Barbara’s Library Talk March 8 & Other Interim Updates

Dear readers, Yours Truly, your ever faithful blogger, still has not had time to write up the last Honduras trip. If you want to go back to the posting of March 28, 2009 on last year’s trip, you will get a flavor there.

Last Monday’s talk at the main DC public library had about 30 attendees, including my new housemate Rob and my older daughter Melanie, who was passing through on a business trip.

I’m leaving again Friday to visit my 7-year-old grandson, Andrew (named for his late uncle), in Texas with daughters Melanie and Stephanie, after which Stephanie will spend the better part of a week here. So I probably will not be posting a full accounting of the February trip to Honduras (and briefly to Panama first) until the end of the month.

For now, I will report that, to my surprise, I now have 22 reviews on Amazon and 4 more Kindle versions of the book have been sold, along with the usual print versions. Also, Jose Manuel, a one-time Cuban refugee who spent his first year at my home after being released from Guantanamo (where boat people were taken per Bill Clinton’s orders) has filmed my talk at the DC public library. He will be making a DVD in both a longer and shorter version, the latter for posting on U-Tube. Will let you know. It’s just as well that I didn’t know he had that in mind or I’d have been more self-conscious during my presentation.

A former brother-in-law is in town on a book tour with Rinpoche, a Buddhist scholar whose newest book he helped to write and edit. So I plan meet them tomorrow at the Library of Congress and again at the Mongolian Embassy. It must be nice to be a mainstream published author and have such doors thrown open, though I’m not complaining since a few other doors have been thrown open for me. In fact, Peace Corps director Aaron Williams has invited me to talk with his staff during a brown bag lunch, which I will do as soon as my schedule permits.

From what I’ve read, no candidate has come forth to challenge Insulza for the OAS presidency, so he will probably be re-elected despite lukewarm support for him in some quarters.

When a damaging earthquake in Chile followed the one in Haiti, I began thinking that I had brought bad luck to those locales, after being an election observer in both. In fact, in Chile, our delegation traveled both to Santiago and Concepcion. I was also an election observe in Nicaragua and the DR, so if an earthquake strikes soon in either of those countries, that will be very spooky.