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WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8823 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-09-09 21:36:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-09-09 21:36:41 [post_content] =>

Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from.

The way it looked promised richness and flavor. Sharp green leaves, stemless, in a transparent plastic package with the words “organic” and “triple-washed.” It was something I’d never seen before: ready-to-eat spinach with no dirt, worms, or roots. In Colombia, my home country, produce always needed to be washed. Spinach, in particular, needed extra effort, because it was always sold as a whole. I usually soaked it in vinegar and lemon for half an hour to kill any parasites or bacteria. But in the United States, everything seemed easy, fast, and reliable—no soaking required. I bought the bag of spinach, and prepared a fresh salad with goat cheese and walnuts. In less than two minutes, it was on my plate. I chewed and chewed. But while there was a hint of spinach in whatever those leaves were, it was certainly not spinach.

In Colombia, I lived in Bogotá, a densely populated and urbanized area. With reduced access to green spaces, I felt most connected to nature through food. Vegetables came from the earth and still carried the signs: roots that once absorbed nutrients, stems that transported water and sugars, bugs that had nibbled on the same leaves I would soon eat, too. Seeing all this reminded me that my food had been grown, not manufactured. It connected me to the farmers who had cultivated, cared for, and harvested it. I felt grounded when peeling, chopping, smelling, washing, and eating my produce. At the end of the day, I was manipulating something that came from the earth.

When I moved to New York City in 2022, I noticed how little people manipulated their food by comparison. Grocery stores sold pre-washed and pre-cut vegetables, and people just opened the packages and threw food on a plate and called it a meal. They didn’t need to bother getting their hands dirty, because their food was already chopped and sanitized.

To me, this disconnect was clearly separating people from nature, making food’s origins feel unfamiliar. When people don’t see, feel, and taste the whole flavor of produce, they also feel less encouraged to eat it. A mango that once grew on a tree, appears nature morte—a dead nature—in a plastic container, more like a granola bar than fruit. In Colombia, produce tasted intense and complex. Spinach, for example, tasted bitter, earthy, and savory. A friend from Peru tells me she avoided fruit her first year in New York because it tasted too sugary and artificial. Another friend from Mexico will only eat pineapple, because she thinks other fruits taste as if they’ve been diluted in a water and sugar solution.

The University of Florida found the reason that fruits, like tomatoes, taste so insipid in the U.S. is because, in the pursuit of higher yield, disease resistance, and shelf life, the genes responsible for flavor were bred out. While unsanitized produce may be risky for gastrointestinal health, GMO and ready-to-eat produce isn’t necessarily always “safer,” either. Processing facilities or farms, for example, frequently wash greens with water and chlorine. While safe in small doses, regular consumption can pose health risks. Other additives, like preservatives or antioxidants, might also cause immune diseases and antibacterial resistance.

It’s also just unnatural. A Colombian friend living in San Francisco tells me she once forgot about a bag of mandarins for two months. When she rediscovered them, they were still edible. “The mandarins were supposed to be spoiled,” she said. “What kind of component do they have to survive for months?”

It is a universal truth that Western society is obsessed with germs. We fear bacteria so much that we do everything we can to isolate ourselves from it, no matter the source. But when it comes to food, are we truly that delicate—unable to tolerate mud on our fingers or on the ground beneath our feet? Is our obsession reinforcing the binary vision that nature is dirty and dangerous, and human creations safe and clean? And what are we robbing ourselves of in the process?

Research published in Communications Psychology found that the more people interact with nature, the more fruits and vegetables they eat. While this affects us all, it disproportionately affects some of us more than others: Access to nature and socioeconomic and racial inequalities in U.S. urban areas have long been related. Simultaneously, the more urban the environment, the fewer healthy food choices are available—especially amongst Black and Hispanic communities, who often have less access to green spaces.

Community gardens and farmers markets help mitigate this gap. They also provide more affordable prices than grocery stores for organic and whole produce. I used to visit a community garden in Queens, where I learned how to compost and take care of the crops they had, allowing me to feel close to food again like I once did in Colombia. I have also tried to buy my produce in farmers markets that sell whole foods, rather than their chopped and sanitized counterparts. But access to these spaces is limited. Community gardens can’t produce the amount of food necessary to feed the whole city. Farmers markets are only in certain neighborhoods and on specific days a week, limiting access for working-class people. Not everyone has the privilege to eat spinach from the earth and not a bag.

I don’t have a solution to this disconnection. But I do know this: We understand the world through our senses. The feel of a vegetable in our hands, the smell of it, the taste, reminds us we exist because of the earth, what we feed ourselves comes from the earth, and that our cells are built from the earth, too. Our bodies evolved alongside the earth. Our ancestors touched soil, grew food, harvested crops, and fed their communities with their hands. And it seems likely for our collective wellbeing that we still need to do everything in our power to do the same.

[post_title] => Food is Meant to Be Touched [post_excerpt] => Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => food-groceries-united-states-colombia-produce-packed-pre-washed-cut-processed-gmo-ready-to-eat-fruits-vegetables-treatment [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 16:40:11 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 16:40:11 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8823 [menu_order] => 10 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 9, 2025September 12, 2025

Food is Meant to Be Touched

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9177 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-09-02 20:19:11 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-09-02 20:19:11 [post_content] =>

How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance.

A few months ago, I was at a protest in Washington, D.C. This was not unusual. Gaza burns. The president deports with impunity. Respect for the rule of law—notably and especially by the government—now seems like the nostalgic artifact of a more innocent era, an era merely months ago. Unsurprisingly, for those of us moved by these simultaneous horror shows, expressing our anger through protest has become almost unremarkable. I’ve lost count of the number of protests I’ve attended, the catchy homemade signs I’ve crafted and seen, and the clever chants I’ve memorized. But at that particular march, something unusual happened: a chant-leader exhorted us to cry a word in my mother tongue, Urdu.

“Azadi!” she called.

“Azadi!” the crowd responded in unison.

Suddenly, the word seemed everywhere: scrawled in chalk across sidewalks and columns; emblazoned across signs. In the heart of the nation, the seat of its power, everywhere, that old watchword of uprising—Azadi.

Azadi, or freedom, is a small word. A scant five letters in both English and its original Farsi (آزادی), these five letters have birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance, having been shouted by students in Srinagar and Tehran, whispered in prison cells in Ankara, and sung by women in Kashmir and Delhi. A cry familiar to all children of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diaspora, myself included, Azadi is hymn, music, and lifeline. It’s a demand for dignity from its callers and from all those who answer the call.

This demand is expansive in scope and depth, inclusive of the dignity of life, of identity, and of the ability to govern your own political destiny. Azadi evokes our collective memory that freedom is claimed, not given, while narrating a people’s unified struggle for systemic social change. For those who seek the protection of the most vulnerable while preserving the dignity of all, Azadi is always within reach.

Still, for all that Azadi is, we must be clear about what it is not. It is not a slogan to be selectively invoked. It is not a justification for state violence. Azadi cannot mean the protection of innocent life only when politically convenient. Moreover, it becomes meaningless when uttered by those who do not uphold a politics grounded in human dignity. Nowhere was this distinction starker than in a recent televised address, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu briefly switched from English to Farsi while commenting on Israel’s bombing of Iran. “Women, life, freedom. Zan, zendagi, azadi,” he said—invoking the slogan of the Iranian women’s rights movement. In that moment, the language of liberation was co-opted to justify the machinery of war. It was surreal to hear a feminist chant—professed often by Iranian women defying authoritarian rule—repurposed by the very man overseeing the brutally indiscriminate bombing of thousands of women and girls in Gaza. The slogan, stripped of its radical roots and repurposed as rhetorical cover, stood in direct contradiction to the grassroots movements that had once breathed life into it.

Creeping autocracy in the United States has for too long been ignored and shrugged off as a dysfunction that happens only in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Global South—the lawless other. But this careless, arrogant posture can no longer be supported, nor can the dangers of autocracy be reduced to a foreign export; and so, Americans chant Azadi now, because America needs it now. The past 100+ days have exhibited what the marginalized in this country have always known: that the greatest repression within America’s borders remains homegrown. Despotism collapses the political distance between nations and times, and just as fascism is rising globally, it has risen here. The myth of American exceptionalism falsely preached that our democracy was immune to the spell of demagoguery. But we know that Americans are just as capable of voting themselves into tyranny as any other people. White supremacy, toxic masculinity, and violent inequalities in rights and liberties were always part of the country’s domestic architectures. Now, from the streets to digital silos, they are plain for all to witness.

From Hungary to India, Israel to the U.S., authoritarian regimes the world over are in conversation, looking admirably upon each other. They swap notes in class, sharing tactics of repression, like aggrandizing executive power and politicizing independent institutions. But just as authoritarian regimes learn from each other, so too must we build solidarity across movements. The rhymes of history—from the surveillance of Black radicals in the U.S. to the targeting of Kashmiri students in India—demand collective study. And along with any new lessons that may arise, we must continue to echo the lessons of some of our most beloved visionaries. From Angela Davis to Edward Said to Arundhati Roy, we are reminded that global resistance is strongest when deeply rooted in local struggle.

In fact, therein lies Azadi’s greatest power: It crosses borders, languages, and faiths, moving between nations without itself becoming nationalized. It is a global grammar of defiance.

Language lives. It breathes, grows, reproduces. Azadi has done so, too, absorbing every movement and tongue it touches: Farsi, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Punjabi, English. The precise journey of the word is contested; after all, linguistic borrowing is never an isolated event. Still, it carries an expansive genealogy of struggle through its travels: against gendered violence, against settler colonialism, against religious nationalism.

While I heard cries for Azadi in D.C. for the first time this year, in Indian-occupied Kashmir—the most militarized zone on earth—Azadi has been invoked for decades, having been part of the Kashmiri liberation movement since its inception. Yet as Modi’s India forbids conversations about the region and brands it as sedition, as students and organizers are arrested for expressing their desire for freedom, as the indigenous Kashmiri struggle for self-determination persists—Azadi remains the movement’s heartbeat.

Long serving as the anthem of the Kashmiri separatist movement, now that Azadi can no longer be expressed in the open, it hides itself in art or in niche digital spaces not yet subject to state discipline. Digital speech, however, is increasingly policed. On platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Indian authorities now block, geofence, or suspend accounts that challenge its narrative. Content from advocacy groups like Stand With Kashmir is censored using the same tools of repression that platforms in the U.S. deploy against pro-Palestinian activists—algorithms, shadowbanning, keyword suppression. Surveillance and censorship, previously characterized as exclusive to so-called illiberal regimes, are now a feature of the liberal democracies just catching up.

As all this occurs, state actors escalate their repression of dissent in the United States. Trumpism has made it clear what can and cannot be said: speech critical of the Trump administration is met with swift retribution; and speech challenging domestic and foreign policy is quickly vilified, as seen by the vicious response to ICE protests in California earlier this summer. Meanwhile, students protesting for Palestine in the U.S. now face the same brutal state retaliation we’ve long associated with authoritarian regimes abroad—even though the U.S. has always had its own archive of violent suppression, from the surveillance and silencing of civil rights activists and abolitionists to the the crackdown on anti–Vietnam War protesters after them. Today, much to Trump’s delight, some of the most prestigious law firms have capitulated to executive pressure, agreeing to perform approximately $1 billion worth of pro-bono labor for Trump’s retributive pet projects. Activists and pro-Palestine advocates have been doxxed, fired, expelled, and/or blacklisted. All the while, institutional liberalism bends the knee: DEI offices that once promised safe harbor for marginalized voices now fall silent or side with power; liberal media outlets fire staff who speak out against atrocities in Gaza. The suppression of speech, criminalization of protest, surveillance of dissent—these are global patterns, and we are not exempt. Arguably, if American exceptionalism matters here at all, it will be in its ability to normalize this authoritarian bent worldwide.

And yet resistance continues. The same dignity Azadi rallies for abroad is now demanded here. On the steps of American universities. In its hallowed institutions. At the foot of the Capitol.

For all that Azadi gives, it demands something of us—namely that we do more than simply bear witness. When we chant Azadi, we are not just echoing other movements, past and present, but entering into dialogue with them, from Kashmir to Kabul to Tehran. This is not mimicry, but lineage, as Azadi reminds us in every generation that our rights are not guaranteed and must be renewed through struggle.

It is not enough, then, to be the appreciative, passive inheritor of a tradition of resistance; one must mobilize. This means texting rideshares, learning how to administer basic first aid for those whose names you don’t yet know, and tracking jail releases of those who you just met and marched alongside. This means disagreement without collapse, and accountability without exile. This means spending hours in rooms with bad lighting and too many opinions, trying to move toward consensus anyway.

If Azadi is to continue to mean something lasting, we’ll need to carry it beyond the chants—into policy fights, mutual aid networks, protective kinship, and more. Because Azadi is not metaphor, it is mandate, and requires all of us to answer its call.

Call and Response:

Hum kya chahte? Azadi!
What do we want? Freedom!

Chheen ke lenge—Azadi!
We will snatch it—Freedom!

Hai haq hamara—Azadi!
It is our right—Freedom!

Zor se bolo—Azadi!
Say it louder—Freedom!

Hai jaan se pyaari—Azadi!
We love it more than life—Freedom!

Tum kuch bhi kar lo, hum leke rahenge—Azadi!
Do what you want, we will still win it—Freedom!

[post_title] => America Needs Azadi [post_excerpt] => How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => america-united-states-azadi-freedom-protest-palestine-gaza [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-03 10:27:10 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-03 10:27:10 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9177 [menu_order] => 4 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 2, 2025September 3, 2025

America Needs Azadi

by Safiyah Zaidi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9206 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-08-07 16:43:47 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-07 16:43:47 [post_content] =>

How one woman's friendship helped guide me to myself.

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

I met Maryam at an Egyptian dance class in 2009, just outside Boston. We ended up on the same train ride back into the city afterwards, and got to chatting, about dance, about life. I was immediately at ease in her presence. Maryam’s big green eyes peered owlishly at me over wire frame glasses as we talked, and I was struck by the sensation that I was speaking to an elderly cartoon wizard who had transfigured, comically, into a freakishly gorgeous human woman. We also learned we were both students at the same college, and when she got off at her stop, we agreed to meet up on campus the next week.

I’m still not sure why Maryam wanted to hang out with me back then. At 21, I’d arrived to our friendship a myopic, self-centered mess of youthful immaturity. Unrecognized neurodivergence and unaddressed teenage trauma had glazed over my entire life, until everything was blurry. I was totally disconnected from myself beyond whatever my current fleeting hyperfixation, which often included chasing after some dehydrated headache of a man. I had no internal compass or intrinsic motivation to carve a deliberate path forward for my life.

In contrast, Maryam was poised, self-expressive, and independent in ways that awed me. Several years older and light years more adult, she moved through life with an enigmatic grace. Her home was full of art, films, perfumes, and books. Meanwhile, I still lived with my mom, and my room was full of…laundry.

I so desperately wanted to be like Maryam. A trained historian, herbalist, doula, and certified babe, this woman had it together. She taught me about feminist geopolitics, which plants would be good for my period cramps, and how to take care of my skin. She kept her fingers and toes manicured (red, always), and had a standing appointment at the nail salon for a polish change every Friday. It was the first time I’d met someone so devoted to herself; not in an egotistical way, but as a practice in self-respect.

“I never leave the house without at least a little makeup,” Maryam told me once. "My mother taught me that.”

Wow, I remember thinking. What a cool mom.

I haven’t spoken to my own mother much since middle school, but at 21, I was a full-time student who couldn’t yet afford my own apartment. Home, then, was a source of constant anxiety and stress; a gulf of silence, punctuated by unpredictable bouts of my mother’s wrath, a pattern that still defines our relationship today.

I cherished having an elder femme take me under her wing. I was a shy, only child, and my living situation had left me feeling pretty isolated. Time with Maryam often felt like an escape; like an alternate plot line where I felt a sense of belonging. Over time, I started to realize that I could actually live in that plot line, if I wanted to.

In the early years of our friendship, Monday nights were ours. Nearly every week, we went dancing in Cambridge, the notorious college town next door. We both had to be up early on Tuesdays, but that didn’t stop us—Maryam may have been responsible and mature, but we were both in our early 20s; still able to party all night and get up at 6 a.m. the next day. Whenever men would try to talk to us, we would start “joke dancing”: lurching and flailing our bodies around to scare away the would-be suitors, purely for our own amusement. When the night was done, I would drop her off and make my way back home in my mom’s Scion.

Maryam quickly became a mother figure to me, and helped me grow strong in ways that I needed, especially when I later stepped into sex work for the first time at 25. Through her, I was also able to see the ways my own mother had inadvertently taught me to hide from myself. My mom, a white woman who adheres to the principles of second wave feminism, raised me to believe that femininity was something that weak women performed for men. She was loud about her disdain, both for men and for femmes. She kept her hair short, never wore makeup, and still rarely wastes an opportunity to let me know she thinks my own femininity is frivolous.

But for all her convictions, my mother has also never been a confident woman; not when I was growing up, and not today. She is direct, entitled, and bossy in the ways that whiteness allows, but, when presented with everyday opportunities to disrupt things like misogyny, racism, or classism, she often stays silent, choosing decorum over the values she believes she holds.

The first iteration of my womanhood was steeped in the same temerity as my mother’s, something that required me to subjugate large swaths of my personality. I am, at my core, a belligerent lesbian with a smart mouth who capitulates to no one. I just didn’t know all of that yet at 21, and Maryam’s friendship helped guide me to myself.

In many ways, just meeting her was a revelation. She embodies a multiplicity that my mother’s idea of feminism can’t compute; a multiplicity that, though different from mine, allowed me to better understand my own contradictions, not as shortcomings, but as evidence of the shortcomings of the patriarchal culture around me. Maryam is brave enough to speak her mind, especially when it comes to standing up to men—even though as a mixed race, high femme, feminist hijabi, she faces a unique set of risks that often compound when she does so. Once, as a new mother, she noticed a man following a woman down the street, harassing her. With her infant strapped to her chest, Maryam began loudly heckling him, and he panicked and ducked into a store. She followed him inside and continued to roast him in front of shoppers.

I wonder if she gets this ferocity from her own mother, Karla, who died suddenly, shortly before Maryam and I first crossed paths. I wonder, too, what it was like for Maryam in the early years of our friendship, to guide me so thoughtfully and patiently through life as she grappled, mostly alone, with her monumental loss. She, like me, is an only child, and she lived with her mom until she died.

I also wonder what it was like to be raised by someone so tough. My favorite story about Karla, who was an artist, is the time that she was working in her studio and accidentally slashed her flesh. She cauterized her own wound with a cigarette, because, according to Maryam, “She couldn’t be bothered with the fuss of the ER.”

So unlike my own mother’s lip-service, Maryam taught me to hold my ground, go with my gut, and never let a man push my boundaries. Wise, wise advice for anyone to heed, but especially for a young person heading into the sex industry, like I did, just a few short years into our friendship. I am 36 at the time of this writing, and I have been in various types of sex work for over a decade. I started out as a stripper, and Maryam was one of my most supportive friends. She immediately understood the complex web of reasons why sex work may be the best choice for some people; even people like me, who have a college degree and other potential career options. Her steadfast support helped me keep my head on straight when others, including my mom, tried to make me feel bad about myself for dancing. And her support never wavered. During our brief but glorious stint as roommates, she would perform parody dances for me in the living room, twerking in a handstand on the wall to strip club classics, like T Pain’s I’m in Love (With a Stripper). Once, during one of my shifts at the club, the bewildered bouncer came inside to let me know that Maryam had tried to come visit me at work—with her new baby asleep in the carriage.

In stark contrast, when my biological mom found out through the grapevine that I had been dancing, she lost it. Even though we barely spoke, she used any contact as an opportunity to let me know she was mortified by my choices. She tried to shame me out of my job, eventually using her own mental health as a manipulation tactic, blaming my stripper status for her anxiety and depression.

I don’t resent my mother for this, I don’t hate her. But I also don’t feel known by her. And when I was younger, I needed to feel known, to feel understood—to feel mothered.

For an off-the-wall autist, pinballing through her early adulthood, Maryam’s care was a lifeline. Her lessons in self respect also helped me shift paradigms in my personal life. Eventually, as I matured, I started to put less attention into toxic relationships and instead focus on building a relationship with myself. I have my own apartment now, full of my own art, music, perfumes, and books. (I’m still locked in a chronic battle with my laundry, though—some things don’t change.) Gradually, as I grew up, my friendship with Maryam changed, too: In the 15 years since we met, she’s had kids, I’ve figured out I’m queer, and we’ve both begun to contend with the ways that time takes a toll on the body; the ways that life shapes the spirit and the mind.

Part of me will forever feel like a clumsy little kid, chasing after Maryam with a lollipop tangled in my hair, but, in general, I feel pretty well equipped to take care of myself. Now, I’m also someone Maryam calls in a crisis, someone she vents to when she has a problem; not just the other way around. I feel rewarded by having earned her trust over the years; a kind of trust that I still don’t get from my own mom.

I’ve also had my own experiences now, mothering younger friends and relatives, and in those situations I often find myself emulating Maryam, trying to strike a balance of grace and leadership; trying to teach my little ducklings to be strong and brave.

It took a long time for me to see just what it meant for Maryam to show up for me like she did in those early years, especially as she was learning to navigate life without her mom. She was attentive to me in ways for which I previously had no barometer; she validated my dreams, recognized my hard work, and showed me care in simple ways, like learning which foods were my favorites, or reminding me my worth every time some dingus broke my heart. On the other hand, my own mother has asked me twice in the past decade what color my eyes are, refuses to believe that I am autistic, and, just before I started grad school for journalism last fall, decided to tell me why she thinks I’ll never be a good journalist.

Since my own mom is mostly a stranger to me, it’s hard for me to imagine what it’s like to lose a bond I never had. But through mine and Maryam’s friendship, I have caught glimpses of Karla, and have come to love her through Maryam’s eyes—to recognize the woman who mothered the woman who mothered me.

When I look back at the ways that Maryam helped guide me in my lost, immature years, or when I reflect on what a spectacular mom she has become to her own children, I am awash with the strange sense of missing someone I never had a chance to meet. I can feel Karla’s presence in so much of Maryam’s life, and, by extension, so much of my own.

It’s been over ten years since Maryam and I lived in the same state. She’s raising a family with her husband in the Midwest, and I’m running around, a gay, sex working journalist in New York. I miss her so much. I keep photos of her and her kids in my studio, along with a pair of Karla’s old boots: a reminder that my best friend is always with me, and of the multigenerational blessings she brings to my world; and of the many mothers, here and gone, who continue to watch over me.

[post_title] => The Cycle of Mothering [post_excerpt] => How one woman's friendship helped guide me to myself. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => old-friends-friendship-mothering-growing-up-self-understanding-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-19 12:32:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-19 12:32:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9206 [menu_order] => 2 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 7, 2025September 19, 2025

The Cycle of Mothering

by Delilah Saul

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9098 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-08-01 17:42:22 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-01 17:42:22 [post_content] =>

As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home.

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

For months, I thought coming to New York City was a mistake. I’d accepted an unpaid internship in the city, leaving my home in Bogota to try living abroad. I dreamed of going to Broadway shows, dining out at different restaurants—enjoying all the fun New York had to offer. But instead, in addition to my internship, I ended up taking another job, just to afford rent. I worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with little time to socialize. I was burned out and deeply lonely. Then, one day, my friend Carolina suggested we go out after our internship and do something fun.

“We should go rollerskating at Rockefeller Center,” she said.

I used to skate for fun back in Colombia—my home country—when I was a teenager, but hadn’t gone in years. Still, I thought it was a great idea. Carolina was a talented skater, and we had so much fun looping around the rink that I was reminded of the joy skating had once made me feel.

For the first time in months, I was completely at ease. Then, as we were leaving the rink, I fell. When I looked down, my arm was shaped like the letter “s”: I’d broken my left wrist. Carolina, somehow, found the strength to pull me up, call an Uber, and take me to the nearest hospital. She waited with me for hours in the emergency room, where I learned I’d need nails and a cast to fix my broken bones.

As my arm healed, Carolina took the subway with me to work every day, protecting me from accidental bumps. She brushed my messy hair, pulled down my pants so I could pee, and dressed me up again; all things I’m not sure I’d ask even my closest friends to do for me back home.

At the time, we had only known each other for four months.

I once read an Instagram post that said being an immigrant is like becoming a dog: one year as an immigrant equals seven years of life experience. Friendships, then, become intense and profound more quickly than they might back home. Sometimes, out of necessity, they become deeper than our friendships back home, too.

Adult immigrants often find themselves profoundly alone. Our families and closest friends usually remain in our home countries, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The friendships we form in our new lives, then, become everything to us: our support network, our first call, our emergency contacts.

In an unfamiliar city, we also seek familiarity. As immigrants, we tend to connect more deeply with people from similar cultural backgrounds, something especially meaningful when we suddenly become the “other” after a lifetime of living in a country where we are the “norm.” Sharing a language, traditions, and social cues lowers the barriers to intimacy: When someone understands the way you were raised, you don’t have to justify or over-explain everything you do.

Carolina was from Bogota, too, and had started at the same internship a week before I had. We had a lot in common: We both came from Catholic-conservative backgrounds, needed to be very mature at a young age, identified as feminists, had issues making friends, and wanted to start life from scratch in the city. We shared similar experiences growing up, and similar experiences since coming to New York. But our friendship deepened after I broke my wrist: I knew then that we could rely on one another. That if something ever happened to me again, she would take care of me—and if something ever happened to her, I’d take care of her, too.

Carolina isn’t the only immigrant friend I’ve felt this immediate intimacy with. One day, I was hiking with Nicol, a Peruvian friend. The trail was rocky and we had to march in rhythm just to move forward. Suddenly, a memory popped into my head: In primary school, I used to march like a soldier with the rest of my classmates. Military culture is deeply ingrained in Colombia because of our near century-long history of war and internal armed conflict. It felt silly, but I decided to share my memory with Nicol.

“Oh, yeah, we did that at my school, too,” she said. “It was so ridiculous. Our parents would come watch us march in squared formations.”

Of course. Peru, too, has a history of armed conflict, and military culture was a part of her primary school indoctrination as well. She didn’t make fun of me for what I thought might be a strange confession. Instead, she took my memory and treated it with care—turning it into something funny and shared.

I immediately felt closer to her, something unusual for me. I’ve always considered myself introverted. During my undergrad years in Colombia, I experienced severe social anxiety. I was trapped in an internal monologue that told me I was boring, strange, and hard to love. For nearly two years, I didn’t make a single friend. I built high walls around myself that kept everyone out. After a while, I made meaningful connections that have stayed with me, but I’d never found it easy.

When I migrated, I assumed I’d again struggle to make friends—especially since, on top of everything else, I now had to add “not fluent enough in English” to my long list of self-demeaning adjectives.

But when I started grad school in the States, I made friends within the first two weeks. At the time, I thought maybe I had changed somehow; become more at ease within myself, more confident. But looking back, I can see it was something else: My deep, human need to belong—and the comfort I felt around other Latin American students—had activated parts of me that had been frozen.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon with María, a friend from Mexico. Before coming here, I had never had friends like her—extroverted, party lovers, heavy users of dating apps, full of energy. After a long conversation about how Latina diet culture has shaped our relationship to food and our bodies, I realized our friendship had grown strong, in spite of our differences, because it was rooted in something larger than us. Like with Carolina, and Nicol, and countless other immigrant friends, we were united by our need to resist a homogenizing environment. We were united by our shared confusion about U.S. social cues. We were united by our warmth, our humor, and our overlapping memories, even if we didn’t grow up in the same country.

“I’ve noticed you’re literally like my younger sister,” she told me. “The good girl who wants to fit in and carries the weight of your lineage. We’re very different, but there’s a strong emotional connection between us.” I realized then that she is, indeed, a lot like my older sister, too.

I’ve been in the U.S. for almost two years now, and I still find it hard to make American friends. Sometimes, people make xenophobic comments to me in the streets. When I meet people who grew up in the States, I quickly find myself running out of conversation topics, unable to find much common ground—something that still makes me feel out of place. But my immigrant friends are part of the reason I still want to stay, to put down roots.

At the end of the day, home is where you feel safe, loved, and cared for, rather than where you grew up. If I have friends who look after me, who resist the harshest expressions of discrimination and exclusion by my side—then here, I’ve found a place to call home.

Don’t get me wrong: I have beautiful, loyal friendships in Colombia, too. But my friends there don’t need me to survive. In Colombia, if I got sick, I could call my parents or sisters, and they would drop everything for me. But there, I had never been anyone’s emergency contact. My friends back home already had someone else to call—their own parents, siblings, partners.

In contrast, my friendships in New York became lifelong within months. I’m now the emergency contact for two friends. I’ve been the caregiver for one of them coming out of a medical procedure that needed anesthesia. Here, my friends and I depend on each other to be each other’s version of family, to be a shoulder to cry on, to be someone reliable for medicine delivery; as a party plus-one, a caregiver, a babysitter (or cat sitter!), among many other things.

The need to survive, to resist, to belong, and to be comforted—that’s what first pushed us together. But it’s the care, love, and familiarity that’s kept us bonded.

[post_title] => Emergency Contact [post_excerpt] => As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => immigrant-friendships-migrant-friends-relationships-home-emergency-contacts-shared-language-culture-latin-america-immigration-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 16:43:09 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 16:43:09 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9098 [menu_order] => 3 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 1, 2025September 12, 2025

Emergency Contact

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

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How younger generations are turning knitting and crochet into a community building affair.

The first known knitted project was a pair of socks. Discovered in Egypt, the socks featured colorwork made from indigo and white cotton, and were believed to date back to the 11th century, although the craft itself has likely existed for much longer. In the many decades since, knitting, crochet, and other fiber arts have become widespread and global, evolving from the work of artisans to a beloved pastime across generations, while still staying true to the original techniques used in the very first woven fabrics. And now, the craft has evolved once more—this time, at the hands of young people seeking a comforting hobby that gets them out of the house.

This is what led Virginia Meinhausen, 28, and Lea Engler, 31, to take the leap and start Knitting Club Potsdam in Germany earlier this year. “Being part of a community in person is something [meaningful], not only just to speak to each other, it's also… Wow, so many people are doing this and we are doing this together,” says Meinhausen. “We are now meeting each other in a huge group once a month.”

Since launching the club in March, Meinhausen says it’s grown to over 100 members. But this quick success isn’t unique to just Knitting Club Potsdam. In recent years, the age-old practice has found new meaning amongst Gen Z and Millennials, who have turned to knitting as a means of bringing back the “third place” and reconnecting with their peers.

“I remember thinking, it’s crazy how many people don’t have a real hobby anymore,” says Isabelle Mann, textile business expert and owner of knitwear brand Fable and Failure. But she says this started to shift during the pandemic, as younger generations sought more analog ways to pass the time.

The trend first began online, rising to prominence through influencers like Petite Knit and platforms like Ravelry, with younger generations taking ancient techniques and adapting their garments and patterns to match modern trends. “People do appreciate knitting more again,” Mann says. She sees fiber arts as a community building affair for those between 25 and 35, and started her own club through her business in 2019 as a means of teaching and preserving the craft. She also believes that fiber arts skipped a generation, and that parents in the 90s and early 2000s simply never taught their Millennial and Gen Z children how to do it. Instead, these generations taught themselves—and eventually, as COVID lockdowns lifted, these same knitters decided it was time to take things offline.

Craving human interaction and a break from their screens, hobbyists began coming together post-pandemic as a means of bringing back the “third place”: a neutral, physical space separate from home and work (or school). The concept is set on community building in-person, without having to spend much or any money to participate—something Gen Z feels that they’ve missed out on, and Millennials frequently mourn, as social media has increasingly replaced it online.

Knitting clubs, in particular, have gained global interest in recent years, with communities expanding rapidly, even in small cities. The industry is expected to grow by $10.69 billion between 2024 and 2028, according to Technavio, a company that specializes in market research reports and industry analysis.

In addition to creating bonds through a like interest, in-person knitting clubs are also helping young fiber artists learn new techniques faster and more effectively. When they began Knitting Club Potsdam, Meinhausen was a beginner and Engler was a seasoned knitter, having learned from her mother starting at 8 years old. The club currently has 60% beginner knitters and 40% advanced, according to Engler. Meinhausen, still a beginner herself, says she can’t believe the intricate project she’s working on now, which she credits to how quickly she’s learned since starting the club. She adds that advanced members “love to help,” which gives those just starting out the confidence to continue attending—and makes everyone joyful in the process.

Quote is good

“I told Gini [Virginia] after the first meeting, for me, it was very calm. Everyone was smiling. Everyone [was] so, so happy,” Engler says. “I think this feeling is the best part.”

According to Meinhausen and Engler, knitting and crochet is very popular amongst young people in Germany, but the hobby has gained traction amongst 20- and 30-somethings in other places, as well. In New York, crochet designer Michelle Palacio is creating garments for her brand Venganza using crochet techniques from her Colombian grandmother. In Nepal, the Nepal KnotCraft Centre, founded in 1984, aims to help women of all ages build traditional skills in fiber arts. In Paris, Avril Bas, 26, and her co-president Alice Pierre-François, 28, launched a crochet club called Club Crochet Tricot in 2024, a club that is now officially recognized by the French government. She says membership is growing every week.

“It's really incredible to have [this] place where a common hobby links people, and it helps us find similarly minded people that want to [enjoy] the same activities,” Bas says. “It's really beautiful.”

Bas says that starting the club, combined with her passion for knitting and crochet, contributed to her pursuing fiber arts full time. She fell in love with the tight-knit nature of the community, and now, their club’s efforts have “blossomed into something massive.”

“I started this club and all of a sudden I had like quadrupled my number of friends,” she says.

Club Crochet Tricot meets on Sundays four times a month, with locations varying from scenic park picnics, local cafes, public libraries, and even the cinema. Between 40 and 100 people regularly attend their in-person crafting sessions, and there are always new and interested attendees week to week. Bas feels like younger generations long for this kind social interaction, building community around creativity—and her club is an outlet for that. She also says that she’s more than happy to be a “third place” for those who have been seeking it—and perhaps, that it’s a sign of more “third places” to come.

“Everybody around our age wants to open a bookstore, plant store, cafe,” Bas says. “I feel like it’s going to happen.”

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July 28, 2025September 19, 2025

Weaving a New Third Place

by Andriana Kourkoumelis

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A few unconventional beach reads from the Conversationalist team.

Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood

Part memoir, part literary criticism, part autofiction, part therapy diary, and totally all-consuming, Jamie Hood's Trauma Plot considers how rape upends subjectivity, narrative, and identity — and, in more personal terms, what it means to build a life that acknowledges the reality of sexual violence while refusing to be defined by it. Structurally, it's one of the most interesting books I've read in years; emotionally, it's one of the most gripping. It's searing and surprisingly funny, both brilliant and deeply intimate. And though its subject matter is dark, Hood's a gifted stylist who writes with a powerful spirit of hopefulness and solidarity. I found Trauma Plot utterly unforgettable.

—Marissa Lorusso

Skin and Bones by Renée Watson

I started reading Skin and Bones by Renée Watson at the top of the year, a Christmas gift from a friend. The premise follows a woman, Lena, who is set to get married when her fiancé divulges a secret the day of their wedding. The book is about heartbreak and forgiveness and how relationships evolve. It's about friendships, motherhood, and multigenerational hurts, lessons, and loves. But even more, it's about the dynamics, social and political, of being a fat, black woman in the U.S.; specifically within historical and present black Portland.

I didn't know what to expect from Skin and Bones, though I'd been a bit familiar with Watson's poetry. Like her poetry, her pose is soulful, and the story keeps you wanting to know more and more and more, so much so that by the end, I still wanted to know more about the main character Lena and the world she existed in. However conscientious I may consider myself now about the politics of fatness, there's so much nuance in the book Watson offers through Lena's story, and I'm appreciative of the insight given that I didn't know; that perhaps I could not have easily known.

All in all, the book is both informative and heartfelt, and whatever time of year you read it in, it's sure to deliver warmth to your skin—and bones.

—Kovie Biakolo

Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays by Edgar Gomez

From working at a bougie flip-flop store to Latin dance nights at Pulse nightclub, Edgar Gomez's Alligator Tears is an ode to Florida and queerness. As someone who also grew up in Florida, I saw so much of myself in Gomez's story. His book made me laugh, cry, and feel less alone. The writing is so raw; it's a refreshing dive into the deep end of some topics that are rarely discussed with such honesty. (Just be warned that in the deep end, you may find some alligators lurking.)

—Kiera Wright-Ruiz

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

I've been reading a lot of escapist fantasy to cope with current events, and this novel about Amina al-Sirafi, a retired pirate who gets sucked back into sailing the medieval Indian Ocean in search of a kidnapped kid and ancient, magical treasures, was the most fun I've had with a book of late. It's also especially unusual to find middle-aged mothers as fantasy protagonists, and it reminded me of another favorite, N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. Even better, the book is set up to become a series, which means more adventures to come.

—Anna Lind-Guzik

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

Early in her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li writes, “Facts are the harshest and the hardest part of life." Yet it is the sturdiness of facts, "unalterable," that the writer finds herself returning to in the aftermath of immeasurable loss: the deaths of both her children by suicide, six years apart.

Li writes about the abyss of grief, aware that she is still in it, and perhaps always will be. Things in Nature Merely Grow is Li’s book for her younger son James, a boy who lived life through his thoughts, and it is therefore led by logic; exploring how we think about, talk about, and rationalize death, suicide, and grief. This isn’t to say the book abandons feeling—far from it—but rather that Li’s feelings are almost always tethered to facts: Each moment she catches herself on the cliff’s edge of a hypothetical, she steps away, knowing no answer will change her reality.

A deeply generous book, this memoir flowed through me. It’s staggering to read something that so deftly addresses how impossible it is to put grief into words while doing it so masterfully. Yet here, Li’s writing is precise, capturing grief’s abyss with unwavering clarity.

—Gina Mei

Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice by Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam

As a sex worker and a writer, I’m constantly on the lookout for that rare text that covers adult industry workers with nuance, accuracy, and cultural competence. Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, written by sex worker advocates Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam, is one such uncommon text. Published last year, this timely book balances workers’ personal narratives with a play-by-play breakdown of the historical and contemporary jigsaw puzzle of racist and sexist policy, stigma, and violence that plagues migrant sex workers in North America. Many people outside the sex industry don’t understand how anti-sex worker stigma affects them personally, and I’m always excited when I find a piece of media that connects the dots in a way that’s easy to understand. Not Your Rescue Project accurately situates migrant sex work as a global justice issue about gender and labor, and every page is a well-researched argument for why anyone who wants to end patriarchy would benefit from joining the fight for migrant sex workers’ rights.

—Delilah Saul

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

The novel is written with simple language, but I read each page slowly, because every sentence contains meaning and emotion. This is the story of Catalina and her grandparents, an undocumented Ecuadorian family living in Queens, New York. From a young age, Catalina feels the fear and pressure of living in the States without a visa. When she graduates from high school, she begins studying at Harvard—her family’s great dream for her. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that attending such an institution won't necessarily fulfill the promise of solidifying her immigration status, nor give her family the upward mobility they'd long hoped for.

Faced with the impossibility of telling her own story, Catalina finds a way to claim space by deciding to become art—because then, she would be seen, and admired, and perhaps even able to legalize her immigration status. After all, a recognized work of art can freely come and go, without needing visas.

Unlike other common portrayals of immigrants in pop culture, Cornejo Villavicencio’s novel does not portray immigrants as victims. Rather, it asserts a claim: Immigrants want to be seen, and have the right to joy.

—Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

Coach Prime: Deion Sanders and the Making of Men by Jean-Jacques Taylor

This book spoke to me on so many levels. Coach Prime is more than a story about football—it’s a deep, intimate look into what it means to lead with integrity, faith, and fearlessness in a world that often misunderstands or underestimates you. Deion Sanders, known for his illustrious NFL career, emerges here not just as a coach, but as a transformational leader, mentor, and father figure who guides young men through life’s toughest moments with purpose and poise.

In an era where diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts are often under attack or dismissed, Sanders' approach also offers a compelling and deeply needed counter-narrative: He doesn’t just preach inclusion—he lives it, modeling how authenticity and high standards can coexist. Rather than lower the bar to accommodate struggle, he lifts people up so they can reach it.

Personally, this book has challenged me to lead with greater intentionality, to show up more consistently in my purpose, and to be a source of confidence and clarity for others. I’ve taken away this truth: Real leadership isn’t about being loud—it’s about being rooted. Others can learn from this book that greatness isn’t found in performance alone—it’s in how you treat people, how you guide them, and how you hold space for others to grow. That’s how we build lasting impact—not just on the field, but in every part of our lives.

—Loleta Ross

The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life by Suleika Jaouad

As a lifelong journaler, I’ve been relishing each page of The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad. Even if you don’t journal (or aspire to but haven’t made it a ritual—yet!), it’s a beautiful collection of 100 essays from deep thinkers and wisdom gatherers that you can flip through and digest at your own speed. I love that each essay is short, only a few pages; which means I can manage to finish one at bedtime before falling asleep. Each essay ends with a prompt for journaling, a friendly hand reaching out to you to help make the habit a little more inviting and doable. It continues to surprise me how a journal (or just any ole notebook, really) can instantly become a safe space and listening ear for what’s swimming inside of you and wants to be released. A free form of therapy that’s available whenever you need it. Thank you Suleika for unlocking the magical world of journaling that’s awaiting all of us!

—Erin Zimmer Strenio

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July 14, 2025September 12, 2025

What We’re Reading This Summer

by The Conversationalist Team

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How Kenya's grocery stores might be hurting local farmers.

When the Mauritian private equity fund, Adenia Capital IV, bought Kenyan supermarket chain Quickmart and merged it with rival Tumaimi in 2019, the benefits to investors were obvious. Under the terms, all 13 Tumaimi stores in Kenya would rebrand as Quickmarts, making it the third-largest supermarket chain in Kenya by number of stores overnight. In a joint statement, the two supermarket chains said this new entity would “enhance the capacity to accelerate expansion” and bolster “operational efficiencies.” With an influx of capital, the expanded Quickmart was also poised to buy up smaller stores around the country and become an even larger retail powerhouse, extending its operations beyond dense shopping areas and into quieter residential areas on the periphery of Kenya’s major cities.

Beyond lower prices and expanded access, Quickmart and its private equity owner also spoke of social advantages for ordinary Kenyans. At the time of the merger, 14,000 farmers across the country supplied the chain. With time, Quickmart expected them to supply about 30 percent of its fresh produce. In a country where an estimated 40 percent of people derive at least some of their income from agriculture, the promise of more opportunities for farmers looked like a benefit for everyone.

Since exploding onto the scene in the early 2000s, there’s been a steady rise in supermarkets across Kenya. In 2002, there were four supermarket chains in the country; by 2018, there were ten. Though more “informal” operations, like market stalls, still account for the vast majority of Kenyan grocery sales, in 2020, the proportion of groceries sold through supermarkets was as high as 15 percent. By the end of the decade, such “modern retailers” could account for as much as 25 percent of sales, according to a report from Boston Consulting Group.

It’s a similar story across the developing world, where supermarkets are rapidly displacing other retailers to become the place of choice to buy food. In doing so, supermarkets have become a major force in the Global South, not just in retailing, but in agricultural purchasing. But a closer look shows the new phenomenon has often done more harm than good for the small farmers these supermarket chains and their investors claim to help.

Well into the 20th century, buying groceries in the United States was a lot like buying them in many parts of Africa today: Different vendors sold different items, like meat, produce, oil, or rice, independently, but in close proximity.

As journalist Benjamin Lorr explains in his book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, the idea of a big store that sells everything in one place only goes back a century. Michael Cullen, the New Jersey grocer who pioneered the supermarket concept, struggled and failed to persuade colleagues about its viability for years. But when he opened his King Kullen store—the first supermarket in history—in New York in 1930, the Great Depression was raging, and the store’s wide range of heavily discounted offerings quickly proved indispensable to legions of customers. Other stores soon followed.

“They came with names like Big Bear, Giant Tiger, Bull Market, Great Leopard, announcing their size and price-chopping ferocity with a zoological zeal that puzzles the modern ear,” Lorr writes. “Adding in-store mascots and costumes, parades and pullout advertisements, each trying to pile up merchandise into ever higher displays of abundance.”

By the 1960s, virtually every new grocery store in America was a supermarket, and regional and national chains like Safeway and Kroger became household names throughout the country. Since big supermarkets meant big parking lots, people could also bring their cars—by then an indispensable part of modern life. And because these stores offered everything in one place, families could load up for the week in a single transaction.

Size came with a cost advantage, both for stores and for customers. By buying so much food at once, supermarkets could insist on lower prices from farmers, then sell it to consumers for less than their smaller competitors, thus drawing more people and fueling their own expansion.

But the supermarkets’ edge was often their suppliers’ curse. Dealing with a big supermarket chain meant farmers could sell vast amounts of their products, but it also made them beholden to them. Some farmers got by under this new regime by adapting the stores’ model for themselves, consolidating with each other, getting bigger, and selling at volume to make up for the smaller margins on each item. More often, however, farmers went out of business entirely.

In developing countries today, farmers are facing a similar threat. As a report from the African Climate Foundation recently found, rising supermarket chains typically impose burdensome costs onto farmers in the form of “fees, terms and supply conditions” that only the very largest farmers can endure.

In Kenya, smaller farmers are already suffering. In 2016, the Competitive Authority of Kenya (CAK), a government agency formed to regulate market competition, found that a number of supermarkets had abused their power by pressing new fees onto suppliers after signing contracts. Soon after, Kenya became only the second country in Africa, after South Africa, to prohibit such abuses in legislation.

Kenya and South Africa’s relative affluence may distinguish them from most countries in Africa, but, as supermarkets spread across the continent, they offer a warning of how supermarkets can harm farmers, even with regulations in place. In 2023, CAK hit the local operators of Carrefour, a French supermarket chain, with a record $8.5 million fine after concluding that the chain had climbed the ranks in Kenya’s supermarket industry by demanding crushing discounts from suppliers with one hand, while promoting impossibly low prices to consumers with the other. Carrefour has said it will appeal the decision, but it’s not the first time the company and its local partners have been accused of harming a supplier. A few years earlier, CAK ruled against Carrefour’s local operators after a Kenyan yogurt producer, Orchards, argued it had been forced to give Carrefour steep discounts and even free merchandise that the supermarket later turned around and sold.

Kenya’s high court upheld the ruling last year. By then, Orchards had already gone out of business.

You might think consumer demand is the sole driving force behind the rise in supermarkets in the Global South. It’s true that in Kenya and other developing countries, an emergent class of consumers has come to expect the same luxuries that people in the United States and Europe have long enjoyed. But the worldwide shift towards supermarkets isn’t just a free market trend: It’s aided by a heavy hand from taxpayers in the Global North.

When Adenia Capital IV purchased Quickmart in 2019, more than 40 percent of the fund’s €230 million came from government-controlled development finance institutions. Development banks from Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany all contributed, as well, along with two multilateral banks—the International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, and the European Investment Bank, the European Union’s development bank.

Similar taxpayer-funded institutions underwrite supermarkets all over the developing world. In the last two years alone, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, another development bank, has invested in supermarket chains in Uzbekistan, Romania, Turkey, Albania, and elsewhere. In 2025, the IFC promised up to $30 million to help Kazyon, an Egyptian chain, expand in Morocco. Two years before, Kazyon also received $165 million from Development Partners International, a private equity fund backed by development banks from France and the UK.

European development banks are typically mandated to use their capital to alleviate poverty in developing countries, and often justify investments in supermarkets as a means of helping women and “modernizing” agricultural economies. Consider the Netherlands’ development bank, FMO, which provided $23 million to Azerbaijan’s Araz Supermarket in 2024 to help it build a new distribution facility. FMO said the investment would “contribute to gender equality” since Araz employed a number of women. The bank also said it would help Araz provide “modern working conditions” in a poor region of the country.

But despite investors’ claims, history has shown that the rise and consolidation of supermarkets is usually also bad news for small farmers. Development banks may tout an altruistic mission, but the supermarkets appeal to them for the same reason they appeal to commercial banks: not because they support local agriculture or gender equality, but because they are reliable investments. What benefits they provide to rural communities is less important than whether they grow and turn a profit.

One way to make conditions more equitable for farmers is to implement regulations that dictate what supermarkets can and cannot do to suppliers. Since 2010, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have adopted mandatory codes that bar grocers from practices like changing the terms of a supplier contract unilaterally or delaying payments to suppliers. In Africa, two countries—Kenya and Namibia—have adopted similar codes; though, for now, adherence is voluntary. That’s an inherent weakness: As the African Climate Foundation notes—and as Kenya’s recent history of supermarket-supplier relations has demonstrated—true change requires enforcement.

Development banks could also play a role in obliging countries to adopt these stronger regulations. By promising to invest in supermarkets only in countries that have adopted mandatory codes of conduct, a bank like the IFC could ensure its capital does more to help than harm the small farmers—not just in Africa, but in developing countries around the world—on whose labor agricultural economies depend.

[post_title] => The Troubling Rise of Supermarkets in the Global South [post_excerpt] => How Kenya's grocery stores might be hurting local farmers. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => kenya-global-south-african-supermarkets-quikmart-private-equity-fund-development-banks-food-groceries [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 16:54:56 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 16:54:56 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8835 [menu_order] => 8 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 10, 2025September 12, 2025

The Troubling Rise of Supermarkets in the Global South

by Alex Park

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8790 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-06-27 18:56:37 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-06-27 18:56:37 [post_content] =>

In defense of a long-neglected form of protest.

Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.

At a press conference in Baghdad in December 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi stood up and threw both of his shoes at then-U.S. President George W. Bush in an act of protest against the Iraq War. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” he yelled in Arabic, chucking the first shoe. “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq,” he continued, throwing the other.

Disappointingly if impressively, Bush managed to duck both shoes. But the impact of al-Zaidi’s actions was both immediate and profound: It demonstrated that an American leader—a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—was not untouchable. And by proxy, neither was the United States.

Muntadhar al-Zaidi wasn’t the first person to throw a shoe at a politician, and he wouldn’t be the last. (In fact, he wasn’t even the first to do it that year.) Still, the Bush incident inspired copycats over the following months, many explicitly citing al-Zaidi as their inspiration. Over a decade and a half later, it feels like the practice has gone out of style. I imagine this is partly because, with the rise of global authoritarianism, the potential punishment for throwing a shoe at a world leader has drastically gotten worse—something true even with softer ammo, such as when a protester was arrested for throwing tomatoes at then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016. Or last year, when another protestor was sentenced to prison for throwing coffee cups at Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. But, in my opinion, this is all the more reason for it to make a comeback: More war criminals need to have shoes thrown at them. And, more importantly, people should be allowed to throw shoes at war criminals without fear of death, jail, or other punishment.

In the grand scheme of violence, having a shoe thrown at you is painful but temporary—often to the ego for far longer than the body. Even in the Bush incident, the only people injured were then-Press Secretary Dana Perino after a boom mic gave her a black eye, and al-Zaidi himself, when he was subsequently tackled to the ground and kicked by Iraqi guards and U.S. Secret Service agents. When compared to the countless deaths caused by the person on the receiving end of the shoe, some might even consider it a relatively minor gesture. But I believe it’s the spirit of the act that matters most, both in meaning and message. Having a shoe thrown at you is highly offensive, and as Iranian-American professor Hamid Dabashi points out, not just in Arab culture; a truth easily understood by the billions of us around the world who know to take off our shoes whenever we enter a home. As an insult, it dates at least as far back as the Old Testament—“Upon Edom I will cast My shoe” (Psalm 60:8)—and as a form of defiance towards a person in power, it requires a great deal of bravery. More than anything else, though, shoeing is an outlet for insurmountable rage and grief—a desperate expression of despair.

Feeling helpless, al-Zaidi chose to throw his shoes at the person most responsible for his people’s suffering. In the nearly 20 years since, arguably, the world’s collective anguish has only ballooned. As I write this from my desk in Los Angeles, President Donald Trump has just sent another 2,000 members of the National Guard to tamp down protests against ICE raids across the city. The U.S. has just bombed Iran, violently escalating and inserting itself into another war in the Middle East. Over four years after their initial arrests, the majority of the Hong Kong 47 remains imprisoned, as press freedom around the world grows increasingly tenuous, further threatening the media’s ability to hold war criminals to account. On a mission to break the blockade and deliver food to Palestinians in Gaza, the Freedom Flotilla—carrying Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, amongst other international activists—has just been intercepted by Israel, its passengers all either deported or unlawfully arrested and detained. Unable to leave, desperate Palestinians continue to starve at "catastrophic" levels, with hundreds killed by the Israeli army "while attempting to approach the few remaining aid convoys" in the last month alone.

As our protests in their many forms continue to go unheard, and the world’s countless injustices mount, it sometimes feels as if there is little recourse to stop the people most responsible for our collective devastation. After reading Chris Stephen’s The Future of War Crimes Justice (2024), I was disappointed but not surprised to learn, in great detail, that the reason most war criminals never face trial is largely bureaucratic. There is no feasible way to have a functioning “international” criminal court, because no country notorious for its crimes against humanity would ever willingly comply with its laws, or even agree that it’s subject to such a court’s jurisdiction. Notably, the United States is still not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC), despite signing the Rome Statute in 2000, two years after the treaty was adopted. In a statement in 2002, then-United Nations Ambassador John Bolton confirmed that the U.S. had no intention of ratifying it, and therefore, the country “has no legal obligations arising from its signature.” (Equally notable, the three other countries that signed the Rome Statute but confirmed they would not comply are Israel, Russia, and Sudan.)

If the so-called systems of justice aren’t serving their purpose, at what point, then, is it acceptable for us to take matters—and shoes—into our own hands? I’m not saying we should all be throwing shoes at any run-of-the-mill asshole, or even any run-of-the-mill asshole politician. But I do think the world shouldn’t bend so easily to fascists and dictators and genocidal oligarchs; that literal war criminals shouldn’t get to feel so comfortable moving through the world, living morally bankrupt lives without consequence. If their victims aren’t ever going to see real justice, then at the very least, they should feel perpetually inconvenienced, and a little on edge—aware that, at any moment, a rogue shoe might thwack them in the head.

Personally, if I were a war criminal or billionaire or other generally detestable figure enacting suffering on millions, I’d rather have a shoe thrown at me than lose my head to a guillotine. (For legal reasons, this is a joke.) But beyond inconvenience, perhaps it might also accomplish something more substantial—if not a reckoning for the person being shoed, then for the millions of people who might witness it. Because sometimes, it takes seeing someone else accomplish something we hadn’t considered possible to understand what’s possible to accomplish ourselves.

Muntadhar al-Zaidi has claimed he does not believe himself to be a hero, but merely “a person with a stance.” His only apology in the incident’s aftermath was to his fellow journalists—with the caveat that, “Professionalism does not preclude nationalism.”

“This scene stands as proof that… a simple person was capable of saying ‘no’ to that arrogant person, with all his power, tyranny, arms, media, money, and authority,” al-Zaidi said in an interview with Reuters for the shoeing’s 15-year anniversary. To me, this is precisely why it has endured in our cultural consciousness for so long: Bush’s shoeing remains an important reminder that each of us, as individuals, is more powerful than we often give ourselves credit for; and when we act collectively, that power only multiplies.

Like all forms of “violent” protest, throwing a shoe at a prominent political figure is not without its risks. After he threw his shoes at Bush, al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years in prison, later docked down to a year. He ultimately served nine months, having been released early for good behavior, alleging he experienced violent torture at the hands of senior government officials throughout. But he has also never once expressed regret for anything other than the fact he “only had two shoes.”

If more of us were to partake in this time-honored tradition, however, this wouldn’t be a problem: After all, if one pair of shoes can cause such a fuss, just imagine what we might accomplish with a few million more.

[post_title] => Who Throws a Shoe, Honestly? [post_excerpt] => In defense of a long-neglected form of protest. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => soapbox-shoe-throwing-shoeing-muntadhar-al-zaidi-george-w-bush-iraq-united-states-war-crimes-international-criminal-court-protest-opinion [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 16:56:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 16:56:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8790 [menu_order] => 9 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 27, 2025September 12, 2025

Who Throws a Shoe, Honestly?

by Gina Mei

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8636 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-06-25 22:18:26 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-06-25 22:18:26 [post_content] =>

Why I became more subscription-conscious (and you should, too).

Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.

In my junior year of college, I wound up with a free subscription to a bunch of magazines, including Real Simple. To this day, I have no idea how it happened, and if my bank account or credit card had been charged at the time, I would have remembered. But it wasn’t. So, even though I hadn’t paid for them, for much of that school year, magazines would show up in my mailbox; and apart from Real Simple, I’d mostly ignore the rest. Unable to remember any other analog subscriptions prior—even if this one was free—we’ll say this was my first. Not one that belonged to my parents, siblings, or friends, that I might have made use of, but one that was truly mine. This was 15 years ago.

Post-college, I briefly lived with my brother and benefited from all his subscriptions, many of them digital. When I eventually began graduate school and moved out, I would acquire my own first digital subscriptions, too—although these, I actually signed up and paid for. Back then and soon after, the $9.99 for Spotify and $7.99 for Netflix didn’t feel like chump change, although it didn’t exactly break the bank. Either way, both seemed like a good deal. At least, a better deal than the price iTunes charged for individual songs and albums, and the cost of renting or buying individual movies from a store, or paying for cable.

It’s been over a decade since I completed graduate school, and since then, in addition to my first two digital subscriptions (and my unintentional first magazine subscriptions), I’ve at some point or another (and quite frankly, altogether) been subscribed to Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Tidal, various print and digital magazines and newspapers, multiple money managing and investing apps, CitiBike, Uber One, Zoom, YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime (#judgeaway), HUM vitamins, and more. This is all without mentioning the endless products I’ve bought online then temporarily and periodically subscribed to, whenever they’ve offered a discount for doing so.

It’s an excessive and exhaustive list, but in my defense, having studied and then covered culture, some of these subscriptions were for work, and the cost was either free for a time or could at least be counted as expenses for my taxes. Others were arguably also because of work due to having less time to myself; during certain periods in my life, hunting for home goods in a store just didn’t seem like a good use of my time when I could just search for them on a database and have them delivered to my door.

At a certain point, however, I gradually began to realize something much more fundamental had been lost in all the “convenience” I’d been paying for. I was becoming less conscientious of how my choices were not just directly affecting my physical locale, but the people who live and work in it. Sure, in theory, I said I valued my neighbors, residents and businesses alike, but I’d make critiques about the changing neighborhood (“there goes the neighborhood!”) without implicating myself in those changes. More thoughtful and purposeful encounters with my community had been sacrificed at my altar of convenience.

So, I began to unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.

Looking back, my subscription-ending journey—or perhaps more accurately, subscription-consciousness journey—was a product, at least in part, of post-COVID lockdown reflections on what I really need and how I’d really like to spend my time. The excess of my subscriptions had started to feel akin to hoarding, and I needed to clear space, even if most of that space was intangible. There was also the lightbulb realization that has become more and more common amongst Millennials, that, despite our monthly investments in accessing various forms of media, we don’t actually own most of the culture that we consume. What’s more, should the companies that do own that media go defunct or be sold to entities that we may prefer not to do business with, we really wouldn’t have much recourse—except to unsubscribe.

This could mean years and years of playlists and TV shows and films that we would no longer have access to because they were never really ours to begin with, ultimately leaving us with nothing. And while I’m not interested in owning many things from culture, save for books and some fashions, I do think ownership of culture in its various forms serves more than capitalistic desire. Our things can be physical memories of what we love or once did, what has been passed on and gifted to us, and sometimes, reminders of what we saved and scraped for—emblems of hard-fought earnings. We are robbed of this when we choose to rent something out of convenience or compulsion instead of mindfully acquiring things that are truly meaningful to us.

We also aren’t the only ones both literally and figuratively footing the bill for our abundance of subscriptions: The obvious, of course, is that small, local businesses pay the ultimate price for our overreliance on the monopolies cannibalizing our choices. There’s an impersonal, persistent transactional relationship that develops when you constantly have things delivered to you via third parties. It’s not your favorite delivery person from your favorite Jamaican spot; it’s just the person that first picked up the order who you’ll likely never see again. It’s not the local hardware store owner that understands which tools work best for your apartment because they know other people in your building dealing with the same problem; it’s you endlessly scrolling through the best reviewed or highest quality or cheapest options online, hoping the tools you’ve chosen will get the job done. It’s missing out on a discount from the owner of the neighborhood craft and candle store—who unbeknownst to too many others, can also act as a notary—and choosing a digital coupon over a beautiful reminder that you’re part of a community.

Moreover, overconsumption inevitably leads to resource depletion, and in this brave new world where the latest AI technology permeates everything we do (sometimes against our will), even the climate-conscious among us are contributing to it negatively. Binge-watching or binging-anything-digital also has adverse health effects, including on our mental health and sleep, and we’re yet to fully grasp all of its socio-psychological effects, not to mention its contribution to our loneliness and isolation crises.

When I think about the last 15 years of subscribing—and lately, unsubscribing—I’ve had to admit that like many of us who live during this time, I sacrificed more convenience for less community, ownership of important things for access to seemingly everything, and gave my contact information to a bunch of companies whose aim is to profile my habits and patterns with little care for how my day is going. Unlike my favorite delivery person at my favorite Jamaican spot, who never fails to ask.

Today, I don’t have as many subscriptions as I once did, and for different reasons. I downgraded or fully got rid of some streaming services because I didn’t watch them enough and I felt the value didn’t match the price—especially as prices have hiked significantly in the last few years. My short stint with CitiBike was because quite frankly, I’m more of a walker and a subway rider—and I’ve accepted once again that biking regularly for transportation is just not something I enjoy. Meanwhile, while I’ve kept some print literature, I’ve ended other subscriptions or kept them as digital-only because they were starting to need their own storage space in my home—and I couldn’t lend or donate them fast enough. And of course, with subscriptions like Amazon Prime, I decided I could no longer live with the cognitive dissonance of having it while being opposed to its labor politics and the politics of its owner. (Unfortunately, this has also meant ending a more than decade-long affair with Whole Foods, which I unashamedly enjoyed as much as the farmer’s market I still frequent.)

I don’t think I’ll ever be subscription-free. I still have Netflix, and although Tidal had replaced Spotify in my life for many years due to its higher-quality sound, I missed my old playlists and collaborations on the latter and decided it’s one excess I can live with for now. But I’ve also returned to collecting vinyl again, shopping for most things in-person, and living with things taking as long as they need to get to me if I do order them online. Putting an end to the mindless and endless subscribing has made me more mindful of the things that I do want showing up in my digital and physical mailbox once a month. Because unlike 15 years ago with that accidental analog subscription, I’m making a conscious choice for them to be there.

[post_title] => Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe [post_excerpt] => Why I became more subscription-conscious (and you should, too). [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => soapbox-unsubscribe-subscriptions-community-streaming-platforms-netflix-spotify-amazon-capitalism [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 16:58:49 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 16:58:49 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8636 [menu_order] => 11 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 25, 2025September 12, 2025

Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8523 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-06-23 21:38:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-06-23 21:38:31 [post_content] =>

And it'll make you feel alive, too.

Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.

A few months ago, I found myself openly crying in the office. I wasn’t crying about something personal, or even something particularly emotionally complex. I also wasn’t crying over the usual slate of workplace drama (bad meetings, good news, big decisions, encroaching deadlines, staffing cuts, etc.), which I’ve admittedly cried about a million times before. No, this time was different: I was crying because I was streaming the Boston Marathon at my desk, and—after 26 miles, all of them occurring hundreds of miles away from the city where I work—the lead women were approaching the finish line.

If the idea of crying over running sounds insane to you, or if the prospect of spending several hours in front of a screen watching strangers run sounds like watching paint dry: I get it. Until a few years ago, the very idea of long-distance running as a professional sport that people followed and spectated was entirely foreign to me. Having grown up in Massachusetts, I was aware that Marathon Monday was a meaningful day for the city; but for me, it mostly meant that work and school would be canceled, lots of roads would be closed, and maybe some friends would be going to cheer their friends on while I enjoyed the day off. I felt no more emotionally invested in the race and its outcome than in a 4th of July parade. Going out of my way to watch a race happening in a different city, then, would never have occurred to me; it would have felt like closely following municipal elections in a city I’d never visit.

But over the last few years, I’ve come to believe that spectating marathons is one of the most beautiful, life-affirming ways we can spend our time. Before I got into watching races, I’d never been a serious fan of any sport. I’ve long been a casual runner, who initially got into the sport out of a vague, begrudging sense of obligation to “fitness.” But then, I made friends who competed in—and sometimes even won!—local races, and who truly adored running on its own merits. Their enthusiasm got me hooked: When they sent me a pro runner’s Instagram post, I’d hit “follow”; when they wanted to watch a race, I’d stream it, too. Whenever we spectated together, they’d point out how everyone racing was quite literally on equal footing—what other sport, they’d ask, has total newbies and elite lifers competing in the same place, at the same time? Not to mention that races aren’t hard to follow. Unlike, say, baseball or football, whose fandoms seem to mandate memorizing reams of stats and plays, marathons have precious few rules to remember: Generally speaking, the first person to the finish line wins, making it incredibly accessible for both the casual and serious viewer alike. By the time the 2021 women’s Olympic marathon rolled around, I was the one texting my friends about whether they’d seen Molly Seidel’s groundbreaking bronze medal performance.

Running asks very little of a viewer, but feels communal, and cathartic, and inspiring—feelings that are increasingly hard to come by in these particularly bleak and fractured times. It’s also just a joy to witness; and as I’ve become a more dedicated fan, I’ve come to appreciate its particular drama and intrigue. Watching as a mass of competitors thins out into a small pack of frontrunners; seeing the determination in runners’ faces as they decide when to make a break for the lead, only to sometimes get subsumed by the pack again; witnessing the absolute bliss of a first-time winner breaking the tape—all of it is, genuinely, thrilling.

I mostly follow the women’s division, in part because we’re living through an incredible moment for American women’s distance running. For decades, the sport was deemed unsafe for our supposedly fragile physiology, and women were barred from participating. The Boston Marathon has been run annually since 1897; women, though, weren’t officially allowed to compete until 1972. (This year, more than 12,000 of the approximately 30,000 runners were women.) Women’s participation in marathon running has increased steadily since the ’70s, but as the New York Times has reported, there’s been “a sea change in women’s running” in the last decade. Simply put: Way more women are running way faster than ever. Consider the U.S. Olympic Trials, which are open to any American woman who can complete a marathon within its wildly fast cut-off time (right now, that’s just under two and a half hours). In 2016, fewer than 200 women met that qualifying mark, as the Times reported; just four years later, that number jumped to over 500. (Meanwhile, the number of qualifying men during that time increased by fewer than 50.) There has never been a time where there’s more enthusiasm, community, or resources for women who want to push themselves to be the best runners they can be—and watching that magic take place at the highest levels of the sport has successfully turned me into a lifelong fan.

Unfortunately, like all sports, it isn’t without its less uplifting aspects. The ever-higher ceiling for women runners has also attracted backlash from anti-trans campaigners, who have fought to keep trans women out of professional running, casting doubt on the biology of women they deem “too masculine” and making it near-impossible for non-binary runners to compete on their own terms. So much of what inspires me about watching women’s running—and being a runner myself—is about pushing past the assumed limits of our genders and our bodies, which makes the bigotry inherent in marginalizing trans runners feel, to me, particularly painful and incongruous. When I look to runners like Nikki Hiltz—a nonbinary middle-distance runner who represented the United States at the Olympics—and the scores of queer run clubs popping up all over the country: That’s where I, as a fan, see the true future of the sport.

Running is an individual activity, but watching (and, of course, participating in) a marathon feels like a community endeavor. Each fall, when the New York City Marathon takes over the streets of the city where I now live, I watch as the roads fill up with people across a wide range of ages, races, sizes, and abilities—all united by their participation in attempting a time-honored and miraculous feat. The sidewalks, meanwhile, are populated with ardent fans, casual viewers, young kids being hoisted on their parents’ shoulders, well-behaved dogs providing moral support; homemade signs that range from tried-and-true to weirdly topical; strangers offering racers water or Gatorade or high-fives—together, watching the sheer speed of the pros as they zoom past, making it all look elegant and easy. Even people who don’t care about running, or would never engage in the sport on their own time, quietly admit that it’s the best day of the year—and who am I to disagree? Just don’t come complaining to me when you suddenly find yourself glued to a stream of a race in a far-off city, crying over a total stranger as she crosses the finish line.

[post_title] => Watching People Run Makes Me Feel Alive [post_excerpt] => And it'll make you feel alive, too. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => women-marathon-runners-running-boston-new-york-sports-soapbox-opinion [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 17:00:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 17:00:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8523 [menu_order] => 12 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 23, 2025September 12, 2025

Watching People Run Makes Me Feel Alive

by Marissa Lorusso

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Meet the mothers caring for Ukraine's most vulnerable children.

One summer day in 2022, Varvara, an autistic 6-year-old girl from Ukraine, approached her mother Oksana while she was on the phone with the police. Oksana, now 39, was inquiring about her husband Maksim, a Ukrainian soldier who had been reported dead, but whose body still hadn’t been found.

“Mom,” Varvara said, “I know that dad is already in heaven.” She pointed toward the sky.

It was at this moment that Oksana realized her daughter was not like other children. “Varvara somehow understood that her father had been killed while he was defending Kharkiv from the Russian troops,” Oksana says, tears streaming down her face. “I never told her the truth; she only knew that her daddy moved to a faraway place… But she understands everything.”

Like Oksana, thousands of mothers in Ukraine are raising their children alone as a direct result of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Although the number of war widows has not officially been confirmed by Ukrainian authorities, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement last February that over 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the war began in 2022. As the fighting continues, it is mostly women who care for the country’s children. Some of these women live on the frontlines and use their own bodies to shield their toddlers from Russian attacks. Others have to safeguard children and teenagers who suffer from post-traumatic stress, developed after witnessing and experiencing atrocities during the war. Others, like Oksana, have to take care of children in increasingly difficult circumstances, managing their households and earning a living while grieving for their dead husbands, or else worrying about those alive but still fighting.

Disabled children are particularly vulnerable during war, in part because they are unable to access the same resources normally available for their ensured safety and care. On the frontline or under Russian occupation, that means that they might not have access to a hospital or needed medications, let alone specialists or therapy, as deteriorating mental health is a widespread issue in war-torn countries. Beyond that, being in the epicenter of the fighting makes children more vulnerable to PTSD and shock, as well as to physical injuries, which can further impact their mental state.

According to UN Women, of the 14.6 million people needing humanitarian assistance in Ukraine in 2024, 8 million were women—many of them single mothers, the elderly, or victims of gender-based violence. A large number of these women take care of children and loved ones with disabilities. The Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development reports that over 3 million persons with disabilities currently live in Ukraine—but this estimate almost definitely falls short of the actual numbers, and will likely continue to increase due to war-related injuries.

Of those, 1.8 million people with disabilities are already in need of humanitarian aid because of the war, a number that will also likely only increase. But where resources have fallen short, mothers across the country have singlehandedly done everything in their power to fill the gap.

Defending Ukraine Since Day One

The city of Kharkiv, where Oksana and Varvara live, was among the first to be invaded by Russian troops following the start of the war on February 24, 2022, in what Russian President Vladimir Putin called “a special military operation.” To this day, Kharkiv remains one of the most dangerous cities in Ukraine, and is regularly hit by both airstrikes and artillery.

“My husband, who has been in the Ukrainian army since 2015, told me he was going to fight immediately after Kharkiv was invaded,” Oksana says. She was left alone with their two daughters: Varvara, now nine, and Sofiia, 17. Her husband Maksim never came back; and even after he was confirmed dead, Oksana shares, it took ten months to find his body.

“It was hell,” Oksana tells me. “I am still taking antidepressants.”

Varvara, who was diagnosed on the autism spectrum at the age of three, has also become increasingly fearful as the war has unfolded. “Whenever she sees dead or injured persons, she says in her own words: ‘A bad boy has been shooting,’” Oksana says. Still, she says it has been difficult for them both. “Whenever the sirens sound, Varvara is extremely stressed—much more than a [neurotypical] child. She experiences panic several times a day.”

Oksana and her daughters, Varvara (top) and Sofiia (right). (Photo courtesy of Oksana.)

Luckily, Varvara is sociable and likes going to school, which is often her only source of joy—and a great source of comfort for her mother. In the suburbs of Kharkiv, Varvara attends classes at a specialized institution, where a local humanitarian organization recently built a bomb shelter specially tailored for children with disabilities, with heating, restrooms, and a library. Disabled children like Varvara—who are extremely afraid of air raids—can spend their entire days there peacefully.

Alyona Budagovska, a communication officer for People in Need, the NGO that constructed the bunker, tells The Conversationalist that families with disabled children in Ukraine face extraordinary challenges. For example, many parents cannot carry their children to safety during air raids, and standard public shelters are often inaccessible or too far away. In some cases, children are left behind out of fear or desperation, including children who are bed-bound or too heavy to be carried.

“In the context of war, children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable, yet often the most overlooked. Many of them attend specialized schools that lack the most basic protection against missile attacks,” Budagovska says. “Building shelters in [these] schools is about more than concrete walls—it’s about dignity and inclusion.”

Oksana feels relieved that her daughter likes school, and that her two daughters get along well. Yet, she says, it is still difficult being left without her husband, who she says knew Varvara best. “My daughters love each other very much and that makes me happy, but it doesn’t replace my husband,” she says. While her loving family is a source of resilience, both she and her daughters continue to be affected by grief.

Mothers On the Frontline

Oksana’s experience is far from singular. In frontline towns and villages across Ukraine, thousands of single mothers also raise their children without any support, despite the incredible risks. According to UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, there are currently 1.9 million children in need inside the country. But prior to the war, Ukraine already had one of the highest rates of child institutionalization in the world, and the highest in Europe. Of these children, UNICEF reports nearly half of them were disabled. Now, the agency reports that 16 children are killed or injured in Ukraine on average every week.

Denys, a 7-year old boy from the Kherson region, is one of the survivors of such frontline attacks—together with his mother, Iuliia, 25, who also suffers from heavy injuries. Both of them were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and are overcoming psychological hardships, facing the challenge of healing both physically and mentally in the aftermath of their attack.

In late April, I meet them in their home village only a few miles away from Kherson, currently the most dangerous city in Ukraine. Upon entering their home, I learn that a Russian drone has shattered a local house just three hours before my arrival. These FPV (first person view) drone attacks and artillery strikes continue on a daily basis—and can be heard as I conduct interviews.

Iuliia is still in shock after the morning attack, and cries relentlessly during our conversation, while Denys is silent, hiding in another room.

“My husband died on the frontline in Kherson shortly after the war broke out,” Iuliia says. “Up until that point, we lived just like everyone else: We had jobs, we worked on a farm, we had our daily worries… Then, everything turned upside down.”

Iuliia and her son, still grieving their loss, had continued living in the destroyed village, even as artillery strikes became more and more frequent. But one night, everything changed.

She and Denys were sleeping in their house—each in a different room—when they awoke to a loud sound. Then, came the shock and the chaos: a Russian missile had hit their home, reducing it to ruins.

Iuliia and her son were lucky in their misfortune: They both survived, but suffered severe concussions, head trauma, and PTSD. Iuliia, who was closer to the explosion, also sustained skin wounds and severe damage to her inner ear.

“The ambulance immediately took us to the nearest hospital,” Iuliia recalls, shuddering at the memory. “We spent several days there. They gave us injections, syrups, medicines, and we underwent various procedures.”

Once Iuliia and Denys were released from the hospital, they also needed to find a safe place to stay. “Our house has been turned into ruins; there is no roof, and the walls are broken,” she tells me. “I literally had to go back and dig out some of our basic personal belongings from the [rubble].”

The pair decided to live, temporarily, with Iuliia’s sister. But their first night there quickly turned into a nightmare. “As we were falling asleep, a rocket hit the property right next to my sister’s house, with shrapnel hitting our walls,” Iuliia tells me, crying. Following that night, she says she suffered a breakdown.

“If I could somehow force myself to function before [the second attack], I really can’t now,” Iuliia tells me. “I have severe PTSD and need to rest and consult a psychologist. I am constantly short of breath, my hands are shaking, my vision is going black.”

But Iuliia tells me she has no savings, and nowhere to go. While Denys is sometimes cared for by their family and friends in the village, she says she has lost hope for a better future. She still suffers from earaches, tinnitus, dizziness, hypervigilance, flashbacks, and frequent blackouts. Denys, she says, is seeing several doctors and a therapist, and is in need of rehabilitation. While he is healing well from his physical injuries, there are multiple layers of trauma that he needs to talk through with a psychologist, especially due to his young age: losing his father as a toddler; losing his home in a bombardment; witnessing his mother and family members injured and suffering.

Iuliia cries whenever she talks about her son. “Denys is everything to me,” she says. “Children heal faster from some wounds; he recovered from his concussion faster than I did. At age seven, he is stronger than I am at 25.” Like many other mothers in Ukraine, she is facing the impossible challenge of remaining calm and composed in front of her child, despite facing deep physical and psychological wounds herself. But taking care of an injured child while suffering from PTSD and her own injuries, in a village hit by drones every day, is one of the most difficult things she has ever had to endure. Her only recourse, she says, has been to reach out to the very few humanitarian NGOs operating where she lives.

Giles Duley, the UN Global Advocate for Persons with Disability in Conflict and CEO of Legacy of War Foundation, which provides aid to people on the frontlines, tells me that in conflict, the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society are often forgotten or ignored. “The elderly, single parent families, and those living with disability are at far higher risk from collapsing healthcare systems, displacement, and lack of social services—in Ukraine we have seen those with disabilities unable to evacuate frontline areas; vital medical facilities targeted by Russian [forces]; and vulnerable communities left without healthcare,” he says.

“The war has also exacerbated previously existing inequalities, with disproportionate effects on older women and single mothers,” he adds.

Surviving Occupation with a Disability

Olena, 54, has felt the weight of this inequality as a single mother to a disabled child. She and her son, Misha, 12, come from Mykhailo-Laryne, a small village near Mykolaiv in the south of Ukraine that was occupied between late February and November in 2022. Her ex-husband, Misha’s father, lives in a different town, and is unable to help support their child financially, in part because of the distance, and in part because of the war.

Olena’s son Misha has an intellectual disability, and she believes he is likely also on the autism spectrum—but she has been unable to take him to a psychiatrist since the war broke out. Traveling, even to neighboring Mykolaiv, is too expensive for her, and while their village was occupied, it was “absolutely unthinkable,” she says.

Olena and her son, Misha. (Photo courtesy of Sara Cincurova.)

Olena currently works as a school assistant for a disabled girl at a local school—but with her single salary and prices skyrocketing since the outbreak of the war, she frequently struggles to buy food, she says. As a school assistant, she earns approximately $88 USD a month at most—but her salary is often cut down significantly, as it largely depends on the number of hours she works per week.

Apart from this severe financial hardship, what Olena suffers from the most is when she sees the inhabitants of her village mock and hurt her Misha, who is her only child.

“People have this narrow-minded mentality in our village… They often used to make fun of Misha, calling him [slurs],” Olena says with pain in her eyes. But Misha is a talented and sensitive boy, she adds. “He is kind, curious, and a patriot. He loves cooking, he is always cheerful.”

Olena is currently receiving humanitarian aid from a local NGO, Voices of Children. The organization works with a wide range of children—including those with disabilities and/or on the autism spectrum. Olha Yerokhina, a Communication Manager for the organization, tells me that whenever a family with a neurodivergent child asks for help, “We listen, we try to understand the need, and even if we can’t provide specialized support in-house, we do our best to refer [the family] to trusted professionals or partner organizations.”

The NGO also supports Ukrainian mothers just like Olena. “[Mothers] are often overwhelmed and left to navigate [the] complex reality alone,” Yerokhina says.

At the end of the interview, Olena recalls the one—and perhaps only—positive aspect that the war has had on her and her son. “People are now more accepting of Misha’s disability,” she says. “During the occupation, many have reconsidered their values and their priorities.”

“They now make less fun of Misha and accept he is a human being, and treat him with more love.”

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June 12, 2025September 12, 2025

Motherhood on the Frontlines

by Sara Cincurova

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We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift.

I once believed that the presence of a female leader signaled real progress—a sign that gender equality had taken root. As a girl growing up in China, I watched with admiration as women like President Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan and President Park Geun-hye in South Korea rose to the highest offices in their respective countries. Their success seemed to promise a future in which women’s voices would be equally heard, equally respected—that perhaps women might finally be seen as equals.

But as I began to study gender and politics more deeply, particularly across East and Southeast Asia, that initial optimism gave way to unease. Representation alone, I realized, does not guarantee change. Even more alarmingly, the symbolic presence of women in power can obscure the systemic barriers that continue to shape—and often silence—most women’s participation in political life.

Globally, this problem has proven surmountable. In Scandinavia, gender quotas and institutional reforms have helped elevate women to between 40% and 50% of parliamentary seats, reflecting not only a shift in numbers but a broader cultural embrace of women as political leaders. Similar gender quotas in Mexico—which elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, last year—have led to women making up 50% of seats in congress, after gender parity was enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2014.

In contrast, however, East and Southeast Asian democracies continue to lag behind—not only in representation, but in the structural support needed to close the gender gap. Japan, for example, despite being one of the world’s largest economies, has seen little progress in this area. Women occupy roughly 16% of seats in the national legislature—a statistic that reveals not just electoral imbalance, but deeper societal expectations about leadership, gender roles, and public legitimacy. As of April of this year, the percentage of women who hold parliamentary seats in India (13.8%), Cambodia (13.6%), Malaysia (13.5%), Sri Lanka (9.8%), and Bhutan (4.3%) remains even lower. And in China, there have been no women in the politburo since 2022, something the United Nations has flagged as a matter of great concern.

So, are women truly gaining power in Asia, or are they simply there to make politics look more gender equal?

Analyzing data from the Asian Barometer Survey suggests the reason women’s political participation remains low in Asia is as much a numbers problem as it is a cultural one. Founded in 1971, the ABS is a cross-national survey that aims to gather “public opinion data on issues such as political values, democracy, governance, human security, and economic reforms.” In a 2020 academic paper from the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Sarah Liu, one surprising finding from the 2010–2012 survey was how the gender of the interviewer affected women’s answers. Faced with female researchers, women opened up about their political beliefs. With male interviewers, many of them hesitated. This suggests a much deeper problem with Asia’s gender divide, rooted in women feeling both uncomfortable with and unwelcome in politics.

Across many societies, not just in Asia, politics is still seen as a man’s domain, where women are expected to support, not lead. But in East and Southeast Asia, where traditional gender roles continue to shape public and private life, this attitude is amplified. Even in modern cities, women are constantly told that politics is not their space. For me, it wasn’t that anyone said I couldn’t be a leader when I was growing up—it was that no one ever expected me to be one. And when women are constantly told that something isn’t an option for them, it makes sense that, eventually, they might actually start to believe it.

When women do step forward to lead, they also face a very different kind of scrutiny to their male peers. Their private lives are often judged more harshly than their professional ones, and given as much attention, if not more. When Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan’s first female president, critics focused on the fact that she was unmarried—as if being single made her unfit to lead. But when it comes to unmarried male leaders, no one ever even thinks to question it.

The media frequently contributes to this double standard. I remember watching coverage of Shoko Kawata, a 33-year-old woman who became the youngest female city mayor in Japanese history after winning her election in Yawata, Kyoto Prefecture in 2023. I was furious that the story’s focus was not on what she’d said in her speech, but on what she was wearing. Other reports also emphasized her love of tea ceremony and traditional kimono attire—while barely mentioning her actual policy goals. Her agenda had been reduced to its aesthetics: her clothes were that day’s headline news, while her policies went overlooked.

Even within political institutions, this bias persists. In Japan, a young Tokyo assemblywoman was once heckled by her male colleagues while speaking about the need for better childcare policies. This incident occurred in 2014, when Ayaka Shiomura, a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, was addressing how the government might better support mothers in light of Japan’s drastically decreasing birth rate. During her speech, several male lawmakers interrupted her with sexist remarks such as “Go and get married!” and “Can you even have children?” One of them, Akihiro Suzuki, later admitted to the heckling and publicly apologized. But the incident sparked widespread outrage, and served as another stark reminder of the entrenched gender bias in even the most formal of political spaces.

Fueling all this is the deeper issue that women are still expected to prioritize the family above all. This problem isn’t singular to Asia, but nonetheless, it feels especially pervasive here: Even in the public sphere, women are still trapped in private expectations. When a woman chooses public service, some see it as a betrayal of her “real” duty. The media asks, “Can she have it all?”—a question they’d never ask of a man, and one that has never been asked of a father.

These attitudes don’t just make the job harder. They make women question whether the space was ever meant for them. And in many ways, it still isn’t—something that keeps women out of politics, and keeps everyone, regardless of gender, chained to the status quo.

Yet, despite persistent challenges, women politicians in Asia have continued to make remarkable strides. President Tsai and President Park both shattered historical barriers to ascend to the highest levels of national leadership in their respective countries, proving that women are more than capable of leading. They also both drove meaningful social and economic change during their terms—even in systems not designed for them.

As the first woman president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen and her administration actively pushed for gender-equal policies, earning Taiwan the top spot in Asia—and one of the highest rankings globally—for gender equality. One particularly meaningful initiative was an amendment requiring companies with more than 100 employees to provide childcare facilities—helping to ease the burden on working mothers. Tsai also supported policies that loosened loan restrictions for women entrepreneurs and promoted female participation in the economy as a path to structural change.

Beyond legislation, she repeatedly called for dismantling gender stereotypes and encouraged women to participate in public life—raising both the visibility and legitimacy of women in leadership. Under her eight-year tenure, Taiwan’s economy grew steadily, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 3.15%, and even reached 6.6% in 2021—a rare achievement during global economic uncertainty.

Park Geun-hye’s presidency, meanwhile, offered a different but equally important approach to leadership. While her administration made more modest progress on gender-specific reforms, it recognized the challenges faced by working mothers and proposed expanding childcare services to support female employment. More broadly, Park’s role as a woman navigating a traditionally male-dominated political landscape was also deeply symbolic.

Under her leadership, South Korea expanded its global economic footprint by signing free trade agreements with 52 countries, including China and Vietnam—bolstering South Korea’s export markets and international competitiveness. These policy efforts, though not always framed through a gender lens, reflected a broader vision of national growth, with women as increasingly visible participants.

Tsai and Park’s contributions—each shaped by their own context—highlight the transformative power and potential of women’s leadership. For millions of women across Asia, seeing them in positions of power—on television, in parliament, in international headlines—continues to deliver an enduring message: women belong here. And their presence alone continues to inspire others to imagine what is possible when women are no longer the exception.

Change won’t come overnight. Cultural shifts take time. But every honest conversation, every woman who speaks up, every moment of resistance matters—so hopefully, one day, girls growing up in East or Southeast Asia will see women in power and think: “That could be me.” Not because it’s rare, but because it’s normal.

To achieve this, we don’t just need more women in office. We need political systems that respect their leadership, media that reports on their work—not their wardrobe—and societies that stop measuring women by outdated standards. We need women in Asia to not just be seen in politics, but truly heard.

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June 5, 2025September 12, 2025

When Will Women in Asia Be Seen as Leaders—Not Exceptions?

by Sun Youyang

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