Youth

Three decades of war and internal conflict has left an indelible mark on the fabric of Afghan society. Nowhere is this more evident than Afghanistan's educational system. Here, the success or failure of the country's schools will have tremendous impact on its future.

Video by Shaun McCanna, Flamingo Productions

Produced in association with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Began airing on Foreign Exchange September 11, 2009

Climate change is front page news in Bangladesh on a near-daily basis, and the English-language newspaper The Daily Star is averaging two to three articles per day on the subject. As Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina traveled to Geneva this week to attend the World Climate Conference-3, coverage has focused on her trip. But there is also a sense in Bangladesh that climate change is putting the country on the international map, so to speak, and Bangladeshis are very much interested in getting that recognition.

Bangladesh is a massive river delta, and river erosion is taking more than 100 sq. km. of land per year. According to local officials, it displaces more than 100,000 riverside residents per year, and the pace is accelerating, fed by melting glaciers and monsoons upstream. We visited the massive Jamuna River near Sirajganj in the northwest corner of the country and saw where large chunks of the dike and roadway had collapsed just a few weeks earlier.

It is monsoon season in Bangladesh, making the delicate balance between water and land more tenuous than ever. It was raining heavily when we disembarked from the ferry on Bhola Island and it continued to rain for much of the day. South of Dhaka some 205 km. (or 11 hours by ferry), Bhola is caught between the rising saltwater of the Bay of Bengal to the south and the ominous churning of the Meghna River to the east.

I am writing from the overnight ferry from Dhaka to Bhola island. Glenn and I spent the morning shooting interviews and b-roll footage at a dismal slum in Dhaka that is home to over 1000 displaced people from the island of Bhola. Bhola, one of six southern islands in Bangladesh, is home to 1.6 million people. But many thousands of people are leaving Bhola as erosion caused by rising sea levels and strong currents swallows the land. Some predict half the island could be gone in 30 years time.

Until they were 6, Bill and his friends Emmanuel and Jean-Jacques lived together in Mkugwa, a camp of 2,000 Central African refugees in Northwest Tanzania. Their parents were close friends, and the boys grew up sharing meals, soccer games, wheelbarrow rides. Then, in October 2006, everything changed.

We will be heading off for Bangladesh on Aug. 22 to explore the "ground zero" of climate change and innovative adaptive strategies they are developing there. We will be traveling to Bhola, a large coastal island that has reportedly lost half its land mass over the past decade, to report on the "children of climate change" whose families are battling to stay there. We have just secured an interview with Dr.

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Dear Bill and Igey,

Mary Wiltenburg looks back on her year with Bill Clinton Hadam, a 9-year-old Tanzanian refugee now living in the United States.

Tanzania is in the midst of a massive push to rid the country of hundreds of thousands of refugees who've been living in United Nations camps within its borders. On the eve of the camp closing, a glimpse of life in two camps in northwestern Tanzania: Mtabila, home to 40,000 Burundians, and Kanembwa, home to 2,000 mostly Congolese refugees.

Photos by Mary Wiltenburg

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center