I can never remember the start of things, the way they begin, the very first tender stirrings of memory—I am more clear on the way that they end. It is fall now, and the trees are blazing toward winter in a last desperate golden show, as if by exploding in artistic showers of shed leaves…
“I have crossed so many rivers I no longer get wet” One evening this summer, just as the light was beginning to fade and the intense summer heat began to give way to cooler evening breezes, in a brightly lit youth center in Downtown Houston, a group of women and girls gathered for a Chinese…
Last week a student asked me why I became a writer, and more than that, a teacher, and although I usually reach for the easy answers—I loved to read, and I loved to talk about reading—suddenly I find myself really answering the question, find myself telling her about walking into a classroom to teach my…
Prepare your area. For most this is the kitchen, but it can be done in backyards, cultural halls, church gyms, and parks—even gathered around temporary tables in a brightly lit corner of a conference center, as we found during the service portion of the U.N. Civil Society Conference in Salt Lake City, when over 4,000…
When I started college I had a battered old backpack, dark green, filled with books and pencils and notebooks. It was faded and fraying at the edges, the leather bottom scuffed and scratched, and had already seen a year or two of wear as I dragged it through the last little bit of high school.…
Nestled at the foot of a string of majestic mountains, so tall their tops are wreathed in clouds and mist, lies a long, green valley that used to be a part of the ancient silk road, a trading route from China to the West. Noorani Barkat grew up here in the Baltistan region of Pakistan,…
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…