I’ve made it my mission to tell the sorts of stories that tend to go untold. This drive has taken me to a week long Vodou festival in Souvenance, Haiti and to the beaches roamed by child sex workers in Mombasa, Kenya. I’ve talked to artists in the world’s second largest refugee camp, a self-taught engineer who hopes to bring aquaponics to Abu Dhabi, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., a model who walks the runway in both menswear and womenswear, T.S.A. officials, Congressman Keith Ellison, a man who studies the sounds fish make, a man who studies the impact of wiring electricity into the brain, a man who tracks the blackmarket sale of conflict antiquities, a woman who had an ISIS-themed wedding in Egypt, a woman who runs a chain of luxury hotels in Myanmar, a Massachusetts State House lobbyist, mourners outside of an Apple store after Steve Jobs’ death, a pair of ghost hunters, and two teenage sisters who ran away from female genital mutilation in Kenya and a group of women working to the end the practice in the U.S. The list goes on. And so does my work. Here's a small sampling of it. -- B.A.
Kenya is one of nearly 80 countries where same-sex relations are illegal.
“If we know that they are really LGBT, then we go in and arrest them because it’s not allowed in Kenya,” said Joseph Ole Kina, the head of the police in Kilifi, a county just outside of Mombasa.
Opportunistic crime and little recourse for violence add to the threats LGBT Kenyans face.
“’Now you’ll pay me for my silence,’” a client who refused to pay for sex told Musa, an gay sex worker whose name has been changed. “’You should pay me or I’ll tell everyone that you’re a sex worker and you’re gay. Choose one.'"
CLICK HERE TO READ MY ARTICLE FOR THINKPROGRESS ABOUT HOW LGBT SEX WORKERS GET BY IN A COUNTRY WHERE BOTH HOMOSEXUALITY AND SEX WORK ARE CRIMINALIZED.
“'Even if I give up dancing, everyone will still call me a hijra so what’s the point? Why not do what I love?'” She adds that even if she were to become a traveling evangelist, her family would still regard her with the same disdain. 'I’m better off staying a hijra.'
While they occupy a marginalized space across Pakistan, hijras are probably worst off in Peshawar. In all of the other major cities in the country, they are frequent sites at traffic intersections or in shopping centers where they offer a prayer for a few rupees. Many passersby fear denying them might mean a curse and so will either oblige quickly or turn away completely."
CLICK HERE TO READ MY ARTICLE FOR VICE ABOUT THE TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY IN ONE OF PAKISTAN'S MOST CONSERVATIVE CITIES.
[Photos by Abdul Majeed Goraya.]
Many parents, even those who are religious themselves, discourage their kids from praying in public or wearing headscarves—things that would "out" them as Muslims, and, they fear, invite prejudice or violence. They certainly have reason to do so: Just under half of all American Muslims polled by Gallup in 2010 said that they have experienced discrimination based on their faith—the highest percentage among any faith group surveyed.
CLICK HERE TO READ MY ARTICLE FOR VICE ABOUT HOW MUSLIM PARENTS TALK TO THEIR CHILDREN ABOUT THEIR SAFETY AFTER THREE YOUNG MUSLIMS WERE SHOT DEAD IN CHAPEL HILL, N.C.
[Photo by David Shankbone Wikimedia Commons.]
“[In Syria], I drew all different types of things, but here…I reflect the reality of being here. Now, I look at things through my true feelings, so art has become darkness,” Mahmoud al Hariri told ThinkProgress in a Skype interview from Za’atari, the world’s second largest refugee camp where he lives along with some 85,000 other Syrian refugees.
“Here in Za’atari now, I draw destruction,” al Hariri said through a translator. “Instead of seeing nature and flowers that come in all different colors and all different styles, instead I see the white and black of destroyed buildings, the smoke that rises after war and destruction. There aren’t flowers left in Syria that we would look at and appreciate.”
Al Hariri is part of a collective of seven artists who meet on a weekly basis through support from the Arlington, VA-based, International Relief and Development (IRD). The artists – all men – came together in October of 2014 to form a collaborative space to create and share their drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Their work, featured here, has never before been shown outside of Jordan.
CLICK HERE TO READ MY ARTICLE ABOUT SYRIA'S DISPLACED ARTISTS FOR THINKPROGRESS.
"She was rude. She was impolite, and I thought, 'Oh my God, [it's the] end of the day and here is a difficult client,"' [Mussarat] Misbah recalls in lilting English from her office in Depilex’s Lahore headquarters.
Her exasperation turned to shock when the woman removed her veil. 'I sat down because I thought there was no life left in my legs,' she says, 'because right in front of me was a young girl who was without a face.'
'"You claim to be a beautician and go on TV to give beauty tips, now do something for me,"' the acid burn survivor demanded. These words struck a chord with Misbah, who didn’t think it was enough to provide manis and pedis to the country’s elite anymore. She vowed to help the woman before her, and when she was unable to reach her again, pressed on anyway. 'That was the beginning of [the] Depilex SmileAgain Foundation.'"
Find out more about how the head of one of Pakistan's most celebrated high-end salons came to serve acid burn survivors -- and how those survivors feel about their clients complaints of split ends or overgrown cuticles given the severe damage wrought on their faces and bodies.
CLICK HERE TO READ MY ARTICLE HOW ACID BURN SURVIVORS ARE RESTARTING THEIR LIVES IN AN UNLIKELY INDUSTRY FOR VICE.
Two years ago, an estimated 20,000 people in and around the city of Lahore contracted the deadly tropical disease. This year, the region has recorded just a few dozen cases of dengue fever, which usually involves a high fever, horrible headache, and severe bone and joint pain.
What triggered the sharp decline in dengue cases? Fortuitous weather patterns may have helped to keep the mosquito population low. But many leaders also credit a mobile phone app — and the public health campaign that uses it.
CLICK HERE TO READ OR LISTEN TO MY PIECE ABOUT HOW PAKISTAN AVERTED ANOTHER DEADLY DENGUE EPIDEMIC FOR NPR.ORG.
“They taught us only how you can handle a man,” Grace Mwase says, looking down at her hands. “So you should be dancing for the man. The man should be on top of you and you should be dancing for him, making him happy.”
The anamkungwi told the girls to lie on top of one another and get a feel for the various positions described to them. They then encouraged the girls to “practice” what they had learned. In fact, girls in Malawi are often told that if they don’t have sex upon concluding initiation, their skin will become dry and brittle. This will mark them for life, and they will be ostracized if they don't complete the custom as their mothers and grandmothers did before them. These guardians often force their daughters to go through with the ritual for fear of breaking with tradition.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE I REPORTED ABOUT THE CUSTOM OF FEMALE INITIATION IN MALAWI FOR THE ATLANTIC.
“Mañana, mañana.” That’s what a group of more than 900 Jewish people fleeing Nazi Germanywere told when their ship docked in Havana, Cuba in May 1939. But that tomorrow never came. Most of the passengers on the MS St. Louis was turned away because they had been sold fake visas by a corrupt Cuban official.
As their ship turned back towards Europe, passengers could see the glittering lights of Miami . Some of them even cabled President Franklin Delano Roosevelt begging to be allowed entry into the United States, but they were forced to return to Europe where 254 of them were eventually killed in the Holocaust.
CLICK HERE TO READ MY ARTICLE FOR THINKPROGRESS HOW THIS PIECE OF HISTORY RELATES TO CONTEMPORARY DEBATES OVER ADMITTING REFUGEES INTO AMERICA.
[Photos courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.]
"A young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station," reads an invitation by Toni Morrison for a posthumous book-launch party she threw for Dumas in 1974, six years after he died. "A transit cop" — who was white — "shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read."
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT HENRY DUMAS' STRIKING WORK AND UNTIMELY DEATH IN AN ESSAY FOR NPR'S CODESWITCH.
[Photos courtesy of Eugene B. Redmond.]