By Adele Barker

It was time to go home. I left Pakistan on February 5 only hours before my visa had expired and winged my way to Paris to see friends for five days before heading back to the U.S. I had mixed feelings about leaving. The pull of family, friends, and the deeply familiar drew me home. But I was leaving a country that has, on an almost daily basis, never failed over the past year to astonish me. Read more →

In an odd way, every day is like Christmas around here in Rawalpindi. The lights we put up once a year in the States are part of my everyday landscape in Pakistan. Red, blue, yellow and green lights are festooned outside the enormous wedding halls that dot the landscape of life here. Weddings are very very big, three-day affairs over here, draining families of their savings and quite possibly Pakistan of its electricity grid. No expense is spared either on the part of the family or on the part of the people who operate the wedding halls. At night, coming back from Islamabad, sometimes I look through the haze of traffic and see the blinking lights decorating the wedding halls, announcing yet another Pakistani wedding! It’s just another day of Christmas. Read more →

Adele Barker reflects on the tenth anniversary of the 2004 tsunami that claimed over 200,000 lives and left her former home of Sri Lanka deeply scarred. Read more →

Adele Barker reflects upon the changes in the country she wrote about in Not Quite Paradise. Read more →

Speaking to a convention of Sri Lankan Tamil doctors, Adele Barker discovers renewal through books. Read more →