In English it’s called a quadrillion. In Swedish there’s not even a word for it.
First post of the new year for me. I would have liked to finish this earlier, but it took me most of December to get the stitching done.
During 2008 the situation in Zimbabwe has gone from bad to… well, catastrophic. I’ve been following the reports from Zim before, during & after the election in March last year & it feels like the whole country is turning into a black hole, like it’s slowly imploding. Zimbabwe was once a prosperous country but years of bad government & raging inflation has left it devastated & unable to care for it’s own people. The people who actually tried to do something about the situation by electing a new president but got robbed of their democratic rights by Robert Mugabe & the Zanu-PF party. Today there is no sufficient health care, hunger & cholera is killing the people, those who dare to speak up are getting arrested & are “disappearing”, Mugabe still holds his office & the talks between him & MDC about sharing government have collapsed. The money situation is bizarre, the inflation has reached heights that are pretty hard to grasp. In august 2008 it passed 11 200 000 %. As Anna Tibblin, a Swedish aid worker living in Harare, puts it: In English it’s called a quadrillion. In Swedish there’s not even a word for it.
So, with that in mind I’ve spent December working on this advent calendar. I used a pattern made from an old ANC poster (which unfortunately didn’t turn out quite as well as I’d hoped) & a quote from the anthem of neo-colonialism as I know it: the slightly bizarre Christmas song Do they know it’s Christmas? by the 80′s Band Aid project.
If you’re wondering why the dates of the calendar only goes up to 24, it’s because in Sweden we traditionally celebrate at Christmas eve, not Christmas day, so here its’ the 24th that is D-day…
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Craftivism, International Politics, Photos, xstitch
5 Responses to “In English it’s called a quadrillion. In Swedish there’s not even a word for it.”
Leave a Reply
On the interwebs
Buy Radical Cross Stitch Stuff
Wow it’s stunning! What’s the significance of the red rings for each day?
you’re supposed to tie a little gift to each day, counting down to christmas.
Cool! I’ve never seen an advent calendar like that. Do you get to open them all on Christmas? How fun!
no you open one gift every day. but it\’s not supposed to be anything big, just some sweets or something like that. me & my sister had a calendar like this when i was i kid & i remember that our favorite was when we got some pieces of lego a day & on christmas eve they made up a whole new set.
Your advent calendar is fantastic, congrats. I’m also disparing the situation in Zimbabwe. The trajectory seems hopeless and yet some people still wonder about whether or not to play cricket there. I’m anything but expert on African politics, but it does seem that the failure in Zimbabwe is in part a failure of other African nations, RSA in particular.