World-renowned rapper K’Naan.

K’Naan, the Somalian-born rap artist whose single “Wavin’ Flag” was an international sensation, performs at 9 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 1, in the Gray Athletic Building, 130 Central Ave.

The concert is sponsored by the Chase Hall Committee, a student organization at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Tickets are $30 and available at .

For more information, please call 207-786-6305.

“Love is harder than war,” says A&M/Octone recording artist K’Naan, explaining the direction he takes on his new album, Country, God Or The Girl.

“I’ve had the chance to write about my experiences in a difficult and violent life. But when the suffering and the pain is something that comes from within me, it’s harder to react and to write about that.”

With his new songs — including the album’s irresistible first single, “Is There Anybody Out There?” featuring Nelly Furtado — the Canadian-based singer and MC turns his attention to the most universal emotions and experiences: the personal relationships which everyone struggles with and rejoices in.

At the same time, though, he never loses the greater sense of the world that has defined him as an artist. °¿²ÔÌýCountry, God Or The Girl, K’Naan attempts to address “the internal wars, rather than the external ones, which I’d been preoccupied with on my previous albums.”

The album is K’Naan’s first full-length work since his multi-platinum global smash single, “Wavin’ Flag,” a version of which was selected as Coca-Cola’s theme song for the 2010 FIFA World Cup campaign.

The exposure sent the song to No. 1 on iTunes in 18 countries and opened up countless doors for K’Naan. That’s reflected by the caliber and range of guests who appear on Country, God Or The Girl, from Nas on “Nothing to Lose” to Bono on “Bulletproof Pride,” plus appearances by Will.I.Am, Keith Richards and B.O.B.

But it was the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour, which traveled to 86 countries that, the singer claims, made the greatest impact on his music. “I went to 22 countries in Africa, back to back,” he says. “Seeing Africa to that degree freed me from having a narrow message in my music.

“A friend told me about working in refugee camps during the Rwandan genocide,” he continues. “When people settled into the evening, though, nobody talked about the horrific tragedies that were happening. They were talking about their lost loves.

“And that hit me so deeply — how human beings are having the same conversations everywhere, even in times of war and famine. Their favorite songs are always love songs. And I wasn’t speaking to them in the place that was most important to them.”

The product of a creative family, K’Naan fled Mogadishu with his family at age 13. After learning English, partly by immersing himself in the classic hip-hop albums of the ’90s, he came to prominence in 1999 with a spoken word performance at the United Nations that caught the attention of Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour.

K’Naan’s debut album, 2005’s The Dusty Foot Philosopher (BMG), won the Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year. He signed with A&M/Octone and released the follow-up, Troubadour, in 2009, winning Junos for Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year.

°¿²ÔÌýCountry, God Or The Girl, K’Naan offers a vision in which the personal is the political, but the personal is also the personal. “Being known for my consciousness and activism can be limiting,” he says. “I do care about the state of the world, but it’s no less true that I care about love and betrayal, heartbreak and pain and loyalty.

“It’s dishonest to ignore parts of yourself just to sustain the idea that people have of you.”

Sarah Davis '10 (center) with NASAP growers at the Lewiston Farmers' Market.

If soup makes the soldier, as Napoleon Bonaparte said, it does a pretty good job shaping students, too.

Issues around food have an unusual teaching potential, a power rooted in one simple fact: everybody eats. And its branches reach out to nearly every corner of the human endeavor.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the topic of food tends to invoke “issues of stewardship and sustainability, writ large,” says Anna Bartel, associate director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. “And poverty and social justice, because there’s no escaping the fact that food is huge in terms of social inequity.”

That scope holds true for the community activities, both volunteer and academically driven, that the Harward Center funds and coordinates year-round.

For instance, this past summer Sarah Davis ’10 worked for a Maine-based nonprofit, administering the Lewiston Farmers’ Market and helping immigrants learn the ways of American farming.

Meanwhile, Ariel Garfinkel ’08 taught kids in Lewiston where food comes from and how to cook it. Also working with youth was Andie Bisceglia ’09, who spent her summer at the Hillview apartments running a program for Lots to Gardens — an agency, founded by Kirsten Walter ’00, that uses gardening projects to strengthen community and support local young people.

For all three, the summer work illuminated the studies that awaited them when autumn came around. In her Harward-funded position with the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project, Davis guided farmers from Somalia and Guatemala in getting their produce to market. “I learned so much about the people that I worked with,” she says.

The work gave her “a first-hand perspective on the idea of difference” — a perspective valuable to her self-designed major exploring issues of difference and conflict in a context of social justice.

As a vehicle for teaching, food is distinctively useful as an exemplar across disciplines. “Pedagogy functions on the assumption that we start where people are and push them to someplace new,” Bartel says. “And everyone can start where they are with food. So pedagogically, it’s really powerful.”

All the more so given today’s mass critique of the food-industrial system. “Food and sustainable agriculture are perfect examples of readily identifiable areas where ordinary citizens can actually do a fair amount of research,” Bartel adds.

“There’s a lot of good information out there,” she says. “People can move from problem identification to problem solving, to living in a set of commitments that promote sustainable answers. And that, right there, is the model of what we think liberal education is doing in the world.”

“I came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ just wanting to be an environmental studies major,” but not knowing how many directions that might take her in, says Bisceglia. “There’s just so many options. And I think farming and local food combine them all.”

By Doug Hubley, photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

Ali Khalif Galaydh, who served as the prime minister of Somalia from 2000 to 2001, visits to discuss the past, present and future of his native country in a lecture at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 15, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Avenue. Free and open to the public, the lecture continues a series of events offered in response to the anti-Somali rally scheduled in Lewiston Jan. 11 by a national hate group.

, a visiting professor at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, holds degrees from Boston and Syracuse universities, and taught at the latter institution’s Maxwell School from 1989 to 1996.

At the Humphrey Institute he teaches about the politics of public affairs, strategies for economic development and the role of nongovernmental organizations in governance. Galaydh supports the outreach mission of the Humphrey Institute by working with the Minneapolis Somali community, the largest in the United States.

Galaydh was an official with the Ministry of the Interior during Somalia’s last democratically elected government, in the mid-1960s. During the 1970s, he headed two large sugar operations before being appointed minister of industry in 1980.

Galaydh was one of 650 delegates at the 2000 Somali National Peace Conference, held in the Republic of Djibouti, to participate in drafting a National Charter based on Somalia’s 1960 Constitution. The delegates then selected a 245-member parliament, which supported Galaydh’s appointment as prime minister in September 2000. He served until December 2001.