Dispatches with Hollie McKay

TRANSCRIPT. PODCAST FEATURING HOLLIE MCKAY & DENNIS SANTIAGO. (Please excuse typos, edited for clarity) DS: Hey, welcome to another “Words that Never Leave You by Hollie McKay.” It is Fifty Pearls of Wisdom and Reflection from Survivors Across the World. This is how she came into the life. Hollie, tell us about this quote. HM: Yes, well, I remember this was in a a tattered tent. It was a displacem...

Junaid Hafeez, a charismatic and philosophical young poet who received his Master’s as a Fulbright scholar in the United States, has languished for years behind bars in the bowels of a Pakistani prison faced with execution. His crime? Well, there is no hard evidence of a crime. Yet Junaid, who was teaching in the English department at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, a city in Punjab Provi...

TRANSCRIPT. PODCAST FEATURING HOLLIE MCKAY & DENNIS SANTIAGO. (Please excuse typos, edited for clarity) DS: “Words that Never Leave You” by Hollie McKay, featuring “Fifty Pearls of Wisdom and Reflection from Survivors Across the World.” Today, we are going to ponder the quote: a child just needs to be loved, Hollie. Tell us about why this quote has so much meaning. HM: This quote has stuck with me...

Pregnant and denied prenatal screenings under the guise they are “not medically necessary” by insurance? Check. It’s been weeks of tearing my hair out in frustration over the thousands and thousands in red to my name despite paying an exorbitant amount each month, bounced between third-party vendors, dropped from calls after hour-long hold times and no real explanation for why the standard testing...

TRANSCRIPT. PODCAST FEATURING HOLLIE MCKAY & DENNIS SANTIAGO. (Please excuse typos, edited for clarity) DS: We're back with “Words that Never Leave You” by Hollie McKay, featuring “Fifty Pearls of Wisdom and Reflection from Survivors Across the World.”… Only a pile of ashes is given to the family members. We cannot be silent. What's this all about, Hollie? HM: So these very striking words were sai...

Earlier this year, a year after the invasion of Ukraine, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, concluding that the Russian President had committed war crimes over the forced “resettlement” of Ukrainian children. As welcome as the news is, I cannot help but feel the weight of despair for my Syrian friends – some of whom have been blistered and burned ac...

TRANSCRIPT. PODCAST FEATURING HOLLIE MCKAY & DENNIS SANTIAGO. (Please excuse typos, edited for clarity) DS: Welcome to another installment of Words that Never Leave You: 50 pearls of wisdom and reflection from survivors across the world by Hollie McKay. Today we have this quote: Meditation and deep breathing are the greatest gifts I could give myself. Hollie, tell us about this quote and why it ha...

Nov. 16, 2020, will forever be seared into the painful folds for the memory of one Beverly Hills mother. Her 37-year-old son, Ray, didn’t show up to pick up his newborn daughter. When they rushed to his nearby home, his body was discovered motionless — his distressed dog licking his lifeless face. Like that, this mother’s child was gone. One year sober, Ray had drifted from his virtual Alcoholics...

TRANSCRIPT. PODCAST FEATURING HOLLIE MCKAY & DENNIS SANTIAGO. (Please excuse typos, edited for clarity) DS: Welcome to a special series on Words that Never Leave You: Fifty Pearls of Wisdom and Reflection from Survivors Across the World. A book by Hollie McKay, where she has vignettes of things that she will never forget. Quote number one out of the book: This is not your war. Where did this quote...

Happy Mother’s Day. I wanted to share with you a few anecdotes, reflections and diary entries of some of the incredible mothers I have met in my expeditions around the world. It is all the more poignant as I ready to become a first-time mother myself in a few months’ time… And a big shout-out to my mum (Aussie spelling) and big sister for always caring for little me… Miss you both. We are never to...

“People come for all the things they can do,” the man says, stepping into the dimly lit three-dimensional world. “But they stay for all the things they can be… It’s the only place that feels like I mean anything.” You may have heard the term “Metaverse” or “Web Three” – it is no longer a futuristic place of lifelike avatars and chillingly real interactions and encounters. Instead, the third evolut...

Human trafficking is a brutal predicament that affects millions of people worldwide. For some, it is an entrapment that consumes the duration of their lives. But what exactly is human trafficking? According to the United States government, this egregious crime, also called modern slavery, involves using force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. The U.S. specific...

TRANSCRIPT Welcome to the World of War, Crimes and Crises with Hollie McKay. I am Hollie McKay. I am illuminating World Press Freedom Day, which is today, Wednesday, May the Third. To raise awareness and encourage governments to respect the free flow of information, and in light of journalists being constantly assaulted and press freedoms eroded around the globe, the United Nations established Wor...

“All of our virtues come from not being gods. Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want. Courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury. The godlike berserk state can destroy the capacity for virtue. Whether the berserker is beneath humanity as an animal, above it as a god, or both, he is cut off from all human community when he...

“Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.”  —Robert Louis Stevenson Michelle Black remembers October 4, 2017, with haunting attention to detail: the peculiar humming of uncertainty, the hours of not knowing, the knock from Chaplains at the door, the collapse into a pool of tears and loneliness at being far from family – a reality of many military spouses. M...

“The thing about dreams, though, is they usually sound crazy to everyone but you. All it takes is one other person to buy into them to keep you going.” ― Lopez Lomong, Running for My Life: One Lost Boy's Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games For Bishop Abraham Yel Nhial, who serves at the Aweil Diocese of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan, life has come full circle. As a...

“Human trafficking is an open wound on the body of contemporary society, a scourge upon the body of Christ. It is a crime against humanity.” —Pope Francis When we hear the term “modern slavery” – perhaps better known as human trafficking – it is hard to wrap our brains around the notion that it still exists. Cocooned by the relative comforts of a Western lifestyle, a warm bed and abundant grocery...

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” ― Benjamin Franklin In a quiet office wedged deep inside a bustling Baghdad courthouse, glints of burning sunlight frame a silky black judge’s robe hung beside a limp Iraqi flag. The large wooden desk is neat and sparse, adorned with a tin of designer pens and stacks of paper encased in thick leather slee...

“Technology like art is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.” ― Daniel Bell Imagine yourself in an F-15EX dogfighting in a real-time battle 5,000 miles away as your heart races strapped into the cockpit and swerving through hostile terrain making split-second decisions about what tactic to use next all while expecting the unexpected. Thirty seconds later, you are stomping through a mine-ri...

“When walking with the strong or with the dead, Do not wear clothes of purple or of red.” ― The Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet XII) Less than three years after the United States withdrew all its troops following eight tumultuous years, yet another rendition of a terrorist group named ISIS swept through large swaths of Iraq in the scorching early summer of 2014. The footage was chilling for many America...

“Right now, this life cannot be called a life. But somehow we are forced to live it.” - Asyeah Jasoor, 22 It’s been a year since the US finally withdrew from Afghanistan on Aug. 30 after occupying the country for more than two decades. The Biden administration’s hasty removal of US troops led to chaotic scenes at Kabul’s international airport, with Afghans clamoring to leave before the Taliban too...

BAGHDAD, Iraq – When ISIS assailed its way through swaths of war-torn Iraq eight years ago, the helpless outer world was slapped with the haunting plight afflicted on the Yazidi minority: thousands slaughtered in cold blood in the arid crevices of Sinjar Mountain, thousands of girls and women kidnapped into the tortuous confines of ISIS sex slavery. But what we did not hear much about is that a si...

“Rugby is a hooligans game played by gentlemen.” - Winston Churchill Their bonds were forged on battlefields 7000 miles away. Only now, they converge once a year in the lush recesses of upstate New York, caked in mud with pigskin-like oval balls – and beers – passed around like an offertory collection, cast against eyes rimmed with excited exhaustion. “Every year, players come here from all over t...

Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. Leonardo da Vinci TWIN FALLS, Idaho – From a distance, it appears morosely idyllic: figurines collapsing like rag dolls into the azure abyss, hurling toward the gushing stream below until color bursts from above, the parachutes propelling th...

In this 20-minute interview, Hollie McKay talks about Al Qaeda terrorist leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, whom the US killed in a CIA drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan on July 31st at the home of a senior official of the Taliban government’s Haqqani Network faction. About where Zawahiri came from, Hollie says, Al Zawahiri is somebody that I've looked into a lot over the over the years.  At the beginning...