Travels With David

While David French was at university in California, his father was posted to Ethiopia by the World Bank. In 1960, David turned a family visit to Addis Ababa into a round-the-world trip, visiting a dozen countries. He was to spend more than 30 of the next 45 years living, working, and touring in almost 60 countries outside America. Coming to rest in Vermont in 2006, he kept his passport current, visiting countries from New Zealand to the United Kingdom, as well as the breadth of Canada and most parts of the United States.

Much of David’s time abroad involved work as a development socioeconomist, a hybrid profession in line with the hybrid degree (a Ph.D. in Political Economy) he had received from Harvard University. Along the way, he worked for institutions including the U.N. World Food Program, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the consulting firm Arthur D. Little, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the Beijer Institute, the World Resources Institute, the International Fund for Agriculture and Development, and more.

It led him to interesting places at interesting times. He lived in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Angola during civil wars in those countries. He was in Pakistan when extremists placed a bounty on the heads of Americans. He was thrown out of Eritrea by a government that didn’t want him looking too closely at its use of his agency’s resources. He was one of the last people to see the towering statues of Ramses II in their original place on the banks of the Nile at Abu Simbel. He trekked in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The best of his stories are included in this book.