Category Archives: Africa

“If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.” -African proverb. It was the United Nation’s “Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples” on Tuesday, August 9th. This year’s theme was a subject dear to my heart: the right to education. Article 14 of the UN Declaration […]

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It was a beautiful scene: the red, rocky banks on the Angolan shore of  Kunene River contrasting with the rushing green waters and the sandy foreshore on the Namibian side. A young man, recognisable as an unmarried Himba by his hairstyle, sat on a rock, stick in hand. It was, of course, a constructed image, not […]

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It was another 4:00am wakeup call: we were expected to break camp before 5:00am so we could drive back into Namib-Naukluft National Park and catch the sunrise colours over the sand dunes near Sossusvlei.  Sleep, as they say, is over rated. We were aiming for Dune 40 – 40 kilometres past the Sesriem gates on the road to Sossusvlei, […]

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Namibia is big. It doesn’t seem particularly big if you are looking at a map of continental Africa, but that is only because Africa is HUGE. Namibia is the 34th largest country in the world. And if your bottom is on a seat in a truck, and you are being driven almost 4000 kilometres in less than two […]

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The Solstice (Yule or Litha – depending which hemisphere you are in) has just passed. Today is Christmas Eve here in Australia. It makes me think of my family – scattered as they are – and of the families I have met in my travels. These families can take very different forms from the “norm” I grew up […]

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