Books by Author David H. Mould
I’m an accidental travel writer. Since the mid-1990s, I’ve traveled widely in Central, South and Southeast Asia and, more recently, in Southern and Eastern Africa, working as a teacher, trainer, researcher and consultant for international development organizations, including UNICEF, UNESCO and USAID contractors. Sometimes, the job paid well; sometimes I worked for less than I’d earn tossing burgers (assuming I knew how to toss burgers). The benefit is that my work took me to places I might never have visited if I had not been hired to do a job. And then to write about them.
One advantage of being new to a place is that the everyday—things so familiar to those who live there that they do not think about them—are often worth recording. I find topics in the most ordinary places—an airport departure lounge, a food court, a roadside restaurant, a government office. Every road trip offers a moving window display of landscape features, crops, livestock, houses, churches, temples, mosques, schools, factories, military bases, vehicles. I note what people are selling on the roadside, the fruits and vegetables on the markets, the restaurant menu, the indecipherable instructions for the TV remote in my hotel room. What people wear. What they eat. How they talk to each other. The questions they ask you. The questions I ask them. It is often the commonplace that is most fascinating and revealing of culture. Don’t read my books to learn about the Taj Mahal or Victoria Falls. I’m more interested in what a South Asia slum looks and feels like, what you’ll see as you travel by bus across Malawi or Nepal, or what’s on the menu in a student cafeteria in the Urals region of Russia.
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