The Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA) is pleased to announce the launch of it’s new website: Your comments and feedback will be welcome.

One particular risk internally displaced persons and refugees face is the loss of property left behind and the inabilility to recover it. In fact, destruction of property has become an instrument of warfare or even ethnic cleansing in many civil wars, and resistance to return often takes the form of refusal to evict persons who have taken over their houses or apartments, or to refuse compensation for destroyed property.

Presenting their latest work in Africa through still images and video film, Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher travel from the swamplands of the Nile in Sudan, to the Omo River in Ethiopia, and to the semi-desert of northern Kenya. Exploring the secret rituals of coming of age and the arts of courtship and seduction, Fisher and Beckwith seek out some of the most fascinating and visually powerful peoples who still retain their traditions on the African continent.

A shocking new report in the British medical journal the Lancet on human rights abuses in Haiti finds that 8,000 people were murdered and 35,000 women and girls raped during the U.S.-backed coup regime that followed Jean Bertrand Aristide. Those responsible included Haitian police, United Nations peacekeepers and anti-Lavalas gangs.

Today we spend the hour with the legendary folk singer, banjo player, storyteller and activist Pete Seeger. For over 60 years Pete Seeger has been an American icon. In the 1940s, he performed in the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie as well as the Weavers. In the 1950s, he opposed Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt and was almost jailed for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee.