Edmund Rice International

On the north-east edge of Mumbai, where the seven islands underlying the city merge with the rest of the state of Maharashtra, St Augustine’s High School, Vasai Road, finds itself with room to move. With spacious grounds and some tall trees already established, it stands in marked contrast to the crowded site at Dadar, the [...]

As you arrive at Mumbai Airport, you are greeted by a mural depicting, amongst many aspects of Mumbai, a pair of house crows. It is a fitting tribute to some of the hardest working birds in any Indian city, and their raucous croaking is part of urban India’s constant curtain of sound. I arrived in [...]

Everybody lives in a watershed, and most of us live in the valley of a large river. Geographers, and many indigenous myths, point to the river as the one that carves the valley, and shapes the surrounding slopes. In Gaillard, we live on the Arve, a word that’s so old the linguists say it pre-dates [...]

A lone black kite appeared around Geneva two weeks ago. In many parts of the world (Asia, Africa, Australia), these kites are common, but in this part of Europe they are rare. A special reserve has been created on the Arve River, near Gaillard where we live, to encourage them to nest there. This bird, [...]

Sterkfontein is one of several sites in the World Heritage area labelled ‘The Cradle of Humanity‘, just northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. A group of us undertaking the first ever Qalehong course, designed and run by Br Kevin McDonnell cfc, of the Catholic Bible College in Johannesburg, visited Sterkfontein, as we began to sound the [...]

The beech forest is the classic ‘wood’ covering most of old Europe, below the conifers on the steep slopes, and above the poplars and willows in the wetlands. I was walking on the slopes of Salève, the mountain that overlooks Geneva, south of the Arve River. I had climbed through hazel and alder, oak and [...]

As we experience the impact of climate change in dramatic weather pattern shifts, droughts and devastating hurricanes, one thing is clear. It is the poor of our world who are most at risk. Whether it is people living on the flood-plains of Bangladesh or the islanders of Kiribati, there are millions today who are on [...]

Oceania is more a state of mind than a place. It is what six former provinces of Christian Brothers are aspiring to become, a complex of islands and oceans, between Asia, Africa and the Americas. Note the stress on oceans (chaos) and remember the first creation story in our Jewish-Christian scriptures. It is that new! [...]

The presence of street children on the streets of Lima is an issue that has been highlighted by a Peruvian NGO, Red Alert. Like many Latin American cities Lima is a burgeoning megapolis that acts as a magnet for the poor who live in the rural areas of Peru. Many children and young people make [...]