It was 1998, and the civil war in Sierra Leone had been raging for seven years. I had been given what I thought would be a standard assignment on child soldiers, some of whom were said to be as young as seven. No sooner had I arrived in the town ...

I first heard about New York's tunnel people in 1992 when I met Terry Williams, an ethnographer specialising in urban issues. Williams described them as 'a new class of people who have been rejected by society and became in fact invisible.' ...

Political caricature has been used for centuries by people wanting to poke fun at or discredit a maligned leader or political party. As freedom of expression has grown in rebel-controlled Libya, so too has the use of cartoon and caricature - most often ...

The readers of De Volkskrant, a Dutch daily newspaper, once voted Charleroi "the ugliest city in Europe". The town of 200,000 just 40 miles south of Brussels is notorious for its dreary housing complexes and defunct industries and is struggling with ...

In the last 25 years 4.9 million people have been forcibly displaced in Colombia's civil conflict. At the root of the violence and displacement is control - control of the local population, control of territory, control of natural resources, and ...

'Thank you for generating employment with your visit' reads a handwritten notice in blue marker pen at the exit to the big top. Not many have read that notice lately. After several weeks of rain, public apathy and just plain bad luck Mario Salazar ...

'It is very Jewish to be a shepherd', says Shaltiel, a young settler in Tekoa in the West Bank. 'When I'm with the herd, I sing and pray in order to lift myself above the animal level. When staying too long with animals, you could easily start to behave ...

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a single house can become an important symbol. In December 2008, a building in Hebron became the focal point for the most bitter clash between settlers and the Israeli government for more than two years.The Israeli ...

The State of Israel, built by immigrants and on the principle of encouraging immigration of Jews from all over the world, is facing a serious crisis of conscience. Since 2006, an estimated 60,000 people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, have ...

The Eritrean capital, Asmara, is a showcase of 1930s Italian Art Deco architecture. Initially created by colonial-era Italians, the style flourished into the '60s as local architects carried on the tradition. There was no modernization in Asmara for 30 ...

In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row The opening lines of John McCrae's poem 'In Flanders Fields', written in 1915 on a scrap of paper upon the back of a fellow Canadian soldier.In the area around Ypres in western ...

Twenty years on, little is left of the Berlin Wall. Most of the structure was dismantled in the immediate aftermath of its opening in November 1989. Those parts that remained became a magnet for souvenir hunters, and chunks of its concrete are now ...

Southern Street in Salford, Greater Manchester was a row of Victorian terraced houses typical of those built in this former industrial heartland of Britain. Over time its inhabitants were made to leave through a combination of alleged social ...

Hoyerswerda was once a boom-town - a model vision of GDR socialism, built around a large coal and gas plant. Between 1955 and 1981, the industrialisation of this medium-sized East German town took the population up to 71,000. A New Town had to be built ...

Manchester as the birthplace of the industrial revolution has always been a symbol for radical change. After decades of heavy decline and neglect, Manchester has of late been widely hailed as a model for urban regeneration. With gleaming architectural...

In its short history, Eritrea - the Land of the Red Sea - has seen its fair share of upheaval and violence. The country was born out of a protracted War of Independence from Ethiopia that rumbled on for three decades, variously involving the Soviet ...

A fitting monument to Germany's ill-fated colonial ambitions at the beginning of the 20th century, the former mining town of Kolmanskop, a few kilometres inland from the colonial-era trading post of Lüderitz, is being swallowed by the ...

Amongst Berliners, the burning issue at the moment is the creeping, and seemingly unstoppable, gentrification of their city. Rising rents, now incomparable to unusually cheap rates in the early 1990s, and a huge tourist boom in Berlin are driving up ...

On 22 September 2013, Germans cast their votes to determine their next government. The outcome of this election, however, has consequences for people far beyond the borders of Germany. Early polls suggest that the leading Christian Democratic Union ...

In the months before EU enlargement in 2004, right wing British newspapers were hysterically predicting that the country would be overrun with migrants from Eastern Europe - especially from Poland - willing to work for next to nothing. The UK, Sweden and...

China took a bow on the world stage in the summer of 2008, as the Olympic Games were held in Beijing. The country's performance was reliant on an army of stagehands who had toiled to prepare the scenery, lighting and props. Around 30,000 labourers are ...

Prince William County in Virginia is one of the highest-income counties in the United States, but it has seen thousands of home foreclosures since the credit crunch started to bite in 2007. In June 2008, Piotr Malecki and writer Tomasz Zalewski went in ...

On December 30th, 2008, a group of young men took an oath and became fully-fledged soldiers in the Polish army. Like generations before them, they would have felt a mix of pride and nervousness as they prepared to serve their country. But as they ...

The City boomed and now the City is bust. Until the final quarter of 2008, the British economy had seen over ten years of continuous expansion led by an unfettered financial services sector. Deregulation encouraged 479 foreign banks to set up offices in ...

I remember from my childhood the glory days of the Peace Race, a popular cycling event in which socialist Poland competed against our neighbouring friendly states. Each year the towns would empty as everybody found a television to watch our brave ...

Jacek Serkiew has been a postman for 40 years. As he makes his daily journey around the Polish town of Piaseczno, he is among friends. Meeting people is the best part of the job, he says. Every morning he carefully sorts through the letters in his ...

Ziemowit Howadek - Ziemek to his friends - lives a pretty ordinary life. He works as an IT specialist for a bank in Poznan, attends church and drives a Lada. But each year, in the week before Easter, Ziemek is nailed to a cross and crucified in front ...

Public House An establishment providing alcoholic beverages to be consumed on the premises. The traditional pub is an establishment found primarily in Britain and regions of British influence. English common law early imposed social responsibilities ...

Ireland is famous for its love of horses and the thoroughbreds raised on its verdant hills. During the boom years, when high-tech companies flocked to the "Celtic Tiger" and the construction industry overdosed on cheap loans, pet horses became a ...

A date has been set for the beatification of Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005 after an almost 27-year-long papacy. Vast crowds of pilgrims are expected in Rome on 1 May 2011 to witness the ceremony, performed by the current pope Benedict XVI, ...

In America, meat is big business. The meat and poultry industry is the largest sector of US agriculture, grossing an impressive US $ 155 billion in 2009 and employing a total of some 6.2 million people in companies involved in meat production along with ...

Call centre consultants are like doctors - they need to get under the client's skin to find out the most effective way of selling a product or getting valuable feedback. Call centre work is readily available and in most cases doesn't require any ...

Wika Szmyt is not your typical grandmother. 'Maturity has its charm' she says, smiling elegantly but a little reserved. 'Some people already know what they want when they are 20 while others grow up for longer. I think that I am in the second ...

About half a million people commute into Warsaw, the Polish capital, from surrounding towns and villages every day. For a city of 1.7 million, this constitutes a huge daily ebb and flow of workers, some of whom have to rise in the early hours to ...

During the Tour de France, the roads and byways of the country are lined with thousands of keen spectators. But it's not necessarily the riders they have come to see. The so-called Caravan Pubicitaire is the main draw for approximately 39% of all ...

Ekon Association in Warsaw is a recycling plant that provides jobs for people with learning difficulties or mental health issues who would otherwise find it difficult to get work.Some people working at Ekon have disabilities which they were born ...