Sustainable development blog : ecology and humanitarian aid

And this is why the Americans did not win the war... As an expatriate living in Afghanistan, I am always started at how far-fetched articles on progress in negotiations between the national government and the Taliban are.

Knowing the demographic and geographic constitution of the country, the Taliban will always have a significant military advantage over all invaders: the Russians gave up their fight ten Read more »

Translated by Vanessa Morrell from De Caracas aux Barrios de Petare, à la découverte d’une autre réalité.

The word “shanty town” takes a new shape and form as we visit the South American continent. Its omnipresence is so crucial to our understanding, that its name even takes a different shape as we cross borders. Chabola, villamiseria, favelas in Brazil, we call them barrios in Venezuela. The term originates from the word “quarter” in academic Castilian speak, but now holds an entire new sense in Chavez’ Bolivarian Republic. 

Bordered by hills-the city of Caracas and its shantytowns Read more »

A guest post by Simon Phillips. For more by Simon visit http://elusiveworld.org/

TIJUANA, Mexico: A family of six migrant workers huddle together in a makeshift shack, one of thousands which cling to the harsh desert, and existence itself, within a stone’s throw of their employers: Korean factories. Samsung Corp. and Hyundai Corp. each employ over a thousand Mexican workers in their “maquiladoras’’ or foreign-owned factories, which line the U.S.-Mexico border.

In these factories people work long, gruelling shifts for a wage less than $2 an hour. It is these workers who produce Samsung’s new MP3 players and plasma-screen TVs, which people in richer parts of the world enjoy in relative comfort. The low wages earned in the factories do not go far and as the companies do not provide a welfare service for their employees, or pay any local taxes, overwhelming housing and health problems exist here. Read more »

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Pictures of children in third world countries... An efficient way to get aware that their way of living is definitely not ours... Unfortunately.

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This photograph set was taken during a walk in the Bazaar of hampi, a main street where locals live and sell plenty of different kind of items to tourists. The Bazaar is also the gate to most of the Vijayanagar ruins. These pictures show some stolen moments in the daily life of the people living in this animated area of the village.

Hampi is well known for being the medieval capital of the Hindu empire Vijayanagara (which means "the City of Victory"). Hampi is listed as one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites.