When Victor “V’key” Ochieng Jumah was nine years old and living on the streets — a “garbage eater,” as they are dubbed in local slang — he learned to mug and rob white foreigners, often scaring them first by smearing oil on his face and feces on his hands.

“Just seeing me like that, the women would scream and hand over whatever money they had,” he said. He also developed an easy intimacy with bare ground for a bed, plastic bags for a toilet, discarded food scraps for meals, and a culture of aggression that included drugs, knives and, eventually, guns.

I didn’t go to Kenya to interview street kids. I traveled there to finish researching an upcoming novel. But in the capital, I couldn’t avoid seeing the homeless kids who roam Nairobi streets like watchful phantoms, feared as much as they are pitied and avoided more than they are helped.

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Womens eNews

BORALGY, Kenya–Amina Ali gestured at the cloudless sky, her voice rising in anger as she recalled how the region’s worst drought in a generation wiped out her entire herd of 40 goats, leaving her to face her final years with no milk, no meat, no means of support.

“We are forgotten people,” she said, sitting on the dusty ground beneath a searing sun in Kenya’s remote North East Province, a string of prayer beads around her neck. “I am 80 years old. I had nine children. Now what can I do? Sometimes food aid arrives, but the young people grab it first. So I go hungry, often for days.”

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It Always Does (published by FictionWarehouse.com)

He brought her stories, long and intricate narratives that he laid at her feet like a dog with a bone. She would have preferred love, or at least more of his wild, open-hearted sex, but that was complicated; after all, he lived in another time zone and the divorce, far beyond messy, had left him in debt. For weeks, he’d camped out in his friend’s van - demoralizing for a middle-aged man. He had an apartment now, on the third floor in a rough neighborhood. He had a son also, and that’s where his energy needed to go. Stories were what he could manage for her.
“Baby with Eggshell Coat”
painting by Erica Harris

So she took them, silently, knowing that one day they would fade away too. It is what it is what it is, she told herself, a mantra. And sometimes she reminded herself it was best this way, that her own life was nowhere near as chaotic as his, was in fact relatively serene, and that’s how she liked it.

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Womens eNews

Women still face obstacles in a country where their voices are ignored and the law is stacked against them.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan–Musliba leans forward, holding her white scarf so that only her dark eyes are visible, and makes an open-handed gesture. She wants to explain to the foreign visitor why she’s been in jail for the last two months, but at age 12, she doesn’t quite understand herself.

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Counterpunch

Without authentic human connections, our alliances can be neither genuine nor lasting.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan–The engineer from Florida seemed the perfect seatmate on that eight-seater Cessna flight from Kabul to Kandahar over the rugged reaches of Afghanistan. It was my first visit, and he’d already been living six months in the former Taliban stronghold, overseeing the construction of highways and schools as part of the effort to rebuild the war-shattered country that America bombed in response to Sept. 11.

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Womens eNews

Women Are Heads Of Households, But Still Unemployed, In Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan–As evening approached in one of west Kabul’s poorest neighborhoods, Parwin sat outside in the waning light, trying to mend one of her daughter’s dresses with a precious bit of thread a neighbor gave her. She didn’t worry about stopping to prepare dinner. There would be no dinner that night.

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The Mothers Movement

Some risks, once measured, are worth taking.

“My desire to go to Afghanistan was fueled by a longing to know, as much as possible, what it means to be an Afghan woman today… Occasionally I felt a jolt of fear as I prepared for the journey. So much was unknown, and so much of the news from there was bad.”

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Miami Herald

After the silence of the Taliban years, Afghanistan is beginning to hum again.

KABUL - In a small room snuggled into the war-damaged buildings of Kharabat Street, Zahed Nodar sits cross-legged on a maroon carpet, inhales deeply and closes his eyes as if to shut out the blare of car horns, the shouts of men pulling wooden carts, the scent of wood smoke and rotting fruit, his own years spent fleeing the fighting.

Then he nods to his fellow band members, leans over his armonia and begins to play with a passion that makes his rich, lined face look far younger and the audience feel larger than four.

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Arizona Daily Star

Sounds of gunfire and prayer mix in the West Bank

Jerusalem — The golden hills of the West Bank are filled with families working in the shade of silver-leafed trees, their arms moving with the rhythm of a conductor’s baton. Sometimes they sing or trade jokes, cheerful with thoughts of the money their labor will bring. But often they are quiet, the sway of branches the only sound. It is the season of olive picking in ancient Judea and Samaria.

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MOSCOW - Valia brought over her special mushroom-shaped glass jars the other day. I watched while she wrapped the end of a pencil in a vodka-soaked cotton ball and set it afire. She held the burning stick inside each container for a minute, pulled it out and slapped the hot jars, one by one, down on my bare back.

As I lay there on my stomach, she brought a mirror so I could see red welts of my skin being sucked inside the jars. This was not a comforting sight.

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