INTRO: During nearly 3 decades of armed conflict, the Khmer Rouge, as well as the Vietnamese and Cambodian Armed Forces, laid an estimated 4 to 6 million landmines throughout Cambodia. The country is now at peace but the casualties continue. In 2010 alone, landmines in Cambodia injured a reported 215 civilians. 71 were killed. The...
INTRO: “Children in orphanages are not tourist Attractions”. That’s the slogan of a new campaign in Cambodia aiming to put an end to what has become known as “orphanage tourism”. The campaign run by a local child rights group argues that despite good intentions, tourist visits to orphanages do more harm than good and support...
INTRO: After intense pressure from the World Bank, the Cambodian government granted a small plot of land to a thousand families facing eviction from a lake in the center of the capital. The residents have been fighting a long battle with a government-linked development company that wants the land to build luxury housing. Already more...
A 12-hour bus ride Northeast of Phnom Penh and I am in Banlung, Ratanakiri Province, where a dusty village road leads to Kah Chhang waterfall.
A few shots taken at a pagoda today as Pchum Ben continues…
By Heather Stilwell In many ways, this tiny classroom was just like any other: rows of young students looking up at their teacher, the day’s lesson displayed on the dusty chalkboard overhead. But this day was not about grammar or arithmetic. It was about the long fight for freedom. In South Sudan, it is rarely...
Happy Independence Day to the world’s newest country, the Republic of South Sudan. To show a bit of the area, below is a short collection of video clips I took throughout South Sudan and in parts near the North-South border. You might wonder why I seem completely unable to hold a camera straight, but much...
Leading up to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s Canadian tour, the CBC News website posted an article under the headline, “Royal visit a tough assignment for world media.” I tried to ignore it. I had vowed to stop reading about the Royals ever since choking down a piece in the Globe and Mail which described...
Leading up to Sudan’s referendum in January, I traveled back to the Kauda radio station in the Nuba Mountains to help lead a workshop on reporting in times of conflict. Over three days of dissecting the local context and history with journalists, we discussed ways they could report to promote peace. But as much as...
The Montreal Gazette published an article today about Fabienne Colas, a Haitian actress who left Port au Prince eight years ago with hopes of advancing her promising career. After settling in Quebec, Colas was struck by what she saw as one-sided media coverage of Haiti, coverage that did not do justice to all that was...
In my last post, I wrote about my friend and former colleague Musa John and described a brief period of his life in the Nuba Mountain’s of Sudan. I purposely kept the post short because I wanted to allow anyone reading the chance to gradually get to know the people and places that I have...
A few weeks ago I worked with NY-based Nepali journalist Kashish Das Shrestha on a piece about Bhutanese families who resettled to Canada from refugee camps in Nepal. Since fleeing ethnic persecution in the early nineties, more than 100,000 Bhutanese have been living in the Nepali camps with little hope of returning home. Starting in...
