Category Archive: Refugees

The Real Story in Tskaltubo

The healing water has been famous for 1400 years and the buildings are relics of the 20th century’s greatest geopolitical tension, but the history I felt most keenly in Tskaltubo happened in 1993.… Continue reading

I’ve been funding genocide

This is not a happy post. It won’t make you feel good. Fair warning.   If you have a mutual fund, you probably get proxy voting notices too. They want you to “vote”… Continue reading

I miss my friends

Well, the good news is, almost everybody got a job. I’m trying to focus on that. The woman in her early 40s with the big smile, and the shy younger woman (who swears… Continue reading

My experience with refugees

Refugees don’t come to America for a handout. They don’t come to take anyone’s job. They come because they are like you and me.

We are not at war. But if we’re lucky and smart, Trump might be just as good as.

War is hell. I’ll take that as a given. But humans seem to have an addiction to it. Sometimes they come close, a veteran of The War to End All Wars coming back… Continue reading

What to say about 2016?

2016. Whew. What to say about this year? A year of plotlines that would have made dubious fiction, played out in the newspapers instead. I tried to make a concise list of the… Continue reading

It’s all one world

My bus pulled up for a WC break on the way to Phuong Nha, Vietnam. A man drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, Germany. Thousands of miles apart, but it’s… Continue reading

Something unexpected and normal happened just now

I was well into my lineup of questions and answers, ordinal numbers and time sequences in class today, blue marker and red marker, hoping my students were getting something out of my antics… Continue reading

Hands Around Lake Merritt

Was election night as bad as it gets, or is the worst still to come? That sick feeling of disappointment, of alienation from your nation, of watching a big part of my demographic… Continue reading

Gratitude for refugees

Eritrea, Myanmar, Iraq, Senegal, Afghanistan, Syria. It’s not my Travel List (well, that too) it’s a sampling of my students. Refugees all, they came from backgrounds I cannot imagine, experiences I want to… Continue reading