By Katherine Jamieson
A tropical love story in Guyana.
The one-room schoolhouse rang with the din of teenage girls’ voices in the humid afternoon air. Someone had erased the sentences with their adjectives and nouns underlined from the black wooden slab we used for a chalkboard and scrawled out a rough schedule for the upcoming concert: [...]
By James Michael Dorsey
A magical day in Mali.
Hippos surfaced with wiggling ears as the boat man poled our dhow past the submerged herd. We were both tense, expecting a bluff charge, while only feet away white pelicans with long golden beaks floated in the shallows casually scooping minnows in their great fleshy pouches. On the [...]
By Suzanne Roberts
Getting naked with your new lover’s family.
Your lover’s family doesn’t like that you’re from California, that you’re only half Jewish (and the wrong half), but most of all, that you’re still married. While nobody seems to question your lover’s decision to have an affair with a married woman, everyone wonders about your lack [...]
By Rosemary Davis
A visit to the home of the Mississippi blues.
Sometimes the answers aren’t easy. Driving down endless country roads—seeing nothing but identical rows of crops covering the flat, uneven land, one ponders the meaning of life.
But in one Southern town, the meaning of life can be summed up in two words: cotton and the [...]
By Carol J. Arnold
An old gypsy teaches a retired American visitor that getting lost is often the best way to find what you’re looking for.
It came out of nowhere, a horrendous crash like something had dropped from the sky, shattering the passenger window only a few feet from my face. “It’s okay,” my husband Andy [...]
By Rosie Cohan
One man’s efforts to preserve traditional culture as tourism changes his community.
Pink skid marks faded to purple in the blackening sky as lights popped on across Goreme, the stony Turkish village below me. I had checked into my room and then saw my friend, Ali, sitting alone on the terrace of the hotel he [...]
By Marianne Bohr
Mother Nature always wins.
The Tour du Mont Blanc, affectionately known to its devotees as the TMB, is one of the world’s classic long-distance footpaths and is a capstone event on our European itinerary. Experiencing the Alpine wilderness in the presence of the dramatic ice-capped peaks is the proverbial icing on our backpacking, sabbatical-year cake. [...]
By Lola Åkerström
The winding road to Ville Montetiffi snakes along rolling hills with lush views of green vineyards, fields with grazing sheep, and farmland with old sheds and villas. Past the occasional cyclist training and struggling uphill. Past a car or two, far and few between. In the distance, you can just make out San Marino [...]
By Rosemary Hanrahan
The healing power of being present.
“Give me five dollars, Blan.” A young Haitian woman, unknown to me, asked in perfect English and extended her hand.
I had received many such requests during my five months living in the mountainous rural community of Fondwa in Haiti as I made my daily journey up the mountain to teach [...]
By Donna Lawrence
A view of another woman’s life.
The road to the Maasai village is gouged with deep holes and littered with rocks. It is barely a road at all. Our Land Cruiser slows to a crawl to tip and sway through a gully. The Maasai don’t need to keep their road in good condition. They [...]
