“I know it’s sinful, but sometimes I feel like committing suicide” are the words of a 66 years old woman I went to interview for this article in Skopje, Macedonia. Mona* suffers from hyperlipidaemia, heart problems, bronchitis and chronic sickness of the uterus. She has no way of paying for […]

A mere two subway stops away from  Bucharest’s center lies the ghetto of Ferentari. It’s Romania’s most dangerous neighbourhood, a festering pocket of crime, gangs, drug addiction, drug trafficing, prostitution, abject deprivation and multi-layered exclusion. 100,000 Romanians call it home. During the interwar period and all the way through the […]

Ayşe[1] is a poor woman living in Ankara. Born in a rural area in Eastern Anatolia, she immigrated to the capital with her family when she was a child. She has only received a basic education as higher education was unthinkable for her poor rural family. She is an Alevi, […]

Romanian opponents of the grandiose mining scheme at Roşia Montană were delighted when a photo of American actor Woody Harrelson supporting their cause circulated for days on the Internet. Harelson is just one of the many people opposed to the project. But pressure on the Government is not yet  enough […]

  Valentyna is in her 70s. She sells used books on the street right under an old rusty fence. I come closer and pick up an extremely old copy of Boccaccio’s “Decameron”. She doesn’t mind a bit of a chat with me and says that she has been in this […]