A few weeks have passed. After awhile the string of conversations and interviews begins to blur. The faces don’t, exactly, but the impressions they make are something like Georges Seurat’s paintings. Pointillistic — dots of red, yellow, blue, white, and black. Assembled close up, each fleck means too little. Taken from afar, the whole is… Read More
My 24 year old landlady, the R&B rapper, Wangechi Waweru Mwende, survived a horrific car accident four years ago. Today she’s rebuilding her life and career without much fuss or desire to talk about either. I happen to have chosen the house she lives in with her Mom, Nancy Wangaru Migwi. The two share a modest… Read More
Try making judgements about human beings and groups and tribes and nations just by what you read in the media. Then, go out into the streets. Hire a bilingual Uber/Littlecub/Taxify driver in Nairobi to take you to Chinese-Kenyan construction sites, as I did. His name is Edward Njogu (the latter name in Kikuyu dialect means… Read More
I wrote the story on Indonesia’s attempts at natural disaster warning and prevention for Earth magazine last April, based on reporting I did in Indonesia in late December. Now with the Sulawesi quake and tsunami disaster, I print it below. The sheer unpredictability of quakes and tsunamis in a nation of 6000 inhabited islands spread… Read More