My Love.

My best friend is a darn beauty.

OBV!!

HIV, Drugs, and Sex Workers

Just read the article on Huffington Post with a title talking about “we can’t fight aids without stopping the war on drugs.”

Yea, preach, cool. But ummmm what about the issue of condom confiscation? How are we to have a generation without HIV when police officers have the legal right to confiscate sex worker’s condoms?

Forcing many, like the ones I interviewed in South Africa, to just not use them. Because if they are caught with condoms in their purses they are immediately arrested and detained for unspecified periods of time, robbed, or raped by those charged to protect the society.

I’m confused.

#insomnia. (Taken with Instagram)

Sex Workers and Condom Confiscation

The interviews I did while in South Africa of sex workers who were having their condoms confiscated by police officers have been compiled with other case studies into Open Society’s Criminalizing Condoms piece which can be downloaded here.

iSupport.

Africa is where my heart resides even when I am long gone and far way

When I was in Ethiopia, I drove up Entoto Mountain and saw these women, dozens of women, climbing up and down this steep mountain with very heavy loads of branches on their backs.

The women were hunched over, almost to a 90 degree angle and one of them I saw had such bad posture that even when she removed the load from her back was permanently hunched over.

Where were they all going? What were they doing with these branches? There is no way they were being paid enough for such hard labor that left most of them permanently deformed.

Of course I was overcome with sadness. The plight of the women in Africa does not became real until you place your self in their space.

Then and only then does life get real, very quickly.

Poetry.

It seems no matter how
I try I become more difficult
to hold
I am not an easy woman
to want

-Nikki Giovanni

Ethiopia was a dream. and now i can’t sleep.

My dad doesn’t need this hat. Imma go ahead and claim it.

Where I get alll my fine fabrics 🙂 Grand Marché d’Adjamé (Abidjan)

Shorts: stolen from my bff

Shirt: $1 from thrift store on 14th street, NW

Head wrap: $3 from fabric lady at the market in Cote d’Ivoire

= $4 outfit

Poetry.

I dreamt that I could paint you with words, but there were no colors bright enough, black or white enough, blue or green enough…they didn’t mean enough.- Mos Def  (via throughkaleidscopeeyes)