Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Learning Greenlandic - one æ at a time

Jason George & Christopher Booker for the Pulitzer Center

Greenlandic & Climate Change from Christopher Booker on Vimeo.

This blog entry re-ran at WorldFocus.

NUUK, Greenland—When Denmark handed "self rule" to Greenland last month—ending 200+ years of significant oversight—one of the first changes Greenland made was to declare Greenlandic the country’s lone national tongue.

For Greenlanders it was a point of pride to drop Danish off the list, but people here also wanted to symbolically declare that Greenlandic is central to the country’s future. They see nothing nostalgic or quaint about Kalaallisut, the most widely-spoken dialect, even if only about 55,000 people speak it.

At a popular internet café in the capital, local teenagers spend summer evenings playing computer games, chatting online in English with other gamers around the world. All Greenlandic students learn English in school and many are as comfortable with the language (and its locker room humor) as any American teen.

However amongst themselves these teens talk almost exclusively in Greenlandic, and there’s no evident pressure to ‘look cool’ by speaking English. In fact one 15-year-old gamer, Rasmus Nielsen, told us that when he moved here from Denmark 10 years ago the kids teased him about not being able to speak Greenlandic.

He learned quickly.

A hope-filled farewell to Neema

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Neema's son Briton "Toni" Joseph, on our final day together

I spent my last day in Tanzania with Neema and Briton.  When Toni spotted me walking down the path to their house, he ran up and gave me one of his somber leg-hugs.  So began the strangest and most wonderful day I spent with them.  It ended with tears, and the hope of a journey.  But it started with a shock.  Continue reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

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The friends Bill Clinton left behind in Africa

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Emma (r.) plays in the grass with his friend Jean in Kanembwa camp in April.  His family is now in the final rounds of resettlement interviews with US immigration.  They have asked to be sent to Atlanta, so they can be with Bill's family.

Until they were 6, Bill and his friends Emmanuel and Jean-Jacques lived together in Mkugwa, a camp of 2,000 Central African refugees in Northwest Tanzania.  Their parents were close friends, and the boys grew up sharing meals, soccer games, wheelbarrow rides.  Then, in October 2006, everything changed.

First, Bill’s family won the “resettlement lottery”and were granted visas to the United States.  Then Mkugwa closed, and Emma’s and Jean-Jacques’s families were sent on to different  camps, different probable futures.  Gulfs started to yawn among the three boys’ experiences.  Today, the onetime soccer buddies are nearly 10.  For a glimpse of their lives now, click below.

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Water Conflict -The Indus Treaty

Anna-Katarina Gravgaard, for the Pulitzer Center

This week, Pakistani intelligence officials complained that India has blocked off the rivers flowing into the country through Kashmir—an allegation, reports The Washington Post, that will likely keep troops along the Indian border even as the Pakistani army prepares for a major offensive against a powerful Taliban leader entrenched in its western westernmost region. Control of the rivers that run through the region has always been a potential source of conflict between the countries and, while the Indus Waters Treaty has long prompted both fears of a much-hyped nuclear water war, as well as optimism about the potential to solve such disputes through negotiations, water remains a strategic hurdle and potential spoiler to any peace process.

World Bank Water Adiviser David Grey talks about the water issues South Asia faces.
 

Mustafa Talpur, a water activist in Islamabad, talks about Pakistani water policies.

Mkugwa’s mark on Little Bill Clinton

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Bill Clinton Hadam at age 5 or 6 in Mkugwa camp (courtesy of the family; photographer unknown)

All this year, I’ve been wondering about the first six years of Bill’s life, in Mkugwa refugee camp.

I’ve asked him about the place countless times, and he remembers a few things about it: making his own soccer balls, a time he fell in scalding water.  His brother Igey remembers a few more details:  the perils of pit toilets, the ubiquitous chickens.  Their sister Neema, of course, has the most searing memories of the camp’s dangers.  Their parents don’t like talking about all the illness and unhappiness that marked their camp life, but a few funny stories about life there are starting to emerge.

I hoped to leave Tanzania with more insight about the former life of the little boy I’ve gotten to know across an ocean.  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

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Changing gender roles in Tanzania’s refugee camps

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

The men sat around in a circle of chairs and benches, smoking, chatting, and playing board games.  Their wives spent hours cooking, cleaning, tending kids, and hauling five-gallon water buckets from the pump on their heads.  Men had first, last, and nicknames.  Women were known by their kids:  Mama Grace, Mama Elisa, Mama Billy.  The gender roles in Kanembwa refugee camp, in northwestern Tanzania, seemed plenty strict to me.

But when six of Hassan’s male friends joined me and translator Pablo Joseph for a discussion one afternoon in Kanembwa, the men were upset.  Camp life had turned the traditional Congolese social order on its head, they said, and women were getting uppity.

“Her rights, she knows,” said former human rights activist Dieudonné Mukucha, “her responsibilities, she forgets.”  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

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Greenland: Thin Ice

Jason George and Christopher Booker, for the Pulitzer Center

Thin Ice from Christopher Booker and Jason George

What do endangered languages, the northern lights and glaciers have in common?

They’ll all topics that researchers are currently studying at Dartmouth College’s Institute of Arctic Studies.

For nearly 100 years, Dartmouth has brought scientists and scholars together to examine life at the top of the world. Given how much the arctic environment is changing, it makes sense that most of those researchers study the region’s climate, ecology and geology.

So why endangered languages?

Such a topic might, at first, seem an unlikely focal point when examining the arctic. However the arctic’s dramatic environmental change has trickled down into other aspects of life as well. Culture, community and traditions must also adapt in world where the ground quite-literally can be shifting underfoot.

That’s where University of Chicago Professor Lenore Grenoble comes in.

Round 7 Pulitzer-Helium Essay Winners Announced

Chris Riha, Pulitzer Center

Congratulations to all those who entered Round 7 of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s Global Issues/Citizen Voices essay contest, hosted in partnership with Helium.com. We asked our contestants to answer the following question: “With mounting violence, a surge in Taliban support and growing numbers of displaced persons making front-page news in Pakistan, are we getting an accurate picture of the realities on the ground?” Contestants were asked to draw from the Center’s current reporting project on Pakistan from Common Language Project journalists Sarah Stuteville, Alex Stonehill, and Jessica Partnow. There were many good essays submitted on this subject, and we’ve selected two as winning entires for their compelling, albeit varied, perspectives on the topic.

Our first winner is Muhammad Fahd Waseem. Muhammad, an Electrical Engineering student from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, makes good marks at school, enjoys spending time with his friends and family, wielding racquets, reading, and writing. As a citizen of Pakistan, he was able to talk with people on the ground and gather public opinions of the media for his essay. Muhammad’s findings were all very similar: people in Pakistan know that the media is not accurately representing life as they see it. Muhammad even spoke with illiterates that knew newspapers were not providing a truthful account of the situation in Pakistan. He read them the essay prompt and they laughed at him. Because of this, Muhammad was hoping to do his country a service by highlighting the biases that occur in media reports on Pakistan. 

Brave or foolish: Friends weigh in on Neema’s choice to run away

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Neema's friend from Mkugwa camp, 16-year-old Sarra Sango, says it makes sense to her.

Why did Neema do it?  In Tanzania, I spent a lot of time trying to understand more – emotionally and culturally – about the decision Bill Clinton’s sister made as a young teen to run away and leave her family.

Neema says she regrets the choice to flee the camp after her rape by two older boys – as do her parents.  In Mtabila camp, old friends Jean-Paul Rukundo and his wife were sympathetic, but as parents of eight children, they said they couldn’t support her decision.  Friends Eva Sango and her husband, whom I met in Kanembwa camp awaiting their resettlement overseas, saw the whole thing as a tragedy.  But no, the parents of five agreed, Neema shouldn’t have run away.

Not until near the end of my visit to Kanembwa, when I stole a cool moment on the floor of Eva’s mud-brick house, did I hear another story.  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>  

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Little Bill Clinton’s celebrity dad

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Two. That’s how many friends Hassan and Dawami told me they had in refugee camps in Tanzania as I prepared to go there. Thanks to the generous help of the United Nations refugee agency, I planned a week of travel around these five words: “Jean-Paul Rukundo, Mtabila” and “Eva, Kanembwa.”  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

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