Posts Tagged ‘language’
There are only so many ways to say something
Earlier this week, I went through recording after recording from Sierra Leone–interviews with forced wives, and with women who suffered every denigrating crime even without being taken in marriage; interviews with ex-rebels, one so young he said he had to be taught how to rape; hour after hour of awful stories, each living in the [...]
Hearing the human, or, Why Marc Lacey is my hero
There’ve been a lot of articles about the rising price of food around the world and what it means for everything from the death of the middle class to the politics of oil nations to US agricultural subsidies to…to…to…
But Marc Lacey, one of my favorite journalists and the only individual for whom I have a [...]
Getting right speech right
I’m pretty sure I waxed rhapsodic in my graduate school essay about the importance of telling people’s stories. Stories were the one thing in the world that always made sense to me, even helped me make sense out of all the other things that didn’t. I don’t know when exactly it happened, but [...]
Is this what they mean by pidgen English?
I went with a roomie to Gisenyi today, just a quick day trip, mostly with just enough time to go down to the lake and back. We stopped at one place asking for directions, a hotel which has a separate building of apartments for rent. $200 a night—Kigali lux prices, in a place [...]
Language Lessons I
I have been taking Kinyarwanda lessons for almost three weeks now. Thank God I studied Swahili for a year; I can remember almost none of it, but all the hard work I invested in laying a neural network to make sense of noun classes and negatives is serving me well in Rwanda, where the [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [