My family had never been close, and now that I was grown I had come to believe that underneath the facade we were all just five people who had been thrown together by the consequence of biology, unable to work out the essentials that went along with it.

It’s an unlikely place to two-step or line dance: an old brick warehouse on a busy downtown street, tucked discreetly between a hipster bar and a slick marketing firm. But on weekend nights in Tulsa, Whiskey 918 flips the switch and a ten-foot vertical marquee lights up to welcome a weekend party crowd that prefers raging fiddles to screaming guitars.

Two women, born in the same year on different continents, are now working side by side in Tulsa to fulfill their dreams of making quality, high-end textile goods. Their stories began worlds apart, but have come together around fabric, sewing machines, and a shared passion.

Our middle child, Erin, started kindergarten at a large public school in a suburb of Tulsa. On her first day at Jenks East Elementary, I packed her Disney character lunchbox, slipped her plastic pink and purple backpack through her two little outstretched arms, and told her that this was the best day of her life so far. I was only repeating what she had been telling everyone for months, that her first day of kindergarten – real school as she called it – was going to be the “best day of my life.”

This blog post is about Nambia. Yes, I’m going there. Not literally, because there is no country of Nambia. In a speech to African leaders at the United Nations last week, the President referred twice to the country of Nambia with regard to an increasingly self-sufficient health care system. To be clear, there are countries in Africa where the names have changed: Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, Gold Coast to Ghana, Belgian Congo to Congo to Zaire to Congo. And countries have s

There is a danger in carrying around a mental image of a moment. For a year and a half, I had envisioned our first meeting with Alison, but that day in the hotel conference room altered all my preconceptions. The baby in Nanning was not the baby I had seen in my mind'

In Azerbaijan, the roles of most females are defined with narrow intention: marry and have babies, preferably sons. These two aspirations drive everything from superstitions to beauty regimens. When visiting Azerbaijan, I’ve been chided for sitting on bare concrete because it produces sterility and an unmarried friend was warned that her pencil-thin eyebrows would cause men to mistake her for a married woman.