Shared experiences have given me some of my best culture lessons. Shared loss of electricity, noisy parties, and broken water pipes made me less of an oddity in our building. As neighbors, we were inconvenienced, challenged and flooded together. A...

I had hardly dropped my suitcase at the Dubai guesthouse when I got the phone call. My husband and I had just enjoyed our school’s spring break in Egypt and were preparing to board our flight into Kabul the next day. It was my stepmother calling f...

I recently attended two funerals in the same week, each one for a person who not too long ago I would have considered “elderly.” The sobering thing, however, is that the deceased were parents of friends my age, forcing me to come face to face with...

When Mom started with “I'm okay,” I knew whatever came next would not be good. She went on to say she had fallen and dislocated her shoulder. I sympathized and asked her neighbor, who had taken her to the hospital, to stay with her overnight. But ...