Miscellaneous – David Griffiths

November 1, 2023July 15, 2024

Child Camel Jockeys – Qatar, 2002

Many things will have changed in the Gulf States since I was last there. Happily, one of them is abolition of child slavery associated with the camel-racing industry – one of the richer sports in the world. Twenty years ago, I was appalled to see tiny, skinny boys, some as young as four, who had been trafficked from poor Muslim countries to be exploited as camel jockeys in Qatar. Across the region such kids were being under-fed, educationally deprived, often injured and sometime killed. Now, it seems, innovative application of technology has contributed to much-needed reform. Continue reading “Child Camel Jockeys – Qatar, 2002”

January 20, 2023

Update to “Days of Our Youth” (February 2020)

For your amusement, I’ve just changed the featured image at the top of the “Days of Our Youth” story to a recently-discovered photo of my teenage self ushering my “clients” aboard the ultra-modern Viscount airliner.

July 1, 2022July 3, 2022

Kana’ta Day 2022

June First. Canada Day. Or, as we are calling it Halifax this year, “Kana’ta Day” to acknowledge the discoverers of this country whose descendants made it their home for millennia before Europeans mastered ocean navigation and gunpowder. “Kana’ta” is an indigenous work for “village”, which European arrivals mistakenly thought was the name of the entire country. Still, when you stop to think about it, that seems appropriate on many levels. Despite its many imperfections and inequalities, this half-continent village of ours is relatively one of the freest, safest and most affluent places in the world to live, notwithstanding the carping and tantrums of the trumpkins among us who persist on using that freedom to take their “fifteen minutes of fame” in spite of inconveniencing everyone else.

Continue reading “Kana’ta Day 2022”

February 1, 2022February 4, 2024

Accidental Adventures – Kazakhstan, 2008

Protests and intervention by Russian paratroops propelled Kazakhstan’s largest city into headlines here recently. My own memories of the place are rather more prosaic. On the outskirts of Almaty, for the second time in my life, I ended up climbing part-way up a mountain by mistake.

Continue reading “Accidental Adventures – Kazakhstan, 2008”

June 1, 2021January 5, 2022

Sabbaticals

Each summer I try to take a couple of months off to reboot, clear the mind, learn new stuff and refresh the spirit. This year I’m also starting a year-long sabbatical from responsibilities like committees, boards, task forces and so on. I need the break, and reckon that organizations may need to do some soul-searching if they can’t manage twelve months without one, particular, chronologically and melanin challenged part of the cisgender heteropatriarchy. (For those who ain’t woke, that means “old, white, straight guy”.)

See you back here in September. Hopefully by then we’ll have all cooperated in outsmarting that brainless but tenacious little coronavirus, so tiny that it would take a couple of thousand to span the period at the end of this sentence. And to those unwilling to follow simple public health guidelines, I offer this thought for the summer……

July 3, 2020September 4, 2020

Summer Reboot

Companions from Nepal and Spain retired as lavender planters

After two years of posting a new story each month it’s time to take a couple of months for site maintenance, upgrade and, perhaps, rebooting the design.

This post originally included a list of all essays from the beginning to latest. I’ve now incorporated that into the new “Index of Posts” page.