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 […]
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.
March, 2015 I’d been on the hunt for former U.S. security firm Blackwater owner, Erik Prince, for Newsweek. At the time Prince’s Malta-based logistics company, Frontier Services Group, was sending supplies and repairing oil production facilities. Contrary to some reports, sources said he’d also been training police and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army – SPLA – to […]
Portugal hardly ever seems in the news. I never gave the little country next to Spain much thought. Recently, however, a writer friend of mine and his wife first told me about Algarve, a largely undiscovered coastal region of Portugal. I haven’t seen refugees from North Africa or the Middle East yet. However, I guess […]
Random images from travels and subjects I wrote about last year.
Continue Reading
Bet you didn’t know the “Big Five” refers to the five species of game hunters favor shooting; rhinoceros, leopard, Cape buffalo, lion, and elephant remain prey to human hunters in Tanzania and South Africa. Luckily, Kenya banned hunting in the 70s. Didn’t see rhino (since they’re now protected by armed guards within confines of private […]
Mpekatoni is a small town in Lamu County on Kenya’s north coast. When initial reports came out of an attack that eventually left up to fifty dead, the international community thought it had occurred in or near Lamu Old Town on Lamu island. Mpekatoni is in fact on the mainland about 30 kilometers by car […]
MARRAKECH, Morocco – Didn’t see much of Marrakech my first week there. Didn’t even glimpse the friends I traveled from Nairobi to meet. Nor had I spent more than fifteen minutes in the swanky hotel room before receiving word that the main subject of a story I was working on – a Muslim […]
