Good morning!
Not long now until the days start getting longer for us in the southern hemisphere.
If you’re enjoying Solidaritas, I’d be incredibly grateful if you became a paying subscriber. Paid subscriptions are available for US$5/month or much cheaper at US$40/year.
-Kate
Read
The island with no water: how foreign mining destroyed Banaba, a small island in Kiribati:
The last decent rain on Banaba was more than a year ago.
Without rain, people on the isolated central Pacific island, which is part of the country of Kiribati, have been forced to rely on a desalination plant for all their water for drinking, bathing and growing crops.
But in late November the plant broke down and the situation became desperate for the nearly 300 people living there. Harrowing stories emerged of people forced to drink contaminated water, outbreaks of diseases and fears of starvation. ...
For three months residents had no fresh water to drink, no food other than fish because all their crops died and were not able to bathe.
More than 350 doctors and medical workers have caught COVID-19 in Indonesia despite being vaccinated with Sinovac, including dozens who have been hospitalised with the Delta variant.
Watch and listen
Writing podcast The Garret spoke to Australian author and memoir writer Alice Pung, who is clearly one of the loveliest human beings to ever exist.
If you want a good laugh, watch Wheezy Waiter take cold showers every day for a month to see if it made him feel any different. (Spoiler: it didn’t, and cold showers are still horrible.)
Eat
So we haven’t technically cooked anything from it yet, but we got Yasmin Khan’s Ripe Figs the other day and I’ve been reading every single word in it. Simply everything looks delicious. It’s a mixture of Mediterranean, Turkish, Middle Eastern, and other cuisines, based on the author’s time spent with asylum seekers in and around Greece and Turkey.
Otherwise, I remain obsessed with chana dal and made it for lunch again yesterday, eaten with Mother’s Punjabi pachranga pickle and some (frozen) roti paratha:
