Some NYTimes articles...
Dec. 31st, 2005 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
On Kazakhs and horses
A Sure Thing for Kazakhs: Horses Will Provide
By C. J. CHIVERS
ILYINKA, Kazakhstan, Dec. 20 - The six Kazakh villagers circled the stallion with movements so nimble and practiced that they disguised the difficulty of the dawn's first task. The animal before them, weighing roughly 550 pounds, was to be rolled onto its back.
Aslakhan Mukanov, 13, pulled the stallion with a rope as it whinnied and bucked. Seimurad Maitai, 27, dodged the hooves, swinging a rope until he snared the kicking forelegs together.
Mr. Maitai pressed closer, whipping the rope's other end, seeking a hind leg. Soon he entangled it as well. The two pulled their lines taut and lunged. The horse fell, landing hard on the snow. The men scrambled atop it, lashed its legs tight and placed a metal trough under its neck.
Out came the knife. Jumat Makhanov, 29, turned his palms skyward and thanked the pinned stallion for what it would provide. A prayer came last. Then Mr. Maitai swept the blade across the horse's neck.
For longer than the once nomadic Kazakhs can remember, the horses of Central Asia's steppe have been near the center of life.
The people who lived in what is now Kazakhstan hunted wild horses in prehistory, and some archaeologists believe that they may have been the first to domesticate the animals, binding the two species together for the ensuing millennia. In an unforgiving climate and a seemingly endless land, horses provided transport and labor. They also provided leather, tools, milk and meat. In time they became staples of commerce and instruments of war.
Today, generations after the Kazakhs were conquered by the Bolsheviks and subjected to the collectivization, terror and dreary servitude of the Soviet state, the horse's place in Kazakh culture is secure.
Riding remains a symbol of Kazakh skill. Horse meat, horse fat, horse entrails and mare's milk are principal ingredients in the national cuisine, and post-Soviet small businesses trade in horses and horse products with a vigor not seen in much of the economy here.
The season of horses is now. Every December and January, as sunlight drops away and winter hardens and darkens the steppe, Kazakhs harvest their animals. Horses are killed in yards throughout the country, for hanging in sheds, for sale to bazaars and for the meat that gives festivals their feasts, which takes the form of a communal besbarmak, a dish of boiled horsemeat and dough, often still eaten by hand.
In the arc of a year is the arc of a horse's life. In Ilyinka, the stallion slaughtered in the snow had been released on the steppe in the spring, to roam and feed in a free-ranging herd. It was captured in fall, and then, following Kazakh custom, tethered beside a feed bucket and fattened with hay and grain.
This morning, plumper and more tender, it was taken to the yard behind the house of Kaldybek Mukanov, 39, a butcher and meat vendor who had bought it from a horse trader in late September.
The animal exuded anxiety. To deceive it, the men led out an older horse first, a big cinnamon-colored specimen with a golden tail - an act that persuaded the younger horse to follow. Then the older horse was rushed back to the feeding stable, unaware that its own death was planned for later in the week.
The younger stallion realized that it was alone and surrounded by men. It was not yet 2 years old. Its chestnut-brown brow was striped white; its flanks and its black tail matted with manure. It was on the verge of the change from life to meat. Its snorts frosted the air.
It complained for an instant before the men were upon it. After it died, its blood filling the trough while the neighborhood's dogs padded nearby, the men Mr. Mukanov had summoned to help him got to work. First they cut through joints and snapped off the lower legs. Then they began skinning the animal, exposing white fat over thick red musculature. The hide slid off like a wet jacket.
A steel frame was produced, and the carcass was raised to waist height and disemboweled. Clouds of steam surged from the body. The guts were placed on a plastic mat.
While others cut away the rib cage and separated the hind legs from the forelegs, Mr. Makhanov squeezed dung from the intestines. Cut into 20-inch sections, the intestines would be stuffed with fat and meat to make kazy and shuzhyk, two garlic-laced sausages enjoyed as delicacies here.
The butchering proceeded swiftly as Mr. Mukanov watched. He had paid 120,000 Kazakh tengi, about $895, for the horse three months ago. Working in a bazaar in nearby Astana, the Kazakh capital, he expected to sell most of the meat, organs and sausage for about $1,050.
After deducting the costs of horse feed and paying his butchers, he said, he would clear at least $40 in profit, a significant amount in a country where many families live on several hundred dollars a month. He would also keep meat for his wife, three children and his mother, who lives with the family in a house beside the stable. "I have to feed my family like anyone else," he said.
Kazakh villages are not alone in having menus dominated by horse. In Astana as well, the markets are stacked with the meat, and horse dishes are found throughout the city's restaurants.
There is creamy sorpa, horse bullion spiced with dried fermented mare's milk and cheese, and there is kespe, unthickened bouillon laced with noodles, onions and thinly sliced meat. Minced horse stomach is boiled and served, with peppers and herbs, as karta. Pieces of meat, lung, liver, heart and kidney are chopped and mixed with potatoes to make stew-like kuyrdak.
The meat is also served at the most important moments in many Kazakh families' lives.
The day before the stallion was killed in Mr. Mukanov's yard, Ayup Smailov, a mechanic, turned up at a small private farm in the village of Vozdvizhenka. His father, 84, had died the night before. The bereaved man sought a horse for the funeral, to be served as besbarmak with tea.
After selecting a mare weighing more than 700 pounds, he watched three of the farm's employees convert it to meat. Nothing was wasted, except the dung and undigested grain drained from the stomach. A tub of blood was saved for the dogs, which had gathered round.
Back in Ilyinka, Mr. Mukanov was contending with a growing pack of dogs, too. He stood beneath the climbing sun, used to it all.
"Kazakhs occupy the second place in the number of horses killed," he said. "First are the wolves, and then the Kazakhs."
On the World's Largest Laundromat
Loads of Wash (Tons of It) and a Community Haven
By JODI WILGOREN
BERWYN, Ill., Dec. 25 - The birds arrived Wednesday, 15 feathered members of the finch family fluttering around a wood-and-glass sanctuary. Thursday brought the sand table and magnet games for the children's play area, where a special laminate floor was being laid.
And when the doors of the World's Largest Laundromat reopen this week, dozens of free doughnuts will be doled out daily, as reliable as the rinse cycle in the spanking-new washing machines.
Oh, yes, the machines. There are 301 of them now, row upon gleaming silver row, including a dozen washers ready to whirl a whopping 75 pounds (for a whopping $6.50) and the Chicago area's first high-powered express models that more than double the G-force in the spin cycle to cut dryer time nearly in half.
But before a four-alarm fire in August 2004 destroyed the World's Largest Laundromat, it was not just a place to pump quarters into metal boxes and pick strangers' lint from filters in this working-class strip just west of Chicago.
It was a haven for Hispanic families who cannot afford cable to watch Spanish-language soap operas. It was a Saturday-afternoon carnival with magicians, jugglers, face painters, even a unicyclist. There was Santa Claus posing for pictures at Christmas, the Easter Bunny handing out chocolate in April, cartoon characters on Halloween and, in summer, a read-athon raffle with bicycles for prizes.
Rebuilt for $3 million ($2 million from insurance) even better than before, the Laundromat will still offer free pizza on Wednesday nights and will also have free wireless Internet access 24 hours a day.
"It's like the beacon of the community," said Ozzie Cruz, 46, who works at a local radio station and is the president of the Berwyn Hispanic Organization. "It's more than just doing your clothes; it's an experience. The first day he's open, people may not even have laundry, but they'll stop by."
While Mr. Cruz praises the Laundromat's owner, Tom Benson, for understanding the neighborhood's needs - "not only their laundry needs," Mr. Cruz said, "just basic human needs" - Mr. Benson says he is simply striving for customers, and their quarters.
"The truth is it's all about business," Mr. Benson said in an interview as he oversaw carpet installation and basket assembly. "My morning business is better because of the free coffee and doughnuts. I'm a businessman; I'm here to make money."
Mr. Benson, 60, who lives in nearby Oak Park and bought the place in 1999, did not set out to be a Laundromateur. He was a business broker, selling mom-and-pop operations, unable to interest anyone in the 13,500-square-foot behemoth, its awning ripped and windows cracked. "I kept looking at it trying to find the right arguments to convince a buyer, and I convinced myself," he said with a laugh.
Hardly a Laundromat connoisseur - his only experience was after a divorce, in the early 1980's, when he would skulk into the dingy place across the street at 10 p.m., dump his clothes and run home to watch the news - Mr. Benson stole ideas from other successful businesses. The birds he had seen delighting residents in a nursing home. The pizza was a ploy to perk up the midweek lull in laundry customers.
He noticed bored children waiting while parents juggled loads, so he commissioned a coloring book telling the story of a Hispanic family on a Laundromat outing. He personally went to pick up and deliver fluff and fold to older shut-ins. That was him, too, in the Santa suit, handing out stuffed animals and toys and 1,000 calendars customized with pictures of each child on his lap.
"I want to make a good living while having a lot of fun," he said. "You can be pretty creative because you've got people for an hour, hour and a half."
Indeed, many Laundromats have diversified to turn the dirgelike chore into a day out. Brainwash Café in San Francisco couples coin-operated machines with live music and comedy nights. Wash and Learn has aspiring teachers from Brooklyn College teaching youngsters to read between loads at three neighborhood outlets. The motto at Laundry Bar in Miami, with nightly disc jockeys and weekly drag shows, is "get sloshed while you wash."
Brian Wallace, president of the national Coin Laundry Association, said storefronts near college campuses often offered Internet access while those in immigrant enclaves might sell international phone cards. The standard televisions and video games are increasingly accompanied by tanning booths. Many Laundromats now also sell lottery tickets, rent videos or provide photo-printing services.
"You need to open up with some new twist that is going to want to make all those customers come to you," said Arthur Lapon, president of ADL Consulting Services, which specializes in the coin laundry industry.
Here in Berwyn, a suburb of about 55,000 that is nearly half Hispanic, there has been a laundry on this prime patch of Cermak Avenue since at least the 1950's, expanding bit by bit to the current sprawling space.
It dwarfs the average Laundromat, which has 50 to 55 machines in maybe 2,400 square feet, according to Mr. Wallace, but most likely does not live up to its lofty title. Mr. Benson knows of a place in Denver with 400 machines, but he is quick to point out that it is only two-thirds the physical size. "They jammed them all in," he said. "There's no place to relax, no place to run around, no place to be human."
The fire, started by an errant spark behind a dryer, left customers and children crying on the corner, but allowed Mr. Benson to dream.
The new place has more bathrooms, with Italian floor tiles, and will have a Mediterranean-themed mural on the back wall. The solar panels on the roof are even stronger than their predecessors, and should cut gas bills by 25 percent.
There will be diner-style booths by the vending machines - not just candy and chips but White Castle hamburgers and other microwaveable meals - and the play area, all under a circular dropped ceiling adorned with neon signs blaring "Welcome" in 20 languages. And it will still be open 24 hours, every day of the year.
"It's a community center," said Joel Rhea, assistant principal of nearby Havlicek Elementary school, who said he kept going to the Laundromat - often with his wife and two children - for pizza and play even after buying a house with a washer and dryer. "It's family-oriented. There's stuff to do. Even though it's a Laundromat, it's not just a Laundromat."
On Brazilian immigrants in NYC
Trading Status for a Raise
By JOSEPH BERGER and FERNANDA SANTOS
Ricardo Stefano spends 11 hours a day, five days a week brushing the scuffed oxfords and dusty loafers of businessmen near Grand Central Terminal, something he has been doing since arriving from Brazil 15 years ago.
Shining shoes was a step down from fixing glasses in his father's eyeglass shop, particularly for someone with a year of college under his belt. But trailblazing compatriots told him he could make far more money shining shoes in New York than he could fixing glasses in Brazil, and the rumors turned out to be true. At age 43, he makes $500 a week, half of which he sends back to his estranged wife and three children in the state of Minas Gerais. He has not seen his children since he left. But Mr. Stefano does not regret his decision.
"When you come to this country, you know what kind of job you will find - because you don't have language, you don't have papers," he said. "That's the price you pay."
Brazilian immigrants in the New York area are emerging as one of the city's faster growing ethnic groups, but unlike most Latin Americans who come here poor, ill-educated and willing to spirit across borders, Brazilians more often tend to come from a range of middle-class backgrounds, are well-schooled and can afford to fly here legally. Experts on these immigrants, like Maxine L. Margolis, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, say that Brazilians qualify for tourist visas, which require proof of jobs and savings accounts, then often intentionally overstay them.
Once in the United States, even those with college degrees are willing to work as housekeepers, limousine drivers and go-go dancers because menial work in America pays much more than white-collar jobs do in the oft-troubled Brazilian economy.
"In Brazil you have quality of life, but here you have financial security," said Jamiel Ramalho de Almeida, a hairdresser who came from Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state in southeastern Brazil, after graduating from the College of Philosophy, Science and Language with a teaching degree. Mr. Almeida, a neatly bearded man of flawless diction, owns the Ipanema Beauty Salon in Astoria, Queens. "When you get a taste of the good life, it's hard to go back to what you had before."
So many Brazilians have streamed here that they have transformed neighborhoods like Astoria and Ironbound in Newark. Together those neighborhoods are home to two dozen Brazilian restaurants, three nightclubs, several bikini-waxing parlors and supermarkets that stock the smoked pork parts used for feijoada, a fatty bean stew so heavy that it is typically followed by a nap.
In Ironbound, Brazilians have fit right in with their former colonizers, the Portuguese, though Brazilians may soon outnumber them. There are also large concentrations of Brazilians in Mineola, Port Chester and Mount Vernon in New York, in Long Branch, N.J., and in Danbury, Conn.
At least since Carmen Miranda, with a fruit bowl for a hat, chica-chica-boomed audiences out of some of their stodginess, Brazil has had a distinct mystique among Americans.
Samba and bossa nova rhythms have shaped the music of Frank Sinatra and Manhattan's dance clubs, and movies like "Black Orpheus" and "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands" have mixed magic, lust and a Brazilian love of revelry to relax American restraints. Pelé ignited a romance with soccer that, in its children's version, has become a ritual of suburban autumn weekends.
But the mystique has always been felt at arm's length. Very few Brazilians actually moved here. That has been changing as a result of Brazil's sometimes inflationary economy and high unemployment, which has been hovering near 10 percent. Although the 2000 Census counted 13,000 New Yorkers of Brazilian ancestry, with 3,372 of them in Astoria, the Brazilian Consulate thinks those are gross undercounts.
José Alfredo Graça Lima, the consul general in New York, said a 2004 Census estimate put the number in New York State at 42,000, in New Jersey at 51,000, and in Connecticut at 18,000, but based on subscribers to Brazilian satellite TV, he thinks those numbers should be more than doubled.
The immigrants include an uncommon proportion of well-educated people. The 2000 Census revealed that 30.8 percent of the city's Brazilians had degrees from colleges or graduate schools, triple the number for some other nationalities from Latin America like Mexicans, at 8.6 percent, or Ecuadorians, at 9.4 percent.
The educated expatriates include Marcia Duarte, 45, who has an exuberant laugh and a degree in psychology. Like a lopsided proportion of Brazilians here, she too hails from Minas Gerais, where she worked in human resources for a firm in Belo Horizonte, a city of both soaring buildings and hovels unconnected to the sewage grid. Here she has worked mostly as a baby sitter, with her first employers assuming she came from a penniless background.
"The families teach us how to cut the ends of flowers to put them in a vase, how to set the table, how to use the remote control," she said. "We know that already!"
But American pay coupled with a multiracial society similar to Brazil's have been irresistible. She now works as a personal assistant to an executive and makes $47,000 a year, five times what she estimates that she might have made back home. "To make money in Brazil is always a problem," she said. With her salary, she can afford to take two trips home a year.
Still, Miss Duarte plans to return to Brazil in four years to live on her national pension. According to Dr. Margolis, most Brazilians come to the United States as sojourners, not settlers, for they seem to have a case of saudades, the longing for home.
Eloah Teixeira, 60, who once managed a light-fixtures shop in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul state in southern Brazil, has cleaned houses for many of her 20 years in America. She lives in a ground-floor apartment in Astoria and exults in being able to afford tickets for musicals like "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," and sampling restaurants like Astoria's Malagueta. But housecleaning, she adds, "is a hard job, especially when you're 60."
The owner of Malagueta, Herbet Gomes, has a two-year degree from a technical college and in Brazil was a skilled mechanic who repaired mining machines. But he earned just $700 a month in 1990 and dreaded losing a finger to a machine. He took a chance on migrating and found work as a dishwasher in Manhattan.
"It was a shame for me considering what I did in Brazil," he said. "All these years I work to be a dishwasher? Wow, what have I done wrong? After two weeks, I loosen up."
He worked his way up to the position of cook at other restaurants, and, in 1999, he married another Brazilian, Alda Teixeira, who worked as a housekeeper. Four years ago, they opened Malagueta, a 14-table spot serving shrimp stew and pudim de leite (flan). It was one of 13 restaurants in Queens to earn a mention in the first Michelin restaurant guide for New York. One waitress, Monica Araújo, has a bachelor's degree in international relations from Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro.
The neighborhood surrounding Malagueta has overshadowed the area of 46th Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan as the city's center of Brazilian life. The two Midtown blocks once had 100 Brazilian shops that sold electronic goods that Brazilian tourists found to be cheaper here than they were at home.
When import taxes were reduced, the shops went out of business. João de Matos, who organizes the annual Brazilian Day that draws hundreds of thousands, said the street is down to three restaurants, his travel agency, a money remitter and a shop that sells the string bikinis that Brazilians call fio dental (dental floss).
Tatiana Pacheco, a 28-year-old college-educated counselor at Immigration Advocacy Services in Astoria who came here to work as an au pair, said that there are so many Brazilians in her neighborhood, "I feel like I'm in a different town instead of 10,000 miles away."
She loves New York's "big boiling machine." Still, she said, Americans do not acknowledge how hard it is for immigrants to do well here. Her compatriots struggle with crowded quarters shared among newcomers. Others like Ms. Araújo, the Malagueta waitress, pine for the Brazilian zest for life.
"Here, you just think about your job, about making money," she said. "You don't think about life."
On Ghana's "Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora"
Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora
By LYDIA POLGREEN
CAPE COAST, Ghana - For centuries, Africans walked through the infamous "door of no return" at Cape Coast castle directly into slave ships, never to set foot in their homelands again. These days, the portal of this massive fort so central to one of history's greatest crimes has a new name, hung on a sign leading back in from the roaring Atlantic Ocean: "The door of return."
Ghana, through whose ports millions of Africans passed on their way to plantations in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, wants its descendants to come back.
Taking Israel as its model, Ghana hopes to persuade the descendants of enslaved Africans to think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, invest, send their children to be educated and even retire here.
"We want Africans everywhere, no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home," J. Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the tourism minister, said on a recent day. "We hope we can help bring the African family back together again."
In many ways it is a quixotic goal. Ghana is doing well by West African standards - with steady economic growth, a stable, democratic g overnment and broad support from the West, making it a favored place for wealthy countries to give aid.
But it remains a very poor, struggling country where a third of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, life expectancy tops out at 59 and basic services like electricity and water are sometimes scarce.
Nevertheless, thousands of African-Americans already live here at least part of the year, said Valerie Papaya Mann, president of the African American Association of Ghana.
To encourage still more to come, or at least visit, Ghana plans to offer a special lifetime visa for members of the diaspora and will relax citizenship requirements so that descendants of slaves can receive Ghanaian passports. The government is also starting an advertising campaign to persuade Ghanaians to treat African-Americans more like long-lost relatives than as rich tourists. That is harder than it sounds.
Many African-Americans who visit Africa are unsettled to find that Africans treat them - even refer to them - the same way as white tourists. The term "obruni," or "white foreigner," is applied regardless of skin color.
To African-Americans who come here seeking their roots, the term is a sign of the chasm between Africans and African-Americans. Though they share a legacy, they experience it entirely differently.
"It is a shock for any black person to be called white," said Ms. Mann, who moved here two years ago. "But it is really tough to hear it when you come with your heart to seek your roots in Africa."
The advertising campaign urges Ghanaians to drop "obruni" in favor of "akwaaba anyemi," a slightly awkward phrase fashioned from two tribal languages meaning "welcome, sister or brother." As part of the effort to reconnect with the diaspora, Ghana plans to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. DuBois and others it calls modern-day Josephs, after the biblical figure who rose from slavery to save his people.
The government plans to hold a huge event in 2007 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the end of the trans-Atlantic trade by Britain and the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence. The ceremonies will include traditional African burial rituals for the millions who died as a result of slavery.
Estimates of the trade vary widely. The most reliable suggest that between 12 million and 25 million people living in the vast lands between present-day Senegal and Angola were caught up, and as many as half died en route to the Americas.
Some perished on the long march from the inland villages where they were captured to seaports. Others died in the dungeons of slave castles and forts, where they were sometimes kept for months, until enough were gathered to pack the hold of a ship. Still others died in the middle passage, the longest leg of the triangular journey between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Of the estimated 11 million who crossed the sea, most went to South America and the Caribbean. About 500,000 are believed to have ended up in the United States.
The mass deportations and the divisions the slave trade wrought are wounds from which Africa still struggles to recover.
Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African nation to shake off its colonial rulers, winning its independence from Britain in 1957. Its founding father, Kwame Nkrumah, attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, and saw in African-Americans a key to developing the new nation.
"Nkrumah saw the American Negro as the vanguard of the African people," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard, who first traveled to Ghana when he was 20 and fresh out of Harvard, afire with Nkrumah's spirit. "He wanted to be able to utilize the services and skills of African-Americans as Ghana made the transition from colonialism to independence."
Many African-Americans, from Maya Angelou to Malcolm X, visited Ghana in the 1950's and 60's, and a handful stayed. To Nkrumah, the struggle for civil rights in the diaspora and the struggles for independence from colonial rule in Africa were inextricably linked, both being expressions of the desire of black people everywhere to regain their freedom.
But Nkrumah was ousted in a coup in 1966, and by then Pan-Africanism had already given way to nationalism and cold war politics, sending much of the continent down a trail of autocracy, civil war and heartbreak.
Still, African-Americans are drawn to Ghana's rich culture, and the history of slavery.
Ghana still has dozens of slave forts, each a chilling reminder of the brutality of the trade. At Elmina Castle, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and taken over by the Dutch 150 years later, visitors are guided through a Christian chapel built adjacent to the hall where slaves were auctioned, and the balcony over the women's dungeons from which the fort's governor would choose a concubine from the chattel below.
The room through which slaves passed into waiting ships is the emotional climax of the tour, a suffocating dungeon dimly lit by sunlight pouring through a narrow portal leading to the churning sea.
"You feel our history here," said Dianne Mark, an administrator at Central Michigan University who visited Elmina Castle, six miles from Cape Coast castle, in early December, tears welling in her eyes as she gazed across the massive, buttressed walls to the ocean. "This is where our people are from. That is a deep, deep experience. I look at everyone and wonder, 'Could he have been my cousin? Could she have been my aunt?' "
Like any family reunion, this one is layered with joy and tears. For African-Americans and others in the African diaspora, there is lingering hostility and confusion about the role Africans played in the slave trade.
"The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them," Mr. Gates said. "But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans."
Many Africans, meanwhile, often fail to see any connection at all between them and African-Americans, or feel African-Americans are better off for having been taken to the United States. Many Africans strive to emigrate; for the past 15 years, the number of Africans moving to the United States has surpassed estimates of the number forced there during any of the peak years of the slave trade. The number of immigrants from Ghana in the United States is larger than that of any other African country except Nigeria, according to the 2000 census.
"So many Africans want to go to America, so they can't understand why Americans would want to come here," said Philip Amoa-Mensah, a guide at Elmina Castle. "Maybe Ghanaians think they are lucky to be from America, even though their ancestors went through so much pain."
The relationship is clearly a work in progress. Ghanaians are still learning of their ancestors' pivotal roles in the slave trade, and slave forts on the coast, long used to thousands of foreign visitors, have in recent years become sites for school field trips.
When the United States and the United Nations gave Ghana money to rehabilitate and restore Cape Coast castle, the government agency responsible for the castle repainted it white. Residents of Cape Coast were thrilled to see the moisture-blackened castle spruced up, but African-Americans living in Ghana were horrified, feeling that the history of their ancestors was being, quite literally, whitewashed.
"It didn't go over too well," said Kohain Nathanyah Halevi, an African-American who lives near Cape Coast.
A recent African-American visitor to Cape Coast castle took the emotionally charged step through the door of no return, only to be greeted by a pair of toddlers playing in a fishing boat on the other side, pointing and shouting, "obruni, obruni!"
William Kwaku Moses, 71, a retired security guard who sells shells to tourists on the other side of the door of no return, shushed the children.
"We are trying," he said, with a shrug.
On global warming....
Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Earth scientists with the longest frames of reference, particularly those whose specialties begin with the prefix "paleo," often seem to be the least agitated about human-caused global warming.
This has been true even in 2005, a year that saw the biggest summer retreat of Arctic sea ice ever measured, a new sign that warming seas are rising at an accelerating pace and global temperatures continuing a sharp climb that began around 1990 and appears unmatched in 2,000 years. But these backward-looking experts have seen it all before.
Recent studies have found that 49 million years ago the balmy Arctic Ocean, instead of being covered in ice, was matted with a cousin of the duckweed that cloaks suburban frog ponds. The forests on the continent now called Antarctica and on shores fringing the Arctic were once thick and lush.
And through hundreds of millions of years, concentrations of carbon dioxide and the other trace gases that trap solar energy and prevent the planet from being an ice ball have mostly been far higher than those typical during humankind's short existence.
Compared with that norm, the rapid buildup of carbon dioxide now from a binge of burning forests, coal and oil lasting for centuries (and counting) is but a blip
In fact, the planet has nothing to worry about from global warming. A hot, steamy earth would be fine for most forms of life. Earth and its biological veneer are far more resilient than human societies, particularly those still mired in poverty or pushed to the margins of the livable.
Only we humans have to be concerned, and species like polar bears that, like the poorest people, are pushed to an edge - in the bear's case the tenuous ecosystem built around coastal sea ice.
Henk Brinkhuis, a paleoecologist and botanist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said it might be hard to get used to the idea, but the Arctic as we have known it for centuries "is history."
He said this may spell doom for polar bears, a species that branched off from brown bears only about 250,000 years ago - an evolutionary blink of the eye.
Still, this is a special case, not necessarily a blow to the prospects of mammals in general.
The world's last huge warm spike, the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum some 55 million years ago, preceded "the biggest radiation in mammals ever," Dr. Brinkhuis said.
"The first horses, cows, the first primates had their origin right around then," Dr. Brinkhuis said. "It may be that the extinction of the polar bear would be followed by all kinds of new species in return."
None of this means that humans should simply embrace their fossil-fueled potency without regard to the effects. In fact, many scientists say, if we value the world as it is, there are still strong, and purely self-serving, reasons to start curbing releases of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases.
That long-scale earth history, while speaking of nature's vagaries, holds supporting evidence. It is rife with thresholds, points at which a little warming turns into a lot in a hurry. Avoiding such thresholds could forestall things that societies decide matter, like rapidly rising seas or a farewell to cherished Arctic icons.
The Arctic, particularly, is filled with what amount to flippable climate switches, including natural repositories of carbon, like boggy tundra, that could emit vast amounts of greenhouse gases should the current warming trend pass certain points, said Jonathan T. Overpeck, the director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona.
This could amplify warming and take the climate into a realm beyond anything experienced through human evolution.
Another lesson of deep planetary history, Dr. Overpeck said, is that, once set in motion, such warm-ups can happen fast and then last a very, very long time.
"That's a condition that might be really hard to get out of for tens of thousands of years," he said.
Studies of the past also show that pace matters. The rise in temperature and greenhouse gases during the great heat wave 55 million years ago, while instantaneous on a geological time scale, took thousands of years to unfold.
But the pace of the recent rise in carbon dioxide is as much as 200 times as fast as what has been estimated in past rapid climate transitions.
Slowing that pace would help human endeavors as much as ecosystems, said David G. Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic systems science at the University of Manitoba.
Those who speak of the potential benefits of warming, he noted, forget that a thawing, greening Arctic, for example, will not suddenly transform from spongy tundra to wheat-friendly farmland.
"You have to generate soil," Dr. Barber said. "It takes a long time to generate this kind of stuff. So it's not going to be an instantaneous sort of thing. There's going to be a lot of messiness in between."
Even for polar bears, there are reasons to think the end is not necessarily nigh. There was at least one significant period - the last gap between ice ages 120,000 years ago - when the global climate was several degrees warmer than it is today and they clearly squeaked through.
So at least slowing or blunting the warming might allow them to squeak through once again. Dr. Barber said he was confident that biology would endure much of what humans throw at it. His concern is for the effects on people and the things they rely on or cherish.
"All of global warming has nothing to do with the planet," Dr. Barber said. "The planet will go on through its normal cycles, and it'll do its own thing.
"It only has to do with us - as people. Our economic side of things and our political side of things are really what are being affected by climate change. The planet could care less."
On a new cooperative restaurant
A Hyphenated-American Dream
By ANTHONY DePALMA
A truly great city inspires truly great dreams, even during the days when all else seems lost.
There was no bleaker time in New York's history than 9/11. Yet it was then, with the restaurant where he had worked for six years - Windows on the World - in splinters and 73 of his fellow employees gone, that Silverio Moog's dream started to take shape.
Now Mr. Moog, a spunky 41-year-old bartender from the Philippines, can hardly believe what is about to happen. Next week he'll go to work in a brand-new restaurant, and start a totally new life.
Restaurants open in New York all the time, but there has never been one like this. Mr. Moog and 50 other waiters, busboys, bartenders and dishwashers, many of them immigrants who worked at Windows, have formed a cooperative that will run one of the city's first worker-owned restaurants.
Each one of them will claim a piece of the restaurant, called Colors, as their own and share in any profits. Each one submitted a family recipe to help shape the restaurant's eclectic menu - which they describe as American fare with a global twist. And each one has pinned lifelong dreams on an idea formed in the crucible of disaster.
"This is one of my American dreams, to be an owner of a business being run by immigrants who have a common goal," Mr. Moog said.
The possibilities and opportunities are wondrous, he said, and he is especially proud to see his Philippine Lobster Lumpia - lobster and minted sweet potato spring rolls - on the Colors menu.
But the reality of what he and the other workers are undertaking is daunting as well.
"I guess I'm a little bit scared," he said.
And no wonder. With the failure rate of restaurants - 60 percent after three years according to a recent Ohio State University study - and all the vagaries of location, perception and the economy to deal with, even experienced, well-financed restaurateurs can stumble.
While the co-op members have centuries of restaurant experience among them, they have never owned a business. So they brought in a professional, Stefan Mailvaganam, a Canadian citizen of Sri Lankan descent, to be general manager.
Mr. Mailvaganam realizes this is no ordinary job. "What we are trying to do here is start a restaurant with a conscience," he told two dozen co-op members who gathered last week for a final training session. While he spoke, spacklers and carpenters rushed to complete their work. The restaurant, in Lower Manhattan a few doors down from the Public Theater, is scheduled to open for dinner on Tuesday. "It's challenging," Mr. Mailvaganam said over the din of steel and wood, "but we are committed to doing it."
Rarely has one project had to carry so many expectations. Besides memorializing the 73 who died in Windows, which was atop 1 World Trade Center, the co-op is trying to do no less than change an industry.
Nobody in the restaurant, not even the dishwashers, will receive less than $13.50 an hour, far higher than average restaurant wages. They will share tips and be eligible to receive overtime and vacations. Eventually they will be covered by health insurance and have pensions.
And, of course, each will share in the profits of the restaurant, if and when there are profits.
"I am doing this for myself, for the workers who died and for all restaurant workers in the city," said Awal Ahmed, 43, a waiter from Bangladesh who worked at Windows for 17 years. "It doesn't matter to me how much profit I get. It's like having a piece of my own restaurant."
The Sept. 11 attack forced many people to change their outlook on life. Surviving workers from Windows realized that nothing more than a simple matter of scheduling had determined who lived and who died.
Many of the surviving workers were left scrambling for work. A cooperative restaurant was seen as a way of providing jobs as well as making a strong point about workers' rights. Money had to be raised, but traditional lenders balked, even after an Italian food cooperative put up $500,000 to support the project.
Saru Jayaraman, executive director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, which gets support from the restaurant workers union, said she thought workers would be eligible to receive the 9/11 financing available for rebuilding Lower Manhattan. But except for wage subsidies from Catholic Charities, they have not received any of that financial help.
The project has a budget of $2.2 million, which the co-op finally raised from more than 20 sources. Each worker contributed at least 100 hours of sweat equity.
The decision to open an expensive, 120-seat tablecloth restaurant in a good location, rather than a humbler place that would have cost much less, and opened a lot sooner, turned into a heated dispute that led several co-op members to leave.
Others left because the legal framework for the co-op was structured so that members' early profits go to pay back the Italian co-op.
Some are still unhappy with how profits are to be shared. "Our percentage keeps going down and down," said Khondoker Delwar, 43, a waiter from Bangladesh. But he's sticking with the project, he said, because it means his young daughter will know he was part of something noble that happened in New York.
A successful co-operatively owned restaurant could become a powerful symbol. Juan Galan, an organizer with Local 100 of Unite Here, which represents hotel and restaurant workers, is trying to persuade co-op members to join the union because it would show owners how treating workers well can actually help increase profits.
And the co-op members are joining the New York State Restaurant Association, an owners' lobby. At a recent co-op meeting, Rajani Adhikary, a policy organizer for the Restaurant Opportunities Center, a labor advocacy group that has been instrumental in forming the co-op, told members that by joining the association they would be helping all restaurant workers. "You're going to be like spies," Ms. Adhikary told them, "and tell us what they do so we will know more about them."
E. Charles Hunt, executive vice president of the restaurant association, said the co-op members were welcome. "We're on their side," Mr. Hunt said. "We just don't see why they would feel they need to have spies amid our ranks."
Most of the co-op members found other jobs while waiting for Colors to open. Magdi Labib, an Egyptian immigrant and a natural leader of the co-op, is doing well as a waiter at an expensive Midtown steakhouse. He said he would probably earn less at Colors, but he will make the switch anyway. "I know that 6 out of 10 restaurants fail, but it's not going to happen here," said Mr. Labib, 51. "Everyone is going to know how to do their job in a proficient way, and that's going to help."
The workers had planned to bring memorabilia from Windows to the new restaurant but abandoned that idea because they felt the constant reminder of what happened there would be too depressing.
The new restaurant will feature 1930's decor because the workers feel that era represented the height of labor power in New York. The name Colors reflects the 22 nations from which the members come, as will be shown on a giant mural in the restaurant.
These veteran restaurant workers realize that the emotional link to 9/11 will bring in diners, but it will become secondary to the things that really determine a restaurant's success - service and food.
"Yes we have 9/11 and people who believe in workers' rights might come at first," said Fekkak Mamdouh, a former Windows waiter who now is assistant director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, "but if you don't give good service and good food, they won't come back."
Mr. Mamdouh said that if Colors fails, it will be a failure for all immigrants in the city. But if it succeeds, he said "it will be a victory for all restaurant workers in New York, all immigrants and all people who believe in workers' rights."
On Muslim women in Europe
Muslim Women in Europe Claim Rights and Keep Faith
By MARLISE SIMONS
PARIS, Dec. 28 - Hanife Karakus, the soft-spoken daughter of Turkish immigrants, is a thoroughly European Muslim. She covers her hair with a scarf, but she also has a law degree and married the man of her choice. Matchmakers exerted no pressure. The couple met on the Internet.
Perhaps even more telling, Mrs. Karakus this year became the first woman to lead one of France's 25 regional Islamic councils.
"At first, the men didn't speak to me," she said. "They were uncomfortable. They didn't know how to work with a woman."
Mrs. Karakus, 24, does not call herself a feminist; she simply says she is a French lawyer. But she qualifies as part of a quiet revolution spreading among young European Muslim women, a generation that claims the same rights as its Western counterparts, without renouncing Islamic values.
For many, the key difference is education, an option often denied their poor, immigrant mothers and grandmothers. These young women are studying law, medicine and anthropology, and now form a majority in many Islamic studies courses, traditionally the world of men. They are getting jobs in social work, business and media, and are more prone to use their new independence to divorce. Also, French, English, German or Dutch may be their native languages.
"We are not fully accepted in France, but we are beginning to be everywhere," said Sihem Habchi, 30, who was born in Algeria, grew up in France and works as a multimedia consultant.
Unlike their homebound elders, these emancipated Muslim women use the Internet and spend hours in proliferating Islamic chat rooms. Web sites are now favorite trysting places, a chance for risk-free "halal dating," that is, interacting with men in a way that violates no social or religious codes.
In the crowded immigrant suburbs ringing Paris, the scene of recent riots mostly led by young Muslim men, high school teachers say girls are the most motivated students because they have the most to gain.
In interviews in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, young women repeated this belief like a mantra: studying offers an escape from the oppressive housing projects, from controlling young Muslim radicals and from strict social codes enforced by fathers and brothers.
"We all understood that education was our passport to freedom," said Soria Makti, 30, the daughter of an Algerian factory worker, who left her Marseille housing project and is a museum curator in the city.
The emancipation of Muslim women, like that of Western women before them, is often slow and sometimes deeply painful when women feel they must break with their families. But nowhere is this quiet new form of Islamic feminism more evident than in the realm of religion, the centuries-old domain of men.
Young women are increasingly engaging in Islamic studies, a fast-growing field across Europe that offers a blend of theology, Koranic law, ethics and Arabic. Diplomas from the two-year courses allow women to teach in mosques and in Islamic schools, or to act as religious advisers.
"This is a big shift," said Amel Boubekeur, a social scientist at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, who is writing her doctoral thesis on Europe's "new Islamic elites." "Instead of having to be passive, women now become teachers," she said. "It used to be taboo for women to recite the Koran." But now, she added, "It offers them a new prestige, new jobs and, not least, it gives them a stronger voice in dealing with their parents, brothers and husbands." In fact, Ms. Boubekeur said, women found religious texts more effective than secular arguments. Today, Islamic studies courses, often taken on weekends and accessible to secondary school graduates, are expanding in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. In the six institutes for Islamic studies in France, almost 60 percent of this year's nearly 1,000 students are women.
La Grande Mosquée in Paris, a large white and green compound from the 1920's with a finely chiseled minaret and students milling about under arcades, is France's leading religious institution. It has its own theological school, largely financed by Algeria. Abdelkrim Bekri, the director, said that the school started a program in 2002, unavailable elsewhere, to train young women as spiritual counselors for hospitals and prisons, much like the ministry of Christian chaplains. Twenty women had graduated, and others were in training, he said. "There is a great need here," he said.
Although women are not allowed to perform the most prestigious ritual of leading the mosque in Friday Prayer, Ms. Boubekeur said women were pushing to have a voice and participate in religious debates. "What is new is that they want direct access to religion, without depending on the rigid views of the clergy," she said.
Change can be measured in other small steps. At the Islamic University of Rotterdam, a small group of theology students, most of them speaking Dutch but all tightly veiled, chatted after classes about the need to end the social segregation of men and women. "In class, we sit anywhere we choose," said a student who gave her name only as Aisha. "In the mosques, we don't want to sit in separate or hidden spaces."
Ertegul Gokcekuyu, the university registrar, said more than 60 percent of his students were women. "The motivation of the girls is very remarkable," he said.
Mrs. Karakus, who heads the Muslim Council in Limoges, has not studied theology, but her tasks, long the work of men, touch on religion as well. She has negotiated with local authorities to obtain plots for Muslim burials at the local cemetery, and has reserved sites for the slaughter of sheep for Eid-el-Kebir, a major Muslim holiday. She also helps to organize courses for imams who arrive with little knowledge of French or French traditions.
As educated Muslim women assert themselves, they appear to be forging a strand of Euro-Islam, a hybrid that attempts to reconcile the principles laid out in the Koran with life in a secular, democratic Europe.
"I tell women, 'We can honor the Koran from our perspective and apply it to our experience today,' " said Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist who is both Algerian and French. "We must recover the religious texts and free them from an exclusively male interpretation that belongs to the Middle Ages. Most important right now is that women get into the universities."
The implications of women flocking to Islamic studies are disturbing to some, who see a potential for them to become radical. Tokia Saifi, a former deputy minister for development who remains one of the few women of Arab descent to reach a high post in the French government, said she worried that many young people studied religion because it was socially acceptable, not because it was an informed choice. "I see it as a regression," she said. "It means we need less discrimination, more ways to promote integration."
Such debates are far from the concerns of Muslim girls who are harassed or punished for being too Western. Latifa Ahmed, 25, arrived in the Netherlands from Morocco when she was 8. As she grew up near Amsterdam, her family turned against her because she preferred to be with her Dutch classmates.
"They were bad, they were infidels, I was told," she said. "My parents and my brothers started hitting me." Ms. Ahmed, who lived at home until she was 23, said, "I was going crazy from all the fights and the lies, but I was afraid to run away and lose my family."
One evening, when she returned from a concert with a Dutch friend, her father yelled, " 'Let's take a knife and we'll finish with her,' " she said. "He didn't kill me, but he put a curse on me. It was very frightening."
She ran away, and although she lives in another city, she said she was still afraid of her brothers, who had sworn to kill her. She has put herself through college doing odd jobs and does not care about religion. "I don't feel discriminated here," she said. "Moroccan girls can find work easier than Moroccan boys. Boys have a bad name."
Changes in the lives of Muslim women in Europe are uneven. Many are still pressed into arranged marriages, while others are finding independence. Change is hard to measure in France, where the law forbids the census to collect data by ethnic origin or religion. But in the Netherlands one telling signal is the rise in divorce among immigrants. According to Dutch government statistics, divorces among Moroccan families have increased by 46 percent since 2000, and among Turkish families by 42 percent in that period, with a majority believed to be instigated by wives.
Women are also often at the forefront of liberal tendencies among Muslims, publishing critiques and studies about the obstacles and abuses women face. In Germany, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer, and Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born sociologist, have recently published books that have been read widely on the oppression of Muslim girls by their own families. Ms. Kelek's book "The Foreign Bride," a best seller, denounces the plight of often illiterate girls, brought from the Turkish countryside "as modern slaves" for their husbands and in-laws in Germany.
Other women are fighting for change through the law. Mimount Bousakla, whose family is from Morocco, is a member of Parliament in Belgium. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, is one in the Netherlands. They were reared as Muslims, and have pressed for policies to aid women, including raising the legal age for marriage to protect young "imported" brides and imposing tougher sentences on men who kill women to save the honor of their families. In France, a movement called "Neither Whores nor Doormats," begun in 2003, helps many Muslim women who have been abused get services from lawyers, doctors or psychologists.
As Muslim women take advantage of democracy and civil liberties in Europe, the question remains whether the impact of an educated minority will be continually blunted by the arrival of often poorly educated young brides from North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East. And as Europe rethinks its faltering integration policies, the place of Muslim women is a new target of scrutiny. Critics, including immigrants themselves, argue that in the name of respecting other cultures, Europeans have allowed the oppression of Muslim women in their midst. Increasingly, women are saying that integration policies have been too male-oriented and must focus more on women.
Senay Ozdemir, a Turkish-born Dutch citizen and the editor of Sen, a new glossy magazine aimed at immigrant women, is among those voices. Sen means you in Turkish. "Obviously women are a key to integration," Ms. Ozdemir said. "If the woman cannot or will not integrate in a new country, it affects the whole family. She will isolate her children."
A Sure Thing for Kazakhs: Horses Will Provide
By C. J. CHIVERS
ILYINKA, Kazakhstan, Dec. 20 - The six Kazakh villagers circled the stallion with movements so nimble and practiced that they disguised the difficulty of the dawn's first task. The animal before them, weighing roughly 550 pounds, was to be rolled onto its back.
Aslakhan Mukanov, 13, pulled the stallion with a rope as it whinnied and bucked. Seimurad Maitai, 27, dodged the hooves, swinging a rope until he snared the kicking forelegs together.
Mr. Maitai pressed closer, whipping the rope's other end, seeking a hind leg. Soon he entangled it as well. The two pulled their lines taut and lunged. The horse fell, landing hard on the snow. The men scrambled atop it, lashed its legs tight and placed a metal trough under its neck.
Out came the knife. Jumat Makhanov, 29, turned his palms skyward and thanked the pinned stallion for what it would provide. A prayer came last. Then Mr. Maitai swept the blade across the horse's neck.
For longer than the once nomadic Kazakhs can remember, the horses of Central Asia's steppe have been near the center of life.
The people who lived in what is now Kazakhstan hunted wild horses in prehistory, and some archaeologists believe that they may have been the first to domesticate the animals, binding the two species together for the ensuing millennia. In an unforgiving climate and a seemingly endless land, horses provided transport and labor. They also provided leather, tools, milk and meat. In time they became staples of commerce and instruments of war.
Today, generations after the Kazakhs were conquered by the Bolsheviks and subjected to the collectivization, terror and dreary servitude of the Soviet state, the horse's place in Kazakh culture is secure.
Riding remains a symbol of Kazakh skill. Horse meat, horse fat, horse entrails and mare's milk are principal ingredients in the national cuisine, and post-Soviet small businesses trade in horses and horse products with a vigor not seen in much of the economy here.
The season of horses is now. Every December and January, as sunlight drops away and winter hardens and darkens the steppe, Kazakhs harvest their animals. Horses are killed in yards throughout the country, for hanging in sheds, for sale to bazaars and for the meat that gives festivals their feasts, which takes the form of a communal besbarmak, a dish of boiled horsemeat and dough, often still eaten by hand.
In the arc of a year is the arc of a horse's life. In Ilyinka, the stallion slaughtered in the snow had been released on the steppe in the spring, to roam and feed in a free-ranging herd. It was captured in fall, and then, following Kazakh custom, tethered beside a feed bucket and fattened with hay and grain.
This morning, plumper and more tender, it was taken to the yard behind the house of Kaldybek Mukanov, 39, a butcher and meat vendor who had bought it from a horse trader in late September.
The animal exuded anxiety. To deceive it, the men led out an older horse first, a big cinnamon-colored specimen with a golden tail - an act that persuaded the younger horse to follow. Then the older horse was rushed back to the feeding stable, unaware that its own death was planned for later in the week.
The younger stallion realized that it was alone and surrounded by men. It was not yet 2 years old. Its chestnut-brown brow was striped white; its flanks and its black tail matted with manure. It was on the verge of the change from life to meat. Its snorts frosted the air.
It complained for an instant before the men were upon it. After it died, its blood filling the trough while the neighborhood's dogs padded nearby, the men Mr. Mukanov had summoned to help him got to work. First they cut through joints and snapped off the lower legs. Then they began skinning the animal, exposing white fat over thick red musculature. The hide slid off like a wet jacket.
A steel frame was produced, and the carcass was raised to waist height and disemboweled. Clouds of steam surged from the body. The guts were placed on a plastic mat.
While others cut away the rib cage and separated the hind legs from the forelegs, Mr. Makhanov squeezed dung from the intestines. Cut into 20-inch sections, the intestines would be stuffed with fat and meat to make kazy and shuzhyk, two garlic-laced sausages enjoyed as delicacies here.
The butchering proceeded swiftly as Mr. Mukanov watched. He had paid 120,000 Kazakh tengi, about $895, for the horse three months ago. Working in a bazaar in nearby Astana, the Kazakh capital, he expected to sell most of the meat, organs and sausage for about $1,050.
After deducting the costs of horse feed and paying his butchers, he said, he would clear at least $40 in profit, a significant amount in a country where many families live on several hundred dollars a month. He would also keep meat for his wife, three children and his mother, who lives with the family in a house beside the stable. "I have to feed my family like anyone else," he said.
Kazakh villages are not alone in having menus dominated by horse. In Astana as well, the markets are stacked with the meat, and horse dishes are found throughout the city's restaurants.
There is creamy sorpa, horse bullion spiced with dried fermented mare's milk and cheese, and there is kespe, unthickened bouillon laced with noodles, onions and thinly sliced meat. Minced horse stomach is boiled and served, with peppers and herbs, as karta. Pieces of meat, lung, liver, heart and kidney are chopped and mixed with potatoes to make stew-like kuyrdak.
The meat is also served at the most important moments in many Kazakh families' lives.
The day before the stallion was killed in Mr. Mukanov's yard, Ayup Smailov, a mechanic, turned up at a small private farm in the village of Vozdvizhenka. His father, 84, had died the night before. The bereaved man sought a horse for the funeral, to be served as besbarmak with tea.
After selecting a mare weighing more than 700 pounds, he watched three of the farm's employees convert it to meat. Nothing was wasted, except the dung and undigested grain drained from the stomach. A tub of blood was saved for the dogs, which had gathered round.
Back in Ilyinka, Mr. Mukanov was contending with a growing pack of dogs, too. He stood beneath the climbing sun, used to it all.
"Kazakhs occupy the second place in the number of horses killed," he said. "First are the wolves, and then the Kazakhs."
On the World's Largest Laundromat
Loads of Wash (Tons of It) and a Community Haven
By JODI WILGOREN
BERWYN, Ill., Dec. 25 - The birds arrived Wednesday, 15 feathered members of the finch family fluttering around a wood-and-glass sanctuary. Thursday brought the sand table and magnet games for the children's play area, where a special laminate floor was being laid.
And when the doors of the World's Largest Laundromat reopen this week, dozens of free doughnuts will be doled out daily, as reliable as the rinse cycle in the spanking-new washing machines.
Oh, yes, the machines. There are 301 of them now, row upon gleaming silver row, including a dozen washers ready to whirl a whopping 75 pounds (for a whopping $6.50) and the Chicago area's first high-powered express models that more than double the G-force in the spin cycle to cut dryer time nearly in half.
But before a four-alarm fire in August 2004 destroyed the World's Largest Laundromat, it was not just a place to pump quarters into metal boxes and pick strangers' lint from filters in this working-class strip just west of Chicago.
It was a haven for Hispanic families who cannot afford cable to watch Spanish-language soap operas. It was a Saturday-afternoon carnival with magicians, jugglers, face painters, even a unicyclist. There was Santa Claus posing for pictures at Christmas, the Easter Bunny handing out chocolate in April, cartoon characters on Halloween and, in summer, a read-athon raffle with bicycles for prizes.
Rebuilt for $3 million ($2 million from insurance) even better than before, the Laundromat will still offer free pizza on Wednesday nights and will also have free wireless Internet access 24 hours a day.
"It's like the beacon of the community," said Ozzie Cruz, 46, who works at a local radio station and is the president of the Berwyn Hispanic Organization. "It's more than just doing your clothes; it's an experience. The first day he's open, people may not even have laundry, but they'll stop by."
While Mr. Cruz praises the Laundromat's owner, Tom Benson, for understanding the neighborhood's needs - "not only their laundry needs," Mr. Cruz said, "just basic human needs" - Mr. Benson says he is simply striving for customers, and their quarters.
"The truth is it's all about business," Mr. Benson said in an interview as he oversaw carpet installation and basket assembly. "My morning business is better because of the free coffee and doughnuts. I'm a businessman; I'm here to make money."
Mr. Benson, 60, who lives in nearby Oak Park and bought the place in 1999, did not set out to be a Laundromateur. He was a business broker, selling mom-and-pop operations, unable to interest anyone in the 13,500-square-foot behemoth, its awning ripped and windows cracked. "I kept looking at it trying to find the right arguments to convince a buyer, and I convinced myself," he said with a laugh.
Hardly a Laundromat connoisseur - his only experience was after a divorce, in the early 1980's, when he would skulk into the dingy place across the street at 10 p.m., dump his clothes and run home to watch the news - Mr. Benson stole ideas from other successful businesses. The birds he had seen delighting residents in a nursing home. The pizza was a ploy to perk up the midweek lull in laundry customers.
He noticed bored children waiting while parents juggled loads, so he commissioned a coloring book telling the story of a Hispanic family on a Laundromat outing. He personally went to pick up and deliver fluff and fold to older shut-ins. That was him, too, in the Santa suit, handing out stuffed animals and toys and 1,000 calendars customized with pictures of each child on his lap.
"I want to make a good living while having a lot of fun," he said. "You can be pretty creative because you've got people for an hour, hour and a half."
Indeed, many Laundromats have diversified to turn the dirgelike chore into a day out. Brainwash Café in San Francisco couples coin-operated machines with live music and comedy nights. Wash and Learn has aspiring teachers from Brooklyn College teaching youngsters to read between loads at three neighborhood outlets. The motto at Laundry Bar in Miami, with nightly disc jockeys and weekly drag shows, is "get sloshed while you wash."
Brian Wallace, president of the national Coin Laundry Association, said storefronts near college campuses often offered Internet access while those in immigrant enclaves might sell international phone cards. The standard televisions and video games are increasingly accompanied by tanning booths. Many Laundromats now also sell lottery tickets, rent videos or provide photo-printing services.
"You need to open up with some new twist that is going to want to make all those customers come to you," said Arthur Lapon, president of ADL Consulting Services, which specializes in the coin laundry industry.
Here in Berwyn, a suburb of about 55,000 that is nearly half Hispanic, there has been a laundry on this prime patch of Cermak Avenue since at least the 1950's, expanding bit by bit to the current sprawling space.
It dwarfs the average Laundromat, which has 50 to 55 machines in maybe 2,400 square feet, according to Mr. Wallace, but most likely does not live up to its lofty title. Mr. Benson knows of a place in Denver with 400 machines, but he is quick to point out that it is only two-thirds the physical size. "They jammed them all in," he said. "There's no place to relax, no place to run around, no place to be human."
The fire, started by an errant spark behind a dryer, left customers and children crying on the corner, but allowed Mr. Benson to dream.
The new place has more bathrooms, with Italian floor tiles, and will have a Mediterranean-themed mural on the back wall. The solar panels on the roof are even stronger than their predecessors, and should cut gas bills by 25 percent.
There will be diner-style booths by the vending machines - not just candy and chips but White Castle hamburgers and other microwaveable meals - and the play area, all under a circular dropped ceiling adorned with neon signs blaring "Welcome" in 20 languages. And it will still be open 24 hours, every day of the year.
"It's a community center," said Joel Rhea, assistant principal of nearby Havlicek Elementary school, who said he kept going to the Laundromat - often with his wife and two children - for pizza and play even after buying a house with a washer and dryer. "It's family-oriented. There's stuff to do. Even though it's a Laundromat, it's not just a Laundromat."
On Brazilian immigrants in NYC
Trading Status for a Raise
By JOSEPH BERGER and FERNANDA SANTOS
Ricardo Stefano spends 11 hours a day, five days a week brushing the scuffed oxfords and dusty loafers of businessmen near Grand Central Terminal, something he has been doing since arriving from Brazil 15 years ago.
Shining shoes was a step down from fixing glasses in his father's eyeglass shop, particularly for someone with a year of college under his belt. But trailblazing compatriots told him he could make far more money shining shoes in New York than he could fixing glasses in Brazil, and the rumors turned out to be true. At age 43, he makes $500 a week, half of which he sends back to his estranged wife and three children in the state of Minas Gerais. He has not seen his children since he left. But Mr. Stefano does not regret his decision.
"When you come to this country, you know what kind of job you will find - because you don't have language, you don't have papers," he said. "That's the price you pay."
Brazilian immigrants in the New York area are emerging as one of the city's faster growing ethnic groups, but unlike most Latin Americans who come here poor, ill-educated and willing to spirit across borders, Brazilians more often tend to come from a range of middle-class backgrounds, are well-schooled and can afford to fly here legally. Experts on these immigrants, like Maxine L. Margolis, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, say that Brazilians qualify for tourist visas, which require proof of jobs and savings accounts, then often intentionally overstay them.
Once in the United States, even those with college degrees are willing to work as housekeepers, limousine drivers and go-go dancers because menial work in America pays much more than white-collar jobs do in the oft-troubled Brazilian economy.
"In Brazil you have quality of life, but here you have financial security," said Jamiel Ramalho de Almeida, a hairdresser who came from Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state in southeastern Brazil, after graduating from the College of Philosophy, Science and Language with a teaching degree. Mr. Almeida, a neatly bearded man of flawless diction, owns the Ipanema Beauty Salon in Astoria, Queens. "When you get a taste of the good life, it's hard to go back to what you had before."
So many Brazilians have streamed here that they have transformed neighborhoods like Astoria and Ironbound in Newark. Together those neighborhoods are home to two dozen Brazilian restaurants, three nightclubs, several bikini-waxing parlors and supermarkets that stock the smoked pork parts used for feijoada, a fatty bean stew so heavy that it is typically followed by a nap.
In Ironbound, Brazilians have fit right in with their former colonizers, the Portuguese, though Brazilians may soon outnumber them. There are also large concentrations of Brazilians in Mineola, Port Chester and Mount Vernon in New York, in Long Branch, N.J., and in Danbury, Conn.
At least since Carmen Miranda, with a fruit bowl for a hat, chica-chica-boomed audiences out of some of their stodginess, Brazil has had a distinct mystique among Americans.
Samba and bossa nova rhythms have shaped the music of Frank Sinatra and Manhattan's dance clubs, and movies like "Black Orpheus" and "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands" have mixed magic, lust and a Brazilian love of revelry to relax American restraints. Pelé ignited a romance with soccer that, in its children's version, has become a ritual of suburban autumn weekends.
But the mystique has always been felt at arm's length. Very few Brazilians actually moved here. That has been changing as a result of Brazil's sometimes inflationary economy and high unemployment, which has been hovering near 10 percent. Although the 2000 Census counted 13,000 New Yorkers of Brazilian ancestry, with 3,372 of them in Astoria, the Brazilian Consulate thinks those are gross undercounts.
José Alfredo Graça Lima, the consul general in New York, said a 2004 Census estimate put the number in New York State at 42,000, in New Jersey at 51,000, and in Connecticut at 18,000, but based on subscribers to Brazilian satellite TV, he thinks those numbers should be more than doubled.
The immigrants include an uncommon proportion of well-educated people. The 2000 Census revealed that 30.8 percent of the city's Brazilians had degrees from colleges or graduate schools, triple the number for some other nationalities from Latin America like Mexicans, at 8.6 percent, or Ecuadorians, at 9.4 percent.
The educated expatriates include Marcia Duarte, 45, who has an exuberant laugh and a degree in psychology. Like a lopsided proportion of Brazilians here, she too hails from Minas Gerais, where she worked in human resources for a firm in Belo Horizonte, a city of both soaring buildings and hovels unconnected to the sewage grid. Here she has worked mostly as a baby sitter, with her first employers assuming she came from a penniless background.
"The families teach us how to cut the ends of flowers to put them in a vase, how to set the table, how to use the remote control," she said. "We know that already!"
But American pay coupled with a multiracial society similar to Brazil's have been irresistible. She now works as a personal assistant to an executive and makes $47,000 a year, five times what she estimates that she might have made back home. "To make money in Brazil is always a problem," she said. With her salary, she can afford to take two trips home a year.
Still, Miss Duarte plans to return to Brazil in four years to live on her national pension. According to Dr. Margolis, most Brazilians come to the United States as sojourners, not settlers, for they seem to have a case of saudades, the longing for home.
Eloah Teixeira, 60, who once managed a light-fixtures shop in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul state in southern Brazil, has cleaned houses for many of her 20 years in America. She lives in a ground-floor apartment in Astoria and exults in being able to afford tickets for musicals like "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," and sampling restaurants like Astoria's Malagueta. But housecleaning, she adds, "is a hard job, especially when you're 60."
The owner of Malagueta, Herbet Gomes, has a two-year degree from a technical college and in Brazil was a skilled mechanic who repaired mining machines. But he earned just $700 a month in 1990 and dreaded losing a finger to a machine. He took a chance on migrating and found work as a dishwasher in Manhattan.
"It was a shame for me considering what I did in Brazil," he said. "All these years I work to be a dishwasher? Wow, what have I done wrong? After two weeks, I loosen up."
He worked his way up to the position of cook at other restaurants, and, in 1999, he married another Brazilian, Alda Teixeira, who worked as a housekeeper. Four years ago, they opened Malagueta, a 14-table spot serving shrimp stew and pudim de leite (flan). It was one of 13 restaurants in Queens to earn a mention in the first Michelin restaurant guide for New York. One waitress, Monica Araújo, has a bachelor's degree in international relations from Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro.
The neighborhood surrounding Malagueta has overshadowed the area of 46th Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan as the city's center of Brazilian life. The two Midtown blocks once had 100 Brazilian shops that sold electronic goods that Brazilian tourists found to be cheaper here than they were at home.
When import taxes were reduced, the shops went out of business. João de Matos, who organizes the annual Brazilian Day that draws hundreds of thousands, said the street is down to three restaurants, his travel agency, a money remitter and a shop that sells the string bikinis that Brazilians call fio dental (dental floss).
Tatiana Pacheco, a 28-year-old college-educated counselor at Immigration Advocacy Services in Astoria who came here to work as an au pair, said that there are so many Brazilians in her neighborhood, "I feel like I'm in a different town instead of 10,000 miles away."
She loves New York's "big boiling machine." Still, she said, Americans do not acknowledge how hard it is for immigrants to do well here. Her compatriots struggle with crowded quarters shared among newcomers. Others like Ms. Araújo, the Malagueta waitress, pine for the Brazilian zest for life.
"Here, you just think about your job, about making money," she said. "You don't think about life."
On Ghana's "Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora"
Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora
By LYDIA POLGREEN
CAPE COAST, Ghana - For centuries, Africans walked through the infamous "door of no return" at Cape Coast castle directly into slave ships, never to set foot in their homelands again. These days, the portal of this massive fort so central to one of history's greatest crimes has a new name, hung on a sign leading back in from the roaring Atlantic Ocean: "The door of return."
Ghana, through whose ports millions of Africans passed on their way to plantations in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, wants its descendants to come back.
Taking Israel as its model, Ghana hopes to persuade the descendants of enslaved Africans to think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, invest, send their children to be educated and even retire here.
"We want Africans everywhere, no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home," J. Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the tourism minister, said on a recent day. "We hope we can help bring the African family back together again."
In many ways it is a quixotic goal. Ghana is doing well by West African standards - with steady economic growth, a stable, democratic g overnment and broad support from the West, making it a favored place for wealthy countries to give aid.
But it remains a very poor, struggling country where a third of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, life expectancy tops out at 59 and basic services like electricity and water are sometimes scarce.
Nevertheless, thousands of African-Americans already live here at least part of the year, said Valerie Papaya Mann, president of the African American Association of Ghana.
To encourage still more to come, or at least visit, Ghana plans to offer a special lifetime visa for members of the diaspora and will relax citizenship requirements so that descendants of slaves can receive Ghanaian passports. The government is also starting an advertising campaign to persuade Ghanaians to treat African-Americans more like long-lost relatives than as rich tourists. That is harder than it sounds.
Many African-Americans who visit Africa are unsettled to find that Africans treat them - even refer to them - the same way as white tourists. The term "obruni," or "white foreigner," is applied regardless of skin color.
To African-Americans who come here seeking their roots, the term is a sign of the chasm between Africans and African-Americans. Though they share a legacy, they experience it entirely differently.
"It is a shock for any black person to be called white," said Ms. Mann, who moved here two years ago. "But it is really tough to hear it when you come with your heart to seek your roots in Africa."
The advertising campaign urges Ghanaians to drop "obruni" in favor of "akwaaba anyemi," a slightly awkward phrase fashioned from two tribal languages meaning "welcome, sister or brother." As part of the effort to reconnect with the diaspora, Ghana plans to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. DuBois and others it calls modern-day Josephs, after the biblical figure who rose from slavery to save his people.
The government plans to hold a huge event in 2007 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the end of the trans-Atlantic trade by Britain and the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence. The ceremonies will include traditional African burial rituals for the millions who died as a result of slavery.
Estimates of the trade vary widely. The most reliable suggest that between 12 million and 25 million people living in the vast lands between present-day Senegal and Angola were caught up, and as many as half died en route to the Americas.
Some perished on the long march from the inland villages where they were captured to seaports. Others died in the dungeons of slave castles and forts, where they were sometimes kept for months, until enough were gathered to pack the hold of a ship. Still others died in the middle passage, the longest leg of the triangular journey between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Of the estimated 11 million who crossed the sea, most went to South America and the Caribbean. About 500,000 are believed to have ended up in the United States.
The mass deportations and the divisions the slave trade wrought are wounds from which Africa still struggles to recover.
Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African nation to shake off its colonial rulers, winning its independence from Britain in 1957. Its founding father, Kwame Nkrumah, attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, and saw in African-Americans a key to developing the new nation.
"Nkrumah saw the American Negro as the vanguard of the African people," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard, who first traveled to Ghana when he was 20 and fresh out of Harvard, afire with Nkrumah's spirit. "He wanted to be able to utilize the services and skills of African-Americans as Ghana made the transition from colonialism to independence."
Many African-Americans, from Maya Angelou to Malcolm X, visited Ghana in the 1950's and 60's, and a handful stayed. To Nkrumah, the struggle for civil rights in the diaspora and the struggles for independence from colonial rule in Africa were inextricably linked, both being expressions of the desire of black people everywhere to regain their freedom.
But Nkrumah was ousted in a coup in 1966, and by then Pan-Africanism had already given way to nationalism and cold war politics, sending much of the continent down a trail of autocracy, civil war and heartbreak.
Still, African-Americans are drawn to Ghana's rich culture, and the history of slavery.
Ghana still has dozens of slave forts, each a chilling reminder of the brutality of the trade. At Elmina Castle, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and taken over by the Dutch 150 years later, visitors are guided through a Christian chapel built adjacent to the hall where slaves were auctioned, and the balcony over the women's dungeons from which the fort's governor would choose a concubine from the chattel below.
The room through which slaves passed into waiting ships is the emotional climax of the tour, a suffocating dungeon dimly lit by sunlight pouring through a narrow portal leading to the churning sea.
"You feel our history here," said Dianne Mark, an administrator at Central Michigan University who visited Elmina Castle, six miles from Cape Coast castle, in early December, tears welling in her eyes as she gazed across the massive, buttressed walls to the ocean. "This is where our people are from. That is a deep, deep experience. I look at everyone and wonder, 'Could he have been my cousin? Could she have been my aunt?' "
Like any family reunion, this one is layered with joy and tears. For African-Americans and others in the African diaspora, there is lingering hostility and confusion about the role Africans played in the slave trade.
"The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them," Mr. Gates said. "But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans."
Many Africans, meanwhile, often fail to see any connection at all between them and African-Americans, or feel African-Americans are better off for having been taken to the United States. Many Africans strive to emigrate; for the past 15 years, the number of Africans moving to the United States has surpassed estimates of the number forced there during any of the peak years of the slave trade. The number of immigrants from Ghana in the United States is larger than that of any other African country except Nigeria, according to the 2000 census.
"So many Africans want to go to America, so they can't understand why Americans would want to come here," said Philip Amoa-Mensah, a guide at Elmina Castle. "Maybe Ghanaians think they are lucky to be from America, even though their ancestors went through so much pain."
The relationship is clearly a work in progress. Ghanaians are still learning of their ancestors' pivotal roles in the slave trade, and slave forts on the coast, long used to thousands of foreign visitors, have in recent years become sites for school field trips.
When the United States and the United Nations gave Ghana money to rehabilitate and restore Cape Coast castle, the government agency responsible for the castle repainted it white. Residents of Cape Coast were thrilled to see the moisture-blackened castle spruced up, but African-Americans living in Ghana were horrified, feeling that the history of their ancestors was being, quite literally, whitewashed.
"It didn't go over too well," said Kohain Nathanyah Halevi, an African-American who lives near Cape Coast.
A recent African-American visitor to Cape Coast castle took the emotionally charged step through the door of no return, only to be greeted by a pair of toddlers playing in a fishing boat on the other side, pointing and shouting, "obruni, obruni!"
William Kwaku Moses, 71, a retired security guard who sells shells to tourists on the other side of the door of no return, shushed the children.
"We are trying," he said, with a shrug.
On global warming....
Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Earth scientists with the longest frames of reference, particularly those whose specialties begin with the prefix "paleo," often seem to be the least agitated about human-caused global warming.
This has been true even in 2005, a year that saw the biggest summer retreat of Arctic sea ice ever measured, a new sign that warming seas are rising at an accelerating pace and global temperatures continuing a sharp climb that began around 1990 and appears unmatched in 2,000 years. But these backward-looking experts have seen it all before.
Recent studies have found that 49 million years ago the balmy Arctic Ocean, instead of being covered in ice, was matted with a cousin of the duckweed that cloaks suburban frog ponds. The forests on the continent now called Antarctica and on shores fringing the Arctic were once thick and lush.
And through hundreds of millions of years, concentrations of carbon dioxide and the other trace gases that trap solar energy and prevent the planet from being an ice ball have mostly been far higher than those typical during humankind's short existence.
Compared with that norm, the rapid buildup of carbon dioxide now from a binge of burning forests, coal and oil lasting for centuries (and counting) is but a blip
In fact, the planet has nothing to worry about from global warming. A hot, steamy earth would be fine for most forms of life. Earth and its biological veneer are far more resilient than human societies, particularly those still mired in poverty or pushed to the margins of the livable.
Only we humans have to be concerned, and species like polar bears that, like the poorest people, are pushed to an edge - in the bear's case the tenuous ecosystem built around coastal sea ice.
Henk Brinkhuis, a paleoecologist and botanist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said it might be hard to get used to the idea, but the Arctic as we have known it for centuries "is history."
He said this may spell doom for polar bears, a species that branched off from brown bears only about 250,000 years ago - an evolutionary blink of the eye.
Still, this is a special case, not necessarily a blow to the prospects of mammals in general.
The world's last huge warm spike, the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum some 55 million years ago, preceded "the biggest radiation in mammals ever," Dr. Brinkhuis said.
"The first horses, cows, the first primates had their origin right around then," Dr. Brinkhuis said. "It may be that the extinction of the polar bear would be followed by all kinds of new species in return."
None of this means that humans should simply embrace their fossil-fueled potency without regard to the effects. In fact, many scientists say, if we value the world as it is, there are still strong, and purely self-serving, reasons to start curbing releases of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases.
That long-scale earth history, while speaking of nature's vagaries, holds supporting evidence. It is rife with thresholds, points at which a little warming turns into a lot in a hurry. Avoiding such thresholds could forestall things that societies decide matter, like rapidly rising seas or a farewell to cherished Arctic icons.
The Arctic, particularly, is filled with what amount to flippable climate switches, including natural repositories of carbon, like boggy tundra, that could emit vast amounts of greenhouse gases should the current warming trend pass certain points, said Jonathan T. Overpeck, the director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona.
This could amplify warming and take the climate into a realm beyond anything experienced through human evolution.
Another lesson of deep planetary history, Dr. Overpeck said, is that, once set in motion, such warm-ups can happen fast and then last a very, very long time.
"That's a condition that might be really hard to get out of for tens of thousands of years," he said.
Studies of the past also show that pace matters. The rise in temperature and greenhouse gases during the great heat wave 55 million years ago, while instantaneous on a geological time scale, took thousands of years to unfold.
But the pace of the recent rise in carbon dioxide is as much as 200 times as fast as what has been estimated in past rapid climate transitions.
Slowing that pace would help human endeavors as much as ecosystems, said David G. Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic systems science at the University of Manitoba.
Those who speak of the potential benefits of warming, he noted, forget that a thawing, greening Arctic, for example, will not suddenly transform from spongy tundra to wheat-friendly farmland.
"You have to generate soil," Dr. Barber said. "It takes a long time to generate this kind of stuff. So it's not going to be an instantaneous sort of thing. There's going to be a lot of messiness in between."
Even for polar bears, there are reasons to think the end is not necessarily nigh. There was at least one significant period - the last gap between ice ages 120,000 years ago - when the global climate was several degrees warmer than it is today and they clearly squeaked through.
So at least slowing or blunting the warming might allow them to squeak through once again. Dr. Barber said he was confident that biology would endure much of what humans throw at it. His concern is for the effects on people and the things they rely on or cherish.
"All of global warming has nothing to do with the planet," Dr. Barber said. "The planet will go on through its normal cycles, and it'll do its own thing.
"It only has to do with us - as people. Our economic side of things and our political side of things are really what are being affected by climate change. The planet could care less."
On a new cooperative restaurant
A Hyphenated-American Dream
By ANTHONY DePALMA
A truly great city inspires truly great dreams, even during the days when all else seems lost.
There was no bleaker time in New York's history than 9/11. Yet it was then, with the restaurant where he had worked for six years - Windows on the World - in splinters and 73 of his fellow employees gone, that Silverio Moog's dream started to take shape.
Now Mr. Moog, a spunky 41-year-old bartender from the Philippines, can hardly believe what is about to happen. Next week he'll go to work in a brand-new restaurant, and start a totally new life.
Restaurants open in New York all the time, but there has never been one like this. Mr. Moog and 50 other waiters, busboys, bartenders and dishwashers, many of them immigrants who worked at Windows, have formed a cooperative that will run one of the city's first worker-owned restaurants.
Each one of them will claim a piece of the restaurant, called Colors, as their own and share in any profits. Each one submitted a family recipe to help shape the restaurant's eclectic menu - which they describe as American fare with a global twist. And each one has pinned lifelong dreams on an idea formed in the crucible of disaster.
"This is one of my American dreams, to be an owner of a business being run by immigrants who have a common goal," Mr. Moog said.
The possibilities and opportunities are wondrous, he said, and he is especially proud to see his Philippine Lobster Lumpia - lobster and minted sweet potato spring rolls - on the Colors menu.
But the reality of what he and the other workers are undertaking is daunting as well.
"I guess I'm a little bit scared," he said.
And no wonder. With the failure rate of restaurants - 60 percent after three years according to a recent Ohio State University study - and all the vagaries of location, perception and the economy to deal with, even experienced, well-financed restaurateurs can stumble.
While the co-op members have centuries of restaurant experience among them, they have never owned a business. So they brought in a professional, Stefan Mailvaganam, a Canadian citizen of Sri Lankan descent, to be general manager.
Mr. Mailvaganam realizes this is no ordinary job. "What we are trying to do here is start a restaurant with a conscience," he told two dozen co-op members who gathered last week for a final training session. While he spoke, spacklers and carpenters rushed to complete their work. The restaurant, in Lower Manhattan a few doors down from the Public Theater, is scheduled to open for dinner on Tuesday. "It's challenging," Mr. Mailvaganam said over the din of steel and wood, "but we are committed to doing it."
Rarely has one project had to carry so many expectations. Besides memorializing the 73 who died in Windows, which was atop 1 World Trade Center, the co-op is trying to do no less than change an industry.
Nobody in the restaurant, not even the dishwashers, will receive less than $13.50 an hour, far higher than average restaurant wages. They will share tips and be eligible to receive overtime and vacations. Eventually they will be covered by health insurance and have pensions.
And, of course, each will share in the profits of the restaurant, if and when there are profits.
"I am doing this for myself, for the workers who died and for all restaurant workers in the city," said Awal Ahmed, 43, a waiter from Bangladesh who worked at Windows for 17 years. "It doesn't matter to me how much profit I get. It's like having a piece of my own restaurant."
The Sept. 11 attack forced many people to change their outlook on life. Surviving workers from Windows realized that nothing more than a simple matter of scheduling had determined who lived and who died.
Many of the surviving workers were left scrambling for work. A cooperative restaurant was seen as a way of providing jobs as well as making a strong point about workers' rights. Money had to be raised, but traditional lenders balked, even after an Italian food cooperative put up $500,000 to support the project.
Saru Jayaraman, executive director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, which gets support from the restaurant workers union, said she thought workers would be eligible to receive the 9/11 financing available for rebuilding Lower Manhattan. But except for wage subsidies from Catholic Charities, they have not received any of that financial help.
The project has a budget of $2.2 million, which the co-op finally raised from more than 20 sources. Each worker contributed at least 100 hours of sweat equity.
The decision to open an expensive, 120-seat tablecloth restaurant in a good location, rather than a humbler place that would have cost much less, and opened a lot sooner, turned into a heated dispute that led several co-op members to leave.
Others left because the legal framework for the co-op was structured so that members' early profits go to pay back the Italian co-op.
Some are still unhappy with how profits are to be shared. "Our percentage keeps going down and down," said Khondoker Delwar, 43, a waiter from Bangladesh. But he's sticking with the project, he said, because it means his young daughter will know he was part of something noble that happened in New York.
A successful co-operatively owned restaurant could become a powerful symbol. Juan Galan, an organizer with Local 100 of Unite Here, which represents hotel and restaurant workers, is trying to persuade co-op members to join the union because it would show owners how treating workers well can actually help increase profits.
And the co-op members are joining the New York State Restaurant Association, an owners' lobby. At a recent co-op meeting, Rajani Adhikary, a policy organizer for the Restaurant Opportunities Center, a labor advocacy group that has been instrumental in forming the co-op, told members that by joining the association they would be helping all restaurant workers. "You're going to be like spies," Ms. Adhikary told them, "and tell us what they do so we will know more about them."
E. Charles Hunt, executive vice president of the restaurant association, said the co-op members were welcome. "We're on their side," Mr. Hunt said. "We just don't see why they would feel they need to have spies amid our ranks."
Most of the co-op members found other jobs while waiting for Colors to open. Magdi Labib, an Egyptian immigrant and a natural leader of the co-op, is doing well as a waiter at an expensive Midtown steakhouse. He said he would probably earn less at Colors, but he will make the switch anyway. "I know that 6 out of 10 restaurants fail, but it's not going to happen here," said Mr. Labib, 51. "Everyone is going to know how to do their job in a proficient way, and that's going to help."
The workers had planned to bring memorabilia from Windows to the new restaurant but abandoned that idea because they felt the constant reminder of what happened there would be too depressing.
The new restaurant will feature 1930's decor because the workers feel that era represented the height of labor power in New York. The name Colors reflects the 22 nations from which the members come, as will be shown on a giant mural in the restaurant.
These veteran restaurant workers realize that the emotional link to 9/11 will bring in diners, but it will become secondary to the things that really determine a restaurant's success - service and food.
"Yes we have 9/11 and people who believe in workers' rights might come at first," said Fekkak Mamdouh, a former Windows waiter who now is assistant director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, "but if you don't give good service and good food, they won't come back."
Mr. Mamdouh said that if Colors fails, it will be a failure for all immigrants in the city. But if it succeeds, he said "it will be a victory for all restaurant workers in New York, all immigrants and all people who believe in workers' rights."
On Muslim women in Europe
Muslim Women in Europe Claim Rights and Keep Faith
By MARLISE SIMONS
PARIS, Dec. 28 - Hanife Karakus, the soft-spoken daughter of Turkish immigrants, is a thoroughly European Muslim. She covers her hair with a scarf, but she also has a law degree and married the man of her choice. Matchmakers exerted no pressure. The couple met on the Internet.
Perhaps even more telling, Mrs. Karakus this year became the first woman to lead one of France's 25 regional Islamic councils.
"At first, the men didn't speak to me," she said. "They were uncomfortable. They didn't know how to work with a woman."
Mrs. Karakus, 24, does not call herself a feminist; she simply says she is a French lawyer. But she qualifies as part of a quiet revolution spreading among young European Muslim women, a generation that claims the same rights as its Western counterparts, without renouncing Islamic values.
For many, the key difference is education, an option often denied their poor, immigrant mothers and grandmothers. These young women are studying law, medicine and anthropology, and now form a majority in many Islamic studies courses, traditionally the world of men. They are getting jobs in social work, business and media, and are more prone to use their new independence to divorce. Also, French, English, German or Dutch may be their native languages.
"We are not fully accepted in France, but we are beginning to be everywhere," said Sihem Habchi, 30, who was born in Algeria, grew up in France and works as a multimedia consultant.
Unlike their homebound elders, these emancipated Muslim women use the Internet and spend hours in proliferating Islamic chat rooms. Web sites are now favorite trysting places, a chance for risk-free "halal dating," that is, interacting with men in a way that violates no social or religious codes.
In the crowded immigrant suburbs ringing Paris, the scene of recent riots mostly led by young Muslim men, high school teachers say girls are the most motivated students because they have the most to gain.
In interviews in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, young women repeated this belief like a mantra: studying offers an escape from the oppressive housing projects, from controlling young Muslim radicals and from strict social codes enforced by fathers and brothers.
"We all understood that education was our passport to freedom," said Soria Makti, 30, the daughter of an Algerian factory worker, who left her Marseille housing project and is a museum curator in the city.
The emancipation of Muslim women, like that of Western women before them, is often slow and sometimes deeply painful when women feel they must break with their families. But nowhere is this quiet new form of Islamic feminism more evident than in the realm of religion, the centuries-old domain of men.
Young women are increasingly engaging in Islamic studies, a fast-growing field across Europe that offers a blend of theology, Koranic law, ethics and Arabic. Diplomas from the two-year courses allow women to teach in mosques and in Islamic schools, or to act as religious advisers.
"This is a big shift," said Amel Boubekeur, a social scientist at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, who is writing her doctoral thesis on Europe's "new Islamic elites." "Instead of having to be passive, women now become teachers," she said. "It used to be taboo for women to recite the Koran." But now, she added, "It offers them a new prestige, new jobs and, not least, it gives them a stronger voice in dealing with their parents, brothers and husbands." In fact, Ms. Boubekeur said, women found religious texts more effective than secular arguments. Today, Islamic studies courses, often taken on weekends and accessible to secondary school graduates, are expanding in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. In the six institutes for Islamic studies in France, almost 60 percent of this year's nearly 1,000 students are women.
La Grande Mosquée in Paris, a large white and green compound from the 1920's with a finely chiseled minaret and students milling about under arcades, is France's leading religious institution. It has its own theological school, largely financed by Algeria. Abdelkrim Bekri, the director, said that the school started a program in 2002, unavailable elsewhere, to train young women as spiritual counselors for hospitals and prisons, much like the ministry of Christian chaplains. Twenty women had graduated, and others were in training, he said. "There is a great need here," he said.
Although women are not allowed to perform the most prestigious ritual of leading the mosque in Friday Prayer, Ms. Boubekeur said women were pushing to have a voice and participate in religious debates. "What is new is that they want direct access to religion, without depending on the rigid views of the clergy," she said.
Change can be measured in other small steps. At the Islamic University of Rotterdam, a small group of theology students, most of them speaking Dutch but all tightly veiled, chatted after classes about the need to end the social segregation of men and women. "In class, we sit anywhere we choose," said a student who gave her name only as Aisha. "In the mosques, we don't want to sit in separate or hidden spaces."
Ertegul Gokcekuyu, the university registrar, said more than 60 percent of his students were women. "The motivation of the girls is very remarkable," he said.
Mrs. Karakus, who heads the Muslim Council in Limoges, has not studied theology, but her tasks, long the work of men, touch on religion as well. She has negotiated with local authorities to obtain plots for Muslim burials at the local cemetery, and has reserved sites for the slaughter of sheep for Eid-el-Kebir, a major Muslim holiday. She also helps to organize courses for imams who arrive with little knowledge of French or French traditions.
As educated Muslim women assert themselves, they appear to be forging a strand of Euro-Islam, a hybrid that attempts to reconcile the principles laid out in the Koran with life in a secular, democratic Europe.
"I tell women, 'We can honor the Koran from our perspective and apply it to our experience today,' " said Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist who is both Algerian and French. "We must recover the religious texts and free them from an exclusively male interpretation that belongs to the Middle Ages. Most important right now is that women get into the universities."
The implications of women flocking to Islamic studies are disturbing to some, who see a potential for them to become radical. Tokia Saifi, a former deputy minister for development who remains one of the few women of Arab descent to reach a high post in the French government, said she worried that many young people studied religion because it was socially acceptable, not because it was an informed choice. "I see it as a regression," she said. "It means we need less discrimination, more ways to promote integration."
Such debates are far from the concerns of Muslim girls who are harassed or punished for being too Western. Latifa Ahmed, 25, arrived in the Netherlands from Morocco when she was 8. As she grew up near Amsterdam, her family turned against her because she preferred to be with her Dutch classmates.
"They were bad, they were infidels, I was told," she said. "My parents and my brothers started hitting me." Ms. Ahmed, who lived at home until she was 23, said, "I was going crazy from all the fights and the lies, but I was afraid to run away and lose my family."
One evening, when she returned from a concert with a Dutch friend, her father yelled, " 'Let's take a knife and we'll finish with her,' " she said. "He didn't kill me, but he put a curse on me. It was very frightening."
She ran away, and although she lives in another city, she said she was still afraid of her brothers, who had sworn to kill her. She has put herself through college doing odd jobs and does not care about religion. "I don't feel discriminated here," she said. "Moroccan girls can find work easier than Moroccan boys. Boys have a bad name."
Changes in the lives of Muslim women in Europe are uneven. Many are still pressed into arranged marriages, while others are finding independence. Change is hard to measure in France, where the law forbids the census to collect data by ethnic origin or religion. But in the Netherlands one telling signal is the rise in divorce among immigrants. According to Dutch government statistics, divorces among Moroccan families have increased by 46 percent since 2000, and among Turkish families by 42 percent in that period, with a majority believed to be instigated by wives.
Women are also often at the forefront of liberal tendencies among Muslims, publishing critiques and studies about the obstacles and abuses women face. In Germany, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer, and Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born sociologist, have recently published books that have been read widely on the oppression of Muslim girls by their own families. Ms. Kelek's book "The Foreign Bride," a best seller, denounces the plight of often illiterate girls, brought from the Turkish countryside "as modern slaves" for their husbands and in-laws in Germany.
Other women are fighting for change through the law. Mimount Bousakla, whose family is from Morocco, is a member of Parliament in Belgium. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, is one in the Netherlands. They were reared as Muslims, and have pressed for policies to aid women, including raising the legal age for marriage to protect young "imported" brides and imposing tougher sentences on men who kill women to save the honor of their families. In France, a movement called "Neither Whores nor Doormats," begun in 2003, helps many Muslim women who have been abused get services from lawyers, doctors or psychologists.
As Muslim women take advantage of democracy and civil liberties in Europe, the question remains whether the impact of an educated minority will be continually blunted by the arrival of often poorly educated young brides from North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East. And as Europe rethinks its faltering integration policies, the place of Muslim women is a new target of scrutiny. Critics, including immigrants themselves, argue that in the name of respecting other cultures, Europeans have allowed the oppression of Muslim women in their midst. Increasingly, women are saying that integration policies have been too male-oriented and must focus more on women.
Senay Ozdemir, a Turkish-born Dutch citizen and the editor of Sen, a new glossy magazine aimed at immigrant women, is among those voices. Sen means you in Turkish. "Obviously women are a key to integration," Ms. Ozdemir said. "If the woman cannot or will not integrate in a new country, it affects the whole family. She will isolate her children."
