News Flash: The Rafflesia is in Bloom!

It’s not news for the rest of the world, but it’s big news where we are.

We don’t much WiFi in the jungles of Borneo, but when we do, people download news and email and I don’t know what else. Someone made the mistake of sharing a few news items and here were the headlines:

• There was another shooting in a nightclub in Florida (I asked if their data wasn’t a month old, but it wasn’t. Apparently, this was another one.) It was another case, for some, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But who chooses what that wrong place is? It’s concerning.
• Another crazed gunman in Germany did … something. Again, we have WiFi for sometimes a matter of hours and our news is in bits and pieces. But crazed person in Germany.
• Trump was leading Clinton in some poll somewhere.

Our guide said we had a possible change in scheduling because of some big news in a neighboring village that we were passing through. We thought:

• Cancelled flights because of terrorism?
• Kidnappings from the Philippines?
• The road was washed out and we had to make a 6-hour detour?

The “news flash” (she even used those words) was something it took us a little while to comprehend. It was big news in the village and everyone was talking about it. It doesn’t happen very often and we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time. The big news?

The Rafflesia is in bloom.

It’s a flower. The news pin balling around the villages was that a flower was in bloom.

C’mon, really?