Scavenging

Man Claims God Led Him to Buried Treasure

Claiming to have seen visions of God revealing the location of a buried treasure, a man has hired a crew to conduct an all-out search in southern Louisiana’s bayou country. According to  The Daily Iberian, Mike Hulin and his team have been at it for three months, and “there has been much testimony from workers who … stand behind Hulin’s beliefs that something is there. Workers have said they were skeptical at first, but after witnessing things Hulin predicted come true  at the site, many are now believers.” After the hole they have been digging collapsed four times, they built a safety wall around it to forestall another collapse. No luck, though: It collapsed a fifth time.

“We gave everybody the weekend off after it fell again,” Hulin said. “But when God puts something in your spirit like this, you don’t need much time to come back to it.”

Now Hulin has hired welders to build a metal box that will be dropped into the hole to support the earth surrounding it. An excavating machine will then be dropped into the box.

Aubry Dauterive, one of the first people to dig at the site with Hulin, said Hulin told him he would find something at around 17 feet, and “sure enough, he was right within 2 or 3 feet.” They found a wooden plank which was sent for testing to Louisiana State University.

Gallic Gleaners Going Strong

Gleaners have been quietly foraging in France for centuries. They’re the subject of Jean-François Millet’s famous 1857 painting The Gleaners (seen on the left-hand side of the montage above). And they’re the subject of Agnes Varda’s 2001 documentary The Gleaners and I. What are French gleaners up to lately? The Observers visits a few, with pictures showing them gathering discarded produce in trash bins and on the ground where farmers’ markets have been. One gleaner from Aix-en-Provence explains that he lives on 90 euros a month: “I started looking through bins because I was hard-up. … Now it’s become a way of life. I pick up everything. … I go gleaning at the market when I wake up in the morning. With what we get we make a soup. And on the market we don’t get any bother from the stall owners. … Homeless people never scavenge. They watch us from the bench, drinking their beers. … But between ourselves, we chat and swap products. We help each other. If someone finds a crate full of cauliflowers, he’ll hand them out to others.”

A new report issued by the Centre d’Etude et de Recherche sur la Philanthropie lists many forms of modern French scavenging and reveals that it’s remarkably common and practiced by people in all walks of life. Among other goals, the report’s authors hope that supermarkets will change their policies and improve access to their unsold merchandise.