The morning after the presidential election my phone was alive with texts from all over the globe. Friends and colleagues expressing concern and amazement, even offering condolences. I’ve spent the last seven years as the editor of Stranger’s Guide, where I’ve forged relationships with a wide array of individuals around the world. Because of this, my post-election text threads showed the extraordinary reverberations of the election. There were messages from a Ukrainian journalist, a woman living in a tent in Gaza and a dance instructor in Lagos. Others wrote from cities in Egypt, Israel, India and Georgia.
In many ways these responses helped demonstrate the entire ethos of Stranger’s Guide. We are an American publication, but we don’t send American journalists on assignment to cover the world. Instead, we believe that writers, journalists and thinkers from their own countries are far better equipped to explain their political and cultural world than even the brightest journalists who parachute in for a few weeks, ever could.
Here is a small sample of what I woke up to the morning after the elections:
Ukraine
One of the first texts I read was from the Ukrainian journalist, Nataliya Gumenyuk, who spent Election Day with me in Oakland, California where I live. She had come from Kyiv to get a sense of the city Kamala Harris was from—how it had shaped the candidate and what it might say about who she is. Early election day morning, Gumenyuk stood outside a polling station near my house trying to gauge the mood of the day before leaving for the airport. Long before the polls closed in the US, she boarded a 16-hour flight with no wifi and no live tv.
The text she wrote to me when she landed was one of the first I read the morning after:
Gaza
Later in the day, I received a note from an engineer in Gaza who, before the war, worked with women and children with disabilities. Almost daily on her Facebook page, she posts poems she writes from a tent in the south of Gaza where she lives with her sister and her sister’s three children. In her personal messages to me she speaks of their dire conditions: the lack of medicine and food and the piles of garbage in the city. On the morning of the US election, she sent me this simple message: “We will continue to love life and beauty, and we hope our voices reach the entire world to end this war in any possible way because the losses are immense.”
Nigeria
Next I heard from Adewale Ayodeji. More than four years ago, I worked on an article about Bariga, a neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria. The word ‘slum’ is a loaded one and is usually only used by people who have never spent time in such places. Adewale and I spent hours walking through Bariga talking with young men drinking homebrew, a father and his three year-old son shucking oysters, the local chiefs of the neighborhood and two delightful teenage girls who let us climb up a rickety ladder to a stilted perch to survey the vast neighborhood. Adewale teaches dance and drumming out of a small wooden hut just on the edge of a dirt parking lot. During COVID his studio was destroyed and he now teaches the kids of the neighborhood outside in the lot. Every month he sends me videos of his students and gives me updates on his work and their progress in the arts. When I asked him how the US election had landed in his neighborhood he replied “Many women in Lagos want a woman president.”
The day after the elections he sent this short video:
Egypt
Last spring, while in Egypt, I struck up a conversation with a cab driver as we swung through the streets of Cairo. He speaks no English and I speak no Arabic, but because of Google Translate we keep up a lively exchange that has continued for months. Egypt’s president has long been a Trump ally and to read the papers, you might assume Egypt is generally favorable to Trump’s leadership. Yet this is the short text my friend sent me on the morning after Trump won. As usual, I pasted it into Google Translate to read:
There were many more notes, but overall the takeaway was clear; Trump’s election will change life not just in the US, but around the world. Families across continents now live even more on a knife’s edge, waiting to see what leaders will cave to this new force. What wars will last longer, and what authoritarian regimes, that should be denied oxygen, will now burn brighter?
Our mission has always been to show how large geopolitical policies play out in the daily lives of individuals. We do this by publishing stories from some of the best writers in the world. Stories made up of nuance, danger, beauty, even a kind of revelatory confusion. Stories that ask us to listen to the complexities of the world.
I wish our respect for these stories could be a political ethos in and of itself. And in my heart of hearts, I think that it can be. True, there won’t be any grand political rallies for a nuanced proliferation of voices. But perhaps there should be. And I’d like to think Stranger’s Guide is a version of what such a gathering would look like. A place where the complexity of existence is discussed and explained directly by the people who live and understand their own human experiences best.
Writers from around the globe don’t just send us texts, they also send us their investigative reporting, their photo essays and their lyrically written essays on art, home, power, family and war.
Contributor
Kira Brunner Don is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Stranger’s Guide. She worked as a magazine editor in New York for seventeen years and as a journalist in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. She studied philosophy at The New School’s Graduate Faculty and worked at a think tank at Columbia University before joining Lapham’s Quarterly, where she was Executive Editor for eight years. She has received two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence in her role as Editor-in-Chief of Stranger’s Guide and one National Magazine Award in Photography for her photo curation. In 2022 she was named the FOLIO: Eddie and Ozzie Award’s Editor of the Year. She is co-editor of the book The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention and was the co-founder of the Oakland Book Festival. She lives in Oakland, California with her two children.
