I wonder if everyone who goes to Kabul for the first time keeps a diary. I know I did. In Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit, Toby Ralph writes about one of the most fascinating and frustrating countries in the world. He spent two weeks there as an ...
Continue readingThe controversy that surrounds him concerns a time when he was seen talking to the militia, It is not known what the conversation was about nor his motives, but the result means that he is a very controversial figure. Despite this Ntihabose, hims...
Continue readingAmadou Cisse had been working for several months on opening his new venture, a restaurant in Djenne, one of Mali’s most famous places after Timbuktu. A Unesco World Heritage site, it is the oldest known city in sub-Saharan Africa, and the magnific...
Continue readingI have already overstayed by several weeks my planned journey of only a few days, sucked into the Kabul vortex. Despite the fact that it’s a warzone and talk is that the country is going to hell in a hand-basket, life is good. It’s probably reall...
Continue readingOutside a nan shop, just as evening falls, a woman sits on the pavement in her ragged burqa. The cheap blue garment is worn thin, it's tattered with small holes. Her legs curl up underneath her, and her body rests against the wall. Her feet have c...
Continue readingThe Australians have it right when they call the Brits ‘whingeing poms’. It’s one of the things that as a nation they do brilliantly, and something of which they are fiercely proud. Every once in a while, they let go of their cynicism and go full ...
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Vast tracts of sand stretch alongside the tarmac road that leads to Saudi Arabia, where most of the Empty Quarter can be found. The drive from Dubai takes roughly three hours through part of the Rub al Khali, the longest sand desert with some of t...
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Down dirt roads and inside anonymous walled compounds, a handful of Kabul's faded town houses, left ruined by decades of war, poverty and uncertainty, are being restored. Trina Ibrahimi, an interior designer, lives in one. Built in the late 50s, i...
Continue readingAnne Sebba’s Battling for News: Women Reporters from the Risorgimento to Tiananmen Square (1994) is a compendium of vignettes profiling dozens of female journalists over the past 150 years. An excellent addition to herstory, Sebba’s book covers al...
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On Jan. 28, 2011, a bomb went off at Finest supermarket in Kabul, killing six members of a prominent Afghan family and injuring many others. For the city’s ex-pat community, the tragedy served as a stark reminder that the place we now call home si...
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Dispatches from the Kabul Café 
Genocide – Personal Stories, Big Questions 