Category: Foreign Affairs
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Mumbai Halloween Posse
Posin’ not posers, trick-o-treaters for life! Copper, Pirate, Scoundrel… Jolly Rancher. No candy? Step back! ##
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Blog of the Week
This pleasant surprise came across my desk yesterday. A blogger at The Skeptical Bureaucrat writes: I picked up some nice items at the AAFSW* book fair last week, and one of them was this quirky novel Two Pumps for the Body Man, which the author describes as a soft-boiled diplomatic noir… The story is a…
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A Gift at Navratri
Navratri celebrates female energy and the conquest of good over evil. Appropriately, this year’s nine nights marking Goddess Durga’s battles against the buffalo demon Mahishasuran arrived in concert with the power of India’s #MeToo movement. Accusations of sexual assault and harassment by men against women first took aim at prominent figures in the Indian film…
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Peace Corps, the Musical
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Five years ago, I flirted with writing a musical based on ‘the generic Peace Corps experience.’ I tabled the idea quickly. The unique nature of volunteer service set abundant hurdles. Peace Corps Africa and Peace Corps Latin America are different beasts. The organization’s six decades presented another problem. We’d moved from the era of ‘Drop…
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Elevatorwala
Mumbai has a wallah for everything, no task too big or small. Outside my 14th-story flat, one of four elevatorwalas pushes the button that takes us to the street and back again. The other night we ate our first dinner at a Parsi restaurant called—this is all one word—Sodabottleopenerwala. It’s a chain. Derived in part…
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Maximum City
We are neither here nor there. The carpets are up and the curios down. The boys are packed and shipped off south for a week with Naniji. A week from tomorrow the packers arrive. They’ll invade for 3 or 4 days to box up several categories of shipment: 700 lbs of air freight; 7k lbs…
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Fly America… Call the Philippines
When your official government travel orders authorize advanced seating to guarantee a seat beside your child during an international move—old home packed, new home empty… …but the airline won’t confirm your seat more than 23 hours before you fly… …and you spend hours on the phone… …talking to the travel agent… …and talking to the…
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Diplomatic Training
U.S. diplomat Ben East revisits his old training grounds with his sons, eight and ten.
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Sex Ed: Anne Frank in Africa
Without telling us the punchlines, Dutch researchers announced this week the discovery of four dirty jokes papered over in Anne Frank’s diary. I taught the diary as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi two decades ago, curious from the start why it was on the curriculum. My students faced a lifetime of grinding poverty, endemic…
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Answer Coming Soon
When I feel ornery about the state of world affairs, I turn to Dan Whitman for a cure. Because he gifted me a large stack of his books, he doesn’t always know this. Whitman’s essays reflect on wide-ranging issues for the foreign affairs professional. They cut across decades (mostly post World War II) and continents…
Ben East Books 