Posts with Category Travel

Staying in it

(Cliff playing a song for Enemias)

When I was in Colombia learning from the Arhuaco about their relationship with nature, my friend Cliff accompanied me. Cliff is a talented musician and photographer. (And he is exhibiting his work on Saturday December 10th at 201 E. Charles St. Muncie, IN 47305, starting at 2 pm and ending with some words and music from Cliff at 7 pm.)

The Arhuaco are an Indigenous People who live in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern Colombia. Like most Indigenous People around the world, they’ve had less than favorable interactions with the outsiders. They were hesitant to have us visit and much of our first day was spent sitting with one of their spiritual leaders, who had…

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Ugly Truth, Beautiful Game

(These ladies in Mumbai showed me how they played the beautiful game)

In Indiana, when I was a kid, we had wooden goal posts painted white. 

In Cambodia, the goals were orange cones.

In the Mosquito jungle of Honduras the goals were piles of fresh wood shavings–leftovers from crafting dugout canoes. 

In a slum in Mumbai, the goal was a puddle of water filled by a monsoon. 

In rural China, the goal was not to have to chase a ball down the terraced fields. 

Beautiful Game

While reporting around the world from some 60 countries, I’ve seen soccer/football played in almost all of them. Often the ball wasn’t a ball but a plastic…

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Good People: Interview with AP reporter Victoria Milko

Victoria Milko has reported from health clinics in rural Bangladesh, protests in the streets of Myanmar, and refugee camps in Thailand. She joins Kelsey & Jay from her apartment in Jakarta to discuss the global impact of COVID-19, the importance of journalism in today’s society, and her path to becoming a Southeast Asia-based science reporter for The Associated Press.

Show notes

Topics we talked about with Victoria:

– COVID-19 impact in developing countries
– Life in Jakarta during the global pandemic
– Reporting on genocide and mass graves
– Impact of reporting on traumatic events
– Family’s refugee history and impact on her career
– Dream of being a foreign correspondent and how she reached that dream
– Living and reporting in Myanmar
– Rise and fall of Aung San Suu Kyi
– Facebook’s impact…

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Good People: Indigenous Wisdom & Intentionality

Live from Patagonia! In this episode Jay and I discuss my experiences visiting with the Arhuaco, an indigenous group in Colombia. This is our first attempt from a show on the road while researching my new book about regenerative agriculture.

This was recorded pre-Covid-19 shutdown. I made it back from South American about one week before the global chaos began. Obviously, the future travels I discuss in the episode are delayed. I should be in Hawaii right now, for instance. But alas, I’m in my basement in Indiana. …

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“Each Land has the Magic” to Help in These Troubling Times

During this time of self-isolating, curve-flattening, and social-distancing, we find ourselves removed from the comforts and relationships of our normal world. We may feel alone, isolated, distant, afraid, and flattened. 

COVID-19 is a reminder that we are part of nature whether we understand that or not. A tiny little life-form previously unknown to us has brought our world to a stop. I have friends in Kenya that are bracing for the impact. My friend in Colombia, Maria, is on lockdown and playing Scrabble with her roommates. And here in Indiana and across the United States we are half-heartedly hunkering while the virus closes in around us. 

Nature Therapy

But removed from our day-to-day world, and as disjointed as that…

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Why we’re canceling our trip to Kauai: an exponential essay

Why we’re canceling our trip to Kauai: an exponential essay

  1. Today
  2. I cancelled
  3. My trip to Hawaii. 
  4. I was leaving next week. My wife, too.  
  5. She was joining me the first week of a three-week research trip for my next book.
  6. We never really had a honeymoon. Unless you count another book-trip stopping at a garment factory in Perry, New York, and then going to Niagara Falls, Canada, for a day. She doesn’t. 
  7. I first visited Kauai nearly 20 years ago. Since I hiked her trails, paddled her waters, ate her wild…
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A baboon in Ethiopia is named after me

Check out this note from a student who read WHERE AM I EATING a few years ago:

Hi Kelsey! Thanks for the invite for The Facing Project. Can’t wait to look into it more! You spoke to my sociology class with Máel Sheridan at Hamline university after we read your book in 2015. Funny story, and long story short: I’m a Peace Corps health volunteer in Ethiopia and was trying to explain in local language the idea behind your books as it relates to my community (where are all these goods coming from? How did they get here?). A couple weeks later the live-in guard at my health center appeared with a pet baboon. It was then named after you in honor of your books. “Kelsey” spelt differently in afran Oromo…

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Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hitchhiking on Earth

The Wait

(Wrote this 10 years ago. You can tell because I was still using two spaces after a period.)

“I was told I was going to die nine years ago. Are you religious?”

My mind raced, what went wrong? Standing beside the road waiting for someone to give me a lift I had considered myself quite lucky when Don pulled over in his BMW. He sported a Rolex and was dressed nicely. Our conversation was interesting and pleasant and abduction was the farthest thing from my mind when he asked if I wanted to take a tour of his kiwi fruit farm and join him for tea. In hindsight, a Rolex and a nice car do not mean that a man is of…

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Good People join the Peace Corps

Joshua Berman has volunteered with the Peace Corps, fought wild fires, gone on a 1+ year-long honeymoon, and written guidebooks. He’s a dad, a teacher, columnist for the Denver Post, and he’s good people.

Joshua writes a monthly column in The Denver Post and is the author of six books. His travel articles have appeared in The New York Times, Yoga Journal, Delta SKY, Sunset, and National Geographic Traveler, among other publications.

Joshua has appeared multiple times on the Travel Channel, including as a tour guide for the host of “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” in Nicaragua.

His…

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Good People Episode #5: Fashion Revolution Day

On the 6th anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory disaster that killed 1,134 Bangladeshi garment works and injured thousands more, Kelsey shares his experiences in Bangladesh. This episode also features Christopher Cox of the Human Thread Campaign who, along with Kelsey, was a featured speaker at DePaul University’s Fair Trade fashion show.

Please subscribe, rate, and review on iTunes or on Stitcher.

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