Field Notes

The smell of rotting garbage in hot humid air; trickles of raw sewage draining down concrete troughs etched in a narrow lane between high walls connecting a maze of cinder-block houses. The first iron door on the ...

Preseident Durantes program of eliminating drugs through sanctioning  dead squads,  has  it’s roots in the notion of  a program called “The Peoples’ Watch”  or “Masa Masid” which would allow ...

In 1996 I spent  over two months travelling  with a circus that was meant to curb the trauma of children who found themselves on the streets of Ethiopia.  Ethiopia has a long history of  political strife and ...

The top of Pagoda Hill is a boat ride, a truck ride and two days’ walk from Manerplaw, and light years away from everything sane. I am wet with perspiration and aching from exhaustion after hours of climbing to a ...

“Sweat runs off the faces of the two boys, 17 and 20 years old, who crouch in the front trench with us. After each shell hits they strain their eyes to see through the dust, and over the logs piled in front of the ...

Yet another warning, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concerning the inevitability of the dire consequences of Climate Change. Persuading politicians, in bed with the hydrocarbon industries, to ...

More than two decades after democracy, the ‘rainbow nation’ of South Africa has come a long way in shedding the segregationist ideas and practices of the past.  Still, for many, the remnants of the ...

For 99% of mankind’s existence, we have been hunters and gatherers.  Our current affluence is but a brief moment in human history.  Yet, we impose our will and influence on people whose way of life is just ...

A group of Dani women chew palm wood heart into a pulp that they use to soak up the brine from ponds, their source of salt for thousands of years. They carry the spongy wet mass back to their village in palm leaves, ...