Portland, Maine celebrates nine books set in Maine’s “new arrival” communities with a 2013 city-wide read. Writers include South Sudanese memoirist, Aruna Kenyi in The Telling’s Room’s anthology I REMEMBER WARM RAIN. High school students who are named by the NAACP as Martin Luther King Jr. Fellows introduced each […]
A teacher in my workshop at the Mass. Reading Association conference talked about the challenge of connecting her students to stories and people of other cultures. Why are you always making us read these books? they asked her, about people outside the U.S. There are a million ways […]
I have just returned from a journey from Nairobi to Kakuma village in the northern Turkana district of Kenya. Beside the village in this semi arid region is the Kakuma refugee camp currently the home of nearly 100,000 refugees from South Sudan and Somalia as well as other […]
January 4, 2013 Hello from Nairobi. I’m doing an experiment. Very hard. I finished the books I brought. A book I bought on Kindle didn’t show up on my ipad and who knows how long I can keep a charge. For a few days I am staying at […]
The Salvation Army Store looked like it was open on January 1st, the day before I leave for Kenya. I stopped and sure enough, it was. It was a vast store with an entire room of books and old record albums. Among the books were ones I was […]
Now that I have some books among my Deet and malaria pills as I head to Kenya, the journey is richer. When I read the premise of Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps, I wanted that with me. To that I’m adding Oil on Water set in Nigeria by Helon […]
It’s immersion time, six days before I leave for Kakuma. Immersion into what I can find Kenyan in New Hampshire. I found “The First Grader,” the story of a old village man who wants to go to school for the first time in his life. I am watching […]
Paul Winter, of the organization Scottie’s Place, posted this photo on a blog post. It is dated December 13, 2013. You can read the post, Life in Kakuma Refugee Camp. Scottie’s Place is an American-based nonprofit organization working to support the education of girls and young women […]
On the road with The Good Braider, I experienced an event this month of Thanksgiving that I will never forget. I’m giving thanks here to all the pIayers who not only imagined, but pulled off a Global Voices […]
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The Good Braider 