Harare was nicer than expected

Nov 3 2011 under zimbabwe | Leave a comment

I’ve noticed this blog sort of degrade into a recycle bin full of drafts and excerpts of articles published elsewhere. Not very interesting for friends and family, I think. So a post more personal than the past few entries.

I recently enjoyed a quick stopover at my mom’s place in Harare, Zimbabwe. She’s working there as a financial director for Médecins Sans Frontières. Lovely visit and all of that.

Harare wasn’t quite what I expected.

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Looking back on the move from Bhutan to Malawi

Aug 31 2011 under malawi | 1 Comment

This article was originally published in Bhutan’s The Journalist on August 14, 2011.

A recent visitor to Bhutan comes face to face with an African reality

I didn’t wake up until the two of them were inside my bedroom. They were young men who had broken through my front door and then stood next to where I slept. They turned on the light, and I was shocked awake. They started shouting.

“Give us your money, give us your money or we will kill you,” one screamed.

I’d only been conscious for maybe a tenth of a second. But that’s about when I realized that I was no longer in Thimphu…

Let me step back.

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A slight bump on a road trip to Sikkim

May 30 2011 under india | Leave a comment

Road trip! It was time for another break from Thimphu. So a few of the guys from the magazine and I hastily threw together some supplies—the trip wasn’t confirmed until 11:00 p.m. the night before our scheduled departure—piled into a car we had borrowed from the office, and made for the mountains of India’s Sikkim province.

We arrived in Gangtok, the region’s capital, long after dark. The rain poured down and while we spent more than an hour searching for a hotel with two vacant rooms, the car’s useless ventilation system kept the windows hopelessly fogged. And of course, it couldn’t be just any guest house we stayed; Mitra, my Butanese buddy at the wheel, insisted we slept at some place run by a friend of a friend’s uncle’s cousin —or something like that.

On the verge of giving up, we stopped a local police officer and asked for directions. That turned out to be a bad decision.

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