Digital Stories

“Sitting on a chipped wooden bench, the three-year-old swings her legs excitedly. Her sandals barely touch the floor as she watches a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.

It is hard to believe Comfort is a witch.Yet this is why she and her two older siblings are now living in an emergency shelter in the city of Calabar, in the

southeast corner of Nigeria.

It’s little more than a basement with a television and half a dozen threadbare mattresses.

The door is locked most of the time for the children’s own safety.

The shelter was intended to be a temporary solution – a stop-gap until the children could be placed with extended family…”

“Things were going terribly wrong. Ato Boropi could feel it.

Dozens of villagers had squeezed next to each other on the floor of a one-room church perched on a mountain in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Several more huddled along the walls outside, as rain pummeled the corrugated metal roof.

Boropi had helped to arrange the meeting. Leaders of two clans had promised her they would formally end the violence between them that had forced 160 people into hiding, fearing for their lives. In the church, she prayed they would keep their promise. A police order to formalize the peace agreement had not yet been issued.…”