Reminders of how close we are

Anyone who has ever been to Walt Disney World knows how tedious the song "It's a Small World After All" can be.

But the sentiment, though overly simple, is true just the same.

This holiday season has brought vivid reminders of that truth.

For starters, Connie's sister and our niece are in West Africa at the moment. Barbara is an African art historian, teaching at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her specialty is Mali, a country she has visited numerous times. She hopes to return there for an extended period next year for research, and she's there now to set the groundwork for that project. But this time, she took her 8-year-old daughter.

They won't be back until mid-January, so until then we have our fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, we're trying to imagine what Christmas is like in a landlocked, arid country south of the equator when Timbuktu is just down the road. We'll ask our niece, Myra, when they get back.

She's not the only little kid celebrating the holidays far from home.

My friends Salla and Denis were in Moscow to visit his family with their daughters, Ilsa and Amanda, before returning home to Finland. Denis was one of my interpreters for a couple of projects in Kyrgyzstan. Salla's a Finnish journalist. I was with them the night they met, and we've been bonded together ever since.

Our package to their daughters will have to wait until they get back to the town that I simply refer to as Unpronounceable. (I think most towns in Finland could go by that name.)

Then there's Ilia, son of my friend and colleague Svetlana Kulikova. Svetlana now teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and Ilia is growing up to be an ethnically-Russian-Kyrgzstan-born-all-American boy. We sent Ilia a Lego advent calendar last month and had a delightful thank-you note right before Christmas.

As if that's not enough, there's Lille. She's the daughter of another former interpreter, Tamuna Kvartskhelia, who worked for me in the Republic of Georgia.

Tamuna is now finishing work on her master's degree at North Dakota State University in Fargo. She brought her daughter Lille and husband Razvan along with her. Last I knew, Razvan was working in a Mexican restaurant to supplement the family's income.

(Only in America: A Georgian working in a Mexican restaurant in North Dakota.)

What I find myself thinking about is all these kids - Myra in Africa, Ilsa and Amanda in Finland, Ilia in Atlanta, and Lille in North Dakota - and how cool it would be if they could all, someday, get together in the same place and tell their stories.

Long after "Tata Jack" is gone, that would make me very happy indeed.[[In-content Ad]]