Life Among the Volcanoes

Life Among the Volcanoes

I like to use Bing's search engine as my default page, so every morning I'm greeted with a new interesting image. This morning's is a beautiful patchwork of crops planted over a dormant volcano field in or near the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda, just west of Lake Victoria. Near my home in the Coastal Bend of Texas, you mostly see cotton and sorghum in flat fields that reach to the horizon. Rwanda's fields are more interesting. I don't know what these crops are, but typical crops for the region might be coffee, tea, beans, sorghum, bananas, and pyrethrum-producing daisies. Rwanda is slowly recovering from the paroxysm of murderous hatred that engulfed it in the mid-90s and nearly destroyed the export agriculture and tourism business on which nearly its entire economy depends.

The little icons in the bottom right of each day's Bing picture give you background information and the option to scroll back through the last week's images. There are also little pop-up squares here and there in each image with links to related information.

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