Livonians are an ethnic group in Latvia, that predate Latvians by several centuries. Livonians speak Liv, a Finno-Uralic language, whereas Latvians speak Lettish, a Baltic language of Indo-European heritage.
Liv is nearly extinct, with only a handful of fluent native speakers left.
Deutsche Welle (the German international broadcasting service) recently reported about an attempt to revive Liv:
Today, a Livonian youth group meets regularly in the Latvian capital, Riga. Their language skills vary. Some have only been learning it for a few months, others started speaking it as children with their grandparents.
The group organizes trips to Mazirbe, a town on the Latvian coast where there's a Livonian cultural center, or to camps where they only speak Livonian to each other.
"If you learn Livonian and not Spanish, the Livonians won't die," said 17-year-old Beate, who started learning Livonian two years ago.
"I will know it and teach it to my children," she said. "Everybody wants to learn Spanish, but why would you need to go after the fashion? I think it's a question of mentality."
According to Valts Ernstreits, an expert on Livonians in Latvia, learning an endangered language has a lot to do with people embarking on a quest for their identity.
"Latvian identity is very complicated," Ernstreits said. "It is basically young. It has maybe a 500-year-long history. So it's pretty unstable. If you can say you're Livonian, you have identified yourself back to the 12th century."
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I wonder why Spanish is so popular in Latvia? Is there an influx of Mexicans? :-)
The other day, there was a Reuter's article about a town in China that depends on a booming scavenging trade -- sorting and extracting metals like gold and copper from electronic trash.
June 11, 2007
China’s e-Waste Capital Chokes on old Computers
by Mark Chisholm / Kitty Bu
GUIYU, China - Guiyu is a modern day gold rush town. But instead of panning for gold in babbling streams, workers shift through piles of broken old computer parts in acrid smelling shacks, smelting down parts with crude equipment to extract valuable metals like gold and copper.
Every year, millions of unwanted computers, keyboards, television sets and cell phones are smuggled into China by sea. Much ends up in Guiyu, a rough town on the southern Chinese coast, not far from the former British colony of Hong Kong.
There is little regard for safety — no masks, little ventilation and few signs of government officials enforcing what safety rules do exist in China.
The lucky few wear rough but thin gloves. They are too scared of losing their jobs, or being beaten up, to dare to talk to visiting foreign reporters.
The state-run newspaper the People’s Daily said last year that Guiyu’s more than 5,500 e-waste businesses employed over 30,000 people.
It estimated the business to be worth 1 billion yuan ($130.9 million) in Guiyu alone.
Yet many of the workers, who come from all parts of China, are paid as little as $3 a day.
“Workers never benefit from this,” said Lai Yun from environmental group Greenpeace, poring over gruesome pictures of workers injured by exploding computer parts or burns from the furnaces.
“It’s always the middlemen. They scoop the most money out of this business. Workers usually end up with nothing, but still they are willing to work this job that’s damaging to their health,” he told Reuters.
(A couple years ago, I met a guy who worked for a Baltimore company that processed old computers. He said that they sent computer parts to China for recycling. I wonder if the shipments are disguised, given how the article characterizes the electronic waste scavenging trade as an underground economy.)
According to a 2005 U.N. report, up to 50 million metric tons of e-waste is generated annually, as people upgrade laptops and PCs and throw out old models.
The China Quality News estimates that about 72 percent of that e-waste ended up in China.
During the disposal process, workers, including women and sometimes children, are exposed to a toxic cocktail of chemicals. The many small businesses take few safety precautions to protect their workers.
State media estimated almost nine of out 10 of the people in Guiyu suffered from problems with their skin, nervous, respiratory or digestive systems.
After the useful metals are taken out, leftover parts are often dumped in landfills or rivers or simply burnt. Piles of old computers even block the traffic in some parts of Guiyu.
“People use the least investment, the most simple equipment, the shortest time possible to get the most profit out of this business,” said Nie Yongfeng, an environment professor at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University.
“That’s all they care about.”
It is highly lucrative. The discarded waste is full of gold and copper.
Reporters and green activists are not welcome.
A car carrying Reuters journalists to Guiyu was stopped on the outskirts of town by stocky men traveling in a car with blacked out windows who threatened to beat up the driver.
Local businessmen fear critical reports, for if the government cracks down and the waste stops coming, the money will stop flowing too.
Nie said the local government did want to take control.
“The problem is that we can control the above board channels, but we cannot control what’s been coming in through underground channels,” he added.
“I think this is the situation in China and it’s the same situation in Japan and the U.S. I can’t say the government is doing nothing to take control, but it’s almost impossible to regulate what happens underground,” Nie said.
E-waste is not supposed to be exported without the consent of the importing country.
To bypass it, e-waste is labeled as “used PCs” or “mixed metals” according to Greenpeace, and smuggled in from Hong Kong.
According to Nie, the local government came up with a plan two years ago to remove the waste in Guiyu.
But the business was too lucrative to just vanish overnight, and little has changed except locals are now much more vigilant about outsiders.
(I have a bunch of broken portable cassette recorders and minidisc recorders, as well as a shortwave radio. I wonder how much this stuff is worth to scavengers. If I just trashed them or dropped them off at the local recycling center, would they eventually end up in Guiyu and contribute to more environmental pollution, health hazards, and worker exploitation?)
I just found out about a relatively new Asian American professional group, the Nat'l. Asian American Society of Accountants (NAASA). They're holding a conference tomorrow:
First Ever National Conference of Asian American Accountants and Financial Executives to Meet in San Francisco
press release - 4 June 2007
A gathering of accountants and finance professionals will meet to determine how to improve the number of Asian Americans advancing into the top management ranks of the nation's top companies. Currently it is estimated that more than 10 percent of all accounting and finance professionals in the U.S. and more than 25 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area are of Asian ethnicity, yet less than two out of every 100 board of directors from Fortune 500 companies are of Asian ethnicity...
...As part of NAASA's mission to continuously influence and encourage the development of accounting professionals, finance professionals and students, it will hold its first conference on June 9 at the Hyatt Embarcadero in San Francisco. The conference and dinner is expected to attract more than 300 attendees...
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The theme of this conference is "Inspiring Across Generations". I would expect that they would eventually have awards for most inspirational accountant of the year, lifetime achievement, etc.
I have a candidate in mind, although I don't know what category he might fit into. His story is kindof inspiring, in a way:
Lou Lung Pai
A Big Stock Seller, with a Taste for Glitter
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13194
by Kate Murphy / CorpWatch
Lou Lung Pai headed several divisions at Enron, including Enron Energy Services, which sold contracts to provide natural gas and electricity to companies for long periods. Born in Nanjing, China, he emigrated with his parents to the United States when he was 2. He earned a master's degree in economics at the University of Maryland and worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission before joining Enron in 1986.
Regarded by colleagues as prickly, Mr. Pai (pronounced "pie") was also known for running up large bills on the company expense account at strip clubs. His affair with an exotic dancer ended his marriage in 1999, and he sold most of his Enron shares to settle the divorce. Mr. Pai's take, more than $271 million, is the largest of any former Enron employee and has made him the target of several shareholder lawsuits.
Mr. Pai, who resigned from the company six months before it filed for bankruptcy protection, has been questioned by federal prosecutors and S.E.C. investigators but has not been charged with wrongdoing. Through his lawyers, he has said he was not involved in promoting Enron stock and denies knowledge of any illegal, off-the-books accounting. His name appears on a list of potential witnesses for the defense in the trial of Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling.
Mr. Pai married the woman with whom he had the affair, and they live with their daughter in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, where they also have a stable for breeding and training dressage horses. Until he sold it last year, Mr. Pai owned a 77,500-acre ranch in southern Colorado, which was the subject of several lawsuits over access and grazing rights.
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Whatever you may think, you'd have to concede that Lou Pai had great timing...
By now I suppose you know that today is a day to celebrate the doughnut.
I had one this morning, although I didn't realize how appropriate it was.
For a long time, I preferred the powdered sugar ones, but I now like a variety. If I have a batch of plain ones, I'll eat one with yogurt. Or I might smear Nutella (or a Nutella knock-off) on it.
More doughnut/donut thoughts:
I understand that Cambodians have taken over the donut shop business in Southern California. Here's a video piece on one such store.
The Germans have a jelly doughnut-like roll they call "Berliner". John F. Kennedy is supposed to have made a linguistic blunder when he called himself a Berliner in his famous speech in Berlin. An entry in Wikipedia claims otherwise, that what he said was acceptable in Berlin. That the Berlin audience understood his meaning, since they don't use that term for the roll. (It is used in elsewhere in Germany.) Well, whatever...
I didn't know that Kennedy's faux pas was an urban legend, I thought it was true. So when I spied a jellied roll labeled "Berliner", a couple years back, in a pastry case in the Bonn (Germany) train station, I had to smile. (Maybe JFK had a premonition he would be reincarnated as a jelly doughnut.)