Today is Human Rights Day, which under the title "Every human has rights" marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's very hard to pick a photo to illustrate this, because in Congo it was always the children that got me. In the end I chose one that is a very bad picture but that has a story behind it that I'd like to share.

These are two doctors at Panzi hospital in Bukavu trying to save the life of a newborn baby that was extremely sick because the mother gave birth literally in the bush without any kind of medical assistance or higienic conditions. She was from a village in the Walungu territory that had been attacked several times by FDLR militias, and the baby was the result of a brutal rape. She didn't want to speak about the baby or his birth, which happened a few days back. During the few hours we were in the car with her to take them to a hospital in Bukavu she refused to hold him. She was very young and seemed under shock.

A few hours after the photo was taken the baby died in the hospital. He didn't even have a name.

Since I have hundreds of pictures of the DRC in my hard drive in need of sorting out, I thought I would start a photo of the day series to give me an excuse to put some order.

The first one was taken in Bukavu on the African children day, the 16th of June 2006, and all the kids in the photo are orphans form a neighboring village. I remembered this photo reading on the blog Jewels in the Jungle a quote from Swedish writer Henning Mankell, author of I die, but the memories live on about HIV in Africa :

We know everything about how Africa is dying but we know very little about how Africa is living.

I started blogging in January 2005, as a way to kill time while doing an unpaid internship in a stuffy intergovernmental organization in which I didn't have much to do besides sitting all day in an office that I shared with the uptight wife of a British diplomat. Fortunately, only a couple of months later I was offered a job in the DR Congo and then all of a sudden life became a lot more exciting. Every minute of the day seemed to be blog-worthy and I also met a few other expat bloggers like me, with whom I seemed to have so much in common. Most of them blogged in English, except one or two in French, and I stuck to Spanish to share all those new experiences with my family and friends back home. Every time I sat in front of the computer, all sorts of stories popped into my head and I never had a shortage of blogging material. I also got into taking photos of every detail that caught my attention, and I often felt like I was recording things that had never been recorded before.

Once I left the DRC I kept blogging about Africa because I felt like I still had hundreds of stories to share, and because the list of stupid questions people asked me about Congo or Africa in general just seemed too much. I had become what Ethan Zuckerman calls a xenophile (I had lost the certainty that my home culture was the “right way” to think about the world). Moreover, I wanted to show people different sides of Africa other than those in the nine o'clock news, other than war, humanitarian crises, disease and famine.

But having moved to the US I also wrote about my impressions of the country as a Spaniard, or about my holidays, or anything that I felt like writing since that's what a personal blog is all about. I had some regular commentors, mostly Spanish mothers that had adopted African babies and a couple of Spanish expats living in the US. In the rare occasions someone included my blog in a blogrolls it was always described as "a Spaniard in the US" or "the blog of a traveler", and I started fearing like nobody read my posts about Africa, I started feeling like I was talking in the void. I started to be discouraged and became more of a reader than a blogger.

Three years and three blogging platforms later, I have now decided to switch to English and to focus on a single topic, the one that absorbes most of my time and my attention. Africa. Which is not really a single topic, I know, since it encompasses so many countries, so many people and so many issues, but you get what I mean -no more blogging about funny store names, Lolcats or annoying American habits. I decided I wanted to participate in the global blogging conversation about Africa. Which sadly it is still mostly in English. That doesn't mean that I like it or that I won't continue to blog in Spanish from time to time, but that I got tired of not being able to engage in dialogue with my favorite blogs out there (and, between us, I also got a bit tired of the navel-gazing of the Spanish blogosphere).

I haven't been blogging much during the last couple of months besides some roundups for Global Voices, that I've been reposting here. But I still feel the need to read, write, engage, communicate, bridge the gap, reflect about Africa through blogging. The other day I collected a few African bloggers' opinions on why they blog about Africa, following a meme started by Cameroonian blogger Téophile Kouamouo. For me it's simple: to be able to share stories such as the one below:

[Video via Africa is a country]

A few days ago, Théophile Kouamouo [Fr], a blogger based in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire), started a meme asking bloggers to reflect on why blog about Africa:

Do we blog for the diaspora and for the world at large, cut off from our contemporary on the continent? Is blogging about Africa done in the same way as blogging about Europe or Asia? Does the African-oriented blogosphere have something specific to offer to the world version 2.0?

After tagging a few fellow African bloggers, Téophile offered his own answer to the question:

I blog about Africa with joy because I believe that it is from our individual and mixed voices that the African renaissance will sprout, which will come as surely as Martin Luther King's dream became a reality forty years later. I read African-oriented blogs with joy because they give me a less monolithic and less doomed image of the continent and its inhabitants.

Amongst the many Francophone bloggers that participated in the meme and gave some thinking to Téophile's question, here is a selection of their answers.

Hilaire Kouakou [Fr], also from Côte d'Ivoire:

.. because Africa cannot escape from the world. Thus blogging about Africa, it's the proof that this continent has a life, that it exists, that it has its ways.

Claudus [Fr]:

For our little sisters, our little brothers and our children I would like an Africa respected in the world, proud and self-confident.

Ramata Sore from Burkina Faso, commenting on l'Atelier des Médias [Fr] of Radio France Internationale:

Because Africa is part of the world,

because this warm continent is always in the news

it is also the continent torn by her children's cries

[...]

Because it is a continent that exists, that's all

And because We are Africa

Africa 2.0 [Fr]:

* Try to rub out the bad image stuck on this continent with my contribution

* Meet other people with the same ideals

* Inform other peoples of the African realities

* Shake things up

* Participate in the world debate

* Make the voice of Africa heard

* Discuss our problems and try to bring solutions to them

Maintikely [Fr] from Madagascar collects a list of common stereotypes about Africa before describing how different she can be from them:

...Africa is not just the black colour, it's not just a synonym of AIDS, or of civil war at every turn. It is not malnutrition, or poverty, or misery, or children mortality. It is not corruption, pirates, poaching, power struggles, debts, safaris, pyramides, exotic landscapes, the Sahara, Mugabe and company, or lions and elephants, etc...

Africa is also the cradle of humanity, the cradle of all civilisation, the smile of her population, the hospitality and welcoming sense, the friendship, its population, its diaspora, the hope for a better day, the soukous, the diversity of her inhabitants , the diversity of landscapes, the family spirit and family values, the Maghreb, the characteristic accent of an African that makes you nostalgic for your country, kouakou, bright colours, her diverse culture...

And finally she answers the question of why she blogs about Africa:

[...] because I'm African, and proud to be. An African woman who doesn't know Africa well but who loves her and who wishes for a new look on the continent, a look that would trascend the clichés associated with it, a look beyond touristic opinions, and beyond her troubles to see also the other side of the coin.