From Apartheid to Freedom Day One -- Wednesday, March 21, 2007. I'm sitting in Ivato Airport in Antananarivo, Madagascar, waiting for my flight to South Africa. This capital city we call 'Tana' has been my home for almost two years and I have been teaching at the American School of Antananarivo since I arrived. My students come from thirty different nations which means that a lot of them do not speak English well. However, we are learning to adjust to each other - to their lack of English language skills and my lack of African and Asian dialects and I'm enjoying my role as educator and lifetime learner very much. Language Arts is my subject in the middle school, grades 6, 7 and 8, but I also teach high school Spanish.  {  Read More  }  My Kolkata I arrived in Kolkata for the first time on August 10, 2002, with visions of Rabindranath Tagore and Victorian architecture in my head. As a fan of "Gitanjali", I was thrilled to be in Bengal and besides, it was monsoon season, and the air around me was thick with moisture while the earth was a lush green, just like in a Tagore poem. The heat was a bit overwhelming for my American body, but I was delighted, as an artist, to be in the "Cultural Capital of India" and with my artist's eye, I looked beyond the mold and crumbling facades and saw beautiful buildings everywhere.  {  Read More  }  That's the Ticket "I won't spend more than $30.00 for it, I promise, " I told my husband, George. "Sweetie, the saleslady is right behind you and just heard every word you said," he replied in a frustrated tone. "Yes, but she doesn't understand English! She won't know what I told you," I added with confidence. "You wanna bet?" said my husband.  {  Read More  }  Our parents,Ourselves. I went to the Andaman Islands in April 2005, to witness the aftermath, the progress of reconstruction since the greatest natural disaster of my lifetime - the December 26, 2004 tsunami. And although I wasn't swept away like so many hundreds of thousands of others, while I was there I thought about the tidal wave that had swept over me as well - the very night of the tsunami, in my arms, my mother breathed her last.  {  Read More  }