The fishermen, beaded with sweat, heroically pulled up the nets from the Red Sea and extracted the fish, big looking things, that they handled like trophies before tossing them back into a long ice chest.
Read More »Last Visit to the Gulf of Aden Part 3
With a wad of khat wadded discreetly in his cheek, his calloused fingers inched the volume up on the SUV’s stereo. A USB stick plugged into a cigarette lighter adaptor fed blaring traditional Somali lute classics over the worn speakers.
Read More »Why I Made a COVID-19 Horror Movie
Coronut is an expression of my anxieties documented during a family vacation we took during the first lockdown phase of COVID-19 in 2020. It's a carnival grotesque, if you will, inspired by The Blair Witch Project, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, and Albert Camus' The Plague.
Read More »Acequia Part 1: Introducción
The first time this movie was screened it was on the back wall of Tijeras church for the East Mountains of New Mexico’s centennial celebration. Ten minutes before the start of the show the entire ...
Read More »In the Shadow of the Hot Sun: Aid Effectiveness & Informal Economies in the Digital Era
The shortcomings of foreign assistance, the potential of new technologies, and what the First World could learn from the Third. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O56AXbm2CzU] The Price of Assistance Even with the stopover in Switzerland, the ride from ...
Read More »Blending In: VS Naipaul’s Masks and Those Who Wear Them
One should never judge a book by its cover, but I chose to read V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River because I liked the photograph on the front of the man wearing a mask. ...
Read More »Developing Dictators: The Problem with Foreign Aid in Uganda
Searching for Sustainability Uganda, an East African country about the size of Oregon, has often been referred to as the poster child of Sub-Saharan development, but lately this title has been questioned. In the 1980s, ...
Read More »Of Crime and Camels
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkSwrGHorfY&w=425&h=349; float=”left”] A few days ago, in the late afternoon, two men stopped a taxi driver at a junction in Soweto East, Kibera. They were thieves running from a crime and needed a ...
Read More »There’s a Hole in the Bucket
I’m sitting in a ramshackle compound in Silanga village, one of the deepest and most neglected areas of Kibera slum, with an impossible task. As one of the Water and Sanitation health workers on this ...
Read More »Slumming it in Kibera
A year later and I’m back in East Africa. This time I’m working on Water Sanitation and Hygiene research for my University in Kibera Slum, Nairobi. Kibera is one of the largest slums in the ...
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