I am dismayed have to say that my first impression of Kathmandu has not been a pleasant one.  Air is so polluted that I have to wear an air filter mask across my face whenever I go outside into the street, and if there is one thing that I hate above all else, it is…Read more »

My journey to the top of the world (Nepal), as opposed to the roof of the world (Tibet), began innocently enough in March, with my submission of an electronic application to the U.S. Department of State’s English Fellow program.  It took me over a week to prepare.  They were much more demanding of the details…Read more »

I think you have a crazy life.  You meet yourself coming and going all of the time, wrote my neighbor to me in an email. My neighbors have been front and center this  past month watching me come and go after my return from Rwanda.   My life has been a mixture of activities in which…Read more »

Whenever I get onto a Southwest flight, I read the section of their magazine entitled “You’ve made our day!”   Like the true stories in Reader’s Digest, this section of the magazine contains cute little stories of special things happening to people in their lives, in this case, the magic occurs when a Southwest staff…Read more »

Do you need any help?  Well… I do have a lot of luggage, I admitted. Let me help you… She was tall, elegantly dressed in a gray suit.  Her skin was chocolate brown, reminiscent of people in my recently lost homeland.  She heaved my luggage out of the trunk of my rental car as if…Read more »

I felt a rush of hot humid air against my skin as I stepped out of the airport terminal. Immediately, tears of perspiration began to trickle down my neck.   I was home, why didn’t it feel like it?   Everything was too clean.  Everything was too well maintained.  The cars were too new, and definitely too…Read more »

Today I found my personal “mission” for the next time I retire, one that combines the two things I love the most, cats and Swahili.   I’ll bet you’re wondering what these two things could possibly have in common. For more than twenty years before I left for Rwanda, I have been rescuing, rehoming, and homing…Read more »

When I visited Zanzibar in December, I was disappointed to see all the tourists wandering around although they didn’t seem to have have changed the Swahili lifestyle of the island’s residents, and tourism was obviously an important source of income for the tiny island.  Fast forward to this week, my second trip to the island…Read more »

Naweza kumpapasa?     (Can I pet him?)   Jina lake nani?   (What is his name?) Ndiyo, waweza kumpapasa.  Huyu ni rafiki mzuri.  Anaitwa Jamal.    (Yes, you can pet him.   He a good friend.  He is called Jamal.)  I realize, from his name that, of course, he is Muslim. As I hesitantly stroke Jamal’s head (he is…Read more »

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place.   We stay there even though we go away.  And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. We travel to ourselves when we go to a place that we have covered a stretch of our life no…Read more »