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Guest editor’s letter newint.org

The meaning of home

I still remember buying our first (and only) house decades ago; pinching ourselves that we’d made such an impossible leap into the financial void.

It was a late autumn afternoon when I slid the key in the lock and tentatively opened the front door for the first time. The rooms were empty and echoing; shadows of past lives seemed to hang in the air.

Then, gradually, that house became our home. We patched and painted the walls and filled the rooms with cast-off furniture. The closets and cupboards were crammed with stuff. And a mountain of memories piled up: babies, birthdays, dinner parties, Christmas mornings, first bicycle rides, play forts in the basement – life.

For me, that’s the core meaning of ‘home’ – it’s bricks-and-mortar, yes. But it’s more than that. It is also shelter wrapped in memory. That sense of security and of belonging is lost when people are homeless. But how do we calculate our loss when we are unable or unwilling to meet the challenge of housing those who have fallen between the cracks?

In the words of the old Phil Ochs’ song: ‘There but for fortune go you or I’. The idea of home also comes under attack when the physical environment is threatened – as in our feature on the depredations of the sand-miners in Cambodia. And from Nigeria we report on the enormous effort to make the country polio-free. n ayne elLwood for the New Internationalist Co-operative newint.org

This month’s contributors include:

Laura Jiménez Varo is a Spanish reporter. She specializes in conflict, humanitarian crises and war reporting and has been working mainly from the Middle East and North Africa in recent years.

Nithin Coca is a freelance journalist based in Berkeley, California. He focuses on environment, social and development issues in the Global South and has specific expertise in Southeast Asia.

Rod Harbinson is an investigative journalist, photographer and filmmaker, with particular experience of the Southeast Asian region where he reports on the struggles of indigenous and local people to defend their natural resources from destructive development projects. RodHarbinson.com

Sian Griffiths is a former Londonbased BBC producer and reporter. She lives in Ottawa where she is a writer and radio journalist specializing in social, humanitarian and indigenous issues.

New ways of seeing Alongside our magazine, this month we publish Where Will I Live? a stunning photo-based picture book for younger readers which looks at homelessness through the eyes of refugee children. For them, life is hard and full of questions. Yet, in spite of everything, they find time to laugh, play, and make friends. And most importantly, they hope that somewhere, someone will welcome them to a new home. nin.tl/WhereWillILive And on the subject of visual books dealing with tough subjects in innovative and sensitive ways, we are delighted to announce that Myriad Editions are joining us. Myriad publish graphic fiction and non-fiction, as well as novels and thematic atlases. Their graphic books have illustrated the roots of the financial crisis and debunked science myths among other subjects. We look forward to an exciting partnership; all Myriad books will be on sale in our Ethical Shop (ethicalshop.org) later this year. Helen Wallis for New Internationalist Co-operative helen.wallis@newint.org

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