Recommended reading:
Sinking Streets Chapter 01 - The Male’ City Swimming Track
TVM Haze
Mohamed Nazim’s 2010 confession - a turning point for Maldivian minorities
A collection of Yameen Rasheed's writings on Maldives, Secularism, Standing up for Maldivian Minorities, and Fighting Religious Radicalism
The Sustainable Fishing Practices of Dhivehi Reef Fishermen (and how the resort industry is screwing them over)
A timeline of religious extremism, minority struggles, and human rights abuses in contemporary Maldives
My Experience Dealing With Maldives Police Service
The Greatest Maldivian Visual Artists of the 21st Century
Splinters Act I - The Akasha Frontier
Is there an easy answer to this question? Primarily I think I speak and write in English because it has been necessary for my survival. Most people from the Maldives are bilingual because of this reason. Our language, Dhivehi, is only spoken by us. And of us there are not many.
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During my time at the Marine Research Centre of the Maldives as a research trainee, I was fortunate enough to go along on one of their reef-fish tagging expeditions to Baa Atoll in February of 2009.
We would go out with the fishermen on their fishing trips during which we would record the daily catch, tag specimens and retrieve tags from specimens which had been released earlier.
We would almost always leave in the early twilight hours and would often not return until it was nearly midnight; dropping off hundreds of kilos of fish to one of the many resorts in the atoll.
For me the most interesting part about all this was not how they catch tons of fish with their hands, instead of nets or rods, or even how they get paid next to nothing by greedy resort operators (more on that later in this article), it was how they would almost always start off the cycle with nothing.
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