Foreign Correspondent Margot Kiser
Letters to Annie from Kaftanistan
Words and Images in Transit
Salah is Islamic prayer worshipers practice five times a day – the way the worshipers hold their hands conveys to me humility and surrender. The intense look in that child’s eyes tells me I was intruding on a deeply intimate moment.
https://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=4680918613205″ width=”1280″ height=”720″ frameborder=”0″> Maulidi is the Swahili (East African coast) traditional celebration of the birth of Prophet Muhammed. Muslims as far away as the Comoros and Zanzibar meet in Lamu, Kenya for the annual festival. Lamu Old Town is one of the oldest and best preserved Swahili settlements along African’s east coast, which UNESCO […]
In July 2012 the British High Commission donated a $100K high speed patrol boat to Lamu Administration police to help protect the Lamu Archipelago’s once pirate-infested waters between the fabled tourist destination and Somalia. The High Commission said it planned to donate a second boat to the Kenya Defense Forces. Whichever of the two boats […]
Read my award-winning Newsweek story about the tourist kidnappings. byliner.com/margot–kiser/stories/filter/award_winners Paradise revised. Difficult to imagine that anything bad can happen in a place this beautiful. Manda island, 2011 Glassy waters on approach to Marie Dedieu’s grass hut. Like fruit on an outdoor stand almost anyone living the Robinson Crusoe dream was ripe for the plucking. […]
Icons of celebrity and revolution. I would take Che Guevara over Bob Dylan any day of the week. Room for interpretation.
I gave what I’m told was a great presentation about Somali piracy and “ruthless tactics of tourist kidnaps” at this anti-piracy conference held this time in Brussels. Hope to share with the experts what happened to our community, how will military forces better protect international waters, as well as get an idea of what security […]
I arrived in Seychelles (to attend a global counter-piracy conference) without my yellow-colored yellow fever card. I haven’t been asked for that in fifteen years. Authorities at the airport rounded up those besides me who also didn’t have theirs and made us all stand to the side like delinquent school children. Eventually, we were given […]
My first steps in Montana were during an unusually cool and rainy August in 1987. We stayed a week at Warren Oates’s crib in the Paradise Valley and spent evenings paying respects to the Bogart-like character actor by meditating (sort of) near his grave behind the house. Thank you, Randy, for having first introduced me […]
Nosing around London about a story eventually relating to Nairobi’s plastic surgery businesses I met some twenty-somethings, who told me about an inner city district called Camden, on the outskirts of London and not far from Abbey Road studios. Forget the punk hairdos, my new friends said. Their peers prance about Camden High street sporting […]
As a primer for my impending trip to Somalia, my friend, an attorney, picked me at Muthaiga club this Sunday to stroll the “streets” of Eastleigh, an ad hoc city within Nairobi that first sprouted as a refugee camp of sorts after wore broke out in Somalia in the early 90’s. It has since mushroomed […]
