A couple of good episodes of CBC's The Current this week:

An interview with the Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen who has been covering individual stories out of millions in the AIDS pandemic. Her sense of frustration with the what she see's as the world's indifference to the thousands dying every day is emphasized through a story (told through clenched teeth) of her role in Oprah Winfrey's crusade to help the orphaned children of Africa. Her appearance on the show lead to her phone ringing off the hook from people urging her to: "Get on that African orphan story!" despite the fact that was just a one aspect of an overwhelmingly horrifying situation that she'd been covering for five years

I never read her stuff, but I'm going to start. The Globe and Mail's website is hard to find your way around, and the search function doesn't work well, but here are the recent articles by her that I could discover (you'll have to register:bugmenot.com):

>>'We've jumped from one holocaust to another': A new South African film is among the first to deal with something other than apartheid, STEPHANIE NOLEN writes. Starring Leleti Khumalo, it focuses on a newer fact of life -- the country's AIDS pandemic. Thursday, Sep 16, 2004

>>Canadian looking for ways to aid students in Lesotho: Woman 'confronted with a whole new dimension''of poverty in African nation. Tuesday, September 7, 2004

>> A new peril, this time from the sky: Hunkering down in teeming rain that hits almost daily, STEPHANIE NOLEN wonders how Darfur's refugees will last the season. Friday, Aug 27, 2004

There's also this enlightening interview with Dick Cheney's biographer John Nichols(scroll down to Part 2), author of Dick: The Man Who is President
Listen by clicking here.

And this BBC 4 episode of Costing the Earth describes a what sounds like a sci-fi plan by Egypt to create millions of hectares of farmland in the desert in order to sustain the countries incredible population growth (a million new people every 9 months?!) In order to make the the Toshka Project a reality, Egypt will need to increase the amount of water provided by the Nile. And how do they plan to do that? By preventing water currently "wasted" by evaporation in the wetlands of the Sudan from ever getting there. As the spokesman for the project says that they expect this will have "micro-effects" on the ecology of area.
Listen by clicking here.

5:57 AM

1 Comments:

Hi Alan,

I am a big fan of Stephanie Nolan as well. Have you seen her new site in the globe and mail, on aids in Africa?

I volunteer with SOS Children's Villages in Canada, perhaps you can help them, by providing a link to their site.

www.soschildrensvillages.ca

cheers

By Anonymous at 1:13 PM
 

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