Memories of Namibia, Vol. 1

The first installment of a continuing series. I am scheduled to meet a Russian-born Canadian graduate student in downtown Windhoek on a clear Saturday in mid-March. The city, as it always is on weekends, is eerily quiet, abandoned. I wait in front of the post office on Independence Avenue, directly across the street from Post [...]

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Lessons Learned

I was thinking the other day about where I was ten years ago. I had been in a poetry program at New York University for six weeks and was ready to quit. So I packed my stuff into a U-Haul and moved to Cooperstown, New York, where I lived in an apartment above a hair [...]

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Abortion in a Country Where It’s Illegal

Like a number of other African countries, abortion is illegal in Namibia, from the moment of conception through the ninth month. In this respect it is virtually the exact opposite of the United States, which has some of the most permissive abortion laws in the world. Observing the frequency with which abortions do occur here [...]

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Living Permanently in a Temporary Place

I woke up Wednesday morning this week with an acute stomach virus that has put me out of commission for most of the past four days. The worst of the virus passed in a day, but was severe enough to make me think I had contracted dysentery or some other exotic illness that once sent [...]

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