A battle is raging in the Western world between Individualism and the traditional family unit. The men have been the individuals in the past and the women have been the ones that have compromised their individuality to be the bearer and care giver to the children. Since WW2, when women went out into the workforce […]
Lamu, Kenya “Western couples seemed chained – body and soul – to each other, and the older they got the stronger the chain. Africans, around since the dawn of civilization, didn’t appear to be coupled at all. Lamu, an exotic mostly Muslim island on the north east coast of Kenya, was not unlike the world […]
Kenya “Utterly alone on an Island, confronted by a giant eland with a scarred face protecting his herd of females and young, I got the message loud and clear. Slowly I looked around for the nearest tree, then I turned back to face him. We looked deeply into the other’s eyes. He was sizing me […]
Ssese Islands, Uganda “The middle of nowhere to us is the heart of somewhere to someone else.” Nowhere was that more true than during my travels in the Ssese islands. Trudging with fellow travellers through a primitive village in the dark of night to catch a tramp steamer to take us to Entebbe, those words […]
By Train to Uganda. Out the window, women and girls weeded and tilled fields of maize. Mothers bent over at the hips with babies strapped to their backs. Their stomachs and faces parallel to the earth. Their hands in it. The apparent idleness of the men and boys made me wonder what my recently deceased […]
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe Rayford, a twenty-six-year-old of Matabele descent, worked as an administrator for a local company. He was the only child of parents high in the political chain. Although English was Rayford’s second language, I was impressed by his fluency and grasp of nuance and idiom—American and British. Nevertheless, I constantly found myself interrupting or […]
Harare 1993 In Harare, Zimbabwe, I visited the luxurious home of a friend, a white businessman in his fifties. Thereafter, whites would become increasingly extinct in that country because of the goons that often take over after a revolution. But at that time, Brent worried most about his business and the lack of foreign investors […]
When I left San Francisco and my old life, I was naive about backpacking and nervous about how I would spend my time. Judgmental and cynical, I was also sophisticated in understanding the workings of organizations and people’s minds, and excelled at asking penetrating questions to find the story. I had been on the leading […]
If you have read the introduction to the book on the homepage you will have read a story of one man’s public meltdown. Many people look for ‘signs’ to guide their life. For some it is synchronicity; a chance meeting; a crossed line on the telephone that leads to romance and marriage, or missing that […]
I had this dream when I was very young. I would have a great family, and enough money so that nobody can pull my strings. Sixteen words! Enough to carry around. Short enough to drive a vision. It was a very ambitious vision as it turned out. Being great at anything is such a life-dominant […]