Together We Move Forward On May 15th, the Paipe community in Abuja, Nigeria, gathered in the dusty street in front of the community school to celebrate the International Day of the Family. Princess Osita-Oleribe, director of the Centre for Family Health Initiative (CFHI), spoke to over 200 participants and celebrated with song and dance—an important…
Imagine a neighborhood floating on water, where roads look like rivers, and where children play on vast bridges and verandas and rafts. Imagine a community where you take a boat to school, where you rely on water for employment, for transportation, for nourishment and sustenance. Makoko is a fishing village floating on the vast Lagos…
I’m on the elevator when the girls get on, a tightly clustered group of young women, heads together, poring over a map of the college campus, excitement and anxiety in every line of their tilted heads, in the eager way they gaze around, and reluctance with which they approach strangers and other students. It is…
Some of the most frequent questions I received when I returned from New York City after attending the Commission on the Status of Women were, “What do you do there? What is your purpose?” There are many reasons to go and many benefits of doing so, but one of the highlights for me, as a…
One of the many things that makes my father the man he is—the tinkerer; the fixer; the chauffeur even for children that are old enough to drive and really should be independent but have not quite gotten the hang of it yet; the hanger of pictures that would otherwise slant crooked on the bedroom wall;…
Here is a story for you. I walked into the museum early, before the sun was up, before the air had warmed, before the presence of others marred the still quiet contemplation that you can find in the presence of great art and the absence of great noise. The gallery was almost deserted, and I…