Naming and Shaming Bad Bosses ... on Facebook

From Saudi Arabia to Central Asia and Egypt to Scandinavia, farmers are now turning to this crop’s climate resilience.

Mavlon Pulodov’s tall quinoa stems sway in the wind. Unlike farmers in the Andean countries of South America — home to the crop for millennia — this agricultural scientist is 9,000 miles away in Tajikistan. Pulodov is thrilled because he’s managed to grow the superfood after years of trying. Together with the Swiss arm of Catholic aid group Caritas, he’s helping farmers cultivate quinoa on a 100-hectare strip in southern Tajikistan, which is expected to yield its first harvest this year.

Rich in protein, minerals and vitamins but free of gluten, quinoa has become a popular health food worldwide in recent years. But as recently as 2014, Bolivia and Peru alone produced 80 percent of the crop, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Now more and more countries with no tradition of growing quinoa are racing to embrace it. In 2010, only 40 countries cultivated any quinoa, but today more than 100 countries do, and Bolivia and Peru’s global share has dropped to 65 percent.

Dipendra Uprety is fighting for Lebanon’s forgotten underclass … from Canada.

When Sanjaya Bholan heard about the organization This Is Lebanon, he sent a message to its Facebook page pleading for help. Dipendra Uprety answered back the same day in August 2017.

Bholan explained that his niece Sonam Maktan had left her remote village in Nepal in 2007 to work as a migrant domestic worker in Lebanon. Her employers locked her in a house in the mountains and told her they had lost her passport. When Maktan was home alone, she would secretly call Bholan and tell him she wanted to return to Nepal.

Uprety, a fellow Nepal native, promised to contact Maktan’s employers and lobby for her release. He tried to persuade them for weeks, but they didn’t give in until he called them out publicly on Facebook. The pressure worked. On Oct. 26, 2017, Maktan boarded a plane back to Nepal.

Maisie Hurley elevated oppressed voices way back in 1946.

Time was running out for Alfred Adams. It was 1944, and Adams — a Haida Nation elder and leader of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia — would soon succumb to cancer. In his final days, he appealed to Maisie Hurley, a White descendant of British aristocracy whom Adams had come to know and trust through her legal advocacy work for First Nations people in Canada. He asked her not to let their struggles go untold. She fulfilled his dying wish.

With the equivalent of just $150, Hurley, then in her late 50s, started a widely circulated newspaper called The Native Voice in 1946. It became the first well-known Canadian paper dedicated to the First Nations community that reported on the discrimination they faced. Hurley spent the remainder of her life working to elevate First Nations voices and shine a light on the systemic injustices affecting them. “There was no model for her,” says Eric Jamieson, author of The Native Voice: The Story of How Maisie Hurley and Canada’s First Aboriginal Newspaper Changed a Nation. In British Columbia, “there was nobody of her ilk doing this sort of work,” he says.