I Made It Myself: East Timor

Today in church I learned that on October 22nd 2017 at approximately 11 AM the Roman-Catholic church St. Josef in Bad Urach (Baden-Wuerttemberg /Germany) is going to have a garage-sale of old books right in front of the entrance of the church to earn money for their charity-projects in East Timor.
The address is: Münsinger Str. 18, 72574 Bad Urach, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany.
Until then you can send books to be donated to this address or bring them personally to this address or bring them to the Roman-Catholic church “Maria zum guten Stein” in the neighbored village Dettingen an der Erms. Boxes for you to put these books into are in both church buildings.

“Tierschutz Euskirchen” says that in Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) a fisherman tried to kill a cormorant by gagging its beak before releasing it into the wild. He wanted to keep the bird from eating “all the fish away”. Luckily someone then called an animal-aid organisation. They could easily capture the exhausted bird, removed the plastic ring and then let the cormorant loose. Needless to say: In Germany such animal-cruelty is illegal. In fact even killing the animal in a more humane way would have been illegal here.
Cases like these still are not that uncommon in Germany. There have been cases of farmers killing wolves and lynxes even though both are critically endangered in Germany, there are breeders of birds who already got sentenced, because they killed a prey bird and many fishermen feel that action needs to be taken against seals, porpoises and fish-eating fowl.
As for fishermen wanting all cormorants dead: It doesn’t need to be that way. These are highly-intelligent, trainable animals. In Cambodia, Myanmar and East-Timor sustainable fishermen actually keep pet-cormorants they train to catch fish for them. Sadly I presume that European fishermen wouldn’t be satisfied with the amount of fish a cormorant can catch per day, but in Cambodia domesticated cormorants already fed entire fishermen-families and in addition to that helped them earn their living.

This Sunday in the Roman-Catholic church of my village I learned that in Suai (East-Timor) you may often find middle-aged ladies on the street selling pastries. However what most tourists don’t know is that these usually are no ordinary bakers. Many among them have children they have to raise on their own due to somehow having gotten separated from the children’s father. Thus they try to earn a bit of coin by selling self-made pastries. Also I learned that there many have worn and old clothes as sewing ladies are rare and those that are there usually focus on school uniforms only.
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Re-upload: East Timor is one of the poorest countries in the world. “http://compassionatealliance.org/EastTimor/” belongs to an organisation that tries to solve this problem. They even give you the chance of getting involved.

Last Saturday a friend of mine and I went to the marketplace in Metzingen to buy some things from the Saturday-market there. This time also the “Porta Salis” from Balingen (Baden-Wuerttemberg /South of Germany) had a stall there. As the name implies this is a combination of salt cave and shop where not just different kinds of salt from all around the world are sold, but also other garlics. Among the countries they get their goods from are Tanzania, Haiti, East Timor and Uganda. These countries may be least developed countries, but they also are known for using no child-laborers at all for the sorts of garlic “Porta Salis” buys from them.
If “Porta Salis” this that on purpose, I like their concept of trading.

“Deutsches Aerzteblatt” says that according to the latest scientific findings a lack of Vitamin A could be one of the factors responsible for people getting infected with malaria. This could be solved if said people ate more: kidney of cattle, kidney of a chicken, liver sausage, yam, carrots, pumpkins, green cabbage, butter, cereals, spinach, eggs, apricots, maze, Cantaloupe-melons, salmon, milk-products, mangos, chicken, peach, codfish, soy-products, peanut butter or beef.
With this knowledge some of the problems these countries have maybe will be solved easier.