retriever & bearer of indigenous Afrikan lifeways
For the English version click here La Ciudad de México es una de las más grandes del mundo con una populación de 21 millones de gente. De esta casi un tercero vive en barrios informales, o sin servicios básicas. Además, como muchas otras ciudades, Ciudad de México es segregada por clases sociales y económicas. En este ambiente surgió un programa de mejoramiento de barrios que está cambiando los barrios por…
I managed to attend two side sessions of the UN environment assembly last week thanks to my communications consultancy for the waste management company Takataka Solutions. I was duly impressed. The conference was focused on the environmental aspects of the sustainable development goals (which include goals like peace and justice and inequality). The format was assembly meetings of states, and side presentations from states, non-profits and business entities on the…
A panel discussion at the 2016 Wellesley College Impact Albright Symposium that I attended focused on the 2nd Sustainable Development Goal, namely, ‘End Hunger by 2030’. Weighing in on the panel titled, ‘Can We End Hunger by 2030? Will We?’, were former UN World Food Programme Executive Director, Catherine Bertini; chief of staff of the International Food and Policy Research Institute, Rajul Pandya-Lorch; former IFPRI director general and professor at…
“Poetry is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without” Wallace Stevens One evening many years ago, I stood up in a modestly filled room at the Goethe Institut, Nairobi, walked somewhat unsurely to a seat at the front and read some poems from my ‘Pink book’ notebook collection of poetry. The event was a poetry night and they had exhausted the list of people who had…
This cold that takes residence in, chills, and sets your bones. You’re seated inside but you might as well have been walking outside in a Wellesley winter. Seated in these stone houses: borrowed, gifted, stolen, forced- they were not meant for the unwarmed cold. They come with chimneys, diligently built into every sitting room. And as diligently used to prop wooden flowerpots, store old newspapers, and confound the odd bat…
Climate change, changes to long-standing weather patterns in response to changes in the atmosphere (forcings), is happening today, perhaps has always been happening. In our world today, the largest forcing is human produced greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and other byproducts of various human activities. Change can mean different things for different people depending on where one is. It could mean more rainfall, warmer dry spells, frequent intense storms,…