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Tegucigalpa and Politicos
Tegucigalpa On Sunday morning I had awaken again on the COMUCAP mountain properties in one of their cabanas. After dawn I had walked down along the gladiola lined pathway to see not only the aloe vera...
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Services Suck I Guess
New Orleans I spend a lot of time (sweat and work, too!) thinking about how to build more sustainable organizations that are less donor driven especially to support international organizing, but...
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Small Scotia Steps on Remittances
New Orleans Handling remittances from working immigrant families is such a lucrative business that progress is measured in very small steps. We were delighted to take one with Scotia Bank when they...
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Conversion Fees and Remittance Charges
New Orleans Packing for the flight to Nairobi over Sunday and Monday, I read with interest a piece in the times about the usual run of charges that companies were charging for use of credit and debit...
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Karen, Kenya Stalemate & Nairobi Return
Nairobi Flying to Nairobi takes forever. Seems to be no way around that fact, and despite email, Skype, digital pictures, and ubiquitous cell phones, anything nearly 5000 miles away is hard to hold...
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Stuck in Korogocho Conversations
Nairobi For hours in the morning, Sammy Ndirangu and David Musungu, ACORN Kenya’s organizers in Nairobi working in two villages in the Korogocho slum discussed their work and the issues that members...
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Fighting Pay-to-Play in Korogocho
Nairobi We hit the jitney early and made it a long day in the villages where we had been organizing. There were bases that needed to be touched with the Chief (a government appointee), the assistant...
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ACORN! Mabadiliko Sasa
Nairobi It took more than an hour for the members to arrive for the official launch of ACORN Kenya in Korogocho, but once they were all in there were more than 200 and every time one of the speakers...
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Matatus
Nairobi If there’s public transportation in Nairobi, no one knows about it. There are matatus though by the hundreds. These are private mini-vans, jitney buses, and even larger buses that hog the...
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Kenya Campaigns Coming
Johannesburg Sitting here with a day to kill in the Joberg airport and ruing having just spent 75 rand for a special South African adapter so I can make it through and finding the young clerk at the...
View ArticlePlanting Trees In Korogocho
New Orleans I mentioned last week from Nairobi that one of the high points of the launch for ACORN Kenya involved a traditional ceremony where we planted trees to show that something new was being...
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Haitian Sweatshops are not Relief
New Orleans In the wake of the tragic earthquake in Haiti a “jobs” plan originally requested by the UN and touted by special envoy, former US President Bill Clinton is making the rounds with its...
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Report Card on Millennium Villages
New Orleans The first report cards at the 5 year mark for some of the 80 Millennium Villages, including Sauri, in Africa are coming in now, and despite criticisms and skeptics, including me, you have...
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Mumbai Water Day with the Embassy
Toronto Started raining in Toronto in the afternoon and it’s still coming down this morning. This must be the way to really take notice of the international observance of Water Day. In Mumbai our...
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Slum Population Increasing
New Orleans Annual report on the “State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011” from the United Nations – Habitat office in Nairobi is not a cheerful bunch of news. The headline grabber is that slum dwellers...
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Doha to Delhi Time Warp
Delhi There’s no way around it – moving half-way across the world still is a schlep, as they say, even at these prices. I climbed onto Qatar Airlines, heavily promoted as a 5 star carrier, in Dulles...
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Commonwealth Games Campaign
Delhi Every conversation Dharmendra Kumar, ACORN India’s Delhi Director, and I had about our communities in East Delhi and especially about our emerging unions of informal workers, kept running into...
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Police and Wages for Rickshaw Pullers
Delhi The chai whalla was doing well because the meeting was starting slowly as drivers finished their last “school” runs and began drifting into the recruitment meeting in this section of East Delhi....
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Delhi Rickshaw Coop
Delhi The ACORN India staff in Delhi, Dharmendra Kumar, Om Prakash, and Animesh Halder and me sat around the table at Tej Abode or XY Lodging for almost 6 hours wrestling with organizing plans for the...
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Big Doings in Mumbai for ACORN India
Mumbai I had left Delhi listening to reports of the heat wave there as we pushed forward with our meetings. Over 41 C which seems to have been around 106 degrees Fahrenheit. I knew we were hot, but I...
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