HAVANA, Aug 25 2023 (IPS)* – Emigrating from Cuba was an agonizing decision for Ana Iraida. She left behind family and friends; in her backpack she carried many hopes, but also the fear of facing dangers on the journey to the United States. | En español
Several people, mainly women, stand in line to check their tickets at Terminal 3 o the José Martí International Airport in Havana. According to the International Organization for Migration, women represent 48 percent of international migrants worldwide, and more and more are migrating on their own. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS
“My salary and that of my second job, as an editor, were insufficient. I wanted to prosper and help my parents. Nor did I want to have a child in a country where it is an ordeal to buy everything from disposable diapers to soap, not to mention food,” the 33-year-old philologist who, like the others interviewed for this story, asked to withhold her last name, told IPS.
It is in our connectedness with other people – in our memories of laughter, smiles, sharing sorrow, being heard, being looked at with kindness, being heard with attention, being remembered by someone, being upset with someone, being comforted – that we become alive as relational beings.
Sumeet Grover
From one perspective, we can only experience the richness of life when we are in relation with other people, amongst other people, and in between other people.
Our relationship with people is not the only relationship that we have: we also have a relationship with what goes on within our minds and bodies.
We have a relationship with a complex internal world that drives us, often out of awareness, until that internal world begins to feel unsettling.
People often come to psychotherapy because there is an uncomfortable relationship with one’s own mind, body or the people around them.
(UN News)* — Truck drivers in southern Africa who have been recruited to traffic or smuggle people illegally are learning about the risks involved thanks to the UN drugs and crime agency, UNODC.
UNODC | Maxwell Matewere (left), a crime prevention expert with the UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC), is accompanied by two officials as he investigates human trafficking allegations in Malawi.
“I used to transport sugar from Malawi,” said an anonymous driver, who was arrested for migrant trafficking. “In 2016, I had to wait for several days at a border crossing in Tanzania for customs checks. I was approached by a man who offered me a lot of money to transport goats.”
On 26 Jul 2023, Niger’s presidential guard moved against the sitting president—Mohamed Bazoum—and conducted a coup d’état. A brief contest among the various armed forces in the country ended with all the branches agreeing to the removal of Bazoum and the creation of a military junta led by Presidential Guard Commander General Abdourahamane “Omar” Tchiani.
Niamey, the capital of Niger (file photo).
This is the fourth country in the Sahel region of Africa to have experienced a coup—the other three being Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali.
The new government announced that it would stop allowing France to leech Niger’s uranium (one in three lightbulbs in France is powered by the uranium from the field in Arlit, northern Niger).
Tog-wachale, 21 August 2023 (IOM)* – “The promise sounded too good to be true, travelling from Ethiopia to Saudi Arabia for work, but I just went with it. They said it will only be for seven days. Now, seven days later, I have three bullet wounds in my body and am nowhere near where I intended,” narrates Halima*, a student from Arsi, Oromia Region of Ethiopia.
Halima* survived a deadly ordeal after crossing from Ethiopia to Somalia, trying to reach the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in search of work. Photo: IOM 2023/Kaye Viray
Like many Ethiopians searching for better work opportunities, Halima was lured to embark on a deadly journey from Ethiopia to the Gulf countries through Somalia, across Yemen, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries through what is often referred to as the Eastern Migration Route.
She had no idea about the insecurity and the conflict situations in the neighbouring countries making up this route.
ACCRA, Aug 22 2023 (IPS)*– The war in Tigray, northern Ethiopian, led to sexual and gender-based violence against women, but when Hilina Berhanu Degefa, researcher, gender policy expert and co-founder of the Yellow Movement AAU, appeared before the UN Security Council Open Debate on Sexual Violence in Conflict last year, and catalogued the problems that the victims of the war faced, it didn’t shock the world.
Hilina Berhanu Degefa, researcher, gender policy expert and co-founder of the Yellow Movement AAU, addresses the UN Security Council. CREDIT: UN Photo/Loey Felipe
The Israeli Supreme Court today [August 25, 2023] approved the punitive demolition of the family home of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy who has spent the past six months in pre-trial detention on unfair charges.
In February 2023, Mohammed Zalabani stabbed an Israeli border police officer on a bus at a checkpoint in the Shu’afat refugee camp in occupied East Jerusalem. He was overpowered, but moments later a private Israeli security guard accidentally shot the officer dead.
Viola Fletcher was just seven years old when she was forcibly displaced from her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, by an armed mob which destroyed the predominantly Black enclave of Greenwood, killing hundreds of residents.
UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe | At age 109, Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Massacre, visits the Ark of Return at UN Headquarters.
(UN News)* — UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said on Friday [25 August 2023] that the spread of fighting and hunger in Sudan could destroy the country, as the future of a “lost generation” of children lies in the balance.
Mr. Griffiths said that the conflict spelled trauma for Sudan’s youth and cited “deeply disturbing” reports that some children were being used in the fighting.
He also warned that hundreds of thousands of children in the country were severely malnourished and “at imminent risk of death” if left untreated.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 