Month: February 2009
Despite anxieties around Rwanda’s military presence in Congo, troops have now begun to leave eastern DRC, five weeks after they crossed the border to attack FDLR Hutu rebels. A ceremony…
As one of its principal missions, AFRICOM states that it will offer “the kind of support that will enable African governments and existing regional organizations… to have greater capacity to provide security…
Last week, Caritas reported on the first-ever gathering of religious leaders from the numerous communities affected by the continued aggression of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a gathering focused on finding a…
Vulture funds, often called “Distressed Debt Funds” are predatory hedge funds that siphon off newly freed resources from poor-country debt cancellation efforts. They do this by buying up a poor…
Hearing Burundians greet each other and greet us in Kirundi got me curious about finding out the meaning of these daily greeting rituals. The finding is, astonishingly, a good ground on which Burundians can build bridges of reconciliation and recovery from the hurt caused by years of war.
In fact, greetings in Burundi are full of expressions of wishes for peace for individuals and for the whole community. In the morning, you say mwaramutse. It literally means ‘did you wake up?’ It can also mean ‘did you survive?’ This question is about surviving the unexpected challenges that can happen in the dark of the night.
