I bought my first Guardian Weekly when, as an Australian, I was struggling to understand how I could have been so ignorant about the situation in East Timor, as it was known then, and the atrocities that occurred there.
It was the Guardian Weekly that led me to working for women’s human rights, now as vice-president of programs at Global Fund for Women in San Francisco.
It’s been the Guardian Weekly that has remained my intellectual companion as I’ve spent time recently with women’s groups in the refugee camps in Lebanon, outraged at the lack of global action in response to the situation there. It’s often a relief to return home, both to rest and to read. As someone who is happiest immersed in nature, my favourite Guardian Weekly column has always been Paul Evans’s Nature watch. I live on a boat in Sausalito and the seals with their bright eyes, and the pelicans skimming the water give me a spurt of joy that I also feel when I read Evans’s poetic witnesses to Wenlock Edge.
There is something about the practice of witness, whether to nature or to wider humanity.
Each week as I disembark from the ferry that takes me into work in San Francisco there waits the twinkly blue-eyed man at the newsstand ready to give me my Guardian Weekly.
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