Life at the moment

By Caitlin Kelly

This is a hasty post.

I have been very frustrated of late at the handful of views this blog now gets — unless I also put it on Facebook and Twitter.

Is it that boring?

WordPress tells me 23,000 people follow it and I am appreciative of the loyal band who does show up to read and comment.

Anyway…life for now:

Torrential rain has hit our area — affecting 23 million people. The subways of New York — an essential service — and even the buses! — have been flooded. Streets are impassable. Even the commuter rail system shut for a while. Any climate deniers remaining are absolute ostriches. I moved here in 1989 and have never seen weather like this.

I have a severely arthritic right hip that, until the past two weeks, has really been destroying my quality of life. There have been days I can barely walk and leave the gym in tears of pain. Now, for no reason I can fathom, I am walking almost normally. It is an enormous relief to not be in pain every day for months!

I tutor a teenager in French, a new venture for us both. One of my blog friends in England shared a great BBC site of lesson plans, so we’re using that, conversing and doing some dictations.

I go to a weekly French conversation group at a local library for an hour, then an hour of Spanish after that. Whew! My brain is very tired at the end, but it’s such an easy way to get out of the apartment, free, and have lively chats. One of the women in the French group told us she’d celebrated her 75th birthday by riding an elephant.

Mahjong is a game of tiles that I associate with ladies wearing cat’s eye glasses and bright caftans. Now I am edging my way into it as well, thanks to some neighbors in the building who ask me to join their group from time to time.

I’m still writing for The New York Times, now on my third personal finance story this year for them. I have a second session scheduled this coming week with a global PR agency who hires me to review pitches to journalists that failed to get traction and discuss how they might have worked better. I’m very glad of the income.

I also still coach other writers at an hourly fee; here’s the link. One of my clients recently sold a story we worked on to the Washington Post, a much-coveted outlet for ambitious writers. Another was delighted to find an outlet for a story he had had difficulty placing — and our session was much enhanced by the presence of his tiny perfect hedgehog!

Two great bits of news — we paid off our mortgage! Now we own our apartment outright.

And we leave soon for four days ‘ vacation at a Quebec resort we love, then five days renting a house in Vermont, a state I love and haven’t been back to in decades. October is the perfect time for both. My husband works so hard at his three freelance jobs and we need time off the computer and away from home, which is also our workspace. Can’t wait!

The highs (and lows) of solo travel

A solo trip to Newport, RI, March 2023

By Caitlin Kelly

Having just booked a hotel in Bern, Switzerland (!) for my first-ever visit there, with Jose, I am really excited to be heading back to Europe.

I’ll be back alone in early September in London for a week. Can’t wait!

Between hip pain and COVID and a rough few few years financially, travel was mostly not possible beyond driving trips back to Canada, (where our dollar is worth $1.30 or more.) But this year, finally having been earning well from webinars and coaching — — Europe!

I’ve already got a ballet ticket, two business meetings and three museum shows to see. Plus three good friends to catch up with and this amazing hotel, recommended to me by a stranger on Twitter. It’s in my favorite area, Spitalfields, a time travel back to the 18th century. I’ll be using short crutches but don’t care — the isolation and boredom and loneliness that my chronic hip pain has caused me has taken a big toll on my mental health.

My birthday pie with Canadian pals in Oakland, CA, hence two sets of flags

I haven’t been back since 2017 when I splurged on an amazing six weeks there, most of it alone. I started with Paris for my birthday with Jose, then went solo by train to Berlin for 10 days. I stayed at the Savoy, a wonderful hotel from the 50s, with a deep red lobby, a formal dining room, small backyard patio and a view across Fasanenstrasse to a cinema. The street contained (!) the stock exchange, a great cafe, another great cafe, the Kathe Kollwitz museum and the Grisebach auction house (who sends me their mailings for paintings selling for 300,000 euros…)

London, of course!

My room was small but charming, with a Juliet balcony. I went by train to Budapest, and met my bestie from university and her daughter, visiting from Canada, on to Zagreb, Rovinj, Venice and London. Even though I banged up my lousy right knee cycling in Berlin, and had to wear a leg brace for weeks, it was all fantastic. I met new and old friends, savored some great meals, took plots of photos, swam in the Adriatic.

Rovinj, Croatia — known as Little Venice

(Injury clearly is not enough of an impediment! My mother broke her neck diving into a swimming pool — then went off to India alone wearing a cervical collar.)

I’ve traveled alone many times: to Mexico (on assignment), to Texas and New Orleans and Ohio (book research), to Nova Scotia (to look at a house to buy.) My late mother had enough income to not have to work, but was super frugal, so she lived on the road for years, traveling alone in her 40s throughout Latin America. She taught me two useful tricks — when all goes to hell, cry to the hotel manager (I did, in Istanbul) and lodge a chair beneath the door handle to stop any intruders.

One of the hairiest solo moments — also sort of funny — was driving alone, cell phone dying and out of range anyway, gas running out and nothing for miles in every direction but oil derricks. I was going to meet a Texas woman who had saved her own life by shooting a rabid bobcat…as one does! A truck comes down the empty highway towards me: “Are you the writer from New York?” said a grizzled guy at the wheel, her husband, still a working cowboy in his 80s.

“I am!” I replied gratefully, and followed him home to their house, my destination.

This little stuffed mouse belonged to my late mother, and was a perfect travel companion for me as well.

I did a glorious month alone in California, in June 2022 — enjoying my birthday at a backyard dinner with friends — driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I met up with 11 friends along the way, two I stayed with. It was perfect! Few things are more luxurious to me than some time alone in a spectacular location, having a hotel room all to myself.

Don’t I get lonely?

Nope! I always have a book to read, people to chat with, friends to meet, photos to take. I love having every day and evening to myself. Don’t forget — I spent my early life at boarding school (8-13) and summer camp (8-16) sharing a room with up to four girls, dealing with endless rules and schedules. I’d had enough!

I’ve only had a few truly nasty experiences — like trying to rush from Dayton, Ohio to Vancouver, BC, and starting my journey at midnight at the Cleveland bus station where the bus driver took one look at me, slammed the door and drove off. I cried, took a cab to the train station, slept on the floor of the train station and trained to Chicago, then onward.

A lot of women say they’re too scared to travel alone, which I understand but also think is unrealistic.

It’s probably both doable and enjoyable if:

• you stay sober (no drugging or drinking to excess)
• you keep a very close eye on your drinks when at a bar or public place (rohypnol)
• you understand and respect local culture and dress appropriately (even if more modestly than at home)
• you make a sincere effort to speak even some of the local language
• you do your research! Some cities and regions, even countries, are less welcoming to a woman alone
• you don’t feel compelled to wear costly jewelry/clothes that can draw unwanted attention
• you are ready to be situationally aware of who’s near you and how to navigate the environment

Have you traveled alone much?

How did you enjoy it?

Telling painful stories

By Caitlin Kelly

From the very start of my journalism career, I’ve taken on some very painful stories to tell, whether women who had terrible things befall them (for Chatelaine, a national Canadian women’s magazine) to my first book about American women and guns. Another Chatelaine story sent me to Edmonton, Winnipeg and Toronto (from my home in New York, an unusual investment on their part) to speak to women who had experienced a terrifying, confusing side effect to Mirapex, a drug prescribed to them for Parkinson’s — incessant and uncontrollable gambling. Some women cried through the interview, not surprising, given their ordeals.

Why do these stories, then?

Because they can offer important insight into others’ lives and challenges, (if not done voyeuristically), because they can offer helpful advice to people in those situations, because they might offer others in that situation some comfort and solace, as often people avoid talking about grief and misery and loss.

I also know why some journalists avoid them — they are difficult to obtain, painful to listen to, challenging to write sensitively. But I’m drawn to them, maybe for all these reasons.

I liken them to water balloons, very fragile objects you must handle with great care. They require establishing trust with sources, speaking to them with compassion and empathy, listening to whatever they are able to share.

A taboo phrase?

“I know how you feel.”

Even when I’ve been in analogous situations, I know better than that.

Here’s my latest, and one of the most emotionally painful of recent years, about men and women widowed in their 20s and 30s. It ran last week in The New York Times.

An excerpt:

It was April 10, 2018, and Colin Brougham hadn’t sent his usual text to his wife that he was biking home. Instead, he lay dead a few blocks away after a commuter train struck him.

“I knew he was dead before I knew he was dead,” recalled Rachel Brougham, his widow. “My son and I went to the scene, and when I was told it was him, I screamed so loud I think all of Minneapolis heard me.”

Mr. Brougham was only 39.

“My life as I knew it changed in an instant,” Ms. Brougham, now 46, said. “My future as I imagined was stolen. Grief changes your brain chemistry. It changes how you think, how you interact with others, how you work. It literally changes every single thing about your life.”

Those widowed in their 20s and 30s, few of whom may even have a will, can feel even more stunned and unprepared — who expects to die that young?

I was very grateful to Rachel and the others who spoke to me about this terrible moment in their young lives. One’s husband died of ALS, one’s wife died of cancer. I was wary of rummaging in their pain, but the journalist’s job is also to gather and share the most powerful and telling details. That feels, to be honest, extremely uncomfortable.

There is now a large and useful body of work to help journalists do these stories sensitively, ideally without re-traumatizing their interview subjects.

I admit it, I cried after one of these interviews and, when the story finally ran — several months after I reported it — I cried again. I am honored to share those stories, but they are indeed sad and moving.

It’s never “just a story.”

If it is, time to hang it up.

12 great days in Ontario

David Dennis, the son of a good friend (photographed for a story in 2019). Toronto skyline

behind him!

By Caitlin Kelly

As some of you know, I grew up in Toronto, ages five to 30, and left — gladly — to try work and life in Montreal, New Hampshire and New York, where I’ve stayed for decades.

But my Canadian friendships, thankfully, have endured, and social media makes it even easier to keep up. I had only been back once in 2023, last June, and Jose hadn’t been back in years. So we decided to splurge on a very good hotel — the Royal York — and some nice meals and just chill out. We’ve both been happily busy with a lot of work projects but at a fairly hectic pace.

We drove the 5.5 hours from our home to the border, then another hour west into Kingston, a handsome small city on Lake Ontario with a terrific restaurant we love returning to, Chez Piggy. From there it was another two hours west to Peterborough, another small city, where my father lives in a retirement home. We spent two days visiting him, and I had a stunning morning, the first of my life, explaining to him how his pretty much constant chosen absence from my life has hurt me. I had never dared say any of this, assuming he wouldn’t listen. But he did.

He had insisted we catch up….and so we did.

I left his care at 19 and he moved that month to live on a boat in Europe with his girlfriend, later wife. I had no effective way to reach him, and was also having to manage my mother’s manic episodes all over Europe while I lived alone, had no one to turn to, was attending a challenging university, living alone and freelancing. He knew none of this, or hadn’t cared.

So it was a tiring morning for us both but a necessary one. We’ll see, going forward, if he is kinder.

We drove another two hours further west to Toronto and checked into a luxuriously large room. I confess, we ordered room service every morning! What a joy to have a white-linen-covered table wheeled in, with no need to dress up or crutch the distance from our room across the lobby to the restaurant; (my hip is a mess.)

We caught up for dinner one night with two high school friends who also donate to the prize I created last year at our old school. Another night, with a dear friend, a fellow former newspaper reporter and her husband, a super creative architect. Mid-week dinner we ate with a woman I’ve known since my early 20s when she gave me amazing stories to write, like performing as an extra in Sleeping Beauty at Lincoln Center with the Canadian National Ballet. She married much later in life and her husband, a retired professor, is a gem.

The gorgeous lobby bar at the Royal York

I saw a great show of wildlife photos with another friend, and treated her to tea at Holt’s Cafe, an elegant hideaway in a very nice department store; we were lucky to enjoy a stupidly favorable exchange rate — the U.S. dollar worth $1.37 Canadian these days.

We enjoyed a great Italian meal out but also took a few days to rest and relax. We live and work in a one bedroom apartment, so having a lot of room was lovely.

I even took in a Blue Jays-NY Yankees baseball game — my excellent ticket in Toronto cost literally one-tenth the price of what we pay here.

We had an extraordinary moment the day we left — Jose is a Tibetan Buddhist — and the bellhop was as well, his name (!) Karma, and a photographer, which Jose is as well. Jose gave him his business card and asked him to stay in touch. As we loaded the car to leave, he gave us (!) two beautiful hand-woven textiles from his aunt, full of familiar Buddhist images.

I skipped the legendary St. Lawrence market this time

We spent our final vacation night back in Kingston, enjoyed another fantastic meal at Chez Piggy, savored a lakeside view from our hotel. Also stocked up at Pan Chancho, after breakfast there, with pretty mugs and dish towels and some delicious food for our first meals back at home.

I was very happy to enjoy our 21-inch deep bathtub again.

It was a well needed break!

Bye kids….taking a break

By Caitlin Kelly

OK, my last post has hit an all-time low — 16 views.

Sorry, but I really just don’t have the energy to keep writing posts no one sees or bothers to read.

Life has been really busy of late — doing webinars and planning more, coaching clients and now taking off for a badly needed vacation back in Canada.

I’ll be back in a few weeks, but maybe it’s time to hang it up here…No matter how little a post is read, it took me time to produce it. Very discouraging.

Enjoy spring!

A movie quiz — 25 questions!

By Caitlin Kelly

As you know, I watch a lot of movies, some many times. I don’t watch horror or kids’ films, but many others.

No Googling!!

What’s the name of the Paris restaurant in “Casablanca” where Sam initially plays “As Time Goes By”?

What’s the monster’s name in the original Ghostbusters?

What was the little girl’s real name, and nickname, in Aliens?

In Annie Hall, what was Annie’s favorite expression?

In Dr. Zhivago, what was the name of the family who adopted Yuri?

The name of his nemesis?

The town where he found Lara again?

“Flowers for spring? Groundbreaking.” Who said it and in what movie?

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Who says it and in what movie?

Which movie about journalism won Best Picture?

In what 1980s film did the female character have a tiny pet owl, a gift?

Who is Tippi Hedren’s daughter — and what 1980s film is she best known for?

A Clint Eastwood film is named for his beloved car — which is?

Who plays the crooked detective in The French Connection?

What Canadian director made Arrival, Dune and Dune Two?

Which late actor played The Joker?

Where was “Brooklyn” filmed?

And “The Shape of Water”?

Which female director won Best Director for her 2021 film?

Which was?

Starring who?

Which female director was snubbed at the 2024 Academy Awards?

For what film?

Which actress — her last win in 1981 — won the most Oscars for Best Actress?

Three men have each one three Oscars each — can you name one?

More simple pleasures

By Caitlin Kelly

Identifying birdsong easily using your phone and the Merlin phone app.

A new monogrammed bath sheet on sale, (and one for my husband!)

Afternoon naps.

Planning visits from old friends who live far away.

Visiting friends who live far away.

Live music! Recently loved an Irish band called JigJam.

Sitting in the sun and enjoying its new warmth.

Crocuses!

Daffodils!

Magnolia blossoms!

Cherry blossoms!

Starting to plan out your garden, whether balcony or backyard.

Tickets to affordable concerts and dance performances.

Lying in bed in the morning listening to Sirius XM.

Going back to bed, aka second sleep.

A new fragrance, something crisp and fresh.

Very good soap.

A long conversation with an old friend.

Or a new one!

Finally using some gift cards for books and beauty items.

And — if you somehow missed it — this astonishing historic ice skater, Ilia Malinin, peforming to the gorgeous music from the HBO series Succession.

25 facts about me (the HTSI questionnaire)

By Caitlin Kelly

Fresh flowers always!

My personal style signifier

Scarves. Silk, linen, wool, printed, plain.

The last thing I bought and loved

Two new printed lampshades for the bedroom.

We’re married!

The place that means a lot to me

Centre Island in Toronto, where I married in a small wooden 19th church on a glorious sunny September afternoon.

The best book I’ve read in the past year

I find most books, sadly, disappointing.

The podcast I’m listening to

Embarrassingly, none

My style icon

Auntie Mame, clothing, interiors and joie de vivre

The item of clothing I’d save from a fire

My burgundy cashmere turtleneck — 10 pounds from a London flea market

I’ve wanted to work in journalism

Since I was small. I watched my mother do it and have a lot of fun.

The journalism moment that changed everything for me

Winning an eight-month, Paris-based journalism fellowship with 27 peers, ages 25-35, from around the world, India to Togo, Japan to NZ. Plus four 10-day solo reporting trips across Europe. I returned to Toronto at 26 sure I could do almost anything.

My signature scent

Chanel No. 5 and Blenheim Bouquet

The best gift I’ve given recently

A tea-set, a repro Famille Rose pattern, to a young friend newly (by choice) single after nine years.

And the best gift I’ve received

An introduction to an editor at a Big Name magazine.

The last music I’ve downloaded

None. Not for lack of interest…overwhelmed by choices.

In my fridge you’ll always find

Cheese, apples, plain yogurt, good mustard.

I’ve recently rediscovered

The pleasure of sitting in the sun! Now it’s finally getting warmer.

The best souvenir I’ve brought home

A sepia tone photo of a woman, shot from behind, with a large palm leaf. Taken by a staff photographer at the Sydney Morning Herald. Also, an enormous black and white Sempe drawing of Paris.

The thing I couldn’t do without

My husband.

An indulgence I would never forgo

A great stylist, colorist and massages. Fresh flowers!

The last item of clothing I added to my wardrobe

A pretty cotton nightdress.

The one artist I would collect if I could

Egon Schiele.

The grooming staples I’m never without

Mascara, perfume, hairbrush, Malin and Goetz moisturizer.

My favorite app

Sirius XM.

In another life I would have been

An interior designer, choreographer or talk radio show host.

My best ideas come

In conversation with someone smart and lively.

The best bit of advice I ever received

Was from my late mother, who survived multiple forms of cancer, when I asked how she got through it all.

“What should I do? Jump out of my skin?”

Tradwives and fundi babies: America 2024

Let’s all be frilly — and dependent.

By Caitlin Kelly

Like every immigrant, I moved to the U.S., at 30, filled with hope and optimism for my new future in a country that spends a lot of energy telling the world — and its citizens — that it’s a “city on a hill”, a bastion of freedom with “liberty for all.”

As if.

In the decades since I chose the U.S. — and especially since the election of Donald Trump, unleashing a hatred and racism and ignorance that stuns many worldwide — I’ve become less and less enamored of the shiny rhetoric. The current mood towards immigrants (always a recurring theme here), towards women (back to the kitchen!) and, always, towards non-white Amerians, is becoming more hateful and louder every day.

State after state is moving to restrict access to abortion, trying to criminalize every effort a woman — or teenage girl — makes to control her own body. How dare she! How dare we!

Then there are “tradwives”, a wildly popular genre on social media — women, often white, thin, affluent — who pride themselves on having a lot of children and relying solely on their husbands for economic support.

From The Guardian:

Trad wives can be traced back to the Red Pill Women forum that was set up in 2013. According to research from Julia Ebner in 2020, 30,000 women identified as Red Pill Women or trad wives. As with most far-right trends, most of them appear to be in the US, but due to the networked nature of the modern far right, trends that start stateside don’t remain there. Interviews I conducted revealed that the British far right encourages its women to be trad, with women attending nationalist conferences such as the annual Patriotic Alternative conference, and making a name for themselves on the far-right infosphere.

The subculture shares aesthetics and values across the Atlantic. Long, floral dresses are the norm, idealising a mythic past of feminine modesty. Women should be covered up, as their bodies are just for their husbands. A woman’s role is to stay at home, serving her spouse domestically and sexually, while her partner goes to work to support her. Men should “discipline” women.

Unsurprisingly, they are anti-feminist, with the far right recruiting women to the trad lifestyle by claiming feminism has failed to make them happy. While not a trad wife herself, “alt-right” influencer Lauren Southern shot to fame by claiming feminism taught women “to work 9–5 and drink wine every night until their ovaries dry up”.

I came of age during second-wave feminism, Ms. magazine and Helen Reddy chanting “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers to be ignore!” I grew up in Canada, where abortion has long been readily available legally. I was stunned when I moved to New York and began job hunting in Manhattan in media, what sexist bullshit women were putting up with! I had lunch with a married very senior editor at Newsweek — then a dream job for me — who leaned close and said “I can’t smell your perfume.”

Gross.

I was lucky enough to have parents who never once suggested marriage and motherhood were the only proper uses of my body and intelligence. I was out of the family home at 19, living alone in a tiny apartment, and managing all my own money. As readers here know, I’m ferociously independent in many ways.

I also learned the hard way the real price of deliberate ignorance when my first husband walked out the door for good after barely two years of marriage and quickly married a colleague. I didn’t even know when the mortgage was due — he walked on June 15th…now I know!

Luckily I had a pre-nuptial agreement and he had to pay alimony to get me back on my feet; here’s my recent New York Times story about that.

Which now brings us to fundi babies, a phrase I had gratefully never heard before GOP Senator Katie Britt’s bizarre State of the Union rebuttal.

She sits in a weirdly expensive all-beige kitchen with costly appliances, insisting she’s just a mom like every other decent American, and talks in a breathy little voice — fundi baby — that, apparently, is a powerful dog whistle to any girl or woman raised in an evangelical Christian household — taught to model submission and docility to men.

An explanation, from a Substack by Jess Piper:

I threw so many folks for a loop last year when I discussed the voice in a video. I used my “training” as a former Evangelical, a Southern Baptist, to describe the breathy cadence and the soft, child-like high pitch. Folks outside of Fundamentalist culture had never heard the term—they just knew the voice made them uncomfortable.

I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was engrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out that I sound that way myself. Yes, friends. That’s the point.

Be sweet. Obey. Prove it by speaking in muted tones.

It’s hard for me to fathom women who willingly make this choice and keep making it. Call me judgmental and I’m fine with it. Relying solely on a man’s benevolence can leave women abused, homeless and broke. And it does.

No, thanks.

I’m weary of this country’s relentless push to keep women submissive to male power and influence.

This, just as France enshrines abortion in its Constitution.

A life-changing assignment: rural Nicaragua

On assignment in rural Nicaragua

By Caitlin Kelly

It started out as an online discussion with people seeking attention for their organizations, speaking with journalists like me about how best to accomplish that. I met one of the women at a hotel bar to talk further, and she began sending me story pitches about water and sanitation projects in Nicaragua, the second-poorest nation (after Haiti) in this Hemisphere.

I knew I could never place them — and made a bold suggestion: take me there and I’d write several stories for their own use, all expenses paid, plus a fee. It happened!

It became a truly life-changing, eye-opening week, full of joys and surprises and discoveries and adventures. The woman in charge of WaterAidAmerica’s PR brought a blogger from Maine, me, and a Mexican photographer. None of us had met before, even though we’d spend the next week working closely in 90+ degree temperatures. We all converged at the airport in Managua, a shockingly brief three hour flight from the casual and nonchalant affluence of the Atlanta airport — where even a sandwich costs more than a day’s wage for a Nicaraguan earning a typical $324 a month.

I lived for a while in Mexico and have been back several times. I’d been to Venezuela, so I had seen some Latin American poverty. This was next level — horse-drawn carts on city streets.

We flew in a very small aircraft — they weighed us! — to Bilwi, on the Pacific coast. I love small planes and enjoyed being able to really see the countryside.

Our flight from Managua to Bilwi

Every morning, after breakfast at the hotel, we’d pile into a rickety black minivan, praying the AC was working as the temperature climbed and climbed. Sometimes we had to get out and push it.

We visited tiny villages and spoke to residents finally gaining access to working toilets and wells, after losing hours every day fetching water for cooking, cleaning and hygiene. And this in a very hot country.

It was a huge insight into how spoiled anyone is with clean, plentiful running water in their home!

We saw plenty of children, smaller than healthy — their growth stunted by malnutrition.

We saw almost no cats or dogs, something wealthier people take for granted.

Dinner on the verandah of the wooden house we stayed in

We stayed one night in a large, wooden house on stilts…the shade beneath offering a respite with a hammock and a place for animals. The interior floor was smooth and shiny and immaculate. There were large windows with no glass. We slept in cots beneath mosquito nets. In all my travels — 41 countries so far — this might be the most memorable of all. The hospitality was gentle and kind, food cooked on a clay stove. The village had no electricity or running water. It was, by every North American standard, poor. It felt welcoming.

The next morning we walked to the river’s edge through a forest — followed by the family’s turkey, gobbling away. The edge was steep and sandy and an older female villager in gum boots casually wielded a machete and cut it into four pieces to make a seat for us in the awaiting wooden dugout canoe. Growing up in Canada, I was happy in a canoe — this was very narrow!

On assignment in Nicaragua for WaterAid — Jen in the bow of a dugout canoe

I can so easily picture it all still — a decade later. We spoke no shared language (they spoke Miskitu) but we managed to make it work, and had translators for interviews.

For a group of strangers — different ages, skills and nationalities — we quickly formed a tight and happy unit, heading out for beers after a long day of work.

A typical home

We drove long hours down dusty roads past wooden houses painted purple and yellow and emerald green.

We gratefully drank as much cold water as we were given.

The clay stove at the wooden house

When we finally parted at the Managua airport, the Canadian-born country director, a dead ringer for Hagrid!, said: “Ok, no tears!” Unlikely, perhaps, but true, we were sad to leave and to leave one another’s daily company.

I met the local team back home in New York to debrief at WaterAid’s office there, and, as we assembled around the table, I found myself — to my shock — in tears.

Try climbing those steps in the dark, wearing a headlamp!

Reporting in Bilwi, Nicaragua for WaterAid

Our aircraft from Managua to Bilwi — and back!

Linda’s home, where we slept and ate and rested

That week had moved me deeply, in ways I never expected, and the tremendous care and kindness with which we were treated there, by Nicaraguans and the group’s staff, was unprecedented for me; journalism, unless you’re at the very top/pampered levels, is a macho, self-reliant, poorly-resourced affair — especially for anyone not on staff.

It forever changed how I wanted to work, to be treated with such respect and kindness.

It reminded me how incredibly affluent many of us are, in relationship to people whose lives we never see.

It reminded me that poverty doesn’t have to equal squalor — an ugly preconception.

And to never carelessly keep a tap running!

Flaco — the eagle owl that united so many of us

By Caitlin Kelly

His name was Flaco, and he was a Eurasian eagle owl, his feathers the most glorious mix of black, rust and sienna, his distinctive ear tufts sometimes blowing sideways in the Manhattan wind. His eyes were brilliant yellow, his talons impressive. He was beautiful and ferocious — and very much out of his natural habitat.

We all feared the day it might kill him, as it did when he recently flew into a window on the upper East Side, one of many birds who die such a terrible death.

Flaco was born and raised in captivity, but set free a year ago from the Central Park Zoo by a vandal who cut the wires of his cage. Thus began an adventure shared, thanks to social media, with many fans worldwide, as Flaco flew onto construction sites, water towers, apartment balconies — all the familiar landmarks of the city.

Can you imagine finding him perched on your balcony? It was a true celebrity sighting!

He was much photographed, allowing his many admirers on social media — I saw him daily on Twitter — to cheer him on as he swooped high above urban towers, finding rats and pigeons for his diet. Whether asleep or taking flight or in flight, or gently hooting above all the city noise, he became a somehow comforting presence in a time when everything we see on the news — Gaza, Darfur, Ukraine, the election, climate change — is so relentlessly awful and depressing and overwhelming. Flaco was gorgeous and free and someone we could all cheer for without reservation, profess our admiration for without fear of rancor or argument.

He was also an introduction to bird life in a way us non-birders never appreciated — asleep, preening, spreading his wings, spitting out the remains of a mouse or rat. The many excellent photos of him allowed us a detailed view of avian life.

The New York Times recently ran a large article about him, to the delight of all his fans — and the photographers who tracked him so carefully:

obsessed Flaco fans scoured the internet to find out more about his past, learning that he hatched on March 15, 2010, at the Sylvan Heights Bird Park in Scotland Neck, N.C. He apparently had younger and older siblings named Gertrude, Salazar, Stan, Morrisey, Boston and Thatcher; and his parents, Xena and Watson, were the offspring, respectively, of Martina and Sinbad, and Nyra and Ezra — owls who traced their lineage back to Eurasian eagle-owls from Europe. The German-born photographer Anke Frohlich noted that some New Yorkers identified with Flaco as a fellow immigrant, another outsider who learned to live as “a stranger in a strange land.”

This, too:

The owl, once described by a frequent zoo visitor as a grumpy and slightly pudgy bird, reinvented himself as New York’s most majestic raptor — the “Prince of the city,” as the dancer Heather Watts put it, who has become a captivating symbol of freedom, resilience and the possibility of renewal.

Then — maybe a first for the Times — a front page obituary:

Ruben Giron, 73, a registered nurse who lives on 112th Street, said he had wept Saturday morning when he heard the news.

“He’s a symbol of just enjoying being out and letting the sun hit you,” he said. “It’s a heart-opening experience of what it means to be free.”

He added: “We’re all figuring out how to live life. That’s what we’re doing, and he did it.”

He will be very much missed.