Now that the the World Health Organization has officially declared the Ebola outbreak over, many U.S. officials are calling to send temporarily protected African immigrants back home.
Coming from such countries as Sierra Leone and Guinea, over 4,000 Africans, including a Liberian novelist named Paul, who asked to go by his first name in order to remain anonymous, all now risk being sent back from the U.S.
“You cannot return because you don’t even have the money to pay your air ticket,” Paul said. “On this temporary status, if you want to look for a job, many [employers] don’t want to give you a full-time job, because they look on your status [like] you are just a short-term person, so they don’t want to give you a long-term job. And this is one of the things that I really suffered.”
Chicago Celebrates Author Gwendolyn Brooks
The city of Chicago recently unveiled a massive tribute to the late Gwendolyn Brooks, America’s first black individual to receive a Pulitzer Prize.
Brooks often paid homage to the Windy City’s front yards, pool halls, bungalows and back alleys in her works, highlighting the people she passed by on the streets and in grocery stores, giving life to urban poetry and Chicago.
“Her quote was ‘poetry is life distilled,’” said her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely. “She was doing a lot of distilling. She looked at things very carefully. She observed well. She recorded life back to its livers.”
The Topeka, Kansas-born Brooks, who died in 2000 at age 83, was also the first black woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, now known as U.S. Poet Laureate.
Africa’s Job Force May Face Extinction by 2040
Some parts of Africa could potentially face mass unemployment by 2040, according to an analysis by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
The report predicted shortfall of over 50 million jobs. Based on world bank data, the labor force in sub-Saharan Africa will rise 823 million by 2040, up from 395 million in 2015. However, total number of jobs is only expected to hit 773 million, reportedly leaving 50 million people in Africa unemployed.
”International donors need to take a more coordinated approach, taking into account each country’s individual needs, helping them to grow their economies and create jobs,” said Jim Murphy, a former cabinet minister, The Guardian reported. “Likewise, donor agencies are failing to adequately address the challenges facing the continent in order to prioritise economic growth.”
