Editor's note: Eileen Pollack is director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan and taught Uwem Akpan, author of "Say You Are One of Them." Akpan's book is the choice of the Oprah Book Club, which will be discussed November 9 at 9 p.m. ET on CNN.com Live or Oprah.com.

Uwem Akpan and Eileen Pollack at a holiday dinner.

Eileen Pollack
Special to CNN

Even among the hundreds of applications, this one stood out. Most applicants to creative writing programs submit stories about the angst of their suburban childhoods. This writer's stories concerned the daily ordeals of a boy living with his family on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, and the horrific plight of a Rwandan girl whose mother is Tutsi and father Hutu.

Not only did the applicant have what writers call "material," he was blessed with an uncanny ear for human speech and the poetry to describe his characters' very unpoetic lives.

I can still remember the young Kenyan boy watching his mother decant the glue she intends to sniff. The glue, the boy tells us, "glowed warm and yellow in the dull light," and when his mother had poured enough, "she cut the flow of the glue by tilting the tin up. The last stream of gum entering the bottle weakened and braided itself before tapering in midair like an icicle."

Still, this applicant gave us pause. The writer had so much to say, he seemed to be trying to channel a raging waterfall through the tiny funnels of two short stories. His use of punctuation was idiosyncratic, to say the least. And the applicant was a priest!

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Somali military recruiters are enlisting men from Kenya's Dadaab camps say Human Rights Watch. The Dadaab refugee complex is the largest of its kind in the world.

Moni Basu
CNN

A global human rights group is urging Kenya to stop Somali military recruiters from enlisting displaced men and boys in Kenya's sprawling Dadaab refugee camps to fight in their war against Islamic militants.

"Recruitment of fighters in refugee camps undermines their very purpose, which is to be a place of refuge from conflict," said Letta Tayler, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, who spent a week interviewing refugees for the group's Thursday report about the practice. "The boys and men who are in these camps risked their lives to flee. Now they're being asked to return to that."

She said allowing recruiters to enlist young refugees in a new force intended to fight on behalf of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government is a violation of U.N. regulations that govern refugee camps.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight for an exclusive AC360º dispatch to watch Anderson Cooper's full report on the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The United Nations estimates that 200,000 women and girls have been raped in the Congo.

from Oxfam International

The five-year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which involved the armies of five other countries, officially ended in 2003 and democratic elections were held in 2006. However, fighting involving a plethora of armed groups continues, especially in the east of this mineral-rich country. Throughout all this conflict it is the civilians who continue to suffer the most.

The DRC has the world's largest peacekeeping force, totaling some 17,000 personnel. But they struggle to maintain security in a country the size of Western Europe with a population of 60 million.

Fighting was fuelled by the DRC’s tremendous mineral resources and by the flow of small arms into the country.

- Humanitarian crisis -

Since the war started in 1997, an estimated 4 million people have died from violence, hunger and disease as a result of the conflict, and 2.5 million have been made homeless – 1.5 million displaced within the DRC’s borders and one million forced to flee to neighboring countries.

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After Congo, the secretary of state will travel to Nigeria, Liberia and Cape Verde.

CNN

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought an offer of help Tuesday for victims, especially victims of sexual violence, of Africa's longest war, a regional conflict that's dragged on for more than a decade.

Clinton on Monday delivered a blunt message to Prime Minister Adolphe Muzito of the Democratic Republic of Congo when he hosted a dinner in her honor.

"There must be an end to widespread financial corruption and abuses of human rights and women's rights," she said. "There must be an improvement in governance and the respect for the rule of law."

She also called for "changes in the business climate, changes in the rules and regulations that involve contracts and the protection of property" to promote foreign investment.

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Top diplomat Hillary Clinton speaks at the African Growth and Opportunity conference in Nairobi Thursday.

Charles Kenny
The Root

Not in the slightest. It's true that some countries in the region are as poor as England under William the Conqueror, but that doesn't mean Africa's on the verge of doomsday. How many serfs had a cellphone? More than 63 million Nigerians do.

Millions travel on buses and trucks across the continent each year, even if the average African road is still fairly bumpy. The list of modern technologies now ubiquitous in the region also includes cement, corrugated iron, steel wire, piping, plastic sheeting and containers, synthetic and cheap cotton clothing, rubber-soled shoes, bicycles, butane, paraffin candles, pens, paper, books, radios, televisions, vaccines, antibiotics, and bed nets.

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Anderson with Dr. Nathan Wolfe, a virus hunter who has published new research about the origins of Malaria.

Program Note: Posted below is the latest article from Dr. Nathan Wolfe, a virus hunter who believes he has discovered how humans first contracted Malaria. One of the world's deadliest diseases, Malaria claims the lives of more than 1 million people a year, most of whom are children. Dr. Sanjay Gupta will have a full report on the study and Dr. Wolfe will join us on AC360° tonight at 10p ET.

Dr. Nathan D. Wolfe et al.
Global Viral Forecasting Initiative

The distinguished anthropologist Frank B. Livingstone conjectured that P. falciparum may have been acquired by a transfer to humans of a chimpanzee parasite. The plausibility of Livingstone’s hypothesis was based on the supposition that, as humans developed increasingly larger agricultural societies, they encroached upon the dwindling forest habitats of species such as the chimpanzee, and so there may have been repeated opportunities for horizontal transfer.

Today, human encroachment into the last forest habitats has further extended, leading to a higher risk of transfer of new pathogens, including new malaria parasites. Our results confirm Livingstone’s conjecture and, moreover, suggest that the world’s extant populations of P. falciparum derive from a single transfer of P. reichenowi from chimpanzees to humans.

How and when did the host transfer occur? A hypothesis proposed in the past was that the ancestors of P. falciparum would have been transferred from another host to humans as our Neolithic ancestors transitioned from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists some 10,000 years ago. This proposal was based on anthropological information about the history of our species, but also on the estimated age of hemoglobin mutants that render humans resistant to malaria infection.

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Researchers compared malaria DNA from infected chimps in Cameroon and Ivory Coast with human malaria.

Stephanie Smith
CNN Medical Producer

Nathan Wolfe is a hunter, but he doesn't carry a gun. His prey are invisible to the naked eye.

Wolfe leads expeditions into the mysterious world of viruses and pathogens.

"They are everywhere," said Wolfe, a microbiologist who speaks of his targets - infectious organisms - with the giddy lilt of a teenager on a first date. "We have the potential to explore a completely new biological world and go out and really find new things all the time."

One bug has been Wolfe's singular obsession for more than a decade, arguably the biggest menace to humans: malaria.

"If you think about HIV virus as a singular hurricane event, malaria is like the hurricane that's been hitting for thousands of years - constantly," said Wolfe, who heads a research institute called the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.

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Sec. Clinton will begin a week-long visit to nations throughout Africa tomorrow.

Jill Dougherty
CNN Foreign Affairs Correspondent

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is embarking on her biggest international trip yet: Africa. Seven countries in eleven days. Issues as diverse as economic entrepreneurship and gender-based violence.

The trip comes just three weeks after President Obama’s trip to Accra, Ghana and Secretary Clinton will highlight many of the themes he struck. The State Department notes it’s the earliest trip by a Secretary of State and a President to Africa of any previous administration. In an administration that prides itself on a plethora of “priorities,” officials say they are putting Africa toward the top of the list.

The Secretary begins her trip in Nairobi, Kenya at the U.S.-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, delivering a speech at the forum’s ministerial opening ceremony.

In Kenya she plans to meet with President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, encouraging them to proceed with their intention to rewrite the country’s constitution. The country was hit with a wave of violence two and a half years ago following flawed presidential elections.

Also in Kenya she will meet briefly with Somalia’s president Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed.

His country is under intense pressure from an Islamist extremist movements affiliated with Al Qaeda of al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam.

On her next stop, South Africa, she will meet with the country’s new leader, President Jacob Zuma, and the Foreign Minister. Top of the agenda for the country, under severe economic pressure, are the crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe and HIV/AIDS.

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Obama points to the Door of No Return, which would shut before Africans were put on slave ships.

Wayne Drash
CNN

President Obama slowly walked across the grounds of Cape Coast Castle, a slave outpost in Ghana where hundreds of thousands of Africans were shipped as human cargo to a life of bondage in the United States, South America and the Caribbean.

"You almost feel as if the walls can speak. You try to project yourself into these incredibly harrowing moments," Obama told CNN's Anderson Cooper.

When the president reached the "Door of No Return," an arched gateway with thick doors that would shut behind African men, women and children before they were forced onto slave ships, Obama looked out over the Atlantic Ocean where waves crashed onto rocks. "Obviously there's a sense of what a profound sorrow must've been felt as people were hauled off into the great unknown," he said.

What does he tell his two daughters, Sasha and Malia, about slavery?

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Editor's Note: An article in Thursday's New York Times details recent findings about Michelle Obama's genealogical roots.  Genealogist Tony Burroughs previously wrote this post for us about the challenges associated with tracing our roots and how professionals are working to better understand our collective histories.

Burroughs Family Photo, Chattanooga, Tennessee 1889. Pictured standing, left to right: Morris Burroughs; Malachias Williams; UNK; Samuel P. Johnson. Seated in the front row are: Robert Elliott Burroughs (baby); Mary Jane Lillie Williams Burroughs; & Martha Williams.

Tony Burroughs
Professional Genealogist and Author

Many African Americans have longed to know their African roots, especially because our language and heritage have been destroyed by colonizers.

Historians have long documented that large numbers of Blacks were brought from different areas in Africa to what is now the United States. But in genealogy research, researchers have to prove the identity of specific individuals, and then document and prove relationships of them to their ancestors.

Genealogical proof is similar to that required in a probate court where relatives of the deceased have to be identified in order to distribute assets of the deceased. But the Board for Certification of Genealogists actually has a higher standard of proof for genealogy than a probate court.

There are several challenges to connect one’s ancestral genealogy back to Africa. Here’s why:

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