Foreign Correspondent Margot Kiser
Letters to Annie from Kaftanistan
LONDON, England – On June 14th a 24-story public housing apartment building caught fire killing at least 80. A faulty freezer-fridge in an apartment sparked the blaze, but police say flammable insulation and exposed gas pipes along the building’s only staircase fueled it. The death toll is expected to rise, so it’s no wonder police […]
I spent the last several weeks in Tucson helping my mother transition to “independent living” after she’d suffered a mild heart attack and stroke. The first takeway – in Tucson (and probably in most retirement communities) elder care is not a service, it’s an industry. Before her discharge from the hospital a case manager told […]
“The Americans are very complicated, aren’t they? On the one hand they are helping us by building roads, dispensaries, schools, but they also seem to want to kill us.”
OMANعمامه A Dubai-based pilot and friend suggested I visit Salalah, a port town on the southern tip of Oman. He told me to visit from June to September or in January, when the monsoon rains paint the sun-baked desert a brilliant green. “What’s the story with Oman?,” I asked a Yemeni friend. “There is […]
Sailing dhows made of garbage, crusaders, flying low over a baobab-packed forest, guerrilla warfare, Maulidi festival, tattooed and “bearded badasses”. This year I seemed to be at a loss for words. For most of last year I stayed in Lamu. I wanted to keep a close eye on a military operation.
A Kenyan man was shot dead last week outside the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi after he stabbed a GSU police officer guarding the compound. Police identified the knife-wielder as Abdimahat Ibrahim Hassan, a 22 year-old from Wajir, in northern Kenya. Much of northern Kenya has been inhabited by ethnic Somalis before and since the nation’s […]
Coffee table books and novels about Africa with ‘Africa’ in their titles seem to stand a better chance of becoming best sellers, or so I hear. “Out of Africa”, “Nowhere in Africa”, “I Dream of Africa” would seem to suggest so. By that formula nothing would sell Africa better than a DVD cover featuring Brad […]
On October 9, 1967, Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, was executed by US Special Forces-trained Bolivian Army. A few months previously “El Che” had traveled to Africa to offer his guidance as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. To get back to his support base in Bolivia, the Marxist diplomat disguised himself as a […]
