Burness Global: Stories

It was a traffic jam, but one that consisted of a shiny TATA tanker truck parked in the narrow lane, dozens and dozens of plastic buckets and curved steel pots of all sizes, and people who seemed to be racing against time to make sure every one of those containers in the road was filled with fresh water.

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I saw a ring in one of the jeweler’s stores that was nearly big enough around for two of my fingers. What woman, I wondered, could possibly wear a ring that big? Haven’t you noticed the women’s hands here? Lo replied. It wasn’t until several days later, in Ain Chaib, that I understood.

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On the first of the seven-day trip, one of my relatives began having dreadful intestinal issues, including pain and cramping that almost immobilized him. All he wanted in life then was a constantly-refilled bottle of filtered water and long naps on the padded benches on the houseboat’s covered deck.

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At a conference in Nairobi that focused on how more trees on farms could help reverse climate change, Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai had a story to tell. It was about a fire that broke out in a huge forest.

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We approached a man carrying a machete and what looked like the trunk of an oil palm tree. In French, one of us asked, “Why do you bury dead here, in front of your house?”

He smiled. “So that they can watch over me and my family,” he said.

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At the start of the story-telling festival at L’Alliance Française, a cultural center in the heart of Nairobi, the host imposed a condition on the audience: we must promise to share the stories we hear. “Deal?” he asked. “Deal” we answered. “Sawa sawa,” he said, and the storytelling began, the first from Kenya.

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As the sun began to set around 3 p.m. in Poznan, Poland, where I was attending the 2008 UNFCCC Climate Change Conference, I couldn’t help but wonder why this city was picked to host the huge event. I knew from an earlier Wikipedia search that it was the fifth largest city in Poland and one [...]

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In the window, I glimpse a book that immediately takes me back years, to my days of trekking in the uplands north of Nairobi and down into the Rift Valley with four Green Belt Movement members. We went village to village to speak to women about planting trees across their treeless lands.

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MUMIAS, Kenya — Margaret Musambi is one of those rare people who likes to expand her job responsibilities to have a greater impact on people’s lives. She is an extension agent for Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, based here in the western part of the country. Musambi’s passion in the last few years has been to [...]

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For me, the AIDS2008 conference in Mexico City this August opened in the lobby of a hotel in the Zona Rosa, where a French human rights activist — a young woman with short spiky hair — was trying unsuccessfully to communicate with a trans-gender sex worker from Mexico, a woman with shoulder-length dark hair and [...]

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