• ON THE GROUND

    • Mandela’s kids
      Apartheid is a state of mind. I spent a week in a township on the Cape Flats and never spotted a white person around, not even a coloured. Self-segregation is firmly in place. Whites drive fast on the freeways cutting through the endless lines of tin/plastic shacks without stopping. After dark no outsider dares to roam the dirt and volatile narrow alleys of […]
    • 2:50 p.m. Silence.
      I was standing in front of my son’s high school in Brookline, Boston, where students were supposed to stand silent for a minute exactly one week after the Marathon bombings: few seemed to care. The CNN is desperate to keep the story alive with “exclusive details” (Anderson Cooper: pressure cookers used in attack were bought at Macy’s) and meaningless “breaki […]
    • Under the Volcanos
      Thousands of flickering lamps floating in the hills and down in the valley: at night the miners leave the digging holes and flock to the village, hungrily looking for women, chanvre and cheap liquor. Drunk soldiers roam the muddy streets, girls peep from the shacks, armed youngsters sit on beer boxes outside the dens, porters pull overloaded bikes and shout […]
    • The slumalso rises
      His dad left home long before he was born, so at the age of two James had no option but to spend two and a half years behind bars at Nairobi’s Langata prison with his mother, convicted for robbery. At ten he dreamed to be a pilot but was already the youngest member of the gang in the Korogocho slum. He was smart. He was the lookout. And was the... […]
    • Sex and drugs in Fortaleza
      I came to Fortaleza, Brazil, to research on sex slavery and women’s trafficking. My friend Ruchira Gupta of Apne Aap should come over from Kolkata and see! Twelve to sixteen years old kids from the slums flock to the back street bars near Praia de Iracema every night and look for tourists, both Europeans (mainly Italians) and Brazilians, while dozens of sord […]