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My kid can’t speak Strayan

I learned a new word the other day: bi-dialectical. We’d been watching a show with Gillian Anderson in it, and wondering at why her British accent is so good. Turns out, because she lived between the US and the UK as a child, she has two accents in the same […]

The soundscape of ‘home’

Elliot calls our apartment in Dar es Salaam ‘the bat house’, because there’s a big colony of bats in the surrounding trees. From the balcony where we hang our washing, you can look directly at bats hanging in the tree only centimetres away, and at dawn and dusk they fill […]

In praise of routine

I like routine. Someone told me I’d be a liability living cross-culturally because of that but I’m not wedded to it. Things come up: kids get sick, sometimes friends are in need, I’m asked to teach at something at the last minute, we’re informed that we’re hosting a dinner, etc. […]