A 20-meter (22-yard) high sculpture of an ancient Egyptian tomb, made from 7,506 red, white and mauve barrels, has taken temporary residence amid the aquatic wildlife on a lake in London’s Hyde Park.

The floating installation — featuring two vertical sides, two slanted sides and a flat top — was unveiled on Monday by Bulgarian-born artist Christo.

“For three months, The London Mastaba will be a part of Hyde Park’s environment in the center of London,” he said. “The colors will transform with the changes in the light and its reflection on the Serpentine Lake will be like an abstract painting.”

Work started in April to stack the 55-gallon barrels into their cut-off pyramid shape on a floating platform 40 meters long and 30 meters wide. Thirty-two anchors hold the structure in place.

Christo, whose full name is Christo Javacheff, was joined at the launch by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, chairman of the Serpentine Galleries.

Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, are known for such works as “The Gates,” a 2005 installation in New York’s Central Park, and the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995.
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Seven-year-old Montannah Kenney has become the youngest girl to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

Climbing Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa at 5,895 meters, was Montannah’s project during a school break last March. The adventure presented her with an opportunity to discover her potential strengths and learn about hiking and foreign cultures.

The Texas native accompanied her mother, Hollie Kenney.

“My sister asked me if I was interested in climbing Kilimanjaro with her,” Hollie Kenney recalled. “We started the planning phase, but she had backed out of it. She decided she didn’t want to do it anymore. Then, I had been asking a couple of friends if they were interested in going. Montannah chimed in and said, ‘I would go with you, Mommy.'”

Montannah also wanted to set a new world record and, more importantly to her, pay tribute to her father who passed away when she was 3 years old. 

“I knew that heaven was not that farther up from Mt. Kilimanjaro. So, I wanted to do it,” she said.

It took six days to reach the peak.

Montannah said it was exciting reaching the top. “It was pretty warm at the bottom, but it was pretty cold at the very, very top.”

Get set, go

Montannah, who is a triathlete, and her mother, who is an endurance athlete, trained for the adventure.

“We started to do a lot of back-to-back hiking,” Kenney said. “Fortunately, in the Austin, Texas, area, we’ve got a couple of big hills that we could go up and down and up and down to get our hip flexers and muscles ready for the big challenge.”   

Getting ready for the trip meant packing appropriate clothing and researching the mountain and the land — Tanzania. But when the trip started, they had to face the real challenges. For Kenney, one was the fear of Montannah getting altitude sickness.

That’s a combination of symptoms ranging from headache, dizziness and nausea to loss of energy and shortness of breath. It’s triggered by the decrease of oxygen, due to the drop in pressure at high altitudes.

“And we had make the decision that even if she showed the slightest sign of altitude sickness, we would turn around. We were not going to go,” she said. “I was so nervous about the summit. So, I was almost certain we weren’t going to make it, but we did it. My daughter didn’t have any issues.”

Beyond the summit

The most challenging part of the trip came on the night they were preparing to reach the summit with their guide.

“We really didn’t get any sleep,” Kenney recalled. “And for a 7-year-old, that’s very challenging because she just wanted to lay down and go to sleep. Then, to take seven hours and a half to reach the summit.  When we finally get there, we have to come back down, which was another three hours. We had lunch, and then another five and a half hours going down even further. So, it was 17 hours total that we were hiking.”

Kenney was deeply touched to watch what Montannah did when she reached the peak.

“To see Montannah blow kisses to her Daddy, to know that she was as close as she possibly could be to him in heaven, that was very meaningful for a mom to see,” Kenney said.

At that point, Montannah was extremely tired but thrilled about her achievement.

“It was very long for me,” she said. “I was really excited, but I wasn’t really thinking about when we had to go all the way down. I was glad I did it, but I didn’t want to go down.”

In addition to the accomplishment of reaching the top of Kilimanjaro and setting a world record, the trip was an introduction to new cultures.

“Not only did we try different foods when we were on the mountain, but we went on two safaris afterward,” Kenney said. “We went to Zanzibar. We stopped in one of the towns to see how people in Tanzania live. We went to their local market, met several business owners. We met several families, and that was really exciting. Kids that lived in the town absolutely loved meeting my daughter. That was a lot of fun.”
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Many football fans in Egypt cannot afford cable sports subscriptions or travel to Russia, but that does not mean they are missing out on World Cup action. Hamada Elrasam shows us how Egyptian fans find ways to get a part of the excitement.
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Discarded life jackets on a beach in Greece inspired artwork by a teenager who wanted to learn more about the refugee crisis.

Achilleas Souras, the 17-year-old creator of the artwork, titled SOS: Save Our Souls, hopes his project prompts others to learn as well. 

Souras was 15 and living in Barcelona when the flood of refugees from places that include the Middle East and Africa landed on the beaches of Lesbos, Greece, and created a humanitarian crisis. 

The idea for the project came to him after he learned about the crisis in school. 

Souras reached out to the mayor of Lesbos, the first stop for thousands of seaborne migrants who undertook their desperate voyage in the Aegean Sea. The island’s beaches were littered with debris from their journeys.

“It culminated in me reaching out to get actual life jackets,” Souras recalled. The mayor of Lesbos responded. 

Souras said the vests still had the smell of the sea. “When I touched them, I realized that every one of these life jackets represented a human life.”

Searching for a theme, Souras, who is of Greek-British heritage, was inspired by what the migrants were seeking – shelter. He used the vests — to build igloo-shaped enclosures modeled on the temporary homes indigenous peoples build of snow and ice in the far north.

The installation struck a chord, and Souras has been invited by museums, design fairs and refugee organizations to show his work around the world. Different versions of the project have been displayed in Spain, Italy, South Africa, Brazil, Thailand and Canada. There is now an installation in Byblos, Lebanon. 

Souras brought a small version of the installation to Los Angeles for the four-day LA Design Festival that ended June 10. The exhibit consisted of miniature life jackets made with fabric from the real ones.

He said the point of the exhibit is not political, and “isn’t really meant to influence somebody’s point of view. “It’s really just meant to make somebody feel more inspired to explore more about the crisis like I did,” he said.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 65 million people worldwide have been displaced from their homes, and more than 22 million are refugees – people forced to flee because of conflict or persecution. 

Souras said that is something he wants those who see his art to think about. 
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In Myanmar, the most popular sport is football. But baseball, which is American’s national pastime, has carved a small niche for itself thanks to a man from Japan. Dave Grunebaum has the story.
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A Palestinian man from Gaza turns tear gas canisters used by Israeli forces into flower pots and prayer beads to commemorate often-violent border protests for future generations. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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A Puerto Rican from the Bronx, Orlando Pagan fell in love with Ukrainian folklore when he was a teenager. He used to dance in the Syzokryli Ukrainian Dance Ensemble, and now he leads it. Pagan believes Ukrainian dances are truly special and hopes to make them as popular as the Argentine tango or the Austrian waltz. Carolyn Presutti narrates this report by Tatiana Vorozhko.
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A Swiss born artist who got his first big break in 1955 in the United States, is back in the city of his first museum exhibit, New York. Sculptor, painter, draftsman Alberto Giacometti created most of his masterpieces in a tiny studio in Montparnasse in Paris, but his work has been closely connected with New York. The maestro’s work returns to the U.S. this summer, as the Guggenheim Museum welcomes art lovers to an exhibition dedicated to Giacometti. Anna Rice narrates this report by Elena Wolf.
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Several hundred yoga practitioners unrolled their mats on the lawn of the United States Capitol on Saturday to celebrate the International Day of Yoga, which takes place June 21. From Washington, VOA’s Jill Craig has more.
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“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves free.”

That proclamation, June 19, 1865, was the spark for a day that has come to be known in the United States as Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of U.S. slavery.

The proclamation in Texas actually came 2½ years after slavery ended with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. That document, which made emancipation effective in slaveholding states January 1, 1863, was signed in the middle of the Civil War. But it was not until federal troops arrived thousands of kilometers west in Texas, two months after the official end of the war in 1965, that many Texas slaves were informed that they were free.

The reason for the delay in notification of the slaves is unclear. It could have been slow communications at a time when telephones and email did not exist; it could have been that such a proclamation could not have been enforced until federal troops arrived in Texas after the war.

Life for freed slaves

The proclamation did not immediately make life easy for freed slaves. They had to find their own work for wages and grapple with prejudice that causes racial divides in the United States today. But emancipation was a legal victory that came as welcome news to the 250,000 African-Americans who had been illegally enslaved in Texas for 30 months after the signing of the document that was meant to free them.

Today, Juneteenth supporters are still working for recognition of the holiday, which is celebrated with picnics, parades, prayer and public celebrations of African-American culture.

The holiday was once celebrated mostly in the western United States. Texas-dwellers took the holiday with them as they followed job opportunities west. But the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s brought a new surge in interest in the holiday in the East, and now 45 out of 50 states have designated the mid-June celebration as an official state holiday or day of observance. Texas was the first state to make Juneteenth a state holiday.

Community celebrations

This Saturday and Sunday, many Juneteenth celebrations are taking place before the official June 19 anniversary of the proclamation. In Salisbury, Maryland, close to the eastern U.S. coast, residents held an outdoor festival featuring dancing and local crafts at a cultural center.

Community organizer Amber Green told a reporter that Juneteenth “is basically Black Independence Day.”

Juneteenth celebrations tend to be generated by the community, highlighting ties among family and friends.

“Today is our festival,” Green said. “We have local artists, local vendors, local music, and we are just bringing the community together through good food, good music and good fun.”
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Following a red carpet arrival Saturday at the New Orleans Museum of Art, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain enjoyed music by a jazz group and a cultural performance by Mardi Gras Indians as they ended a visit to the city celebrating its tricentennial.

After a private lunch with New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell, Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser and other dignitaries and officials, the royals departed New Orleans for San Antonio, Texas, which is also celebrating 300 years of existence.

“It was a great and amazing weekend for the city, our residents and the king and queen for them to come back to a former Spanish colony,” said Trey Caruso, a spokesman for Cantrell’s office.

Musical connections

Clarinetist, music historian and Xavier University Spanish professor Michael White said he and his Original Liberty Brass Band played two pieces with a connection to Europe and New Orleans at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

The first piece was Panama, a march in the traditional European style.

“It was published in 1911, and all over the country it was played by and read by brass bands,” White said prior to the performance. “But in New Orleans they kind of threw away the sheet music and improvised, and therefore made it personal. I think it’s a good way to show the interaction between European culture and New Orleans culture.”

The second piece, Andalusian Strut, was one of White’s compositions. It combines a common flamenco structure and flamenco-type rhythms and melodies with classic New Orleans jazz style and improvisation, he said.

“That one went over really, really well,” White said after the event. “The king and all of the people there really loved it.”

White said their third song was When the Saints Go Marching In, which White described as “probably the most famous song in New Orleans history.”

“We surprised them by singing the chorus in Spanish,” he said.

The Mardi Gras Indians, groups of African-Americans who create elaborate feathered and beaded costumes in which they strut and dance through the streets on Mardi Gras, performed as well.

“Though the program was relatively short, I think overall it gave a good idea of New Orleans’ culture,” White said.

Arrived Thursday

Felipe and Letizia flew in Thursday evening to Louisiana, which was a Spanish colony from 1763 to 1802. They arrived at New Orleans’ airport at sunset and were greeted by several officials, including Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and Cantrell.

They saluted New Orleans’ centuries-old Spanish heritage at an event Friday at Gallier Hall, a former City Hall opened in 1853 and renovated for the city’s 300th anniversary. That evening, they visited two buildings erected under Spanish rule: St. Louis Cathedral and the Cabildo, the Spanish government seat in Louisiana.

On Monday they’ll go to Washington for a White House visit Tuesday with President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump.
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