Er, well, one more (funny) thing.
I’m waiting at the airport, where there’s a fair amount of funny English. Here’s a few little gems to keep you smiling:
In the duty free, all kinds of cigarettes have all kinds of warnings on them. Marlboro is descriptive but somehow non-committal: Smoking Kills. Dunhills are rather considerate: Smoking seriously harms you and others around [...]
Offsetting my digital footprint
You can’t get on a plane or buy something significant any more without someone asking you to offset your carbon footprint. Well, that’s probably not entirely true; I imagine that from Kigali, where that’s not really an issue, but I read about this offsetting a lot.
I would like to offset my digital footprint. [...]
What to read on Pakistan?
I’ve been distracted in and by my little pocket of Central Africa, and meanwhile, Pakistan is floating away. I’ve known this, of course — I do still do all the world news headlines — but something about being reminded today that one-fifth of Pakistan is under water jarred me.
What have you read on Pakistan [...]
Read this
Tis the season of African writing in English, or at least the prize season. The Caine prize. The African Playwriting Competition. There must be others, but these are the prizes I’ve encountered in the pages of African in-flight magazines of late.
I’ve loved this moment, because while I’ve been doing some standard reporting work in the [...]
On normal — and whether it can mean turning that radio down?
I’ve been writing a lot about normalcy lately, it turns out. Somehow it emerged as a theme in my peacebuilding work, in particular in this post about Sierra Leone’s progress since its own terrible war. And one thing I keep stressing to friends and family is how normal Kigali was the night of the grenade [...]
The most entertaining 22 minutes on American radio
After all that, I needed a change of pace (see, “Self-care to prevent self-pickling”), and a friend mentioned in an email this radio program, whose first 22 minutes I think may be the single most fantastic America broadcast of all time. Even those of you who are tired of This American Life have to agree, [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [