I am asked. ‘I don’t know’ comes the facetious response. A) I’m in Kurdistan, which is legally part of Iraq, but it really doesn’t want to be. It has its own government, systems and I’m not sure if I mentioned, but it really doesn’t want to be part of Iraq B) I haven’t yet been Continue reading

‘How is Iraq?’ I am asked frequently. ‘Wow, it must be tough there’ Nobody, especially not me, expected a text message like this from one of my team the night before they were due back at work. It’s extremely rare that I’m speechless. This did it. Quite literally nothing prepared me for a hair transplant Continue reading

Like many of us, those at least who have proper priorities, coffee is a thing. I have a wonderful Gaggia coffee machine at home but it not exactly practical to travel with. I used to travel with a French Press, but it never hit the spot. Or hit too many spots if I didn’t pack Continue reading

We are so weird as humans. Not that I know what it’s like to be any other creature. Our resistance to change is enormous and powerful, in my case, despite myself. I’m off to Iraq tomorrow and despite the usual deployment nonsense, I’ve been really keen to go and looking forward to it. Right up Continue reading

I’m off to Kurdistan Iraq in a week – assuming flights are sorted out. I’ll be based in Erbil on and off for the next 3 months which I’m really looking forward to – amazing city and fascinating part of the world. And the icing on the cake is that I won’t be the one Continue reading

Or perhaps that should be the other way around. However, they are not related per se, rather just relevant to my life in the last 24 hours For the former, I ended up at 3am this morning buying this expensive app to help me sleep. Except it clearly didn’t help me sleep since I had Continue reading

I appreciate this screams a little too loudly ‘look at me, I’m so authentic’. But fuck, if I am one thing, it’s authentic. And I know that I have threatened others many times because of their fraudulence – for the most part, completely unintentionally. Let me be clear – when I say authentic, I do Continue reading

I’ve worked in and on Myanmar since 2017, and its a place that rarely gets the headlines, yet is deeply complex. The West made Aung San Suu Kyi into a heroine that they wanted to see, but that she never was nor could be, and then villified her soon after. And this spread across more Continue reading

19 years old – shot and killed by the Junta I’ve covered Myanmar for 4 years, working in country for 2 of those years. I won’t pretend some massive affinity for Myanmar, not like I had for Bosnia & Hercegovina, or in a different but powerful way, for Somalia. But, amazingly, it’s not about me. Continue reading

This goes a long way to summing it up for me 🙂 We’re a long way from equality or even equity, but also, I’m a long way from my youth when I was raised that women stayed quiet and did all the household work. In my work, since forever, I have had to compete in Continue reading