Given I knew I was going to Africa for work this month (specifically Tanzania and Ethiopia, because we know Africa is not a country), I decided to load up my kindle with some Africa reading. This is how Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s book This Child Will Be Great made it into my head.
For those who don’t know, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the President of Liberia. She was also the first female head of state in Africa. And by Liberia I do mean the country that spent over a decade living through civil war involving all the horrors of child soldiers, displaced people, destroyed cities and massive loss of life.
It’s fair to say that Liberia was decimated, socially, politically and economically. Not only that, but its neighbours are far from peaceful too. Sierra Leone and Cote d’Iviore have experienced terrible conflict themselves. All of this makes it a fairly unstable, and cripplingly poor, region.
So the fact that such an educated woman was elected in Liberia, and has actually stuck by the country implementing policies to significantly reduce debt, bring government spending under control, and is resisting the temptations of corruption which is so common in leadership is seriously impressive.
Ellen Sirleaf Johnson has just been reelected for a second term of government, and while Liberia’s problems are far from solved, it’s hard not to see the turnaround as a beacon of hope, a good news story, for a country which was synonymous with hopelessness.
Further reading on Liberia - Chris Blattman
I know it’s not the weekend, but I felt like bringing you some link love anyway. Here’s the seven links I loved most last week:
* Liberia, When Darkness Falls is an astonishing account of the war in Liberia by photojournalist Gregory Stemn. Be warned, the images are confronting.
* It’s official, sleep is more important than food. This is not news for someone like me who struggles to catch enough Zzzzs on a regular basis:
“even small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our health, our mood, our cognitive capacity and our productivity.
Many of the effects we suffer are invisible. Insufficient sleep, for example, deeply impairs our ability to consolidate and stabilize learning that occurs during the waking day. In other words, it wreaks havoc on our memory.” - Tony Schwarz.
* If you had to guess the most generous country towards refugees in the world, who would you pick? - Chris Blattman.
* Now that I’m standing in front of classrooms full of students on a regular basis as part of my day job, I take my hat off to teachers who do it all the time, and I have a whole lot of empathy for the incredible hours teachers can work - Amy Letter.
* Every time I buy bottled water a little bit more of my self respect dies. Particularly after I’ve reminded myself, again, why bottled water sucks:
“some 2.7 million tons of petroleum-derived plastic are used to bottle water around the world every year” - Scientific American
* I recently rewatched Walk the Line and fell back in love with Johnny Cash, not that we’d ever really been estranged. But it is a good time to discover Johnny Cash’s cover of The Beatle’s “In My Life” - Something Changed.
* I didn’t like it the first time I saw it, and I still don’t like it after a second, but you might. This is what the most typical person on earth looks like today - National Geographic.
[image: St Kilda in the dying sunshine]
