My final phase in China! Sweden next?
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Welcome to my page
Hej! Welcome to my page! I was born in the small town of Kabale in Uganda, close to our borders with Rwanda and Congo. My district was then known as Kigezi, a cold and mountainous region. My father was a Member of Parliament who loved and believed in politics and my mother was a teacher who often became Uganda’s female diplomat in government missions abroad. When she returned from these missions she was often asked to give public lectures on the sprawling lawns of her school or in churches. Our district was proud of her travels, from which she returned with interesting stories about leaders she met, including Chairman Mao of China, Prime Minister Nehru of India, President Tito of Yugoslavia and President Pak of South Korea. Along with my geography lessons at school, her experiences made me eager to travel, learn new languages and make lasting friendships abroad. Like my parents, I wanted to live in the widest spectrum of humanity possible. Our first break from Uganda as a family was to take us to live in Kenya and Tanzania, where we learned Swahili. School in Kenya gave me great new friends and life in Tanzania led to my writing poems about animals and climbing Mountain Kilimanjaro. Later, I went to Ohio for university studies and then worked in biological and medical research first in Burlington, Vermont and then in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Cambridge, I was fortunate to meet the man we now know as President Barack Obama, with whom I shared an interest in all issues concerning Africa. In Cambridge I also saw the publication of a book called “Alva Myrdal: A Daughter’s Memoirs”. However, I did not read it until I moved to the UK 8 years later. Its subject was a Swedish woman called Alva, who had married, become a mother and, together with her husband, Gunnar, gave Sweden its ideas of social welfare in a jointly written thesis. In India, where she was Swedish Ambassador, Alva gained the ideas that later influenced the UN on world poverty. While on a diplomatic mission to India, my mother was also touched by the fate of the poor in India. (In Uganda and Kenya, we had many Indians who had come to East Africa as labour for a British railway construction project from Mombasa to Kampala.) My mother, Irene, returned to India to spend a year as a social worker among the lepers and beggars of Bombay, now Mumbai and New Delhi. Like Alva she was devoted to a universal humanity rather than a provincial one. When she returned, with sweet Indian coconut-and-jelly sweets, she taught us to put out little palms together and say, “Namaste!”, or Peace!, particularly astonishing many Ugandan Asians with whom we had spoken English before. I have Sissela Bok, the daughter of Alva Myrdal, to thank for the affirmation of important lessons I had gained at my parents’ feet in East Africa. In New York, where Alva was Sweden’s UN Representative and from where Gunnar researched the oppression of African-Americans with the aid of a great African-American intellectual and Nobel Peace Prizewinner named Ralph Bunche, Harlem poets and jazz musicians flocked to their home, influencing their daughter Sissela’s first attempts at writing poetry. Today, we celebrate Barack Obama’s rise to the office of President of the United States. Alva and Gunnar Myrdal would have been deeply proud!