Polish Presidential Election

[posted June 20th, 2010 at 5:00 am]
Polish_Election-14

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been 60 days since the Polish President died in a tragic accident. I wrote about it a bit in this post.

On Saturday, I woke up at 3:45AM, had a good breakfast and walked over to the Polish Consulate on 37th and Madison to take part on an election commission. I felt honored to be partaking in this momentous occasion for Poland. There were 8 of us selected to administer the voting process, make sure the records and details were accurate, oversee the vote and certify the results.

The process was really interesting; I’ll go into detail with photographs so you can understand how it works.

Voting always takes place in Poland on Sunday. All the Consulates in the United States did their voting on Saturday, so the time change would line up properly. By the time we were finished, Poland had already been voting for several hours.

The first people were allowed in to vote at 6AM, but when I arrived at the consulate, I saw several people who had been waiting to vote since 3AM.

When I came in, the setup process had just begun. I took a photo [...read more...]

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Grieving with Poland

[posted April 14th, 2010 at 12:56 am]
candles

As we all know, a tragedy of large proportions occurred this past Saturday, where Polish President Lech Kaczynski, First Lady Maria Kaczynska and other top officials and clergy were killed in a plane crash in Russia. They were on their way to a ceremony commemorating the massacre of Katyn 70 years ago. Their blood was spilled on the site where thousands upon thousands of people were slaughtered in the past.

This week has been extremely emotional for all Polish people, whether in Poland or living in other countries. We are all grieving and mourning for this great loss.

Today, I went to the Polish Consulate in New York to write in the Book of Condolences and I had the chance to photograph our way of dealing with this painful situation. While I was there, the Consul General of Albania came, along with other people representing various nations. I saw people crying, bowing to the photograph of President Kaczynski and his wife and lighting candles.

Due to this horrible tragedy, Speaker of the Sejm, Bronislaw Komorowski, has declared the national mourning in Poland to be from April 10th through April 16th, 2010.

Please come to the Polish Consulate, located at [...read more...]

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