses get ready for an opera performance at a hotel.
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  • Cleaning an apartment before dinner.
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  • A man on a computer and a woman with a child in a Chinese apartment.
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  • The mask of a medicine man at the door where  Pygmy boys are secluded before the rituals signifying their manhood.
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  • Ghanaian men building a volunteer health clinic.
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  • People sitting outside a bar in the Over the Rhine district of Cincinnati, Ohio.
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  • Young cowboys turn a ranch cattle chute into a homegrown playground on a ranch near Steens Mountain in southeastern Oregon. The young cow pokes learn to ride horses when they are young, and help move cattle on the ranch.
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  • Nuns walk through a cobblestone passage inside Santa Catalina Convent. They are  followed by a dog that greets them while wandering freely the convent.
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  • Kids doing a fashion shoot in a new unfinished mall in Nanjing.
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  • Kids doing a fashion shoot in a new unfinished mall in Nanjing.
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  • Rachel is a “headhunter” for the Comfort Class, which is the buffer class between first world needs and third world sweatshops or between first world companies and third world consumers. Rachel is single and lives at home with her parents, who were part of one of the worst social experiments in history. Mao unified the country, but then was responsible for the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, countless famines. Then, Deng proclaimed, “To get rich is glorious” and opened the flood gates to the “Special Economic Zone” cities on the south coast, creating the largest peacetime human migration in history. Many 20-somethings say that Tiananmen Square had to be put down or it would have hurt Deng’s economic plans and they would not have their nice apartments with flat screens in every room.
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  • A pet lover with her dogs and friends.
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  • Commuters in a subway car.
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  • Women working in a textile factory in Huaxi.
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  • Commuters in a crowded subway car.
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  • Commuters in a subway car.
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  • Refugee Pygmies near their leaf huts are threatened by logging companies and a broadening modern world. .
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  • Villagers gather to see volunteer nurses and clinic workers.
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  • Ghanaian standing in water as others relax in a canoe on shore.
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  • Man loading bag of cement onto a truck.
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  • A couple at 'Michael's Genuine Food & Drink' restaurant.
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  • Musicians play lively dance music on a small outdoor stage for a crowd.
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  • Across a ridge top, a farmer follows his burros burdened with firewood to a mescal factory in rural Oaxaca. The region is where 80% of the mescal made in Mexico. Workers harvest the Maguey plant and bury it with dirt placing it in an oven with hot rocks for 36-48 hours. The burned plant is milled with a horse pulling a heavy stone. It is fermented 8-10 days and the manager plays classical music to help the process. It is distilled twice to be about 70% alcohol and stored for 3-6 months.
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  • Mexican schoolchildren walk in pairs holding hands through the ruins of Teotihuacan. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is the most visited site in Mexico. <br />
Teotihuacan is known for having the most architecturally significant Mesoamerican pyramids built in the pre-Columbian Americas.
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  • Sunrise aerial photo showing traffic crossing Juarez-Lincoln International, one of four bridges over the Rio Grande River located in the cities Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, that connects the United States with Mexico.<br />
The Pan-American Highway is a network of road that passes through the America's many diverse climates and ecological types – ranging from dense jungles to arid deserts.
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  • Bygone atmosphere of aging alleys and jumbled rooflines characterizes Valparaiso's older neighborhoods. Victorian-era funicular railways run up and down the port city's notoriously steep hillsides behind a building where a man sits in a window.
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  • A family eats together in the home they all share.
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  • Models primp before appearing at a fashion show at a bar venue.
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  • Trying on clothes and jewelry for an accessory photo shoot.
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  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University students in their dorm room.
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  • In 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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  • An afternoon in an opulent home in Huaxi.
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  • At eyou.com they have a climbing wall and the CEO’s computer (that was used to found the company) is embedded partially into the wall of the conference room. These employees work in a faux-silicon-valley atmosphere. Eyou wants to bring Facebook to China, which brings up some serious issues. Facebook is based on knowing and trusting your community of friends. But many Chinese only feel comfortable using pseudonyms and eyou forces them to be who they are when they talk about issues with their parents, girlfriends or boyfriends.
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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 Chinese woman runs a chain of boutique spas.
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  • A teenage girl plays piano for her family.
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  • A teenage girl shopping for lemons and limes with her parents.
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  • A teenage girl shopping.
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  • A teenage girl shopping with her parents.
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  • Lu (the father, not shown) lives with his daughter-in-law and son who is trying to do a start up GPS business and often works from home. Lu was sent to prison during the Cultural Revolution and tries to keep pace with today’s values, but still has questions about his son’s world. The “little capitalists” that live with their Cultural Revolution parents often have conflicts of ideology. The older generation thinks in a more Confucian way—never rise above your teacher, never rise above your father, others’ needs are more important than your own.
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  • 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 with the longest name I saw in China, decided one day they would just photograph the interior of the restaurant with all the customers and then have it printed on huge canvas sheets so it feels like you are sitting inside the restaurant – inside the restaurant.
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  • School children explore a worn pyramid on an archeological site. The Huaca Rajada, of Sipán, Peru, is a Moche Pyramid near Chiclayo, Peru in the Lambayeque Valley, famous for the tomb of the Lord of Sipán, Peru excavated in 1987. The ruins of Sipán are dated from 50–700 AD, during the Moche culture.
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  • A cocktail party celebration at an Evian spa.
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  • A man gets a haircut from his daughter-in-law.
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  • Two midwives help a woman give birth at the Dan Moser Memorial Clinic.
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  • With ears pricked forward, a yearling thoroughbred curiously awaits at a white fence on Manchester Farm, a Thoroughbred horse with a barn that is located on the backside of Keeneland Race Track. What makes Kentucky special is that it is geologically favored for horses. Millions of years ago, layers of shells were buried and the crushed limestone makes the grass rich in calcium. As the land sinks, hills and valley are formed which make a perfect terrain for building strong muscles when horses run.
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  • A personal trainer helps a client at the Ozone Fitness Club.
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  • Students in their dorm room at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University.
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  • Mbuti Pygmies at a forest hunting camp where people gather to flush out duikers into their nets.
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  • The Kakuma Refugee Camp is near Lake Turkana and the northern border of Kenya. 123K  people have lived in this camp since the beginning of the war between Sudan and Ethiopia and have continued to live there thru the 20 year conflict in South Sudan. The town of Kakuma has grown to 70,000 because of the UN presence. Turkana are the local tribal people and would normally be agrarian but they now spend their time cutting firewood and making charcoal for the refugees in the camp. The exchange is generally for food. There are many Nuer and Dinkas in this camp as well as DRC folks from Kivu and Goma primarily.
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  • Yearlings stand in a pasture surrounded by white fences and a historic Thoroughbred horse farm. Located in the heart of the Bluegrass, next to Keeneland Race Track, Manchester Farm holds the distinction as one of the most recognizable farms in Kentucky. What makes Kentucky special is that it is geologically favored for horses. Millions of years ago, layers of shells were buried and the crushed limestone makes the grass rich in calcium. As the land sinks, hills and valley are formed which make a perfect terrain for building strong muscles when horses run.
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  • Children dressed in their costumes ride on a truck through town to celebrate the first da of spring. The Primavera parade is also known as Friendship Day or Children’s Day.
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  • Circus performers dressed in their costumes ride on a truck through town to advertise the show in Pisco. Locals watch the parade as 20 performers from Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Uruguay and Chile smile and wave as they ride around in a circus truck the first night in town.
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  • A visitor looks out from the lighthouse at Bill Baggs State Park.
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  • Skeletons bleach in the desert sun Chauchilla Cemetery, a burial ground dating from the late Nazca Period from A.D. 500-700. Grave robbers have looted most of the tombs in this  remote spot of southern Peru, scattering bones, garments and pottery shards across the blistering sands. Tourists pay to see some skulls that have been re-arranged. Mummies with hair, teeth and clothing sit in rock walled tomb-like graves facing east.
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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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  • Business men take a smoke and coffee break at an upscale coffee bar. Coffee shops are on every block in downtown Santiago where men catch a cup of coffee and maybe a kiss. Dressed in a short, red dress, the waitress works for substantial tips at Cafe Cousino or Coffee with Legs. She can make $800 a week by flirting, lighting cigarettes and serving coffee.
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  • Zapotec Indian women wearing colorful, traditional clothing dance into the night at a wedding party in the streets of Juchitan, Mexico. Weekends are full of wedding celebrations in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrow and flat part of the country where the Zapotec culture is still strong. Women are noticeably open and confident, taking a leading role in business and government in matrilineal traditions. The Isthmus never became part of the Aztec Empire and resistance to the Spanish was strong in the mid-1500s. After the church wedding, the couple walks through the streets of town following musicians. They collect family and carry food to where the street is blocked off for the party.
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  • Homeward-bound farm families loaded with food and possessions, crowd into the flatbed of a pickup truck taxi as the open-air market in Xilitla draws to and end. In one of the largest ethnic Huastec Indian towns, each Sunday morning the narrow cobbled streets fill with stalls selling locally grown coffee, sugarcane, incense and corn tamales from the market.
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  • Huastec Indian seller and an indigenous woman haggle over the price of a pig at the local outdoor market held every Sunday morning in Ciudad Valles.
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  • On the edge of the PanAmerican highway, a Huastec Indian family plays soccer kicking the ball under a clothes line in the front courtyard. The family still follows the old ways in the mountains of Mexico, living in a thatched adobe house and surviving on farming.
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  • Children play atop a truckload of dried fish in the village of Selicho.
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  • A man sells mirrors in the Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • A camel with oblong nostrils and drooping lips.
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  • Camels are decorated with tassels for a camel beauty contest.
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  • Workers pull a net with salmon at a fishing brigade on the Bolshaya River.
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  • Models on a cattle call fixing their make up.
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  • 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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  • People at an upscale shopping mall.
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  • Final touches to makeup before a Chinese cultural program show.
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  • Models at a fashion show.
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  • A personal trainer helps a client at the Ozone Fitness Club.
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  • A bride talks on a cell phone as her hair is styled for her wedding.
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  • A reflection in a mirror of a bridesmaid fixing her hair.
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  • Rachel broke up with her ex-pat boyfriend and is well-versed in the social scene of Shanghai. She prefers ex-pats but doesn’t like the dynamic that many of them think that women like her prefer them and use this to their advantage. Even though the statistics show that there are many more western men marrying Chinese women, those statistics are not discussed in the Chinese media. For example, the government would never allow a soap opera about all the western men connecting with Chinese women, so they promoted a soap opera about the opposite situation called “Foreign Babes in Beijing” featuring western women falling for Chinese men.
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  • A portrait of a man and his daughter.
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  • Mannequins for displaying clothing.
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  • At the check-out of a Sam's Club store in China.
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  • The building front of the Save the Pygmies Foundation which is an effort to protect one of the few remaining traditional tribes of the rainforest.
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  • A woman holds her child safely during a domestic dispute incident amon Pygmy family members.
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  • Bantu tribespeople living a more urban existence in permanently build homes decorated with more modern items and wear western-style clothing.
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  • A mother holds her children waiting as Pygmy tribespeople are treated at a health clinic.
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