Archive for the ‘Rwanda’ Category
From the Department of Locally Appropriate Transportation
On a listserve that functions as classified ads for mzungus and upper class Rwandans in Kigali, someone recently advertised a car for rent: Rent RAV 4 FOR $80 PER DAY. we accept rent this cars only 10days and more. Rent new Brand Grand Vitar, 2008 for 120$ per day….Buy and rent quickly Which garnered this [...]
Remembering the genocide: Three snapshots
I am hoping to put together a quick multimedia thing to share tomorrow or Friday. Meantime, here are three snapshots from today’s Walk to Remember and the memorial at Amahoro Stadium. A young man in the purple memorial scarf looks at the crowd preparing to walk from Parliament to the stadium. An old woman and [...]
It’s that time again
It’s genocide memorial day, although that’s the wrong way to think about it. Today is the day they’ve chosen to commemorate the beginning of the genocide, though really how do you peg the exact time? The president’s plane went down in the evening; the soldiers in his army and the militias they had trained put [...]
Muraho! And with that: How should we cover the genocide commemoration?
I’ve finally landed back in Kigali, where I’ll be for the foreseeable future. That silence? That was me packing up my life… Shortly, Rwanda will be consumed by remembering the 1994 genocide. The stories and photographs are already starting to appear. Today, the NYT Lens Blog has some portraits of survivors, some of the rather [...]
Farm aid from space
This is the title of my newest Christian Science Monitor article, which is actually about weather-indexed insurance programs in sub-Saharan Africa. All kinds of cool science-and-tech stuff has come together in the last five years to allow big insurance companies to offer super-small insurance policies — low-premiums, comparatively low-payout, to the usually poor, always vulnerable [...]
African poverty is falling. (Seriously.) Maybe it’s the tourism? (Doubt it.)
The ridiculously digitally prolific Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points to a new paper from an MIT-Columbia team of authors who’ve found that across the board, poverty is falling in Africa. Not just in certain kinds of countries, with certain advantageous histories or certain huge amounts of minerals…everywhere. (In a sentence that has to have [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [