Saturday, July 26, 2008

Stage 30

The day's activities shrunk to a smaller scale. It looks a bit like a table decoration, but the floor area covered is 18 feet by 14 feet. Stage front is where the three candles are burning and here we are standing right at the wings of the stage, so some of the gubbins supporting the bamboo is visible. This will hopefully stay up till 3pm tomorrow and then we tear it down.
This is the 30th year that there has been some kind of remembrance ceremony for the builders of the local dam. Prisoners of war and whatnot working as slave labor, the usual intolerable inhumanity. It gets further in the past each year and it has been some years now since any immediate relatives of those who died attended the ceremony. I don't keep track of time too well so I am not sure how many years I have been involved or indeed why I still am involved with this particular volunteer task. Just because I was asked I suppose. My job each year seems to be to create some kind of bamboo structure that will fill up enough of the stage to make it obvious that there is something going on up there. So far, each year I have learnt a little more about bamboo and delegating tasks to others. I'll see if I can get a more explanatory picture of the thing tomorrow while the ceremony is in progress.