NEPAL | The Boy with Icy Hands by Léa Corrêa Pinto
Aquiraz ,CE, Brazil 05/05/2015
“… I warn for dangerous dams that today are now in operation or implementation phase in the Himalayas and may raise new pain and death events for Nepalese …”
Who smiled first do not remember, if it was the boy or me, but at the first smile a mutual sympathy relationship has been established. It was summer 1968 in Paris, and I was 23 years ” en vacances ” in Kathmandu square, surrounded by temples everywhere, whose roofs some golden delimited the sky with its triangular shapes.
The squere was filled by a gentle people still using their traditional costume. The only syncretism was a tough plastic bag in a variety of colors, latest fashion among women!
There too, Pele was a reference.
According to the reception at customs, I was the first Brazilian to be in Nepal. How did I get there? Well, it’s another story.
Nepalese men who paid the militar service, at the time, ran the morning, with their battalion in uniform, then cream.Some of the soldiers carried on the ear a beautiful flower (yellow were preferred), and thus passing through the square, offered its flower on the temples, which were from very small to very imponent. Turning then to the formation of the group.
An army so peculiar to a country between China India, two countries so populous, worried me, however was the 2015 earthquake, the great villain.
The boy of 7 years, in bare feet and shorts woven on looms whenever he saw me smiled. We communicated with some phrases and key words in English as Good Morning, Thank You, Where and other basics. He gave me his ice-cold hand and guided me here or there. It was he who led me , under request to a tailor who fashioned in native wool woven hand made, a bright orange custom, used by men, and that was very helpful in my return to Europe, by the road made by URSS, long before de war, through the mountains of Afghanistan (Old Marco Polo Silk Course).
The smile and the look of the boy with ice-cold hands, who is or would be 49 years now, crosses time and space and print me an appeal to the Nepalese people, for today and tomorrow, so:
It is a must to alert for dangerous dams that today are now in operation or implementation phase in the Himalayas and may raise new pain and death event for the Nepalese, according to the New Yorker article. Call for urgent and effective preventive and mitigating measures to international agencies, particularly the UNDP- United Nations Development Programme, that after the recent earthquake in Nepal, promoted manual of preventive measures, as well as the financial agents of these hydroelectric dams. Follows also a special alert to local and international non-governamental organizations, and to all who like me were part of the universal pilgrimage of young people from the west to the east, which began in the 60s, and are mobilized in safeguarding these traditional people, who so graciously welcomed us.
Dangerous dams in Nepal (The New Yorker)
http://www.newyorker.com/ne…/news-desk/nepals-dangerous-dams
About the author Léa Corrêa Pinto:
http://issuu.com/iterei/docs/lcplattes221245170885
Worth looking at:
http://issuu.com/iterei/docs/itereimemoria1
http://pt.slideshare.net/…/mountains-under-review-human-alt…
http://plataforma-montanhas.rio20.net/…/rio20-lancamento-e…/
Iterei Iguassu