Summer blogs

Last week, I pointed you to The Fletcher Forum, but the Forum isn’t the only location for learning what Fletcher students have to say.  Throughout the year, but particularly in the summer, many of them keep their own blogs.  Here’s a sampler (in no special order) of what they’re writing now.

Bernardo:  I am currently in Uganda working on a fish farming project in cooperation with Maple Microdevelopment, an Oregon based NGO.  I keep a blog that both gives regular updates on the progress of the project and shares my insights, more often guesses, on the country and the local culture. The blog also contains photos of the work I am carrying out.

Noah:  I’m in Guatemala this summer, and my blog follows research I’m undertaking for my MALD thesis, regarding the cultural impacts of large dams on indigenous communities.

Nathan:  My blog includes thoughts on international development work and my reflections on living abroad.

Ashirul (PhD student):  I’m trying to jump start this Tufts site, and the hope is to get other bloggers to post, too, in addition to just myself.  The blog is focused on inclusive commerce and financial inclusion.

Mallory:  I am in Rwanda this summer, working with Initiatives for Peace and Human Rights, a Rwandan non-profit that promotes good governance and the protection of human rights as a means of ensuring sustainable peace.  While here, I am helping to establish a mediation center and to coordinate the implementation of a Mobile Legal Aid Clinic, and am learning a mind-swelling amount about reconciliation and transitional justice — all of which will be recorded here!

Blake:  My bureau (Arms Control, Verification and Compliance) asked me to write a short post for the State Department blog on the President’s Speech in Prague in 2009 (calling for world without nukes, etc).

Katherine:  This is the Search for Common Ground blog, with a post I contributed from Rwanda.

Finally, not a blog, but student writing nonetheless.  Elia, who is interning this summer in Libya, sent a note on last week’s election to the Social List.  Under the subject line “I wish you all…” he wrote:

In this moment of jubilation in Tripoli, let me wish all of you the chance to experience — either directly for your own country, or indirectly through friends — a peoples’ first opportunity at political self-determination.

No matter the likely political troubles ahead, no matter democracy’s many flaws, no matter how much of a transitional government this new government in Libya will still be, the weight of today’s simple exercise is source of immeasurable joy in its own for millions of Libyans. You just can’t put it in words.

Witnessing fellow human beings go through something like this is truly extraordinary.

–A European who never had to fight with guns for the right to vote for his leaders.