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Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21st Century
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Creating connections through the arts and across cultures and the home of "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary." Feautures family issues and the creative vitality of the blogger's father, in his 90s, Erwin A. Thompson.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'ah'
John Nunley: “There are no straight lines in Africa.”
Africa is all about the undulating line. Linear functions don’t apply....
“Africa is a continent, not a country!”
“Africa is a continent, not a country!” Have you noticed that folks all too often flatten out the mind-spinning variety of African topography, countries, cultures, languages, beliefs, architecture, conflicts, joys and sorrows…by ref...
Kwanda video: South Africa launches self-help program
New media for old problems. Click: “Full Story” to watch video. Find more videos like this on Kwanda...
Kwanda (wealth & growth): Reality TV for Social Action & Community Development in South Africa
Damaria Senne is a writer based in Johannesburg. She chats about her life as a writer and mother on Storypot. In addition to writing about technology(www.jcse.org.za) , she also blogs for OneLove, a regional HIV prevention campaign spanning 9 countr...
St.Louis Writer’s Guild profils Janet Riehl
This is one of my favorite profiles anyone wrote about me. (St. Louis Writers Guild Newsletter “The Scribe” Fall 2008). Even I learned some things about me! I joined SLWG in 2007 when I moved here, and became a member of distinction in 20...
African Memories by Mary Trimble
Mary Trimble has two outstanding remembrances of Africa on her blog....
Wangari Naathai’s Kenyan grassroots story told in “Taking Root,” KETC film series at Missouri History Museum
Tonight at the Missouri History Museum, as part of the Community Cinema Series, a packed auditorium viewed “Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai.” “Taking Root” tells the dramatic story of Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize Laure...
Ghanaian President Attah Mills Installed
On midnight of January 6th, in a specially convened session of Parliament, the bi-carmel house switched sides, signaling a transfer of power. On January 7th, the day I arrived back in the United States, President John Evans Atta Mills was formally in...
Where do you write? In bed, like Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, Collette, Proust, James Joyce, Mark Twain…and me (at African Rainbow Resort)?
Photo from Aerphant. A tidbit from my Author’s Guild Bulletin caught my eye: “Comfy: Where do you do your writing? For a book of photographs, The Writer’s Desk, by Jill Krementz and published in 1996, John Updike wrote the introduct...
HAPPINESS DIET: GO TO GHANA…AND LOSE WEIGHT!
Map from Virtual Explorers (http://www.virtualexplorers.org/ghana/map.htm). Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, my West African speech gave way to my Midwestern speech. I am going home…to my ancestral home, the place of my father awaits, heart b...
Riehlife off to Ghana on African Holiday…back in 2009
Between December 6th to January 7, Riehlife goes on holiday as Janet travels to Ghana, a place she lived and worked for several years in the 1970s. This trip will be far more simple than her August trip to Southern Africa. Because I’ll only be...
Identity: Report from Kenya, by David Zarembka
It seems that humans, in order to deal with the mass of humanity they encounter, need to organize the masses by reverting to labeling people through identity. I don’t know if this is genetic or a learned behavior (clearly the details are very m...
Learn the Music of Language to Float in Communal Space
It’s perfectly possible to not know a word of a language, but to seem as if you know the language and culture well if you know the symbolic utterances and music of a language…it’s rhythms, rising and falling. If you know when to mak...
Post-Apartheid: A White Woman and a Black Woman Walk Down the Street…It is Unremarkable.
A woman in an on-line group I belong to shared this comment with me: “I was at an Romance Writers of America party in the early ’90’s and we were talking about apartheid and a best selling author said, ‘What’s apartheid...
Riehlife on African Holiday
Between August 4th to August 26th, Riehlife travels to Southern Africa—South Africa and Botswana. I’ve decided not to take too many gadgets, so I’ll be leaving my laptop and cellphone at home. I’ll be in erratic computer con...
Iconic Moments: Treasured Touchstones or Dross that Drowns?
Iconic Moments are defining life moments we harken back to. On the downside, they may be idealistic images that keep us from being grounded in the now. On the upside, they can serve as guideposts in our lives…to follow what was best and brighte...
Ladysmith Black Mambazo brings African Spirit to America:Portable Village in Song
These eight men comprise a Portable Village. They bring the feeling of the village and the values of the village to the American Stage, so longing as we are and so needing this as we are as a culture. Click here to view and here video on You Tube wit...
Portable Village…on the move!
Portable Village is a phrase that came to me in 2002 when I gave a talk at the Writers Center in San Rafael, California, on “Celebrating an African Experience.” Friends from New Mexico, Lake County, and all around came to support me in th...
Back to Africa…Yes!
In my 60th year, I set out for Africa, the continent that transformed my life when I first sojourned there thirty years before. I’d waited half a lifetime to return, and could scarcely believe that the waiting…the exile…was finally ...
