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5 Best Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

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5 Best Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

Posted by Laura Heaton on November 6, 2009

5 Best Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.

Don’t miss this excellent good-news story about the path that Valentino Achak Deng’s life, featured memorably in Dave Eggers’ book What Is The What, has taken. Valentino and Dave spoke with Jeb Sharp of PRI’s The World about returning to Marial Bai in southern Sudan to build the region’s first secondary school.

Natalie Parke of the Century Foundation contributed this excellent piece to Foreign Policy about the bind the U.S. government is in when it comes to sending aid to Somalia. Meanwhile, well over 3 million people are in need of emergency assistance.

Writing from Goma, the largest city in eastern Congo, Josh Kron wrote an interesting piece for the NYTimes yesterday about a far lesser known peril found along the border between Congo and Rwanda: the deadly gases that collect in pockets on Lake Kivu. Known as makuzu, or “evil wind,” in Swahili, the gases (carbon dioxide and methane) are a potential energy source but also pose grave risk.

Written in almost stream of consciousness, this blog post by a doctor with MSF in Congo (via the MSF-affiliated project Condition: Critical) is both startling and moving in the way the author describes a day of work in a remote clinic. Her day unfolds like the most daunting checklist, marked by moments of real desperation, described in blunt terms by someone who regularly confronts death and is clearly reaching her limits. It is an important perspective we rarely hear.

Following up on the new Human Rights Watch report this week, Congo analyst Jason Stearns wrote a blog post that offers some additional statistics and proposes some next steps. He draws an interesting conclusion: “[W]e finally need to get more serious about other, non-violent options for dealing with the FDLR. (…) Until now, we’ve been all stick and no carrot with the FDLR.”