CATEGORIES: ALL ARTICLES | BEARING WITNESS | EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE | EXPERIENCES | THOUGHTS | NATURAL WORLD
In Bangladesh, education is a gift that, for many, marks the difference between a future largely confined to factory work and a dream of a future shaped by knowledge rather than necessity.
Everything is difficult when you live more than a day's travel from even a simple road. Community is not just a choice—it is a way of life.
On 13 August 1961, East Berlin authorities began constructing the Berlin Wall. For 28 years, it divided the city until people on both sides tore it down with their bare hands, driven by the hope of a united future.
Water has been an essential commodity for as long as humanity has existed. So critical is water to all life that wars have been fought over its supply for millennia. And yet, much of the world still takes water for granted, even in the face of a global warming crisis.
If you could name one thing that would make you happy, what would it be? Clearing your student loan? Owning your dream home? World peace? For Abiba, the answer is far simpler.
Do you hate this child? It feels unthinkable to ask, yet much of the world seems to hate her—or at least, people like her.
This isn’t the most famous door in the world, despite what you might have thought at first glance. Despite living in possibly the safest era in history, the door you are thinking of lies behind layers of iron gates, surveillance cameras, and armed police officers. The question is, why?
All over the world, communities are suffering the everyday realities of climate change. Yet, their stories are often drowned out by the noise of global discussions that seldom hear from those most affected.
"It's not just that I mistrust this government; it's gone beyond that; I simply don't believe them anymore." That is what Lika told me when I met her protesting outside the parliament building in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.
Patrick stands tall against the backdrop of Mifetu, a small coastal village in Ghana that bears his family's legacy. "My father named this village," he says, with pride and sorrow in equal measure, as he looks at what the village has become.
In our so-called advanced world of shopping malls and online stores packed to the brim with mass-produced "stuff" manufactured in power-guzzling, environment-polluting factories for those with the wealth to buy them, has consumerism spiralled out of control? When did the things we enjoy become things we buy rather than make?
The story of the Prime Meridian, an invisible line that silently choreographs the dance of time and space across the globe, is a tale of science, power, and intrigue. But standing with one foot in each hemisphere, I wondered whether this arbitrary line of imaginary division has a greater significance in our increasingly divided real world.
For nearly half a century, the Lost Violin of Kraków lay hidden in pieces, scattered throughout the house abandoned by victims of the Holocaust, until a master craftsman meticulously brought it back to life in their honour.
The Nazis murdered an estimated 1.1 million people in Auschwitz, most within the first few hours of arrival. What intense confusion, fear, and unimaginable brutality must they have experienced on their way to the gas chambers?
Are there words adequate to describe the emotion of passing through the gates of Auschwitz? Can a photograph truly do justice to the memory of those who met their dreadful end in the gas chambers at the end of the railway tracks? Those were my thoughts as I entered the infamous camp, which left such an indelible stain on 20th-century history.
