Citizen Reporter

In 2011 the Republic of Honduras became the most dangerous country in the world. With the murder rate rising and wages plummeting, the miitary have now been granted extraordinary police powers. Multinational mining, agribusness, and textile corporations pay poverty wages while the government cooperates closely with the objectives of the US military. The result is what human rights observers like G...

When three friends set out on a journey through West Africa, they knew an unpredictable but potentially wonderful adventure awaited them.  And sure enough from Senegal through Mali, BurkinaFaso to Ghana and finally to Togo, they experienced the joy and witnessed the struggles of everyday life there.  As radio journalists and documentary film makers, they observed and reported, but some things even...

Thomas Wiegold was there in Somalia even before the German military arrived back in 1993. And he has been there ever since, reporting on what is a unique situation for both a country and its military. As the decades have passed, as an independent journalist Thomas has continued to both report about as well as look critically at the decisions that are made and how those decisions are carried out by...

Personal media empires aren't a new concept, but with every year that goes by and every advancement that helps individuals produce original content- they rise.  Media commentators used to predict a media revolution or the collapse of traditional media institutions, but recent history shows us that it won't exactly unfold that way.  Instead, personal media producers like Tim Pritlove are hard at wo...

"If my grandmother knows Kosovo is a country… everyone knows Kosovo is a country"  Flekitza repeats in an attempt to help me understand what is going on in the Serbian community of Kosovo.  In her home city in Kosovo, public school teachers get pay checks from the Serbian government, which are substantially larger the the salary Kosovo pays them.  A confusing situation that you'll hear me get lost...

Gent Thaçi is a rare bird in Kosovo, even he would admit it.  At 17 years old he devotes most of his energy to making Kosovo a better place, speci

Çelik Nimani is well aware of the difficulties his young country faces.  He is also well aware of the tremendous creativity and potential that can be found here as well as throughout the international Kosovar diaspora.  His goal is to help unleash that potential with a resounding call for everyone to get involved, take initiative, and be the change the nation needs to see.  He's not just a busines...

It is often assumed that in order to be successful and realize your dreams you must go to university. Year after year people of all ages apply to institutions of higher education and go to great lengths to afford the high costs that come with such schools.  Increasingly people are realizing that the costs to attend such schools far outweigh the benefits.  Beyond that, with the dawn of interest net...

Unrecognized by many countries, unable to secure their borders, a struggling economy in a world already in crisis- the laundry list of problems that Kosovo faces can easily be called daunting.  But in the face of so much adversity there are some exciting things happening and one source of excitement in Prishtina is the new media project called Kosovo 2.0

He was podcasting before there was podcasting. Looking to the online conversations and connections between old and new media long before any media company understood what was going on. He's a global citizen who has a talent for finding inspiring voices and teaching us about our world. His is a voice I hear in my head whenever I turn on a microphone or ask a question. Who better to talk about the p...

Madge Weinstein is an internet celebrity, a culinary pioneer, and an extremely irritable elderly lesbian. Beyond all that, she is an inspiration to several generations of children around the world.  After surviving many tragedies, including 3 Bush presidential terms and the current socio-political disaster that has gripped the United States, this podcasting diva has moved her life to Paris where s...

Bank Transfer Day was this past weekend. Even now, people around the world are looking at their bank account thinking, maybe I dont want my money with these guys. What are the alternatives? Many will say "all banks are the same" as a way of justifying not doing anything. But what a little investigation can easily reveal is that not all banks are the same. In the US much of the focus is on communit...

Occupy Amsterdam has just entered into its 3rd week. 3 weeks of building a community where people have come together and occupied a public space, where debates are an almost 24 hour phenomenon and cooperation is currency. Over the first 7 days of occupyamsterdam I was there checking in with people and observing how things developed.  During those days I observed meetings of the General Assembly, a...

My guest on this edition of Citizenreporter.org is Chilean-American, community organizer, world citizen Nick Farr who has been traveling around Chile observing many of the activities connected with the student protests demanding education reform in that country. For several months students throughout Chile have been holding mass rallies, protests as well as occupying university and high school bui...

Earlier this year a famine was declared in Somalia. It was not the first time the world had heard about a humanitarian crisis in that struggling country. How did the world respond? How did Somalia get to the state it is in today and who was involved in getting it that way?

John Howard Wolf doesn't know how to fix the global economy, but he can teach us a thing or two about education. Its been his business and passion for most of his adult life.  Having immigrated from the US to Portugal in the late 1970's, even back then he was a swimming against the current, setting up a primary school in a country still getting over its post-fascist hangover.  As a Americano-Luso...

Erik Nelson moved from house to house as an urban dweller, never living in a space that he felt connected to. Until he found forest land that appealed to him and built his own home there.  Or as he explains it:  "While most people find a job and then live near that job, we picked the place where we really want to live and then made it work with jobs we could get." But approach to work isn't the on...

The goal to live life on their terms took Ryanne and Jay from New York City to San Francisco and eventually to Western Virginia.  It is here that this dynamic couple set out to build their own home, grow some of their own food, work on their terms, and generally tinker with life choices that were previously not an option or unaffordable.  The result is an inspiring start to healthy, stimulating an...

What happens when two New Yorkers leave their successful careers and fabulous apartments in favor of building their own house and a new kind of life on a former trailer park in New Mexico? 5 years ago Wendy Tremayn and Mikey Sklar set off to live life in a radically different way in Truth and Consequences, New Mexico. Building their own home-compound. Growing a lot of their own food. Using alterna...

This month saw one of the first major uprisings against the government in Angola in recent memory. It was organized, you guessed it- with the help of social media. After Gaddafi, President José Eduardo dos Santos is the longest running leader of an African state (32 years). And just like with  the now-fugitive Muammar, many are saying this presidency has gone on for too long. But can change finall...

When the city of Vancouver made the push to get the Winter Olympics, Joe Bowser and citizens throughout BC were opposed. Through the ballot box and demonstrations they expressed their disapproval. As a result, they were spied on, targeted, and to this day followed by a Canadian government that knows no limits and sees opposition as terrorism. I caught up with Joe at CCC2011, just a few weeks ago....

An investigative journalist in the Netherlands has exposed major security flaws in a major government project which promised safe and easy travel throughout the country. He has been reporting the results of his work to both the public and the government. The goal was to inform the public while also pressuring decision makers to address this problem before further damage is done. The result, howeve...

There is a direct connection between armed conflict in Congo and the minerals we use in our phones and computers. Bibi Bleekemolen has been investigating that connection, in an effort to understand how it works, who is involved, and what can be done about it.  Her focus is the role that electronics companies have in the raging conflicts in eastern Congo. Earlier this year she went along as part of...

Earlier this year Michael Schaap went to DRCongo as part of the Fairphone fact finding mission. The goal was to better understand how the minerals that make up our technology, our mobile phones, are mined and how they travel from miners up through all the middle people and eventually to the mobile phone producers.  Can this process be carried out ethically? Where people are not taken advantage of...

Since the beginning of 2011 Juan Rodriguez has been working in Afghanistan with the mission to help this country communicate.  This has meant bringing internet connectivity to schools, mobile phones for farmers, and an array of crowdsource projects for health, security, and agriculture.  On one beautiful and relaxed Friday afternoon in Jalalabad, Juan and I sat in the garden of the wonderful Taj t...