A Time of Light and Shadow is a travel adventure that explores my quest as a young woman to live life on the front lines. While confronting the harsh realities of conflict zones, chasing adventure, and traveling solo in disparate cultures, I find connection in the unlikeliest of places.

 

In 1975, a time of new freedom for women, I lived in Paris, worked as a nurse in war-torn Lebanon, and fell in love in Istanbul. Jostled between cultures, between love and loss, I found my way home. A year later, I set off alone for India, a land of unsettling contradictions. A solo trek in the Himalayas completed that Asian journey. 

 

By 1980, I was working for the International Red Cross, immersed in the heart-wrenching tragedy of a Cambodian refugee camp, and later that same year with the nomadic Issa in the drought-ridden desert of Djibouti, Africa. Faced with the immensity of poverty and suffering, my commitment to service was shaken. 

 

Four decades later, I return to India, and ask myself “Would I dare do now what I readily did then?” I explore my complicity in privilege, my troubled past with my mother, and reflect on solitude and friendship, youth and aging, longing and belonging. I believe it is in conscious engagement with ‘the other’ that we find our common humanity.