By Evelyn Iritani

RUMANGABO, Democratic Republic of Congo — Emmanuel de Merode knows exactly when his passion began. He was a curious young man with a dream of becoming a park ranger when he first saw the mountain gorillas, giant beasts with an intelligent, surprisingly disarming nature. 

He was smitten. 

“Every time you go into a group of gorillas, you’re blown off your feet,” said de Merode, who is now the director at Virunga National Park, home for 220 of the endangered animals. “It’s like being married to somebody you adore. Whether you’re 20 or 90. It’s the same thing with the mountain gorillas.”

Continue reading on Al Jazeera America

By Daniel Estrin

At the Israeli army checkpoint, David barely slowed down. His pale skin, blue eyes and confident smile identified him as an Israeli. Even when Israeli soldiers signaled to him to stop or slow down, he just waved and drove past, spitting dust behind him.

Each time he did this, and it was often, he was thrilled and terrified. So was his Palestinian boyfriend, Eyad, who would sit in the back seat. It is hard to describe how dicey pulling this stunt off is in this part of the world. But for David and Eyad, sneaking Eyad from the West Bank to David’s apartment in Israel was worth the risk.

It is extremely rare for an Israeli to fall in love with a Palestinian. Gay love is an even trickier prospect.

There is, of course, the bitter conflict waging between the two peoples. Sleeping with the enemy is, in most circles, considered to be a betrayal to one’s family, identity and nation.

There are legal barriers. Israel bans Palestinians from joining their spouses in Israel, citing fears that Palestinians could carry out attacks if given entry to Israel.

There are physical hurdles. Security forces carefully police the frontier between Israel and the Palestinian territories. No Israeli is allowed to enter Palestinian-governed areas, and no Palestinian is allowed into Israeli areas, without special permits.

You don’t need a special permit, however, to enter a dating website.

In early 2012, a 29-year-old Israeli man from Jerusalem began chatting online with a 29-year-old Palestinian man in the West Bank. They lived just a few miles, and worlds away, from each other.

The Palestinian asked the Israeli what his name was. (Their real names are not revealed here, for their safety and privacy.) When the Israeli responded with a Hebrew name, the Palestinian thought it was a joke, a fake nickname.

“I was speaking to him in Arabic, and he saw my pictures, and I didn’t seem like an Arab,” David, the Israeli, said. “He thought I was fooling him. And eventually I told him I was Jewish. And he was shocked. And I asked if problem. And he said, ‘no, no.’”

Many Palestinian gay men do not reveal their real names to the Palestinian men they meet online. Strangers, even gay strangers, cannot be trusted to keep their sexuality a secret. Homosexuality is one of the most extreme taboos in Palestinian society.

David was not the first Israeli man Eyad chatted with online. But none of them with were willing to meet him, a Palestinian, in the West Bank. They thought it would be dangerous.

David agreed to meet him in a town in the West Bank, taking circuitous, Jewish settlement back roads to avoid Israeli military checkpoints.

“I still remember his face. How happy he was,” Eyad, the Palestinian, said of their first date. “I told him, you are in Jerusalem, and I am in the West Bank, and there is a wall between us…it’s not a good idea to draw expectations. Like, we cannot really go far with it.”

Then, as if defying gravity, they fell in love. To be a couple – this kind of couple, in this unforgiving place – required creating a life of fiction. David didn’t tell his parents for a very long time about his relationship with Eyad. And Eyad hid his own sexuality from his family, as well as the true nature of his relationship with David, who became a frequent and welcome visitor to his family’s village home.

“I really can’t tell what would happen if someone from Palestine knew that I am gay. People here in Palestine, they say that, oh, that guy was talking about this, he should be killed,” Eyad said. “I live in a big lie.”

When their fiction began to unravel, the two crossed many of their own personal boundaries, in a place where borders matter most.

Tune into their audio documentary to hear David and Eyad tell their story.

By Erika Solomon

MALIKIYA, Syria (Reuters) – Like her five sisters before her, Ahin left school to help her mother at home. Now she’s training to fight.

At a remote Kurdish militia base on the grassy rolling hills near Syria’s border with Iraq, the stocky 19-year-old jumps and crawls with rows of women in olive green fatigues. Their commander barks an order, and they take position and aim their Kalashnikovs.

The training camp is a powerful sign of the way Syria’s Kurds are working to create an autonomous region. While both Islamist rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have sidelined women, in this Kurdish area, men are happy to fight alongside them. Kurdish military leaders say about a third of the Kurds’ fighting force are women. Many, like Ahin, would never have dreamed of taking up arms until recently.

“I saw all these women leaving home to defend our land and was inspired. I never thought about things like women’s equality before I joined the Women’s Defence Brigades. It was a strange decision for me to make,” she says, wiping sweaty brown curls off her forehead. “Now I’ve started a whole new life.”

Kurdish society in Syria may be conservative by Western standards, but it is less so than other communities in the country. Now, says Nisreen, the base’s 32-year-old trainer and commander, Kurdish women see an opportunity to tie their own liberation to the region’s.

“When there is war, violence doesn’t discriminate between men or women, so why do we? Women are just as much a part of this society. We will share in this task,” she says.

Like all the women interviewed for this story, Nisreen declined to give her last name.

SMART POLITICS

The Democratic Union Party (PYD), the most powerful group in Syria’s Kurdish areas, has run the region since Assad’s forces withdrew in 2012, and created both the male and female militia groups that now defend the area. The PYD has ideological ties to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) in Turkey, which fought a three-decade war against Ankara and pioneered women’s militias and quotas.

Both groups require political and military leadership roles to have co-chairs – one man, one woman. The rule is ideological, but also smart politics in a society where women have few options in public life.

“That’s a whole extra bloc of potential constituents,” says Kurdish expert Aliza Marcus. “And because it offers options for advancement, women are often the most committed members.”

Nojan, 20, who adorns her plain fatigues with a black scarf embroidered with flowers, said female fighters were particularly proud of helping beat back fighters from al Qaeda during battles late last year.

“When we arrived at the front, it was dark, and al Qaeda was close to our position … we shouted to them that we were women with weapons in our hands, here to defend our people to the death,” says Nojan.

“They told us to leave, they didn’t want to fight women.”

Ahin says that on trips home she is sparking heated debates about women’s rights with her brothers and father, who bristle at her critiques of male-dominated society.

“I want them to follow my path, but they need time,” she says, smiling. “When I lived at home, I was just a well-behaved girl. Here, I not only learned how to carry a gun, I learned how to speak. I became a woman.”

Erika Solomon is a Bending Borders contributor. Reuters originally published this story in January 2014.