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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 office celebrated water day in the Dharavi slum with school children [...]

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 roads and rule the roost.  They seem to be semi-regulated, which means that in certain areas in downtown Nairobi a driver will [...]

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 said, “ACORN!” the called response was “Mabadiliko Sasa!” meaning “Reform Now!” I fell in love with [...]

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 chief, the ward manager for the City of Nairobi, and the Chair of the Highridge Village and Father John [...]

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 were identifying around health care, education, and housing.  In the afternoon we were joined by the chair of one of the groups, [...]

No Unions for Honduran Maquiladores

San Pedro Sula In a little more than two hours from Houston, I landed at the smallish airport of this city of almost a million which is the second largest in Honduras and the industrial capital of the country.  The Sula Valley is dotted with one huge fenced and barbed wired maquila plant after [...]