Desde Bogotá

Desde Bogotá

Often times I work myself harder than my body is able to support, but this past month has been especially rough. And now I’m paying the price. I arrived to Bogotá yesterday morning with deep purple bags under my eyes, a sore throat, and about enough energy to...
Loneliness is Nobody Reading Me

Loneliness is Nobody Reading Me

I keep thinking back to this idea that rather than readers paying for publications, writers will eventually have to pay readers for their attention. Many – maybe most – of my friends consider themselves writers of some type. They hang onto different labels...
A Very Merry Global Birthday

A Very Merry Global Birthday

I’m in Amsterdam right now for three nearly consecutive meetings: Open Translation Tools, a Global Voices team meeting, and State of the Map. I am also now 29-years-old; dangerously close to real adulthood. Last year I spent the first half of my birthday with...
Local Street Art in Barrio El Progreso, Colombia

Local Street Art in Barrio El Progreso, Colombia

A couple months ago a French photographer and street artist who goes by JR gained a good deal of attention for his latest installation in Kibera, one of the world’s largest slums (population 1 million), located on the outskirts of Nairobi in Kenya. His work was...
Peace Blogging Along the Colombia-Venezuela Border

Peace Blogging Along the Colombia-Venezuela Border

View Larger Map Map of El Nula, a small village in the Venzuelan state of Apure along the Colombian border. One of the world’s lesser-known conflicts has endured for over a decade along the Colombia-Venezuela border. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees...
Fragments of Wakefulness II

Fragments of Wakefulness II

You’re right, absolutely right, this is said about so many things, but if you really, and I mean really, think about it, then this, this must be humankind’s very first technology. That’s what I was thinking. I cupped my hands underneath the bathroom...
Fragments of Wakefulness II

Fragments of Wakefulness I

20 days. It had already been twenty days. Twenty days in Medellín. Twenty days surrounded by the fungus-covered lime green walls of my private room at the back of the Black Sheep hostel. Twenty days of backpackers shuffling in, shuffling out, flirting,...