I was out in Birtamod after the Thanksgiving trip to Kolkata. I was having lunch with a guy from the Peace Corps’ office in Washington, DC.
He was security. He told me that he had been doing, well, military intelligence in Somalia for a several years before retiring and coming to work for the Peace Corps. [...]
During training, one of the hardest and seemingly most necessary things I wanted to communicate to my host family was that I missed home. I missed home. I missed my friends. I missed pizza and beer as dark as the nights in my new, lightless neighborhood.
But the best that I could do after two months [...]
It was the end of December and I was coming back to Birganj from Rajbiraj. I’d celebrated Christmas for the second time in Rajbiraj and was thinking that this would be the last time I’d be there, the last time I’d make the trip I’d made perhaps ten times before.
Last year’s Christmas was, well, difficult. [...]
Things should be simpler. If people can travel to another hemisphere, learn a somewhat obscure second language, eat with their hands, and grow comfortable with the sounds of bombs and gunfire then surely organizing and executing a basic teacher training with motivated teachers in a scenic location shouldn’t be a problem.
Piece of cake. Kid stuff. [...]
Birganj to Kolkata, November 26–30, 2003
If I said that my Thanksgiving plans for this year were made by my friends while trekking around Kalimpong and Darjeeling with the US Consulate to India, I might sound a little over the top, as if I was trying to impress whoever might stumble across these scribblings.
Actually, that’s about [...]
