When I’m jogging around the 2.5k path at the edge of the UN compound here in Dadaab, I often find myself thinking about all of the celebrities who have come here. This is probably caused by the mixture of the “This American Life” episodes I listen to and the best dance songs of 2012. Somewhere […]
Read more "Celebrities in Dadaab"(This post is late in coming so it’s a collection of some notes over the course of the past two weeks) It rained today. The sand is stained red and tiny droplets inch off the leaves. I woke this morning to hear it, only to think my mind was fooling me. It was the wind […]
Read more "First impressions of Dadaab"I don’t blog enough to be considered a blogger by BlogHer (at least once a month). And when I do, I feel the need to preface every entry with something about how I don’t blog enough. But this is a catch up post on what I’ve been up to that hasn’t made it to the […]
Read more "Catching up"In my travels, invariably, I met the disgruntled American expat who believed, without a doubt, that life was more efficient in the United States. I commiserated with this person. I scorned this person. I was this person. There’s a little part of me that thought, “oh, I’m not like that, I’m an anthropologist, I take […]
Read more "To-do-To-day: … Read 200 pages"This week in my life I had a lot of small frustrations at work and large successes out of work, running my first public 5k ever. This week in my home country, I looked on as a film played out, the stars being the SWAT teams and individuals in the Boston area searching for some […]
Read more "This Week"It was good to be back in Uganda. The staff at Endiro, the local coffee shop, frequented by Ugandan business people and expats alike, remember me. I got a free refill with only a smile. The nightclubs may have changed and there are a lot of new buildings, but it feels very much like I’m […]
Read more "Home away from home"As a horribly unreliable photography, let me make a picture in words. This morning as I rode in the first row of the shuttle to get to campus, my usual seat, we passed shop after shop where men, and in some cases children, were digging their way out of the recent snow. The trees glistened […]
Read more "Kabul in the Snow"Scene 7: JFK* *Previously on “Control,” I bought an antique firearm on Chicken Street in Kabul for my father’s Christmas present. I stored it in my checked luggage and transported it back to the United States. The story of the antique firearm’s transport is longer than this but the time spent at John F. Kennedy […]
Read more "Control: Or how I managed to fly with a gun from Kabul to Pittsburgh"So, I’ve been trying to think of how to blog about this new transition. It’s hard because I’m surrounded by so many Afghanistan experts, from natives to long-term expats to know-it-all short term expats. Sparks, who often instigates blog posts from me when I feel social pressure to avoid it, asked me to write about […]
Read more "Surprising things about Kabul*"For those who were not present Sunday July 29th, at 10pm, over drinks in Jinja, Uganda, here’s the full version of my response to the end of year assignment for Global Health Corps. I am part of the global health movement because I believe in human rights. I believe we are all guaranteed the same […]
Read more "Why I’m part of the global health movement"
Ally Krupar 