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Personally Practicing Prevention
This year we had the opportunity to travel to nearly ten countries. Aside from the normal processes of purchasing tickets, booking rentals cars and lodging, coordinating meet-ups with friends, planning the itinerary, and the new normal of PCR tests and passenger locator forms, we did what we’ve always done – check our vaccination cards to…
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The Car Seat Racket
By far one of the most tedious aspects of travel in this season of family life is the daunting ‘hauling of the car seat’. Heavy and durable, it slides with great effort into a canvas bag that can be carried on the back of whichever parent is the beast of burden for the day. When…
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Cape Town during a pandemic
Before every move we have a ‘List’ discussion. We list two or three places we want to go if we get a long break. We list three to five places we want to go on a long weekend. I won’t travel to those places without my husband. Those are reserved for family trips. After one…
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The Gift
The details are hazy, but the mental snapshots are clear. There were palm trees and red tile roofs, individual buildings interspersed with tropical plants and the occasional bird of paradise. The images are faded in the orange glow of a Mediterranean sun. Perhaps we took a bus to this location, far from our apartment complex…
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The Fortress and Those Who Flee
My earliest childhood memories include forts and castles. The structures were reference points for giving directions in the city or historic landmarks to explore. For a child exploring a fort, a measure of bravery was always involved, climbing uneven stone steps with no guardrails in a time that pre-existed liability lawsuits. I had no context…
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It’s Been a Year
One year ago I lived half a world away from where I sit today. I sat in my comfortable home in southern California. I had no idea that a black man named Ahmaud Arbery had been lynched. COVID came. We were bound to our home. In those early days, we grasped for opportunities for fellowship…
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In search of imperfection
There was a rumor. Perhaps it was on a website or a social media group page. I heard it was possible to buy a real Christmas tree in Bahrain. Of course, here one does not acquire a tree by chopping it down in the wild or snuggling up for an outing to a Christmas tree…
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But what will we eat?
Breakfast spread across the table in typical morning disarray. A kilogram tub of yogurt. A variety of fruits. Scrambled eggs. Toast. Fruit jam and Irish butter. It was a fairly average breakfast that I was quick to compare to my average breakfast in the United States. As we sat around the table enjoying our morning…
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The Humbling Vote
Poppies, like scarlet sprinkles on a cupcake, adorned patches of wild grass along the lane. As I drove my youngsters to their Romanian preschool that spring, it wasn’t just another morning. It was the morning after a presidential primary debate in 2016. When we walked into the small school building, grandparents and mothers turned to…
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The Normalization of Contempt
Years ago I sat in a college seminar class with ‘genocide’ written across the board. Our small cohort was learning about specific atrocities perpetrated by humans on other humans. Through documentaries, books and journal articles, and with the guidance of a lawyer, historian and political scientist, we discussed the roots of genocide. Though this was…
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will travel with kids 