A Spring Pop (aka Site Relaunch)

Something great just got better. Enlisting the amazing talents of my good friend Matt Schloss, a web designer and WordPress guru, blog.micahbrubin.com received a springtime polish. The site has a new face with cleaner text, bigger pictures, sharper galleries and … Continued


Perfection to a Tea

A photo of the fileds in Srimangal, Bangladesh at the Bangladesh Tea Research Institue.  


George Orwell’s Home Town: Mawlamyine, Myanmar

George Orwell gets a bad wrap in Myanmar. His book: Burmese Days is banned by the government due to its unapologetically candid descriptions of the Burmese bureaucracy under British rule (can you say sloth?). Before Myanmar’s political thaw began, possession of the book … Continued


Another Brick in the Bangladeshi Wall: Part 2

An estimated 15 billion bricks are produced in Bangladesh each year by an industry that employs nearly 2,000,000 workers during the peak season and 800,000 during the off-season. At the nearly 1,200 brick kilns surrounding Dhaka, workers often live in … Continued


Another Brick in the Bangladeshi Wall: Part 1

Scattered around Dhaka, Bangladesh’s chaotic capital, brick factories cut and bake the foundation of the countries breakneck building boom. Despite recent initiatives to improve efficiency and reduce green house gasses, Bangladesh’s brick making produces 6-million tons of CO2 annually, according … Continued


Roots of Hope

Hope often finds itself in the most dire of places and Dhaka’s School of Hope takes no exception. Planted in a slum in the city’s northern edge and surrounded by mosquito-filled marshes and grinding poverty, the School of Hope nourishes … Continued


Myanmar – Part 5: Thaunggok

There wasn’t much to do in Thaunggok besides wander around and by 9pm everything was shut down and the streets hauntingly dark. On my first day there I rented a motorbike but ended up returning it after about 5 minutes … Continued


Myanmar – Part 4: Faces of Thaunggok

Many areas of western Myanmar are off-limits to tourists/foreigners due to pockets of insurgency as well as the government’s inability to establish regional authority. It is possible to secure government permits to explore these areas but the onerous and time-consuming, … Continued


Myanmar – Part 3: Faces of Yangon

Yangon, which means “End of Strife,” was founded in the early 11th century. Nearly 4.5 million people call this sprawling city home that was the country’s capital until 2005, when the military government decamped 200 miles north to the newly … Continued