POTTUVIL, SRI LANKA – The Sri Lanka offices of Mercy Corps occupy a single room on Dharmapala Mawatha, in a building run by the Academy for Educational Development. Senior Program Officer Nick MacDonald and two volunteers hammer away at laptops, preparing proposals and responding to local grant proposals; the bookshelf is stacked with project reports, […]
POTTUVIL, SRI LANKA – Aboard the Blackhawk helicopter, his ears plugged against the roar of the rotors, a US Marine in a flak jacket pencils me a note: DESTINATION = 1 HOUR That’s how long it will take us to reach the shores of Arugam Bay. It would be nine torturous hours by car from […]
In January of 1984, two months shy of my 30th birthday, I explored the west coast of Sri Lanka on one of my first travel assignments. My girlfriend Teri and I started in Colombo, and traveled by bus to the southern tip of the island at Dondra Head: the last landfall until the frozen beaches […]
There is no predicting, at this point, what I will find, or even what I’ll write. This whole trip came together so quickly that I’m still in a state of shock, sitting on a Singapore Airlines Mega-Top with a pink tablecloth under my iBook, iced cranberry juice on my right, and a selection of 60 […]
Officials from nine Central American countries met last month to work out a plan for looser border regulations – a first step toward operating as a regional unit similar to the European Union. Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama and the Dominican Republic collaborated to change border policies to allow greater freedom in travel and […]
Global warming trends and changes in weather patterns will have disastrous effects across Asia by 2050 unless greenhouse gases are reduced globally, say numerous climatologists and green groups. Citing current weather trends, they predict that, over the next 50 years, rising waters will force residents of many Asian islands to evacuate, water-borne disease will spread […]
Forest department officials in India’s state of Kerela are implanting sandalwood trees with tracking devices in an effort to protect dwindling forests from illegal logging. Once the devices are activated, satellites will be used to monitor forests and detect attempts to cut wood or smuggle timber from forest areas. The trade in contraband sandalwood is […]
European Union fishing policies are directly linked to the extinction of such African wildlife as monkeys, elephants and warthogs, according to findings recently published in Science. The findings, based on a 30-year study of Ghana, show that as fish populations in waters off the country’s western coast drop, residents resort to hunting bush meat both […]
Several years ago, on a solo trek in northern India, I was joined by an eight-year-old boy wearing a tattered red vest. He startled me with a phrase in perfect English: “Excuse me, sir, but what is your hobby?” Startled, I stammered a brief but no doubt incomprehensible reply about astrophotography. The lad took my […]
