Latitude Adjustment

While much has been written about the "refugee crisis" coming to Western shores, we rarely hear about the long standing crises across the Global South, where 85% of the world's forcibly displaced people's have been forced to seek refuge.

Hashed had to flee Yemen after his father was killed, and what followed was an odyssey that has taken him from Djibouti, to India, to Malaysia, where his struggle is far from over.

Hassan is from Syria, and he also wound up in Malaysia, after his work visa in the UAE expired and the Emirati government threatened to deport him back to Syria. Hassan spent 7 months trapped in the airport in Kuala Lumpur and, after becoming the subject of international headlines, private Canadian citizens stepped forward to help him find asylum in Canada. These are their stories, but they are not unique, and you can help.

Fatma Naib won a Peabody Award in 2017 for her film, "The Cut", which she and her team completed for Al Jazeera English on the subject of Female Genital Mutilation. FGM is a non-medical procedure that involves partial or radical removal of young women's genitalia, and while widely practiced in parts of Africa and the Middle East, is neither limited to these regions nor defined by theology or religion. The practice is typically linked to a right of passage, sexual purity, or as a marker of cultural identity (or all three), and its impact on the lives of tens of millions of women is cruel, often deadly, and the UN is working to eliminate the practice by 2030. Our conversation also focuses on the broader questions around navigating multiple cultural identities and contexts.

The subject of FGM makes some of us more than a little squeamish, but it's important to move past our personal sensitivities and make some time to inform ourselves about a practice that is impacting the lives of women around the world, and perhaps closer to where you live than you might realize. And while the practice itself might be fundamentally rooted in ignorance so are a lot of the popular perceptions about the it, so it's important that we leave our assumptions and pre-judgements at the door and listen so that we can take meaningful action to help eliminate the practice. Support our show on Patreon!

Maria Pisani PhD is a Maltese citizen, lecturer, former head of office for the International Organization for Migration on Malta, and co-founder and director of Integra Foundation. As the EU's smallest and southern-most member state Malta has long been on the front lines of one of the busiest and the deadliest migratory path on earth, where more than 14,000 people have lost their lives since 2014, attempting the crossing from North African shores to the EU. We discuss Malta's role in this discussion, the features of Maltese policies and how they have shifted over the years, and the moral, political, and logistical implications of the EU's de facto policy of containment and deterrence since 2015, when Europe saw the largest numbers of refugees since the Second World War.

Latitude Adjustment Podcast

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The DRC remains an enigma to many in the West, and for a variety of reasons. Whether it's the lack of coverage, the singular focus on violence and poverty, or the silent bigotry that informs many Western attitudes towards the fortunes of Africans more generally, many of the roots causes of the people's suffering continues to go ignored while aid money pours in, resources pour out, and little changes to improve the lives of the people. Murhula Zigabe is one example of many stories that we don't hear about much in the Congo. He's from the easter part of The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and by recycling organic waste into eco-charcoal for cooking he has found a solution to multiple problems faced by his community, including environmental degradation, unemployment, poverty, lack of education, autonomy for women, and more. In our conversation we set his work against the backdrop of the DR Congo's recent history, in particular the wars of the mid 90's and early 2000's that claimed approximately 5 million lives, and the ongoing use of rape as a weapon of war on a scale that sees a woman raped nearly once every minute. However this conversation is not a catalogue of miseries and grievances. Murhula is an optimist, and perhaps after listening to his story you will be too, and perhaps you'll be inspired to look at the DRC and Africa a little differently: https://www.latitudeadjustmentpod.com/podcast

This month marks the 8th anniversary of the popular demonstrations in Syria that ultimately led to the war. Assil Alnaser's story takes us from the early days of those protests to her harrowing experiences as a prisoner, and then her escape and her struggles to find a home and a future in Jordan and Turkey, and later in the US, where she was subjected to the "Muslim Ban" twice after winning a scholarship. Assil's story provides a needed reminder of how the conflict in Syria started, it forces us to confront the double-victimization that many women face from their own communities after suffering sexual violence, and puts a human face on the ordeals faced by many Syrian refugees right up to the present.

A handful of countries and three continents later, she now finally has a new home in Canada.

Western Sahara is one of the world's forgotten occupations. In 1975 Spain ended its nearly century-long colonization of Spanish Sahara, leaving the territory to be overtaken by Moroccan and Mauritanian forces. Under the leadership of the POLISARIO front the Sahrawis continued their guerilla war for self determination. In 1979 Mauritania withdrew and Morocco moved in to claim the rest of the territory now known as Western Sahara. The war continued until 1991, until a UN-brokered ceasefire with the promise of a referendum on independence for Western Sahara that never came. Morocco continues to occupy Western Sahara, transferring its citizens to the territory and extracting its resources under the protection of France's protective veto in the UN. Meanwhile the Sahrawi community either lives under a brutally oppressive police state in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, or on the other side of the wall, a 2,700 kilometer barrier constructed by Morocco, which forms the second longest wall on earth and the de-facto border. It also splits Western Sahara in half and annexes most of the economically valuable land.

Mahfud Mohamed Lamin is one of approximately 170,000 Sahrawi refugees who are stuck on the other side of that wall in the harsh desert of Western Algeria. He was was born in 1991, the very same year that saw an end to the 16-year war between the the Sahrawis and the Moroccan government. But the following 28 years have not seen an end to the conflict or the referendum that was promised to his people.

Kimberly Walters completed her PhD research in India, and her current project focuses on humanitarian interventions into the lives of women who sell sex in South India. We examine the competing narratives, political interests, and funding priorities that distinguish campaigns for the rights of sex workers from those that focus on abolition and rehabilitation. And we discuss how the very institutions which are supposed to be rescuing women from trafficking end up incarcerating, exploiting, and oppressing them further. This episode is a must listen no matter your level of familiarity with this subject, as donors can find themselves unwittingly supporting organizations and policies that contribute to the abuse and stigmatization of women across the Global South.

Isra Chaker is a force of nature, and we were lucky to get a few minutes to interrupt her whirlwind of advocacy, public speaking, and campaign organizing on issues ranging from Islamophobia and bullying, to refugees and asylum seekers, to the so-called "Muslim Ban" imposed by the current US administration. We talk about her experiences growing up as a Muslim in the US in the aftermath of September 11, and how she confronted the bullying she faced in school and the role this played in setting her on her current path. We also discuss her campaign to highlight the lives and the challenges faced by asylum seekers by renting out Donald Trump's childhood home on AirBnB, the curriculum that she helped to develop for thousands of US schools to teach young kids about the experiences of Muslims and refugees, and her recent trip to visit refugee camps in Jordan for Oxfam USA.

Meena Menon is the author of three books, and her reporting career has seen her covering a broad range of topics in India, and also took her to Islamabad, Pakistan as the correspondent for The Hindu. We discuss her experiences as an Indian reporting from Pakistan as well as India-Pakistan relations, the suicides of tens of thousands of Indian farmers since the 1980's and the colonial legacy of the cotton industry, the 1992-93 sectarian riots in Mumbai, and her thoughts on the upcoming general elections in India, the world's largest democracy.

Latitude Adjustment is 100% listener supported. Show your love my contributing through our Patreon page today.

"Know more. Carry less." That's the philosophy behind the Boulder Outdoor Survival School where Eli Loomis teaches traditional and primitive survival skills (the knowledge and techniques used by indigenous peoples as opposed to military training).

For its most intense course, BOSS takes students out on a 28-day trek through the Utah desert, where they learn to forage and survive with little more than a knife and a blanket. Eli also spent two seasons conducting marine biology research in Antarctica. When he's not immersed in extreme outdoor environments Eli teaches university courses in Biology and Ecology in Washington State.

Also, I've launched my Patreon page for Latitude Adjustment. If you can kick down a dollar or more a month to make this show sustainable it would be a big help!