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Troubled Waters
Lake Victoria's waters have begun to fall dramatically in recent years. Climate change, hydroelectric dam projects and increasing pressure on its threatened resources have some environmentalists suggesting the lake may be destroyed within twenty years.
As featured on PBS's Foreign Exchange with Daljit Dhaliwal.
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Julia Marino's East Africa Blog
Ailing in Addis
A classic form of torture is the practice of ripping off the fingernails of the victim until the information is forcefully and mercilessly extracted.
For a CLP reporter, a single fingernail torn out by the quick bite of a rusty folding chair, to the smell of unpalatable spaghetti, only evokes sympathetic questions.
And while such a bloody episode is more often dealt with by the likes of a fictional character played by George Clooney in the sociopolitical montage Syriana, my encounter was very real, any scandalous or covert activity notwithstanding.
On the contrary, my absurd experience at St. Gabriel's hospital in Addis Ababa exposed me to the realities of healthcare in Eastern Africa, and provoked me to look further into healthcare availability and costs while comparing the Ethiopian system to healthcare realities in the United States.
Heading South Part 3: A Night at the Yabello Motel
The white Toyota Hilux glowed as it pulled up in the middle of the unrecognizable night to what was the small, destined village of Arero. In my comatose daze, I was astounded by the reality of our arrival, our minds and bodies unscathed, curious, and ready for a warm bed and an Aspirin. At that moment, I realized that part of me believed we would navigate the nebulous, jarring road forever, the truck jerking to and fro rapturously, repeatedly, sending our bags up in the air before stopping urgently to change another bald tire. Such an experience erases all consciousness of time, all understanding of place. Yet, once the moment sinks in, its unfamiliarity can create a sense of peace even amid chaos.
To See a World in a Grain of Sand
As I sit here in my drafty college apartment in Athens, Ohio, I begin to recollect a few remarkable moments in my life. Moments I like to call "a-ha! moments," that have not only stirred inspiration in me, but have shaped what I am about to experience in the approaching months - a multimedia reporting trip to eastern Africa with the independent, nonprofit news magazines The Common Language Project and Afrikanews.org.
One of my first "a-ha! moment" occurred as an idealistic 17-year-old foreign correspondent/ columnist for my high school paper while living in Cochabamba, Bolivia. For six months I explored the issues ranging from carnival, coca eradication, globalization and poverty. It was there along the Andean valleys that I realized what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I saw stories all around me that were just waiting to be illuminated, and I wanted to uncover them.