Happy birthday Malcolm!

 Mille´s first steps in Sandhamn some years ago..

On the beach - Trouville, Sandhamn,some years later.

Mum´s digital drawing after a photo of Malcolm´s first year at Brahegatan, Stockholm..
Who is on the T-shirt?

The fastest shooter in Saltsjöbaden!

A happy guy in tartan slacks..

Growing up. Summers in the archipelago..

Moving to Zimbabwe and bringing Swedish customs to Africa..

Holiday break from Speciss College, Harare, Zimbabwe. Mombasa, Diani Beach..

Living and working for many years in Paris left a certain impact..

Business trip to the Dead Sea..

Meeting the love of his life, Hinda, at the World Bank in Washington. Moving and working there.

Getting Married in Sandhamn ..

 

Becoming a father in Washington!

Malcolm and Thalia.

Happy, happy birthday my dear son and I´ll be seeing you soon!

Mum

100 years of struggle ..

"We come along way - but the struggle is needed more than ever:

 Afghan wives choose to burn themselves to death to escape a life
of domestic torture and abuse.

(Video clip from REUTERS November 2009) 


Monday 08 March 2010
 
International Women's Day
The first International Women's Day

In 1869 British MP John Stuart Mill was the first person in Parliament to call for women's right to vote. On 19 September 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the right to vote. Women in other countries did not enjoy this equality and campaigned for justice for many years.
In 1910 a second International Conference of Working Women was held in Copenhagen. A woman named Clara Zetkin (Leader of the 'Women's Office' for the Social Democratic Party in Germany) tabled the idea of an International Women's Day. She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day - a Women's Day - to press for their demands. The conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women's clubs, and including the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, greeted Zetkin's suggestion with unanimous approval and thus International Women's Day was the result.

The very first International Women's Day was launched the following year by Clara Zetkin on 19 March (not 8 March). The date was chosen because on 19 March in the year of the 1848 revolution, the Prussian king recognized for the first time the strength of the armed people and gave way before the threat of a proletarian uprising. Among the many promise he made, which he later failed to keep, was the introduction of votes for women.

Plans for the first International Women's Day demonstration were spread by word of mouth and in the press. During the week before International Women's Day two journals appeared: The Vote for Women in Germany and Women's Day in Austria. Various articles were devoted to International Women's Day: 'Women and Parliament', 'The Working Women and Municipal Affairs', 'What Has the Housewife got to do with Politics?', etc. The articles thoroughly analyzed the question of the equality of women in the government and in society. All articles emphasized the same point that it was absolutely necessary to make parliament more democratic by extending the franchise to women.
Success of the first International Women's Day in 1911 exceeded all expectation.
Meetings were organized everywhere in small towns and even the villages halls were packed so full that male workers were asked to give up their places for women.
Men stayed at home with their children for a change, and their wives, the captive housewives, went to meetings.

During the largest street demonstration of 30,000 women, the police decided to remove the demonstrators' banners so the women workers made a stand. In the scuffle that followed, bloodshed was averted only with the help of the socialist deputies in Parliament.
In 1913 International Women's Day was transferred to 8 March and this day has remained the global date for International Wommen's Day ever since.

During International Women's Year in 1975, IWD was given official recognition by the United Nations and was taken up by many governments. International Women's Day is marked by a national holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. 
(Cut from  the IWD official page)

Have your say on Reuters about what women's day means to you:

Log in to a range of guest bloggers posting into this live blog throughout International Women's Day.

 

The Trouville jetty..

..in Sandhamn yesterday! It´s been many years since we were covered with so much ice in the archipelago!

I was not there. The photo was snapped by my friend Paivi (her shadow can be spotted in the left hand corner!) who defies and endures any weather and made her way out there over the weekend! People living in Sandhamn confirm that they never experienced a winter like this with so much snow in their lifetime!

(Personally I´ll wait to Easter to go there..) 

More pictures from Sandhamn on Paivi´s blog here.

Unprecedented amounts of the cold, white stuff show the inaccessability to get to my house in Sandhamn.

Paivi was kind to send me this photo as well.

With Alice once more leaping into that rabbit hole..

.in the fresh release of Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland", here's a rare clip from her very first film leap in the1903 original:

..and the official trailer for another "Alice" - 110 years later:

In the mid 80´s..

  ..1,5 million refugees from Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda fled their homes and crosses the borders into neighbouring Sudan - one of the poorest countries in the world. How would they cope and how would the Sudaneese handle the situation?

Massive international efforts had to be coordinated to help the Sudaneese in their huge task. An international refugee conference for potential donors in Khartoum in 1982 was the starting point to focus on the plight of this poor country. I participated in this conference and was subsequently contracted by the Sudaneese Commissioner for Refugees to do fund raising internationally for an information project based mainly on collecting facts through the writing and publishing of a number of booklets on the needs of the refugees. These are some photos on my mission and from my booklet:  "The swelling toll of war and disruption: Refugees in southern Sudan : a photo essay on Ugandans in exile"  to Southern Sudan where the Ugandans came in across the border in huge numbers to seek shelter from a dangerous and deadly situation prevailing in the northern part of their home country.

Early morning in the UN Cessna from Khartoum to Juba. 

  

Landing on a field strip in Juba in southern Sudan -country of the Dinkapeople - following a four hour plane ride southwards along the Nile provided a good view of the massive Sudd region with its swamp  below.

A fisherman on the Nile with his excellent Nile perch! 

Humidity of 70 % and degrees sometimes reaching 45 C!
 

Getting the aid across to the refugees camps-one way or the other..

 

An old refugee woman in a make shift clinic. A spectrum of deprivations.. 

   A young refugee with scabies.

  

 A shallow bore well providing the refugees with water.

  

Dry, dry, drought! This is a refugee camp in Eastern Sudan taken from the Cessna on another occation when we were flying East.

  No paper, books or pens or the refugee schools..Sand will have to do.

  

 There is a time to make yourself pretty no matter what..

..or to make your fellow man laugh in a very poor refugee camp in Southern Sudan.

(Photos above from my book by photographer Otto Pfister)

(The text and picture captions here are just randomly chosen fragments on a difficult and complex situation that ruled a poverty stricken and refugee burdened country in the 80`s. P E)

Chasing the Red Baron..

I found Rebecca Salced´s painting of Snoopy "entering his Sopwith Camel" and just had to download it! Loved it!

 And then I could not help but to add Sherry into it! The first bitch to fly a Sopwith during the Second WW! Imagine! And in style!

A cold but splendid day..

 

 ..in Gotland. Long walks with the happy puppy on the beach by the small harbour at Lickershamn..

 

..completely exhausted her! 

Within minutes on returning home, she snores away in my bed..(I, who  promised myself solemnly "No dogs in ever my bed! " a longtime ago..Hmmm.  

"You can´t be perfect all the time!" as my old friend Tore used to say tongue-in-cheek..)

Sonya at HM!

I know what I am gonna get! Yes! A "Mon Pull" for the summer! Mais bien sur! (If they will have it at HM in smalville Visby!?)Oh how great it is to start making summer plans after this endless snowy winter in Sweden! Last night another 15 centimeters of snow fell! When will it stop? Mmmmmm. Pulling the pull over your sunbleached head, jump into the shorts and run barefoot on the sandy beach...

A winning picture..

..I shot in Sandhamn last summer! It just won a contest as a cover picture to the yearbook of the "Friends of Sandhamn" which are published annually.

The photo displays a pieceful view of the Sandhamn harbour in July with my favourite old steamer "Norrskär" by the main jetty in the background  when the lime trees cast its cooling shadow over mid-summer tourists resting on a village bench. The sailing boats as back drop and the last islands can be spotted before the "Big Baltic" totally takes over. There will be very few skerries after Sandhamn - only the big sea all the way to Estonia, Finland Russia..

Sandhamn is really the last outpost of the Stockholm archipelago.

How the war really started..

Swedish comedians Magnus Härenstam and Sune Mangs in their hilarious interpretation!