Women in Nepal Face Abuse, but the Real Problem Is Nobody Wants to Talk About It
It is a chilly night in a rural hospital in Nepal. I have been asked to attend to Sita Devi, who is lying in a pool of blood as nurses rush around her. A mother of three young daughters, she is four months pregnant. And badly beaten. A local fortune teller has told her husband …
Empowering Farmers on the Kenyan Coast
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that over 795 million people in the world are affected by severe hunger and poverty. The majority of these people live off the land, many as smallholder farmers. Their farms often have unproductive soils and are dependent on increasingly erratic rainfall patterns. When crops do grow, they are …
Why My Mom Didn’t Say ‘I Love You’ For 11 Years
Earlier this year on my 40th birthday, my mother sent me a text that said, "I love you." This was the first time she said this to me since I publicly came out as gay on Nigerian television in 2004. A few months before my birthday, my father called me. We had not spoken in almost ten years. He …
Now Obama’s coming to town, can we talk about fighting terror without ethnic profiling?
With Nairobi preparing to welcome US President Barack Obama and Westgate Mall about to reopen after the deadly 2013 terror attack, it would be a timely moment to hear about efforts to repair trust in Kenya’s security forces and to ensure that they do not unfairly target minorities and foreigners. This silence is particularly deafening …