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Adulting
The past few weeks have been a revelation. I have realised that I have transitioned from a needy self-absorbed sub-adult to being a nurturing carer. No, this did not just happen with motherhood. It’s not even a function of age. It’s probably much more than that. It’s situational, for sure – I am suddenly having to step in because I’d rather be the one doing the nurturing rather than leave it to someone else. I could have had this experience a decade or two ago, but it is happening to me now. I am adulting. My experience with adulting is not the dictionary definition which lists holding a job, paying…
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Gender in Resilience
A few weeks ago (yes that’s how long it has been), I gave a talk on ways in which disaster management and recovery projects – and indeed all resilience efforts – can better integrate gender. Many of us in the development community struggle to incorporate meaningful gender actions while planning for resilience because they focus on the “disaster”. The trick is to think and plan for “normal” and take into consideration existing gender norms and intersectionality. For those grappling with mainstreaming gender in resilience initiatives and struggling to explain why the additional gender lens will make communities more secure and, in the event of a calamity, recover faster and better,…
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Omicron
Last Thursday, our daughter K came home with a runny nose. I thought of testing her for covid but put it off. As the evening progressed, she developed high temperature and climbed into our bed for comfort. On Friday morning, she tested positive. Protected by three Pfizer shots, we were negative. We chose to isolate. It would only be a matter of time that prolonged exposure to the highly virulent Omicron would render us positive. We just needed to make sure we were well stocked for a week. Luckily, all of that is possible in 2022. We spent the next ten minutes informing close contacts. For O and me, it…
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the backlog of this new year
Half of January is gone and I am terribly behind with all the promises I made to myself. Most of these are half baked and poorly articulated so it is easy to get around them if the flesh is weak. But what I have stuck to fervently, is the promise of dry January. That promise will be temporarily on hold for a few hours this evening, when I have intended to treat myself to just one drink to celebrate a billion covid-19 doses reaching 144 countries in the world, but that I feel is worth it… So here’s the reason for the backlog: 2022 feels just the same as 2021.…
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Opportunity?
In my last blog, I ranted about how my generation wasn’t quite keeping up and how we wanted to solve today’s problems using yesterday’s solutions, our eyes firmly shut as we live in denial about structural inequalities, offering cutesy cosmetic explanations when we are expected to be bold. To use an allegory, why should one spend enormous resources trying to prop up a tower destined for collapse instead of building one with solid foundations? Yes, I haven’t ended my rant and I don’t think anyone is listening either… Thing is, the pandemic isn’t over. Europe is in the throes of a terrible fifth wave (frankly, I stopped counting). And yet…
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The fault of our generation
Last week, I was invited to participate in a panel on Gender the Youth SDG Summit, UNITE2030. Totally up my street, I thought, as I scribbled my key messages: post 2030, its time for gender equality to be the norm… let’s broaden the narrow focus of gender in SDG 5 to include LGBTIAQ+… this, I can do in my sleep, I thought cockily. What else? Young people are incredible advocates and activists, but it is time to move from activism to influencing policy, so how about making that shift, being part of the democratic process and changing the system from within? Agitate to increase women’s representation in local bodies and…
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Afghanistan – since I had to…
I volunteered to work for the polio programme in Afghanistan in 2008, fresh from my first international assignment in Nigeria. It was only in 2010 that this materialised. I spent half a year with UNICEF working on eradicating polio, a job that came quite naturally to me since I wrote my book, but nothing had prepared me for the complexities that came with working in a country that had only known conflict. At the end of six months, I was weary and weatherbeaten. But Afghanistan was a drug that was hard to shake. So I returned. This time, I transitioned from polio (and public health) to regional integration and from…
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Spot the Token Jerk in your video calls
It has been a year and over a thousand video calls on countless platforms. When I am not jumping in and out of calls – mostly professional, I am either attending a webinar or participating in one. Or I am in my online French lessons. Whenever a video call involves more than four – OK, let’s say, five persons, you are sure to encounter the token jerk (TJ). They pervade meetings and they are skilled at derailing the agenda and talking as the precious minutes trickle away. A TJ will never chair the meeting. He (yes, 99% of the time it’s a man) will skulk about in the shadows waiting…
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Tinker, tailor, trader, TEACHER
It is the last day of 2020. The sun falls pleasantly on my back, mildly warming the mid-afternoon chill in the air. I must not forget it is still winter and spring is a few months away. And though tomorrow a new year will begin, winter will still persist… Perhaps that is 2020’s lesson to me: to trust (and expect) the persistence and resoluteness of nature. Nature remained infallible as we witnessed one cataclysm after the other unleashed by the pandemic and pestilence (remember the locusts?). So much has happened in the last twelve months that in many ways, it feels like one has lived right through a decade. Two…
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#NoCoverUp
Are we really surprised about the spate of domestic violence unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic? This brief by UNWOMEN has estimated that globally, 243 million women and girls between the ages of 15 and 49 have experienced sexual and/or physical violence perpetrated by an intimate partner in the previous 12 months. “This number is likely to increase as security, health, and money worries heighten tensions and strains are accentuated by cramped and confined living conditions.” What was that last sentence again? It almost sounded like a justification for domestic violence. As the world attempts a feeble recovery from the pandemic, economic uncertainty will continue for a long time. More people…