Suriname Edition
World Family Photo Box Day leads today's complete edition for Suriname.
Daily Edition
Official observances, world days, local context, and everyday celebrations for people who need something worth reading, sharing, or talking about today.
A day for printed pictures, old phones, albums, names written on backs, and the people a household remembers together.
National holiday. A significant day for Burkina's Catholic community. Churches fill, choirs sing, and afterward everyone gathers for a meal that always includes riz gras. The faith runs deep in the Centre-Ouest and the processions through Koudougou and Ouaga are a sight that stays with you.
The Brokopondo Reservoir, created in 1964 by damming the Suriname River, is one of the largest artificial lakes in the world : 1,560 km² of flooded rainforest. When the dam was built, 5,000 Maroon people were displaced from ancestral villages that had existed for 300 years. The trees in the flooded forest still stand upright underwater, their dead branches poking above the surface like ghost fingers. Diving in Brokopondo means swimming through a drowned forest where howler monkeys once screamed. The dam powered an aluminum smelter for Alcoa : American industry literally drowned Maroon civilization to make soda cans. This is not metaphor. This is history.
Winti is the Afro-Surinamese religion that the Dutch banned for centuries and that survives now as a living spiritual tradition. Winti recognizes 4 pantheons: the Amina (earth spirits), the Watra (water spirits), the Tapu Kromanti (sky/warrior spirits), and the Kra (ancestral spirits). The Kromanti : named after the Coromantee people of Ghana's Gold Coast : are the fiercest. During a winti prey (ceremony), a Kromanti spirit can possess a dancer, giving them superhuman strength and speaking in languages the person has never learned. This isn't theater. This is a 400-year-old spiritual technology for contacting ancestors who crossed the ocean in chains. The Dutch made winti illegal in 1874. The law stayed on the books until 1971. For nearly 100 years, Suriname's majority religion was literally criminal.
A day for the proof of purchase nobody can find until the warranty is over.
A day for umbrellas, towels by the door, backup shoes, covered stalls, and the local wisdom of wet weather.
You spot the resplendent quetzal, three-toed sloths, scarlet macaws, and jaguars throughout Costa Rica's diverse ecosystems and cloud forests. You notice that Costa Ricans predominantly keep dogs, cats, and occasionally exotic birds like macaws and toucans as pets. ACADA celebrates the world's pets, and helps assure better care.