By Rick Antonson
Timbuktu: the African urban recognized to legend as a land of students, elegance and secret, a golden age within the Sahara wilderness. yet to many it's a vaguely recognizable identify – a flippant tag for “the so much distant position on earth.” With this fabled urban as his aim, writer Rick Antonson started a month-long trek. His preliminary plan? To get a haircut.
Aided by means of an adventuresome spirit, Rick endures a forty-five hour educate trip, a swindling go back and forth agent, “Third international, three-lane” roads, rivers, and a flat deck ferry boat prior to ultimately achieving Timbuktu. Rick narrates the historical past of this elusive vacation spot throughout the teachings of his Malian advisor Zak, and encounters with stranded travelers, a camel proprietor, a riverboat captain, and the folk who name Timbuktu home.
Antonson’s eloquence and quiet wit spotlight the city’s myths—the centuries outdated capital and traveler’s dream—as good as its realities: A urban gripped via poverty, the place ancient treasures lie as regards to the sands of destruction. certainly, a few 700,000 historical manuscripts stay there, endangered. either a travelogue and a background of a spot lengthy forgotten, To Timbuktu for a Haircut emerges as a plea to maintain the prior and open cultural dialogues on an international scale.
The moment variation of this crucial ebook outlines the risky political occasions in Timbuktu following the spring 2012 army coup in Mali and the following seize of town by means of Islamic extremists. actually, it's a race opposed to time to save lots of the city’s irreplaceable artifacts, mosques, and monuments, and to appreciate why Timbuktu’s previous is key to the way forward for Africa.
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Extra info for To Timbuktu for a Haircut: A Journey through West Africa (2nd Edition)
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Finally, current challenges and limitations for mainstreaming and upscaling these local adaptation measures in Africa will be explored and recommendations given for further research. 20 F. Mannke Methodology In methodological terms, a structured Internet-based assessment of communitybased climate change initiatives in Africa was undertaken in the frame of a 12-month mapping research fellowship. 1 The resulting database has thus been reduced and cleared of those countries where no initiatives could be identified; projects where climate change was not explicitly mentioned; those projects where information on status of implementation is lacking; those projects which were implemented before 2000; those projects which have been terminated in the meantime; and those projects for which no further information could be obtained to qualify for inclusion in the evaluation.
All project coordinators pointed out the key role of stakeholders in terms of working with and within the initiatives, becoming multipliers of project results for other regions and stakeholders, supporting the project with resources of all kinds, and promoting the uptake of similar activities in further regions, stressing the crucial importance of not only incorporating stakeholders fully into the design, planning and implementation of such local initiatives, but also keeping them motivated and involved in the process.
Critical success factors: this is a successful pilot project that aims to translate theoretical knowledge on climate change impacts into practical tools that protect not only ecosystems, but the local communities that depend on their goods and services. • Transferability: the lessons learnt from the project will be used to inform similar activities in other protected areas throughout Madagascar. Bravos do Zambeze—Mozambique (by Community Media For Development/UN Delivering as One Joint Programme on Disaster Risk Reduction, May 2009–February 2010) • Key objectives: producing a high-quality, 26-episode radio drama with training for community radio journalists to convey information about disaster risk reduction and build local capacity for reporting disasters and climate change adaptation • Community involvement: communities affected by flooding in the Zambezi river region were visited by researchers and case studies were drawn up which fed into the design of the radio drama.