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they wanted a son so much they made their daughter live as a boy - cnn

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They wanted a son so much they made their daughter live as a boy

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In Afghanistan's deeply patriarchal society, sons are highly valued over daughters -- to the point where some parents dress their girls as boys in a centuries-old practice called "bacha posh."

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Filthy and frightened, the three young children staggered up the beach. Their tiny frames were feverish and behind them, on board the small sailboat they had drifted ashore upon, lay the bodies of two dead men.

The group had been attempting to flee an outbreak of disease that had devastated their small, isolated village further upstream from the spot where they run aground on the Naknek River in Bristol Bay, Alaska. The three young survivors were quickly taken to a hospital run by a salmon canning company.

Their unexpected arrival at the Alaska Packer Association's "Diamond O" cannery on the Naknek announced that "Spanish flu" had taken hold in this remote, largely ice-bound part of the world. The inhospitable winter weather conditions had prevented travel to the area between the months of September and May, meaning it had escaped the waves of influenza that swept the world during 1918.

By the time the pandemic had run its course, it claimed somewhere between 50 and 100 million lives - more than the total number of deaths from the terrors of World War One.

The arrival of the boat at the cannery on 4 June 1919 indicated the disease had finally found its way to the remote native Inuit communities that dotted the Alaskan coastline. The next day, the superintendent of the cannery dispatched a team to the children's village to see if they could help.
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What they discovered was horrifying.

Reports from the men on the expedition described the village of Savonoski as being in a "deplorable state" and " wretched". Nearly all of the adult population in the small cluster of around 10 houses were dead. Those still alive were gravely ill and told how their relatives had dropped even as they walked around. The team from the cannery buried the dead in a mass grave and brought those still alive back to the hospital in Naknek.

It was a picture that was repeated in villages all across Alaska. In just a few days nearly 200 people would die from the disease in the Bristol Bay area, leaving dozens of children orphaned. From some places, stories emerged of packs of stray dogs feasting on the bodies of the dead. In some communities, up to 90% of the population died and the mortality rates were some of the highest in the world.

Yet, just a few miles from some of the worst hit areas of Bristol Bay, one community in a tiny settlement called Egegak escaped the disease entirely.

"It is strange to relate that Egegak was the only village on Bristol Bay that was not troubled with the malady," the Alaska Packing Association's superintendent at Naknek station, JF Heinbockel was to say in his official report of the epidemic. "The natives there were apparently just as healthy when we left as they ever were."

Other medical reports stated that some villagers at Egegak showed only mild symptoms of the disease. It appears they were lucky.

"More people per capita died from influenza in Alaska than almost anywhere else in the world," says Katherine Ringsmuth, a historian who has been piecing together the story of the canneries in Bristol Bay. "Some places like Egegak escaped it and no one really knows why."

The survival of these so-called ;escape communities' could prove valuable today as public health officials look fearfully towards the next influenza pandemic

As the world tried to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of the global pandemic, stories began to emerge of similar places that had escaped the virus. There were not many - a handful of remote islands, rural towns, walled asylums and schools were left unaffected.

But the survival of these so-called "escape communities" could prove valuable today as public health officials look fearfully towards the next influenza pandemic.

The lessons they contain are considered so important that the US Department of Defense's Treat Reduction Agency investigated the handful of the places across the United States that were untouched by Spanish flu in the hope of gleaning some clues about how to keep military personnel safe in the future.

In all, the authors of the report focused on seven communities that they found had escaped the virus, although they say there may have been others they did not identify. Among them were the rural farming village of Fletcher, in northern Vermont, and Gunnison, Colorado, a remote town in the Rocky Mountains. Princeton University in New Jersey, Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, the Western Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind in Pittsburgh and the Trudeau Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York.

"These communities basically shut themselves down," explains Howard Markel, an epidemiological historian at the University of Michigan who was one of the authors of the study. "No one came in and no one came out. Schools were closed and there were no public gatherings. We came up with the term 'protective sequestration', where a defined and healthy group of people are shielded from the risk of infection from outsiders."

The people of Gunnison managed this by erecting guarded barricades on the main highways in and out of the surrounding county. Railway passengers were forced to submit to two days of quarantine upon arrival.

The sanatorium and school for the blind benefited from being relatively closed communities already, with walls to confine those who lived there also helping to protect those inside from the disease running rampant through the communities on the outside.

Being hard to reach also helped to protect other communities in 1918. The US naval base on the island of Yerba Buena, in San Francisco Bay, was only accessibly by boat. The base's 6,000 residents were confined to the island and no visitors were allowed ashore. The few arrivals allowed on the island were confined to quarantine, were given three times daily throat sprays, and had to maintain a distance of 20 feet from one another.

For severe pandemics it might be cost beneficial for some islands to close their borders

When these measures were lifted in November 1918, as reports of cases in San Francisco were on the decline, the base experienced only mild cases, but at least three people did die.

"The moment you open up the gates, the virus enters in the bodies of people who come in," says Markel. "Protective sequestration is only as good as long as you are doing it.

"The notion that you can shut down a modern city or even a university today is not very likely though. It is extremely expensive and disruptive."

But there may be some benefit to keeping the virus out for as long as is possible. American Samoa implemented a five-day quarantine for all boats that kept influenza from its shores until 1920. When it finally did arrive, the virus appears to have lost much of its sting and there were no deaths attributed to influenza in a population of more than 8,000. The main island of Samoa to the northwest, however, lost around a fifth of its population to the pandemic.

A similar story unfolded on the on the Australian island of Tasmania, which implemented strict quarantine measures for boats arriving on its shores that required all passengers and crew to be isolated for seven days. When the infection penetrated the island in August 1919, medical officers reported that it was a milder infection than that on the mainland. The death rate on Tasmania was one of the lowest recorded worldwide.

"For some islands, it might have been a mix of chance, remoteness and small numbers of travellers," says Nick Wilson, a professor of public health at the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand. "This experience has some modern relevance - for severe pandemics it might be cost beneficial for some islands to close their borders."

Other islands had similar success at keeping the pandemic at bay. The French territory of New Caledonia in the South Pacific did not experience an outbreak until July 1921, again escaping with just a mild form of the disease.

In some areas, the older populations particularly were not as affected as much because they had some protection - Gerardo Chowell

It's not clear why those attempts to delay the arrival of the disease reduced the mortality rates in these places. But research has suggested that over time, as the virus burned its way through populations, it accumulated mutations that naturally reduced its capacity to cause disease.

Another possibility could be that some populations may have acquired a degree of immunity against the pandemic strain from comparatively harmless seasonal flu strains that were circulating in the years running up to 1918.

In Denmark, for example, the pandemic claimed just 0.2% of the population while in Australia just 0.3% died. China also escaped lightly, with relatively few deaths - again something that has been attributed to some existing immunity within the population. Some large cities also reported lower mortality rates than might be expected in places where the risk of passing the virus from person to person is high, perhaps also due to immunity obtained in earlier less deadly outbreaks.

"This is known as the 'antigen recycling hypothesis'," says Professor Gerardo Chowell, an epidemiologist at Georgia State University who has been attempting to piece together the events that led to the 1918 pandemic. "In some areas, the older populations particularly were not as affected as much because they had some protection that they probably acquired when they were children."

While the idea is still debated, it has provided some clues that could help health officials in the fight against future pandemics. Today some countries offer annual vaccinations against seasonal flu strains that can help their populations build up temporary immunity. According to research by Jodie McVernon, an immunologist at the University of Melbourne, this could "provide important protection in the early stages of a new pandemic".

"The more times you get vaccinated, the more you are exposed to different versions of the flu virus," adds Markel.

Transportation was much scarcer than nowadays and the population of Brazil was much smaller, so it is easy to see that Marajo might have got lucky

But locations even with this potential immunity still saw people fall ill and some deaths. Just two small chains of remote volcanic islands in Fiji, in the South Pacific - the Lau and Yasawa islands - along with Marajo island on Brazil's Amazon delta, and a handful of tiny communities in Alaska and the Bering Strait could claim to have been left entirely untouched by the pandemic.

Their isolated locations and lack of outside visitors meant these island communities were never exposed to the virus.

"Transportation was much scarcer than nowadays and the population of Brazil was much smaller, so it is easy to see that Marajo might have got lucky," says Wladimir Alonso, a technical officer at the World Health Organization who has studied the patterns of the 1918 pandemic in Brazil. "But you would expect the population to remain immunologically susceptible to the pandemic virus."

This could mean that these remote locations were hit by the virus at a later date, but the very isolation that protected them from the waves of flu hitting other parts of the world meant these cases went unreported.

Blood tests conducted in Alaska, however, have confirmed that some remote populations were never exposed. People in the Yupik settlements of Gambell and Savoonga on St Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait and the even more remote Saint Paul Island further to the south, showed no trace of antibodies to the 1918 virus when they were tested in the 1950s.

While it appears these places were largely protected by their geography alone, other communities took matters into their own hands. Villagers in Barrow and Wainwright in north Alaska posted armed guards around their villages and travel between settlements was prohibited. When scientists tested people living in a number of remote settlements in north Alaska, they found they too were free of antibodies, suggesting they had never been exposed.

It appears that many of these villages were given advanced warning of the oncoming virus as it spread across Alaska by dog sled teams that raced ahead of the infection to alert villages. It was an incredible gamble - mail delivery teams and seal hunters moving through the region were already spreading the virus from settlement to settlement - but one that paid off.

One native Inupiaq community placed armed guards eight miles south of the town. It was among those villages to evade the flu completely

One native Inupiaq community called Shishmaref, situated on a barrier reef island to the north of the Bering Strait, received news in this way and were able to place armed guards eight miles south of the town with orders not to let anyone pass. It was among those villages to evade the flu completely.

"A few places had warning," says Nicole Braem, a cultural anthropologist with the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, which is part of the US National Park Service. "Numerous settlements in Alaska were unaffected, largely because of quarantines established along travel routes or their remoteness. Communities at the time were very self-sufficient for food and clothing. They were not as dependent on food and goods imported from elsewhere in the United States [compared to today]."

In the modern world, shutting down settlements like this would be far harder. Few places are now not dependent on goods brought in from around the world. Global travel networks and supply chains could also mean few places would be remote enough to escape a modern pandemic.

"In 1918 they had very little idea about viruses or what caused the pandemic," says Howard Markel. "Today we would have a better shot at coping with it - we have antivirals, hospitals with intensive care units, respirators and much better surveillance. But we travel further and faster than we ever have before, so the spread could be much faster than we could cope with."

Some communities in 1918 also appear to have escaped the virus against all logic. The 737 people living in the town of Fletcher, Vermont, defied advice to avoid contact with the outside world, holding a dance and attending a county fair in a neighbouring town. The town even hosted a wedding for a soldier from a military camp in Massachusetts that saw 28% of its population hit by influenza and suffered 757 deaths in the same month as the wedding. Despite 120 guests attending the wedding, the residents of Fletcher appeared to have dodged a bullet.

And this good fortune is perhaps the greatest lesson that the escape communities of 1918 have to offer modern health officials. Many communities that implemented rigid protection and quarantine measures were still hit by the pandemic.

The disease struck so quickly, most people didn't have a chance to respond

It was a lesson that the communities of Bristol Bay in Alaska learned the hard way.

"Although they knew about the flu and did what they could to prevent it from coming, it arrived anyway," says Katherine Ringsmuth. "The disease struck so quickly, most people didn't have a chance to respond." A fall in salmon stocks may have ultimately helped the Egegak village. "It was a terrible year for salmon as they had been producing so much canned salmon for the war effort in Europe, it caused the fish numbers to decline.

"It might have meant no one had any reason to visit the area. It was just chance."

Survival, it seems, can sometimes come down to blind luck.

--

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Filthy and frightened, the three young children staggered up the beach. Their tiny frames were feverish and behind them, on board the small sailboat they had drifted ashore upon, lay the bodies of two dead men.

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By Laura Spinney Features correspondent

The Spanish flu emerged as the world was recovering from years of global war. It was to have some surprising and far-reaching effects.

The picture we have of the 1918 flu pandemic is vastly more detailed today than it was 20 years ago, let alone 50 or 100 years ago. But it's nowhere near complete. Pathologist Jeffery Taubenberger of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases - the man who in 2005, with his colleague Ann Reid, published the genetic sequence of the virus responsible for the pandemic - said at a recent conference there were still many unanswered outstanding questions.

Researchers all over the world are working hard to answer them. But what they have already uncovered might surprise you.

The fittest were among the most vulnerable

Austrian artist Egon Schiele died of influenza in October 1918, just a few days after his wife Edith, who was pregnant with their first child. In the interim, though desperately sick and grieving, he worked on a painting that depicted a family - his own - that would never exist.

Schiele was 28 years old, firmly within an age group that proved acutely vulnerable to the 1918 flu. It is one reason why his unfinished painting, The Family, is often described as a poignant testimony to the disease's cruelty.

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Because it was so deadly to 20-to-40-year-olds, the disease robbed families of their breadwinners and communities of their pillars, leaving large numbers of elderly people and orphans with no means of support. Men were at greater risk of dying than women, in general, unless the women were pregnant - in which case they died or suffered miscarriages in droves.

Scientists don't know precisely why those in the prime of life were so vulnerable, but a possible clue lies in the fact that the elderly - always a high-risk group for flu - were actually less likely to die in the 1918 pandemic than they had been in flu seasons throughout the previous decade.

One theory that potentially explains both observations is "original antigenic sin" - the idea that a person's immune system mounts its most effective response to the first strain of flu it encounters. Flu is a highly labile virus, meaning that it changes its structure all the time - including that of the two main antigens on its surface, known by the shorthand H and N, that engage with the host's immune system.

Deaths from the flu varied greatly across the world - sometimes because a less severe version in the past had given some immunity (Credit: Getty Images)

There's some evidence to suggest the first flu subtype that young adults in 1918 had been exposed to was H3N8, meaning they were primed to fight a very different germ from the one that caused the 1918 flu - which belonged to the H1N1 subtype. Following the same logic, the elderly may have been relatively protected in 1918 by dint of having been exposed to an H1 or N1 antigen that was circulating in the human population circa 1830.

Death rates varied greatly across the globe

Flu has sometimes been called a democratic disease, but in 1918 it was anything but. If you lived in certain parts of Asia, for example, you were 30 times more likely to die than if you lived in certain parts of Europe.

Asia and Africa suffered the highest death rates, in general, and Europe, North America and Australia the lowest, but there was great variation within continents too. Denmark lost around 0.4 per cent of its population, while Hungary lost around three times that. Cities tended to suffer worse than rural areas, but there was variation within cities too.

In Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil, it was those inhabiting the sprawling shanty towns at the city's edge who were hit hardest

People had a vague sense of these inequalities at the time, but it took decades for statisticians to put hard numbers on them. Once they had, they realised that the explanation must lie in differences between human populations - notably, socioeconomic differences.

In the US state of Connecticut, for example, the newest immigrant group - the Italians - suffered the worst losses, while in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil, it was those inhabiting the sprawling shanty towns at the city's edge who were hit hardest.

Paris presented a conundrum - the highest mortality being recorded in some of the wealthiest neighbourhoods - until the statisticians realised who was dying there. It wasn't the owners of the grand apartments, but their overworked maids who slept in chilly chambres de bonne high up under the eaves.

The disease struck those who were healthy the hardest, due to the strength of the immune reaction (Credit: Getty Images)

All over the world, the poor, immigrants and ethnic minorities were more susceptible - not, as eugenicists liked to claim, because they were constitutionally inferior, but because they were more likely to eat badly, to live in crowded conditions, to be suffering from other, underlying diseases, and to have poor access to healthcare.

Things haven't changed all that much. A study of the 2009 flu pandemic in England showed that the death rate in the poorest fifth of the population was triple that in the richest.

It wasn't just a respiratory disease

The vast majority of those who fell sick recovered, but among the unlucky minority who did not - and they were at least 25 times more numerous, proportionately, than in other flu pandemics - the disease took a grisly course.

They began to have trouble breathing, and their faces turned a mahogany colour. The mahogany darkened to blue - an effect doctors dubbed "heliotrope cyanosis" - and by the time they died they were black all over. The cause of death in almost all cases was not the flu itself, but opportunistic bacteria that colonised the lung lesions created by the virus, producing the symptoms of the "old man's friend", pneumonia.

Many patients grew ill with bacterial infections that flourished in lungs filled with fluid (Credit: Getty Images)

That much is relatively well known. Less well-known is that the flu affected the entire constitution. Teeth and hair fell out. People reported dizziness, insomnia, loss of hearing or smell and blurred vision. There were psychiatric after-effects, notably "melancholia" or what we might now call post-viral depression.

It continues to be true that the waves of death associated with both flu pandemics and annual flu seasons are followed by waves of death due to other causes, notably heart attacks and strokes - indirect consequences of the inflammatory response to flu. Flu wasn't in 1918, and still isn't, exclusively a respiratory disease.

The pandemic transformed public health...

Eugenics was a mainstream current of thought both before and after the 1918 flu, but the pandemic undermined it in at least one domain: infectious diseases.

Previously, social Darwinist - and misguided - thinking about some human "races" or castes being superior to others had mixed insidiously with the insight of Louis Pasteur and others that infectious diseases were preventable. They produced a toxic cocktail of an idea: people who caught infectious diseases only had themselves to blame.

Many countries created or re-organised their health ministries, set up better systems of disease surveillance, and embraced the concept of socialised medicine

The pandemic revealed the truth: that although the poor and immigrants died in higher numbers, nobody was immune. When it came to contagion, in other words, there was no point in treating individuals in isolation or lecturing them on personal responsibility. Infectious diseases were a problem that had to be tackled at the population level.

Starting in the 1920s, this cognitive shift began to be reflected in changes to public health strategy. Many countries created or re-organised their health ministries, set up better systems of disease surveillance, and embraced the concept of socialised medicine - healthcare for all, free at the point of delivery.

The pandemic changed the idea of public health, causing governments to tackle diseases at the public level (Credit: Getty Images)

There had been moves in this direction earlier - you don't put a universal healthcare system in place at the drop of a hat - but the pandemic seems to have galvanised governments. In Britain these efforts came to fruition in 1948, with the birth of the National Health Service, but Russia already had a centralised, fully public healthcare system up-and-running by 1920. To begin with only urban folk benefited (rural populations were finally covered in 1969), but it was still a major achievement, and the driving force behind it was Vladimir Lenin.

...and transformed society in other ways too

The expression "the lost generation" has been applied to various groups of people who were alive in the early 20th Century, including the talented American artists who came of age during the First World War, and the British army officers whose lives were cut short by that war.

But it could reasonably be argued, as I do in my book Pale Rider, that the title should really go to the millions of people in the prime of life who died of the 1918 flu, or to the children who were orphaned by it, or to those, not yet born, who suffered its slings and arrows in their mothers' wombs.

Those who survived the flu in utero, and survived to be born, lived with the scars until they died

The nature of the 1918 pandemic, and of scientific knowledge at the time, means that we don't know exactly how many there were in those three groups, but we can be certain that each one outnumbered both the Jazz-Age artists and the 35,000-odd British officers who died in combat (South Africa had an estimated 500,000 "flu orphans" alone).

Those who survived the flu in utero to be born, lived with the scars until they died. Research suggests that they were less likely to graduate or earn a reasonable wage, and more likely to go to prison, than contemporaries who hadn't been infected.

The flu killed in even some of the most far-flung outposts - these crosses are for miners who died in a remote Norwegian settlement (Credit: Getty Images)

There is even evidence that the 1918 flu contributed to the baby boom of the 1920s, by leaving behind a smaller but healthier population that was able to reproduce at higher rates.

That the 1918 flu cast a long shadow over the 20th Century is not in doubt. We should bear that in mind as we prepare for the next one.

Laura Spinney is the author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, published by Penguin Books.

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The Spanish flu emerged as the world was recovering from years of global war. It was to have some surprising and far-reaching effects.

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By Adrienne Bernhard & Elisabetta Abrami

A scent with few natural analogues, orris is exceedingly rare; the fact that people continue to seek out this fragrance despite its high cost speaks to its enduring appeal.

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Orris: The world's rarest perfume ingredient

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By Adrienne Bernhard & Elisabetta Abrami A scent with few natural analogues, orris is exceedingly rare; the fact that people continue to seek out this fragrance despite its high cost speaks to its enduring appeal.

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In 2008, I was one of the 1.5 million students who graduated from university in the US.

And, like everyone else, I was caught off guard.

Whatever we expected then, the reality today is that as a generation, we have more debt, fewer children and quite a few scars.

A decade on, there has been quite a bit of handwringing about what's changed since the financial crisis.

And I'm convinced that the biggest fallout isn't the increased regulation, or the jailed bankers (or lack thereof), but the impact it had on those of us who were just entering the workforce in 2008.

To find out more, I've travelled around the country asking experts and fellow 2008 graduates - what happened to us?

1. We have fewer children, if we have them at all

In the decade since the recession, American women had 4.8 million fewer babies than demographers were expecting.

No, that isn't a typo.

"Every year when I look at the fertility data I expect the number of births to go up and it hasn't," says University of New Hampshire Professor Kenneth Johnson.

Prof Johnson says part of the fertility decline is attributable to women in their early and late 20s having fewer children than expected - in other words, my classmates and those who came after us.

And it's not getting better. The gap is getting wider - which is why he brings up a historical parallel.

"There were a group of women who were in their early 20s at the beginning of the Great Depression who never made up for the births that they didn't have.

"More of them are childless than any group of American women before or since."

The question, says Prof Johnson, is if we too will simply forego births like the women of the Depression or if we're simply just waiting longer.

Nora Carroll graduated from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in 2008 and says she delayed starting a family due to the crash.

"I spent the last decade really concentrating on getting a stable career, saving enough money so I can purchase a house," she says.

"All of that just takes time [especially because] being in a lower paying job [it] takes a little bit longer."

She is now expecting her first child.

2. We've accumulated a lot less wealth than prior generations

In the UK, research commissioned by the BBC found that people who are 30-39 years old now were worst affected by the financial crisis - losing on average 7.2% in real terms, or £2,057 ($2,684) a year between 2008 and 2017.

That's pretty similar to what happened in the US.

Americans born in the mid-1980s have accumulated 34% less wealth than predicted based on previous generations, the St Louis Federal Reserve found.

One reason? We started out with less.

The average salary of a newly-minted college graduate in 2008 was $46,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That was 8% less, adjusted for inflation, than college graduates aged 25 to 34 earned in 2002.

3. We hate the stock market

Just two out of five millennials are invested in the stock market.

And even those of us who do invest have ventured only about $7,000, according to the Federal Reserve.

That's not simply because we're money-strapped.

"Investors' willingness to bear financial risk depends on personal experiences of macroeconomic history", economists at the University of California-Berkeley have found.

In other words, if you are a young person who, say, watched the Dow Jones plummet over 500 points in one day - your appetite for risk is slim.

So even though the S&P 500 officially entered the longest bull market in history this summer - rising over 325% since the depths of the financial crisis - well, we haven't really benefited from all those stock market gains.

4. We don't buy homes

The homeownership rate of millennials between the ages of 25 and 34 was 37% in 2015 - 8% lower than that of prior generations, according to the Urban Institute. In the UK, the home-ownership rate for millennials has nearly halved.

There are plenty of explanations - not least fewer children, less wealth and coming of age after the housing market imploded.

When we do manage to buy property, it's worth a lot less than the average first-homes of prior generations.

The average median home value for someone aged 18-33 in 2013 was $133,000 compared to $197,000 for the same age group in 2007.

5. We trust no-one

Trust in institutions was on the decline well before the financial crisis, but as a generation, our faith is especially low.

Just 19% of millennials agree with the statement that "generally speaking, most people can be trusted" - compared to 31% for the generation before us, and 40% for our parents' generation, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

And, no surprise here, when it comes to institutions, we trust Wall Street least of all.

"Wall Street certainly took a hit," says Eric Fraser, who graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2008 and took what he thought was an innocuous job in the financial services industry.

"At that time it didn't seem villainous until these names and faces started hitting the news."

That caused him to re-think what it was like to work in the industry.

"I had a bit of hesitation to explain, 'yes I do work in financial services but no I'm not a subprime mortgage lender or anything like that.'"

Today, he says there is one silver lining to having had a front row seat to that dissolution in trust.

"I think entering the workforce around that time really gave me a sense of humility and I don't know if I would have had that same mindset if I had graduated earlier."

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The millions of 'missing' babies after 2008 crash

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In 2008, I was one of the 1.5 million students who graduated from university in the US. And, like everyone else, I was caught off guard. Whatever we expected then, the reality today is that as a generation, we have more debt, fewer children and quite a few scars.

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From crowdturfing to brainjacking, BBC Future Now explores the unusual and intriguing vocabulary emerging from technology advances this year.

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A man wearing make-up on the street may elicit unwelcome glares, questions about his masculinity and even his sexuality. But in South Korea, ideas about how to look good as a man are changing attitudes and influencing the world, as the BBC's Saira Asher reports.

When the BBC posted a video about the make-up routine of a 16-year-old YouTuber in Seoul on Facebook, the reactions ranged from intrigued to downright vitriolic.

Some assumed this meant he was gay, while others admonished him for his choice saying "real men don't wear make-up". There were, of course, those that argued for his freedom to live life however he pleased and against the "fragile masculinities" on show.

But Kim Seung-hwan is used to it. He says he's been called gay by some Koreans online for as long as he's been doing make-up tutorials.

When asked about whether he thought he looked feminine after he put on make-up, he was confused by the question as if he had never even thought about it.

"No I don't. I do not think about this being a girly look," he says. "It's about looking good."

Inside a male beauty salon

For those uncomfortable with men who wear make-up, the scene at a high-end salon for men in Seoul's Gangnam district would have been quite something. But it points to an important shift in cultural expectations.

Senior make-up artist Han Hyun-jae expertly applies foundation, eyeliner and lipstick on a man. He chooses from an array of products and brands that will be familiar to most women, and goes in for the final touches of what he calls the K-pop (short for Korean pop) look . It's a scene that repeats itself day after day.

Packs of confident young men saunter into the salon and then leave with perfect skin and hair. Many of them are singers or actors on their way to promotional events.

One man is there for his wedding make-up, a common practice for men in South Korea. He chooses to get red lips for his special day.

"We make their complexion cleaner, eyebrows darker, contour their faces and draw out their masculinity in a way they can't do themselves," says Mr Han. He says men come in wanting to look like their favourite K-pop idols.

In the last few years, K-pop bands and Korean dramas have become the major influence on young people in the country and last year K-pop broke into the mainstream US and UK music scenes.

"I think Korea is a trailblazer in men's beauty culture, definitely in Asia at the moment, if not the world," says Joanna Elfving-Hwang from the University of Western Australia, who has done extensive research on beauty and image in South Korea.

"The way they (K-pop stars) play with masculinity, what it means to be a beautiful man in a heterosexual or non-heterosexual way, it opens up possibilities for men on the street and eventually makes it more acceptable."

This doesn't mean every man in Seoul walks around with a full face of make-up.

But in young and fashionable neighbourhoods like Myeong-dong it's common to see men walking around with foundation or BB cream (blemish balm) - a moisturiser and light foundation hybrid.

More importantly it has allowed for a much looser interpretation of what's acceptable for men when it comes to beauty.

And some young Korean men are unapologetic about the drive to enhance their look.

That wasn't always the case. In the 1980s and 90s the salaryman was the prevailing male aesthetic. Suits, luxury watches and a traditional strong male look were the norm. Korea has mandatory national service and that moulded and defined what men thought would look appealing.

"In the 80s and 90s, men in Korean pop content were largely portrayed as tough guys in gangster and detective films, and rebellious young men in some TV dramas," says Sun Jung, the author of Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption.

But all that changed in the mid-1990s when music group Seo Taeji and The Boys came onto the scene, says Prof Elfving-Hwang. They used rap, rock and techno influences and incorporated English language into their music.

They kick-started fan culture which has now become a major force in the music industry, she says.

Then followed the big entertainment companies churning out K-pop girl bands and boy bands, and their influence has been like nothing before it.

"Compared to the 80s and 90s, now there are a lot more soft masculinities - pretty boy images and gentle male images - represented in media, and consumers welcome and widely consume them," says Dr Sun Jung.

They came to be known as Khonminam - combining the words for flower and a beautiful man. She says it takes inspiration from similar concepts in Japan of bishonen or beautiful boys and Shojo manga - girls comics.

But it's not feminine.

"I think the phenomenon should rather be explained through the notion of hybrid or versatile masculinity - soft yet manly at the same time - which is different from effeminised," says Dr Jung.

She cites Song Joong-ki, the star of hugely popular Korean drama "Descendants of the Sun" as the embodiment of this. He may be a khonminam in his look, but as a special forces captain in the military he is also a tough guy.

Descendants of the Sun and other Korean dramas have helped spread the South Korean look around Asia and now the world. And that means the ways to achieve that look are in demand.

Male idols are plastered on billboards in Seoul hawking products like face masks and moisturisers. Companies are actively hiring men to sell women make-up products.

Their fandom in places like China, Thailand and Singapore is not to be dismissed either. Huge crowds show up to their performances and product launches.

"Men in China and South East Asia tend to think that Korean men are the typical beauty," says Lee Gung-min, a consultant to South Korean beauty companies.

"That is having a huge impact on male consumers in Asia."

Korean beauty boom

Beyond Asia, brand Korea is starting to sell well in the US and Europe.

Walmart and Sephora now have K-beauty (Korean beauty) brands on their shelves and beauty bloggers are spouting the virtues of the 10-step K-beauty routine for glowing skin. American and European make-up enthusiasts are fast becoming acquainted with brands that were previously only popular in Asia like TonyMoly, Innisfree and Etude House.

Most interestingly, established beauty brands are making their own versions of products that originated in South Korea - like Clinique, Lancome and L'oreal introducing cushion compacts.

The drive for the perfect face has undoubtedly also contributed to a well reported rise in cosmetic surgeries in South Korea to achieve the desired jawline or nose. But it also stems from a deeply ingrained preoccupation with how you present yourself to others.

That's a common sentiment across Seoul. People here really care about how they look and how they come off to the world - both men and women.

You can't walk a few steps without coming across a cosmetics or skincare shop with a salesperson outside trying to lure you in with a free face mask, and companies are definitely capitalising on that self-care culture to sell products.

But men are now as much at the receiving end of that drive - or perhaps pressure - for self enhancement that women have felt for generations.

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Flowerboys and the appeal of 'soft masculinity' in South Korea

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South Korea's idea of a good-looking man has changed, and the world is taking notice.

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Spanish moss draped over St Helena Island, South Carolina, as Elting Buster Smalls and his children hummed down the earthen path in their 1960s station wagon. It was the summer of 1974, and the harvest from the Smalls' 20-acre farm - passed down since the late-1800s through their family of newly freed enslaved and runaway West Africans - was bountiful. Smalls and his children packed baskets of fresh honeydew, peanuts and sugar cane, and fish they'd caught in the river, to drop on the porches of local elders who were no longer able to work the land.

But today, nearly 50 years after Elting first taught his young daughter Victoria Smalls about the traditions integral to their identity, many Gullah Geechee can no longer work the land, as the land - and thereby the Gullah Geechee way of life - is being rattled by climate change.

Victoria, the 13th of Elting and his wife Laura's 14 children, grew up Gullah - a word she didn't actually learn until after college in the early 1990s. (Colloquially, Gullah distinguishes whether a Gullah Geechee individual lives north of the Savannah River, while those south of it are referred to as Geechee.) For Victoria, Gullah Geechee wasn't the mystic, isolated culture of inherited Africanisms and Southern landscapes that had become of interest to 21st-Century academics, tourists and hungry land developers.

"It was just our way of life," said Victoria, who later moved from St Helena to Charleston, South Carolina, to work on the International African American Museum, which, when it opens in 2020, will illuminate South Carolina's global historical significance and show the role enslaved Africans and free blacks had in shaping the US.

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The Gullah Geechee are descendants of Central and West Africans who are believed to have been trafficked into what is known as the Low Country for their expertise in coastal rice farming and irrigation systems. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, Union General William T Sherman established Special Field Order 15, which designated 400,000 acres of land along the coastline of the Southern US, from South Carolina to Florida, to newly freed black families in parcels of roughly 40 acres each. The isolated geography, which is spread out over 12,000 sq miles known as the Gullah Geechee Corridor, created insulated coastal and island communities, most of which were at least 90% black, with well-preserved cultural traditions.

Gullah Geechee religion incorporates Christianity with African belief systems, much of which was reflected in the lessons Victoria was taught as a child. Respect for nature, as well as elders and community, was sacred. African crafts were passed down for necessity, like cast nets and flat-bottomed boats known as 'bateau boats', which Victoria said are based off the West African dugout and redesigned to easily navigate shallow shores and waterways. The craft of sewing pieces of cloth into large, colourful patterns was combined with European quilting to become a creole art form that also allowed Gullah Geechee women to sit and socialise.

"We didn't have a bridge on [St Helena] until 19 39. The island was like an incubator for the culture, the language. You don't hear it now, but when I was growing up I had a very thick accent," Victoria said.

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which strives to preserve the Gullah Geechee sites and stories, describes the Gullah Geechee language as a creole dialect that sprung from the linguistic influences of "European slave traders, slave owners and diverse African ethnic groups".

"Beaufort was only 7 miles away, and when I was four, five, up to 10 years old, people would laugh at me in Beaufort, even the blacks who were still Gullah Geechee people," Victoria said. "The nurturing you received on St Helena Island was so wonderful that the language and the way of life and working the land, farming, living off the water and living in tight-knit communities - it was so different than that just 7 miles inland on the mainland."

Today, the pejorative perception of the Gullah Geechee being uneducated or backcountry has shifted to one in which the identity is celebrated, both by academics and those who grew up in the culture. Yet the Gullah Geechee ways are slipping away.

According to Dr Albert George II, director of conservation at the South Carolina Aquarium who was raised Gullah Geechee, individuals residing in the more isolated communities such as St Helena still subsist on their own agriculture, sourcing food from their farms and gardens and fish from the waterways rather than going to the grocery store. But due to environmental changes, such as rising sea levels and salt water erosion, connecting to the earth through food is becoming a complicated feat.

Climate change is taking away hundreds of years of cuisine and culture

Shrimp, for example, is an integral ingredient in several Gullah Geechee dishes eaten throughout the South, such as the popular low country boil, which to the Gullah Geechee was considered a 'slop pot', a way to use all the leftovers from the fridge before they went bad. But "shellfish need a certain level of water quality and salinity. Oysters, clams - you see serious shifts in their ability to propagate in [the] environment," George said. "These people are experiencing changes to their land, a shift in habitat and [a] shift of what's in the water itself. Climate change is taking away hundreds of years of cuisine and culture."

He continued: "Some places in the Gullah Geechee Corridor are experiencing subsidence from climate change and land development factors like building upon sand-based soils or wetlands in the Charleston peninsula. In these areas, the land is actually sinking."

George, however, is determined that Gullah Geechee culture will not disappear. His father was a proud Gullah Geechee man who told him "unless there was rice with the meal, it wasn't a full dinner." As homage to the crop that is agriculturally obsolete in most Gullah Geechee farming communities, George founded RICE ( Resilience Initiative for Coastal Education).

RICE strives to open a "two-way flow of communication," George said, between the Gullah Geechee and the local municipal, county, business and state government leaders. He hopes this will help establish a long-term plan to preserve the land and culture for the Gullah Geechee people in the wake of what is arguably one of the most harrowing issues the world faces today.

"Growing up, you didn't evacuate for a hurricane," Victoria said. "We let our horses roam free... and they would always come back. Somehow our community knew where the animals were from - what belonged to whom. I remember not even boarding up our windows."

All we have now is our name

Since Hurricane Matthew hit the island in October 2016, Victoria said flooding has become a major issue, and not just during hurricanes. During high tide and torrential rain, the land bridge floods and becomes impassable, and entire crops have been wiped out.

"All we have now is our name. We're the last Saltwater Geechee [island dwellers as opposed to the mainland's Freshwater Geechee] on Sapelo," said Maurice Bailey, a resident of Sapelo Island, Georgia's only remaining Gullah Geechee community, Hogg Hummock, and vice president of the Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society (SICARS).

"Our lifestyle is surviving... We grew up farming, hunting, preserving meats. Our lifestyle was rough, but we didn't know how rough 'til we got older," he said.

Now, the Sapelo community cannot thrive on farming alone and many of its residents have left the island to either find work or love - as most who remain are related by blood. Bailey is spearheading an effort to plant a 10-acre community garden and honeybee hive so Sapelo residents will have a means of revenue growing and selling produce at markets on the mainland. So far, they've planted purple ribbon sugar cane as well as red peas, a much smaller version of red kidney beans, that were brought over as seeds from Africa and are used in a traditional Gullah Geechee beans-and-rice dish called Hoppin' John.

When Bailey was a boy, Sapelo Island had close to 300 people living on it. Today, he said there are only 29 Gullah Geechee left. Some traditions still live on, like eating Hoppin' John on New Year's, farming in the community gardens and gathering around at night by the camp fire - the dwindling community of elders and children seated together. But other cherished ways, like placing baskets of food on a neighbour's porch, are almost completely obsolete.

Almost.

"My 16-year-old son died four years ago. While I was trying to heal, someone left a bag of beautiful squash, peppers - just a wonderful bounty on my steps and I didn't know who it was," Victoria said.

At the time, Victoria still lived on St Helena Island. The gift was a reminder of her past, of her Gullah Geechee roots, of her father, Elting, who died in 1992 but cast lessons of community and love upon his children the way he once cast his shrimp net into the water. With climate change, these nets may not sweep up the same bounty they once did, but individuals like Victoria, George and Bailey are not letting their heritage die out.

"At some point, based on predictions, we will have to move. Yes, there would be culture lost, but we're resilient people. I mean we were able to keep a lot of our Africanisms intact," Victoria said, the echo of her father's commanding voice sturdy in her tone. "We may be able to keep some of our culture in the palm of our hands - the way someone maybe carried some seeds in their palm as they were carried on a ship from West Africa."

Our Unique World is a BBC Travel series that celebrates what makes us different and distinctive by exploring offbeat subcultures and obscure communities around the globe.
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Spanish moss draped over St Helena Island, South Carolina, as Elting Buster Smalls and his children hummed down the earthen path in their 1960s station wagon. It was the summer of 1974, and the harvest from the Smalls' 20-acre farm - passed down since the late-1800s through their family of newly freed enslaved and runaway West Africans - was bountiful.

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Actors Chadwick Boseman and Michael B Jordan earned high praise for their roles in the 2018 Marvel film Black Panther. But for me, the real stars were the Dora Milaje, the special forces unit of the fictional Kingdom of Wakanda. Fearsome yet principled, these female bodyguards provided the film's moral compass.

I was thrilled to find out that the inspiration for these powerful women is rooted in reality, and that the descendants of these women still keep their traditions alive.

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"She is our King. She is our God. We would die for her," said Rubinelle, choosing her words carefully. The 24-year-old secretary was talking about her grandmother, who was sitting on a bed in one of the front rooms of a house in Abomey, the former capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey and now a thriving city in southern Benin. The elderly woman's head was adorned with a crown.

I had been granted an audience with Dahomian royalty: a descendant of Queen Hangbe, who according to local legend is the founder of the Amazons, an elite group of female warriors. As her living embodiment, the elderly woman has inherited her name and her authority. Four Amazons were attending to her, sitting on a woven mat on the floor. The room was relatively grand: there was a table and chairs for visitors and, in the corner, sat an old-fashioned television next to a makeshift drinks cabinet.

After indicating that I should prostrate myself before the queen and take a ceremonial sip of water, Rubinelle and her grandmother told me the story of their ancestors.

The Dahomey Amazons were frontline soldiers in the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey, a West African empire that existed from 1625 to 1894. Its remnants lie in modern-day Benin, which occupies a sliver of the coast between Nigeria and Togo. Whether conquering neighbouring tribes or resisting European forces, the Amazons were known for their fearlessness. In one of the final battles against the French in 1892 before the kingdom became a French colony, it is said only 17 out of 434 Amazons came back alive.

According to legend, Hangbe assumed the throne in the early 18th Century after the sudden death of her twin brother, Akaba. After a short rule, she was forcibly deposed by her power-hungry younger brother, Agaja. The current Queen Hangbe told me that all traces of her ancestor's reign were erased by Agaja, who believed that only men should hold the throne. In a dusty museum that lies within the walls of the Royal Palaces in Abomey, the monarchs' elaborate bronze sceptres are displayed in order of their reign. There is no sign of one belonging to Hangbe, and some historians question whether she existed at all.

Yet her legacy lived on through her mighty female soldiers. Oral and written accounts differ over the origins of the women-only corps. Some sources describe the Amazons as elephant hunters who graduated to human prey. The more widely accepted theory is that they served as royal bodyguards to Hangbe and the kings who came after.

It was King Ghezo, who ruled over Dahomey from 1818 to 1858, who officially integrated the Amazons into the army. This in part was a practical decision, as manpower was increasingly scarce due to the European slave trade.

The recognition of the Amazons as official soldiers of Dahomey strengthened a duality that was already embedded in the society through the kingdom's religion, which has since developed into Vodun, now one of Benin's official religions and the basis of voodoo. An integral legend told of Mawu-Lisa, a male and female god who came together to create the universe. In all institutions, political, religious and military, men would have a female equivalent. The king, however, reigned supreme.

Her legacy lived on through her mighty female soldiers

Historical accounts of the Amazons are notoriously unreliable, though several European slave traders, missionaries and colonialists recorded their encounters with the fearless women. In 1861, Italian priest Francesco Borghero described an army exercise where thousands of women scaled 120m-high thorny acacia bushes barefoot without a whimper. In 1889, French colonial administrator Jean Bayol described witnessing one young Amazon approach a captive as part of her training. "[She] walked jauntily up, swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk... She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it."

Europeans who visited the kingdom in the 19th Century called Dahomey's female fighters Amazons after the ruthless warriors of Greek mythology. Today, historians refer to them as mino, which can be translated as 'our mothers' in the local Fon language. However, Leonard Wantchekon, who was born in Benin and is now professor of politics at Princeton University and founder of the African School of Economics in Cotonou, Benin, claims the contemporary term does not accurately reflect the role the warriors played in Dahomey society. "Mino means witch," he said.

Today, the role of Queen Hangbe and her Amazons is primarily ceremonial, presiding over religious rituals that take place at the temple near her home. When I asked to take photographs of Queen Hangbe, Pierrette, another Amazon, jumped up to unfurl a ceremonial parasol over her mistress in the dark room. Fabric spelling out ' Reine Hangbe ' (Queen Hangbe) had been sewn into the fabric using the appliqué technique of Dahomey tradition. A dressmaker, Pierrette designs a new umbrella for her queen every year. Loaded with symbolism, these elaborately decorated parasols once showed status in the Dahomey court.

Queen Hangbe's umbrella was relatively simple, though in the 18th and 19th Centuries, they were often adorned with the bones of vanquished enemies. Parasols also featured images of birds and animals, as well as the round-headed clubs that Amazons used in battle.

These lethal weapons also feature in carvings on the mud walls of the squat palace buildings. Each king would build a new palace next to his predecessor's, leaving the former as a mausoleum. Though Behanzin, the last king of the Dahomey Empire, burnt the palaces before the French arrived, a section still stands in Abomey, a rusty Unesco sign hanging limply at the entrance. The bas reliefs show how the Amazons used the clubs, as well as muskets and machetes, to inflict death on enemies. In one dusty cabinet, a horse's tail springs from a human skull - a trophy brought back by an Amazon for her monarch to use as a fancy fly swatter.

There has always been a fascination with the Amazons, but its nature seems to be changing. The Black Panther film is responsible, certainly, but Dr Arthur Vido at the University of Abomey-Calavi, who has introduced a new course on the history of women in West Africa, has another theory. "As the status of women is changing in Africa, people want to know more about their role in the past."

Much of the interest in the Amazons centres on their mercilessness, though Wantchekon dismisses the glorification of their battle exploits. "That's just what soldiers did," he said. Instead, Wantchekon is more interested in what the Amazons achieved as veterans.

Where a profession that's critical for society is dominated by men, well, why don't we insert a unit of elite women to work side by side with men? To be equal to men

The village where Wantchekon grew up, to the west of Abomey, used to be the site of the Amazons' training camp. For many years, his aunt looked after an elderly Amazon who had moved to the village after retiring from the army. Villagers still remember the former soldier as "strong, independent and powerful," Wantchekon said. She challenged village hierarchies and "could do that without any repercussion from the local chief because she was an Amazon". Her example, Wantchekon thinks, inspired other women, including his mother, to be ambitious and independent.

For this reason, Wantchekon believes the Amazons are still relevant today. "Where a profession that's critical for society is dominated by men, well, why don't we insert a unit of elite women to work side by side with men? To be equal to men." For Wantchekon, it is not their strength or military prowess that made the Amazons extraordinary, but rather their capacity as role models. Marvel Studios can see the appeal: a spin-off devoted to the Dora Milaje is in the works.

As I took my leave of Queen Hangbe, Rubinelle rose to shake my hand, towering over me and looking me firmly in the eye. Driving away, I saw newly erected statues of Amazons along the road. They stood tall and broad-shouldered, and looked a lot like Rubinelle.
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The legend of Benin's fearless female warriors

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Actors Chadwick Boseman and Michael B Jordan earned high praise for their roles in the 2018 Marvel film Black Panther. But for me, the real stars were the Dora Milaje, the special forces unit of the fictional Kingdom of Wakanda. Fearsome yet principled, these female bodyguards provided the film's moral compass.

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When people call someone a 'good Samaritan', they may know the parable of the good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke, where a Samaritan helped a man who was beaten, stripped of his clothes and left by the roadside to die. But they probably don't know that there are hundreds of ancient Israelite Samaritans still living today. I was so fascinated when I heard this that I decided to find a way to meet them when I was in Israel.

My first visit was at the turn of the new millennium. Although tension was high between Israelis and Palestinians, I found a tour guide who agreed to drive me from Israel to the northern West Bank and then up Mount Gerizim to the Samaritan village of Kiryat Luza. We passed modest limestone houses and arrived at the dusty main street, where the guide stopped in front of a small, two-storey museum. Inside, it was the size of a large living room, and I saw a diorama of ancient priestly garments, a sample of round matza (unleavened bread) and a genealogical tree in the shape of a menorah (seven-branched candelabrum) that went back thousands of years.

One wall was covered with photographs of austere, bearded old men wearing turbans. The priest, who was the guardian of the museum, pointed to one of them and said, "That was my father, the kohen gadol, or high priest of the Samaritans. The priestly lineage goes back to Aaron, the brother of Moses."

"Moses of the Ten Commandments?" I asked. He nodded.

And that's when I lost it. I began to cry, and the tears never stopped until I left the mountaintop. I felt I had encountered something that was very ancient, powerful and true.

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Many visitors to the sacred Mount Gerizim are Christians, drawn by the New Testament parable and the fact that the Samaritans still speak the ancient Hebraic language that Jesus spoke. According to Biblical tradition, the Israelites were divided into 12 tribes and the Israelite Samaritans say they are descended from three of them: Menasseh, Ephraim and Levi. After the Exodus from Egypt and 40 years of wandering, Joshua led the people of Israel to Mount Gerizim. There he united the tribes with a ceremony that included a blessing for Mount Gerizim (which became known as the Mountain of the Blessing) and a curse for Mount Ebal (the Mountain of the Curse).

I felt I had encountered something that was very ancient, powerful and true

I felt like I'd been catapulted back to the days of the Hebrew Bible. When I returned home to the US, I emailed Benyamim (Benny) Tsedaka, a scholar, historian and ambassador-at-large for the Israelite Samaritans. He explained that "There were two ancient kingdoms: Judea (Jews) from the south, and we were the tribes from the north. We eventually separated, but our origins are identical." He said that in the 6th Century CE, the Israelite Samaritans numbered 1,500,000. They were persecuted and killed for practicing their ancient faith by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans. By 1919, there were only 141 Samaritans left. Today they number more than 800, with half living in Holon (south of Tel Aviv) and the other half on the mountain. They're one of the world's oldest and smallest religious groups and their songs are among the most ancient in the world.

Several years later, on my second visit to the region, I went to Holon to meet Tsedaka. Tall, grey-haired, with cocoa-coloured skin and a penchant for telling jokes, singing Shirley Bassey songs and Broadway tunes, he talked passionately about his people, called me ' achot' (sister) and insisted I call him ' ach' (brother). We walked around Holon, where about 80 Samaritan families were then living and working as lawyers, teachers, bankers and engineers.

"No-one is a doctor," Tsedaka explained, "because that would mean working on Sabbath, which is strictly forbidden."

We approached the Samaritan synagogue, a small building with a red-tile roof, limestone walls and a seven-branched candelabrum above the entry gate, inscribed with ancient Hebrew writing. Inside were piles of prayer books but no seats. Tsedaka explained that the men kneel or sit on the floor, and their Torah (holy book) has three crowns on it, which represent their three tribes of origin. Men are obliged to attend synagogue on Sabbath; for women, it's optional.

On Friday afternoon, before the Sabbath, Tsedaka drove me from his house in Holon through the West Bank, arriving at his second home in Kiryat Luza without incident, even though a Palastinian uprising was roiling in the area. The Samaritans who live on their sacred mountain, between Palestinians in the West Bank and Jews in Israel, try to be a neutral bridge of peace between the two. Many Samaritans speak Arabic, have Arabic names in addition to Hebrew names, and speak both ancient and modern Hebrew; some speak English as well.

Tsedaka took me to the Samaritans' three holiest places on the mountain: where Abraham brought Isaac to be sacrificed; the 12 stones where Joshua united the tribes after the Exodus; and a large, empty slab of deep-grey stone where the Israelites erected the Tabernacle when they arrived in Israel. "This is called the Eternal Hill," Tsedaka said. "It's the holy of holies. I know the Jews have another version of where these events took place, but our history says they happened here."

We walked around the Mount Gerizim archaeological site which had recently opened. More than 500 ancient stone inscriptions were found here, Tsedaka told me, in addition to Persian, Hellenistic, Byzantine and Samaritan ruins and artefacts. Today the area is a national park, maintained by Israel.

As the sun lowered on the horizon, we entered Tsedaka's house to prepare for Sabbath. Tsedaka went into his bedroom, and when he emerged, I was shocked by his transformation. He wore traditional ancient Israelite clothes: a long, white robe, tarboosh (red cylindrical hat with the white band of an elder) and sandals. We walked down the main street to the synagogue, joining other men and boys dressed like Tsedaka heading in the same direction. They left their sandals outside the sanctuary door. Inside, they sat, kneeled and stood on rugs, sometimes bowing their heads in the direction of their ancient Tabernacle. The sound of their prayers was deep and throaty. When they said the name 'Moses', they covered their faces with their hands as Moses did when God spoke to him.

After the service, a group of men approached me at the back of the synagogue, where I was sitting on a plastic chair. They asked me a pressing question: "Do you know if Maccabee Tel Aviv won?" It was their favourite basketball team. Samaritans are not permitted to watch television or use anything electric on the Sabbath. But even on their holiest day of the week, they still wanted to know how their team had done.

We get along with Palestinians and Jews, and we want to propose Mount Gerizim as an international peace centre

Tsedaka, like all the other men, goes to the synagogue three times on the Sabbath day, starting at 03:30. At 11:00, Tsedaka's wife Miriam served lunch: copious amounts of salad, hummus, tahini, round matza, fried green beans, potatoes and fillet of sole. At 13:00, we headed back to the synagogue for 90 minutes of melodic prayer, and then visited several Samaritan homes, which is a custom on Sabbath. One of the community's political leaders had a sumptuously decorated room dotted with photos of him with former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan.

"We get along with Palestinians and Jews," Tsedaka said, "and we want to propose Mount Gerizim as an international peace centre."

As the sun set, half of the men did their final prayers for Sabbath in the synagogue and the other half on the sacrificial grounds on Mount Gerizim where the startlingly gory Samaritan Passover takes place. Every year, scholars and tourists come from around the world to witness the Paschal sacrifice, which is performed as it's described in the Book of Exodus. The High Priest examines each family's lamb or sheep to make sure it has no blemishes. All the animals are slaughtered at once, and roasted on spits in large, sunken fire pits. It's a bloody ritual, and participants, dressed in white, spread blood on their foreheads to stave off the angel of death. At midnight, the roasted lamb is consumed rapidly with matza and bitter herbs.

The third time I visited, several years later, Tsedaka took me to the city of Nablus in the West Bank to visit Jacob's Well; it's associated with the patriarch Jacob who fathered the 12 ancient tribes of Israel, and it's believed to be where Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman. Today, the solid rock well is in a sunken crypt on the grounds of a Greek-Orthodox monastery, and I purchased a small ceramic souvenir bottle of well water.

We stopped briefly at Joseph's Tomb, which is also in Nablus; over the years, Muslims, Christians and Jews have contended for control of the site. Today, only a small, 19th-Century rectangular room with a cupola remains; alas, no, there's no visible archaeological evidence of an earlier structure.

"How do you like it?" Tsedaka asked.

"It's like it all stepped out of the pages of the Bible. Moses, Joshua, Jacob, Joseph, the Exodus, the 12 tribes... it's overwhelming," I replied.

Tsedaka nodded, and grinned.

On my last visit to Mount Gerizim in 2012, Tsedaka got permission for me to meet with the High Priest, the spiritual leader of the Israelite Samaritans who I had heard could trace his lineage back through 130 high priests to the second son of Aaron, the brother of Moses.

The gate swung open and I was cordially ushered inside to an ornate living room. Within minutes, the white-bearded High Priest entered, wearing a grey robe and red turban. A dignified man in his early 80s, he was accompanied by his deputy High Priest and members of his family. He motioned for me to sit next to him on a sofa. The audience had begun. "What can I do for you?" he asked with genteel formality.

The meeting was very friendly, until I mentioned that I had once eaten camel. The High Priest grew ashen and his family looked away, as though embarrassed.

"Eating camel is worse than eating pig!" he bellowed.

He said I had to atone and do penance. I swore I'd never eat camel again. The meeting was clearly over. Completely deflated, I began skulking out of the room in shame. The High Priest burst out laughing. "It's been enjoyable meeting... a camel-eater," he said.

Tsedaka later told me that after I left, the High Priest asked if the camel-eater had got home safely.

It was the second time I realised that Samaritans have one foot in orthodoxy and serious tradition, and another in a world of humour - and a friendly acceptance of visitors who come to learn about them.

Our Unique World is a BBC Travel series that celebrates what makes us different and distinctive by exploring offbeat subcultures and obscure communities around the globe.
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When people call someone a 'good Samaritan', they may know the parable of the good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke, where a Samaritan helped a man who was beaten, stripped of his clothes and left by the roadside to die. But they probably don't know that there are hundreds of ancient Israelite Samaritans still living today.