People often ask me what’s my favorite country. Surely one of them is Somalia. These people who have had to endure so many trials are tough and yet gentle, hardened and yet gracious. My days among them were blessed with support and lessons in how to face life’s demands. Let’s continue the story of that …

We returned to the States as 1975 turned to ’76, discovering that some of our elders were not in good health. More long-term overseas projects didn’t make sense, we thought and decided to stay Stateside until the situations became clearer. Russell took a short-term consulting assignment advising Indonesian Government lawyers at U.C. Berkeley Law School, …

When I started Where in the World?, the COVID lockdown prevented me from accessing photos in storage that would have illustrated my posts. Now the lockdown has eased somewhat, and I can get to those albums. In the meantime, many of you have sent feedback sharing your own overseas experiences and/or support for these excerpts …

My work on the documentary film for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania proceeded throughout 1975. I travelled here and there, visiting sites where ELCT was engaged in health, support for women and youth, education and other projects. The plan was to write a script in English, from which the team could film and which …

While I was working on the ELCT film, I’d typically be away from home for 3-7 days, then back for days or even weeks, depending on the availability of hosts for my scouting visits, as well as an ELCT driver to take me to potential film sites if I couldn’t get there by rural bus. …

Let me turn, in this post, from our domestic to my professional life in East Africa. My participation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania film project entailed a lot of red tape with both ELCT and the Tanzanian government. One example of the latter was that any entity hiring a foreign national had to …

I was working for CBS in Los Angeles and sharing an apartment with WVU chum Bettina Altizer when the phone rang one day. Recent calls from men who wanted to inquire if I liked to “swing” had made us cautious. Bettina answered, listened for a few moments, put her hand over the receiver and said, …