Thankfully, most of us don’t know. However, many of us have woken from a nightmare at two in the morning and then tried to stay awake for a while, clearing our minds, rather than plunging back to sleep where the nightmare resumes. Yet, this doesn’t come close to capturing the awfulness of repeated flashbacks to […]

Shortly after the devastating civil war in Liberia, I accompanied the inexhaustible President and Mrs Carter (then in their 80s) on an election monitoring mission. I was dispatched to Lower Bong County with a local driver called David. On the way out of bustling Monrovia, we passed hundreds of buildings, schools, homes and offices that […]

My first encounter with Rwanda, back in 2004, would change my life, and it was thanks to the Survivors Fund, known as SURF. When I met the founder, Mary Kayitesi Blewitt, I knew I had found a charity with a clear-sighted, no-frills vision: helping the survivors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide rebuild their lives. There […]