By Tracy Barnett
“Tell me, where does it hurt?”
“Dime, ¿donde te duele?”
The flood of words that followed was overwhelming at first, both for Colorado pediatrician Joni Weiss and for me. It was our first venture into the world of the medical mission, and we both had much to learn.
My role was to serve as the bridge […]

by Cecilia Worth
Friday evening and the Safeway in Homer, Alaska is half empty. No end-of-week-thank-God-it’s-time-to-party festivities going on in this supermarket. On the other side of the continent, my family and friends sat down to dinner hours ago, and my east-coast upbringing frowns on a woman dropping in to a local bar for conversation. Maybe […]

By Eliot Stein
There exists an inherent sorrow in the Italian culture—the kind that drives you towards theatrical hand motions, delicate flicks of the tongue, and designer fashion instead of prescription drugs. It is grief channeled in its most artistic form. Were it not for Italians’ emotional fragility, there would have been no Renaissance, opera, or […]

by Cindy Rasicot
Beep-beep-beep, an alarm clock rings, softly. I open my eyes to darkness.
“Turn the light on,” a voice says.
The alarm goes off ten minutes late. We’re all wrestling to get out of our sleeping bags, confused, sleepy and anxious. Even though I know the routine, it’s hard to wake up so early. Why do […]

by Jeff Vize
Charlotte and I arrived in Istanbul in the throes of the longest day of our lives. A day earlier, we had woken in Sri Lanka at 5 a.m., flown into Dubai at 11 a.m., and spent the better part of sixteen hours wandering through the city. Our flight to Turkey had departed at […]

by Mary Beth Ray
I walked to the Duomo early in the morning to watch people for a while. I was glad to be able to set my own pace. That’s one of the reasons I travel alone. Today the pace would be measured. But for a few Japanese tourists doing the pigeon […]