#abandonment

#abandonment

Elsa is a beautiful little girl, a raucous bundle of excitement and laughter. I am pleased to have seen photos of her. I know from reports that she lights up the space around her. She is happy and settled in her new family, as yet unaware of how she differs from other children. Her best chance in life comes with a permanent placement in an alternative family.

Tinadas, pigsties, mills, and washhouses populate this natural landscape of the Sierra de Segura alongside small, generally abandoned villages. Remnants that were once an essential part of everyday life and the memory of thousands of anonymous men and women who inhabited these landscapes. People forced to abandon their homes and lands to create an environment where they could enjoy hunting, disregarding their rights.

Bayazid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Rawalpindi. He had a memory more of forces than of people, a crowd, a hand, a hand no more. Yet the bazaars in those early nineteen-fifties were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found.

"I was dumped while being wheeled into emergency surgery after surgical complications. I'm lying on a gurney, literally bleeding out my ass, and the nurse tells me my partner wants to talk to me. She then tells me that when I get out of the hospital, she won't be living at our place anymore." "The nurse walks in between her and me, gives the now-ex a look that would peel paint, says 'that's enough' and wheels me into the operating theatre.

I felt an inner devastation that caused so much emotional distress I could no longer hide it or hide from it through my work. I did not feel like doing anything except cry and share my suffering with anyone willing to listen. After Karla left me for the third time, I went to a meditation retreat in Estes Park, Colorado, led by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who founded mindfulness and was nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr., for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The emotional journey of three newborns, abandoned in different regions, converges fifty years later as they search for their identity and shared history.

Police are investigating after four large pythons were found abandoned in the Lincolnshire countryside, with one still suspected to be at large.

"I wanted to cry actually. It's awful to find them like this. They couldn't get out of there. It's like being in prison."