Post Tagged with "Rising Voices"

Will the real Liberia please stand up?

In 2005 Liberia elected Africa’s first female president. The country may be best known for its civil war, but little by little things are changing.

Ceasefire Liberia is a blog about the real Liberia written by real Liberians – some are living in Liberia, some are living abroad (many in Staten Island, USA).

Pulling in the right direction. Credit

Recommended reading is the post on Liberian reactions to the Vice guide to Liberia (a much debated travel series about Liberia).

Want to discover more of the real Liberia? Try A Star is Born, Liberia’s answer to Britain’s got Talent; or take a look at the soon to be reopened University of Liberia; or the newly released reconstruction plan for Liberia’s capital Monrovia City.

Via Rising Voices.

Update: we’re planning a week of interviews with some of the Ceasefire Liberia bloggers. What would you like to know about Liberia? Tell us your questions.

Read more:
More West African blogs featured on Blogs of the World
Cross-cultural romance in Ghana
Africa: name that country! Can you tell Senegal from Tanzania? Test yourself here…

Streets of Yemen

This week we’re featuring two Yemeni bloggers who write about life in their country. Most of their posts are in Arabic, but with Google Translate and a bit of patience, we can see a bit of Yemen through the eyes of some Yemeni women.

Shells is about ‘Yemeni girls and the surrounding community’. In the post Shells and Pearl she says:

I mean in pearl every yemeni woman who try to be stronger and overcome all difficulties that she faces, shell are the environment around the pearl as family (father, mother, brothers, sisters and husband). Sometimes this shell dosn’t have a flexibility so this leads to damaging of the very fine pearl but even those pearls try to have her own identity and personility whatever happens. Sea is the society which also sometimes makes restrictions on the pearl, ocean is the whole world. So all of these things surround the little pearl. Is she lucky or poor? What can she do to deal with all of these things?

The second blog, Feeling (scroll down for English), aims to write about social issues. In a series of posts, the author Rahaf has been exploring the situation of street children in Yemen.

These bloggers were trained by the Hand in Hand Initiative, which is a project supported by Rising Voices, aiming to enable Yemenis to add their voices to the global blogosphere. This interview with project leader Ghaida’a al-Absi is also worth a watch to find out more about Yemen and the project, which has produced 67 new bloggers so far.

Read more:
More Middle East blogs from Blogs of the World
What is the future of Arabic dialects? Different dialects of Arabic and where they are spoken
Reem Kelani’s introduction to Arabic music
The dying art of Yemeni shoes and Kutnu fabrics