by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

Former Finnish President and Nobel laureate Martti Ahtisaari once gave a talk in our town and we went to see him. The distinguished gentleman who introduced him at Atlanta’s distinguished Piedmont Driving Club listed among Ahtisaari’s achievements “helping to achieve independence for Nambia.”

We visited Nambia a few years back, and found that the locals actually call it “Namibia.” Its European colonizers called it Southwest Africa. Call it what you like, it’s one of the world’s really remarkable places. Unusual things happen in Namibia.

Most places, rivers flow to the sea. The thousand-mile long Okavango River flows into desert, beginning in the highlands of Angola where it’s called the Cubango. The Cubango becomes the Kavango as it marks the Angola/Namibia border. There it hits a fault line and spills into the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, where it is finally known as the Okavango.

It’s hard to visualize an inland delta, so consider its scientific definition; geographers call it an alluvial fan, depositing some two million tons of sand and silt every year and draining summer rain from a catchment area something like the size of Nepal or Tunisia.

This labyrinth of channels, islands and plains brings forth papyrus swamps, forests and savannah, providing habitats for elephant, lion, crocodile, hyena, leopard, zebra, cheetah, porcupine, monkey, serval, baboon, wild dog, hippo, giraffes, buffalo, wildebeest, kudu, warthog, impala, tsessebe and countless more. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

I just spent two months living on the Caribbean island of Grenada. It’s a wonderful place with a somewhat antiquated healthcare system. To visit Grenada, I had to have a negative PCR test within 72 hours of flying. I was planning to go to a clinic and wait in line, which I’d done for a previous PCR test. I’d waited in line in the freezing cold for almost 3 hours. But a couple of weeks before my flight in January, Jet Blue let me know that Grenada was accepting PCR tests through a company called Vault who would mail me an at-home test. I signed up, they sent me the test, and three days before my flight, I logged onto a Zoom call with Vault from the comfort of my own living room. My test kit had a barcode and I had to show that to the technician on the Zoom. She then watched me spit into the vial with the barcode and instructed me how to package up the kit appropriately to send it back. I walked it over to UPS 30 minutes later, and within 48 hours, I received my results by email.

A couple of weeks ago, towards the end of my stay in Grenada, I started to get some awful shooting pains in my right leg. A few days later, I woke up to a horrible rash that was blistering. I went on WebMD and put in my symptoms. Looking at the possible diagnoses it suggested, I was reasonably sure that I had shingles. I was able to look at photos of a typical shingles rash that looked a lot like what was all over my thigh. I took a photo of my rash, went online to my health insurer, UnitedHealthcare, and requested a telehealth video call. Five minutes later, a doctor came online. I uploaded the photo of my rash, told her my symptoms, and said that I thought I had shingles. She immediately validated my WebMD diagnosis and prescribed a course of Valtrex, which I could get filled at a Grenadian pharmacy.  Read more »

Late afternoon one day last week as I was waiting for a train at the station in Bruneck, South Tyrol.

by Philip Graham

Whenever I discover a band that sports an accordion in the lineup, I’m ready to listen.

But this wasn’t always so.

It all goes back to the mid-1960s, those days of my mid-adolescence, when my father’s favorite cousin, who we called our “aunt” May, came to visit nearly every weekend. The year before, her hard-drinking brother’s liver had finally given up on him, and my father wanted to draw her closer to our family. Aunt May lived alone, unmarried and childless. As if this was a condition that needed explanation, our parents whispered to us a secret we were never to repeat aloud, that she once had a boyfriend, but he’d died in World War II and she never found another man like him.

After the ritual of a Saturday afternoon dinner, the time arrived for the ritual of settling in the living room to watch the latest installment of Aunt May’s favorite program, Lawrence Welk’s musical variety show. My younger brother and I were expected to keep her company. We, too, loved our kind and self-effacing aunt, but to my easily-affronted adolescent self, Lawrence Welk had invented his show to personally torment me. It was a kind of musical quicksand, Stepford Wives music, everything that rock and roll was trying to replace or destroy. Read more »