Table talk, everything in one. Illustration Copyright © 2021 by Izora Devonish.

DEAR MIA,

May I call you Mia? Madam Prime Minister? PM? Not Aunty Mia. I know who my aunts are and have been, and that would confuse our relationship, or what it is supposed to be.

How to begin?

UNESCO poster reminds us there's still work to be done to protect freedom of speech and journalists, maybe now more than ever.  

RESPONSIBLE.  Accurate.  Reputable.  Truthful.  Fair.  

These terms are often associated with good journalism.  News stories we can trust in whatever medium.

Prime Minister Mia Mottley speaking at the United Nations in 2019.  Barbados' first Prime Minister, Errol Barrow, declared in a December 1966 address to the UN that the newly independent country would be "friends of all, satellites of none." Photo Copyright (c) 2019. 

"Beware....  He'll pour a honeyed potion in your ear, and you'll wake up one day and all you'll say is 'Republic!  Republic!  Republic!'"  Gladiator

Getting used to long streets that are emptier than usual...almost.  Photos Copyright © 2020 by Ronald A. Williams.  

What's more crushing than COVID-19?  Illustration Copyright © 2020 by Aeryn Sandiford.

“How does a culture withstand the onslaught of a pandemic? We survive first of all with the presence of culture within us. It is to our inner culture that we turn, the culture we carry in us through years of unconscious osmosis and conscious acquisition.” Ben Okri

MY 13-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER is afraid to die.  Some days, it’s an abstract fear: the thought of not being here, of being nothing, is an unfathomable void.   There are days—today—it is COVID-19.