Water Wars: Ethiopia and Kenya
Notable Entry, Interactive Narratives. 2008 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.
Pulitzer Gateway: Water Wars
Visit the interactive Water Wars Web Portal, sponsored by the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting.
Kibera: Not a Drop to Drink
The long rainy season in Kenya has begun and sudden storms regularly burst over Nairobi. Many welcome the downpours, which signal the end of another dry summer and wash the steamy crowded capital clean each morning.
As featured in Women's eNews, 1h2o.org, and Living on Earth. Produced in association with the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting.
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Common Language Project Blog, 2007
Back to Africa on a Water Mission
Some of my toughest times growing up in Kenya were those spent on my way to and from the village river. I call it the village river because it was by and large the only source of water for my village. Never mind the fact that the river was four miles away and was shared among scores of villages along its course.
Like other countries on the east coast of Africa, Kenya has no cold or warm season as understood in the West; rather it has a dry and a wet season. During the wet season, people collect the rainwater in all manner of water reservoirs ranging from small plastic bottles to dams. On a good wet season, the collected water is expected to sustain a family and their livestock for months.
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.
In Our Backyard
It’s visiting day at the Northwest Detention Center. The facility, opened three years ago to hold undocumented people awaiting deportation, is set among a tangle of industrial roads near downtown Tacoma. A distant midday sun reflects new spirals of razor wire circling the low grey building as a middle-aged Sikh man and a frightened looking Hispanic family approach the line of police armed with plastic handcuffs and padded gear, here to guard the entrance against today’s planned protests.
What’s Democracy Got to Do With It?
Not too long ago, I found myself on the balcony of the youth radio station in Thimphu, Bhutan. I was having a discussion with a new radio host at the station, 13-year-old Tenzin “Sora” Tshewang. The skater shoe and hoodie-clad young man spoke impeccable English and had just begun volunteering as a DJ for the station’s popular call-in request show ‘Youth Unplugged’. A familiar back and forth took place before he went on the air: ‘Favorite bands?’ I asked. Jimmy Eat World and Daft Punk. ‘TV show?’ Dragon Ball Z.
To Be (Or Not To Be) An Independent Journalist
There’s some pretty powerful propaganda out there romanticizing my profession. Whether it’s Blood Diamond’s Jennifer Connelly scooping the dirt on an evil civil war, dodging bullets and out flirting African militiamen only long enough to fall in love with Leonardo DiCaprio and pull down the greedy international diamond cabal — or the stoic portrayal of Edward R. Murrow exposing the free-speech hating Senator McCarthy as America watched on the evening news in last year’s Good Night and Good Luck, I can understand why some of my idealistic peers might want to pursue a career in journalism. I did.
Reflections from Pakistan
I was in Pakistan for a little over a month last year reporting on the issue of bonded labor and debt slavery in the country. Though Pakistan was only one of the ten countries I visited in an eight-month tour, it looms the largest in my memory. I was fascinated by this country so at odds with itself: as feudal as it is modern, as isolated from as it is harassed by the international community, as hospitable as it is hostile. But the real reason Pakistan is still on my mind is because America won’t let me forget it.