Published!
Book Release Celebration
Long Time FWC Author
Rev. Mary Coday Edwards
Join Her At18 N. San Francisco St.Flagstaff, AZLight refreshments will be served.
To Travel Well, Travel Light is a story of the joys and pitfalls of living and working abroad for many years with children in tow. Mary, her husband Mike, and their two young sons moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, to help their Afghan friends rebuild their country after the Soviet departure in 1992. A USAID program brought educated young Afghan men to the Midwest to instruct them in public administration. Mary and Mike befriended them through a community friendship program, and these mujahideen persuaded this adventurous family to move to Peshawar.
Mary worked for an Afghan NGO as a consultant for construction projects inside Afghanistan, and Mike administered the Afghan Eye Hospital. Their older and outgoing son finished high school in Peshawar through a university distance-learning program and in the process learned to hang glide, met young people from all over the world, and grew fluent in the Pashtu language. Their younger son learned British English and had to be reminded by his parents that in the US, an eraser is not called a “rubber.”
The cover shows Mary in a chador. She wore that in public to protect her Afghan refugee friends from ultra-conservative Muslims who would punish Muslims who were suspected of consorting with loose Western women. She didn’t know it at the time of their move, but she was also wrapped in the chador of patriarchal, conservative Christianity, a religion that served a nonexistent male god that kept adult women as children. This family lived and worked abroad for 20 years, time enough for Mary to experience how her resistance to this religion found affirmation in wisdom ancient and modern and to rebuild her values with soul-driven goals.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Before becoming an internationally published author, Mary Coday Edwards was a project manager on multi-million dollar construction projects in the US and continued in this field when her family moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, where she was a consultant for post-conflict reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. A trailing spouse, she traveled the world with her family through her husband’s employment with CBM, a nonprofit headquartered in Germany. Her writing skills landed her jobs with international, English daily print newspapers, The Jakarta Post and The News, in Indonesia and Mexico, respectively. With her MA in Environmental Studies from Boston University, her articles and op-ed pieces on local and global environmental issues were published internationally.
The many countries she has lived in—Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mexico—provided her with the opportunities to pursue spirituality as expressed through the various worldviews she encountered. Mary took post-graduate studies in theological ethics from the University of South Africa, focusing on Ecological Justice: how to keep both the human species and the natural environment flourishing. Upon returning to the US after living abroad for almost twenty years, she became a nonsectarian spiritual growth facilitator and ordained minister through People House, a center for spiritual and personal growth based in Denver, Colorado. She’s been a regular blogger for People House for six years.
Mary spends her free time pulling invasive weeds from their small plot of shortgrass prairie land in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she lives with her husband and is within easy driving distance to their two adult sons and their families.
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