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I’m at DFW en route from EBB to AMS to MSP to DFW to AUS…33 ½ hours of travel since I left the hotel in Kampala and I still have 1 ½ hours to go before I see Phil and the team in Austin. It’s been way too long away from him and them…101paige

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Being an undergraduate history major and on my way to Africa, I should have known more about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. But, admittedly and probably like many of my fellow Americans, I was naïve, unaware, and protected from world news in 1994, which pre-dated my introduction to NPR in 2000.
This book [...]

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Being the first Africa book I read and considering I was reading it as I landed in Africa for the fist time, you can understand why I consider this one of the more influential books in my Africa experience.
Theroux’s overland safari takes us all the way down Eastern Africa “from Cairo to Capetown.” [...]

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(…still at Schiphol…)
Addis Ababa is one of the few (the only?) capital cities in Africa not built by the colonizers, whether it be the French, the Belgians, the Germans, the British (the list goes on and on). Yeshi, an Ethiopian woman who I met in Dar es Salaam, was outwardly proud of this and [...]

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I’ve got 5 hours to kill in Schiphol, the Amsterdam airport…on my way home from 1 month in Africa (2 weeks in Dar, 2 weeks in Uganda).
Reflections, first impressions, lessons learned:
(1) My name’s hard to pronounce.
For a native English speaker, my name’s about as easy as it gets…Paige. Simple, straightforward, albeit unique. [...]

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Conversation with Kizito on my drive to the EBB airport tonight…
There are no poor people in America.
But, there are!
If there are poor people in America, then why do the American people give so much money to us?
It is not the American people that give you so much money, it is the American government.
But, if there [...]

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