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piqer for: piqd Boom and bust Climate and Environment Global finds Globalization and politics Health and Sanity Technology and society Doing Good Deep Dives
Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
A Haunting, Masterful Look Into The Lives Of Four Former Child Soldiers In Boko Haram
If you read one long-read this weekend, let this be it. Sarah A. Topol's beautiful, haunting prose reads like a novel. In it, she paints an intimate portrait of the lives of four children, kidnapped from a fishing village in Nigeria, and forced to work as child soldiers for Boko Haram.
Each boy finds different ways to cope with his radically changed circumstances, each adopting a different strategy for survival: Mustafa, barely a teenager when taken, chooses to distinguish himself, climbing the ranks of the organization until he becomes second-Emeer (second-in-command for his unit). To do this, he follows orders without question — shooting, beheading, and slaughtering people his superiors tell him to, regardless of whether they are innocent or guilty. Eventually, when he can no longer stomach the endless blood-letting, he finds a way to escape — and takes a truckload of his comrades-in-arms with him to freedom.
Fanami was just 13 when he was captured by Boko Haram. A gentle soul, he was haunted by his mother's disapproval of fighting, and tried to minimize his own participation in violence — though he could not avoid it entirely.
We meet Zanna and Kolomi — just 13 and 12 when they were abducted into Boko Haram — also from the same village. Through Topol's masterful prose, we see what they see, hear their thoughts — are with them, as they are forced to do unspeakable things, and make the choices that quite literally mean life or death, for themselves and others.
Although all four boys manage to escape, and are reunited with their families, there is no happy ending. The boys will have to live with what they have experienced, and what they were forced to do their entire lives. Not to mention the thousands of others who are still trapped, forced to fight in Boko Haram's ranks. Which is why it is all the more important to read this masterful reportage, to understand the conflict that is affecting so many, and to remind us of what is at stake.
