Heading on vacation to the DMZ

Human stories from a world in conflict. No Images? [Click here]( — Aug. 31, 2018 — What comes to mind when you think of taking a holiday? Perhaps swaying palm trees and sun-drenched beaches, museums and fine dining, or flora and fauna. How about a no man’s land — a demilitarized zone? As relations between North Korea and South Korea thaw, [visitors are flocking to the DMZ]( for a glimpse of what may soon be a relic of the past. In fact, an official South Korean tourism site notes more than a million people visit the DMZ every year. It’s the closest most South Koreans have ever gotten to their neighbors in the North. ### Many refugees find comfort in the flavors of home. Om Mohammed found a new career. It started in Turkey when she found an under-the-table job as a housekeeper. Occasionally, she would cook for her new employers, and when the family hosted guests, those guests would invite her to cook for them as well. Before she knew it, word of mouth had earned her cooking a following among Syrian families wanting a taste of home, as well as NGO workers and Turks who couldn’t resist Om Mohammed’s recipes. Now, six years after she left her home in Syria for Turkey, [Om Mohammed is running a modest restaurant]( out of several rooms she is renting in an older building near her home. ### [There have been sightings of Charlie Chaplin in Kabul, Afghanistan](. Karim Asir, also known as "Afghani Charlie Chaplin," is just like you’d picture him: Toothbrush mustache, bowler hat, baggy pants, oversized shoes and the jet-black eyeliner. For the past five years, Asir has been making appearances on the streets and in various venues across Kabul. His goal is to recreate some of the comedic giant’s Silent Era antics for Afghans and drop in a few sociocultural messages along the way. Asir is popular but he also has critics. He says some people don’t see comedy as a remedy for the myriad problems Afghanistan faces today. Asir begs to differ. He sees his Chaplin sketches as a brief escape from Afghanistan’s troubles. He says he wants to bring joy and solace to his audience at a time when they need it the most. ### Finally, the humanitarian crisis at Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, where nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees have fled to, is also a communication crisis. With an array of Southeast Asian languages spoken in the camps, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are having a tough time talking to aid workers. Even with the assistance of translators, it's hard to sort out all the languages and dialects. [The humanitarian group Translators Without Borders has created a new app to help clear up the miscommunication](. Socio-linguist AK Rahim helped design it with input from female Rohingya refugees in the camps. More visitors are coming to the DMZ amid thawing relations with North Korea The border between North and South Korea is one of the most heavily guarded in the world. Separating the nations is the Demilitarized Zone — the DMZ. It’s a 150-mile-long, and 2.5-mile-wide swath of land that neither side occupies. It’s both a potential conflict zone and a tourist destination. [Learn more >]( Syrian revolution changed how women are viewed in the workplace It wasn’t long ago that Om Mohammed was cooking kibbeh for her family in Aleppo. She, her husband and five children fled Syria’s once-largest city when clashes between rebels and the regime forces intensified in 2012. They arrived in Gaziantep, Turkey that summer after crossing the border illegally on foot. Now she, and many other refugee women, are making a living off their culinary skills. [Learn more >]( Charlie Chaplin on the streets of Kabul? One Afghan takes on the Little Tramp. The first time Karim Asir played Charlie Chaplin on a street in Kabul, he was nervous about how he’d be received. But after a couple of minutes, an audience started to gather. And their reaction, he says, was priceless. “At first they didn’t know that this is an Afghan,” he recalls. “They said, ‘Oh, my God! Charlie Chaplin is in Afghanistan!’ But someone said, ‘Oh, Charlie Chaplin is dead. Who is this?’ Then someone said, ‘OK, I think this guy is from Afghanistan.’” [Learn more>]( When reporting sexual assault, Rohingya women are being lost in translation Socio-linguist AK Rahim helped develop an app to aid translation in Rohingya refugee camps. "The men and the woman," he says, "developed almost distinct vocabulary sets — different words for even the same thing — especially when it comes to very sensitive topics like sex, gender and sexual harassment, etc. And many women in the camps, when they were trying to tell the story of them being raped or harassed by the Burmese military they were using these euphemisms. They weren't directly saying, 'Oh, we've been raped. We've been assaulted.' "They were saying 'oh, we've been stained.' And many people couldn't understand it. They were like, 'What do you mean by "stained?"' "You have to understand contextually. They would not directly say that they were raped. They're going to say that their reputation or their character has been stained." [Learn more >]( The Atlantic [Isis never went away in Iraq]( “You can say that almost all of Iraq has been liberated from ISIS during the day, but you can’t say that at night.” The Guardian [BDS: how a controversial non-violent movement has transformed the Israeli-Palestinian debate]( Israel sees the international boycott campaign as an existential threat to the Jewish state. Palestinians regard it as their last resort. Smithsonian [The women code breakers who unmasked Soviet spies]( At the height of the Cold War, America’s most secretive counterespionage effort set out to crack unbreakable ciphers. On The Media [Fallout]( This podcast looks through a few recent highlights from the end-of-times genre, including a 1980's made-for-TV spectacle and a new piece of speculative fiction documenting a hypothetical nuclear conflict with North Korea. 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