The Travel itinerary

I have lots of travel ahead in the weeks to come with little rest in between. Today I depart for New England. I'll arrive in Boston, drive north, take a quick overnight stop in the old home town to stay with my Dad, and early tomorrow morning will head to Burlington, Vermont where I am on the program for the Northeast Workshop in Southern African Studies.

I get home late Tuesday night and the next day head to Chapel Hill, where I will be giving a talk at the Wilson Special Collections Library in a program titled "The Long Road to Parchman: North Carolina and the Desegregation of Interstate Busing." I'll be discussing the Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides in North Carolina. From there I'll fly straight to the Southern Historical Association's annual meeting in Baltimore.

I'll return from Baltimore for just a few days before heading on to the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) meeting, where I am giving a paper on the 2010 World Cup. Then it's back for a few days before one last trip to Washington, where I am giving a paper on gender, race and South African track and field at the Sport and the Global South Conference at George Mason University. I'll also squeeze a quick trip up to Williams for Homecoming while I'm at it. And it all ends with a socer tournament in Austin.

I've somehow even managed to avoid canceling any classes during this crazy month or so.

Posting will be light, it goes without saying, but I leave you with this assessment of Liberia's fascinating but fraught presidential election.

Dear Valentine: Be Mine. Oh, And About That Debt

This week demonstrators delivered more than 10,000 Valentine's Day cards to the US treasury department asking the United States to "have a heart" and cancel that long-beleaguered country's debts. Liberia is the country with the closest historical relationship to the United states, and even the normally Grinch-like International Monetary Fund is concerned with Liberia's debt burden. Africa Focus has several relevant stories here and you can see dcat's coverage of Liberia here. I believe that some form of debt relief or forgiveness is essential to African development. That relief can be coupled with sticks as well as carrots, but it is an issue that needs to continue to gain traction among policymakers.

Ellen Sirleaf Johnson's Liberia, One Year Later

South Africa's IOL ("Independent On Line") shows the slow but discernible progress that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has made as head of once- (and in some ways still) ravaged Liberia in her year in office. It is too early, as the article clearly shows, for much more than closely guarded optimism, but even slight progress warrants our support. See here for previous dcat coverage of Sirleaf's Liberia.