This is a true story of a young boy who lived in a cave with his grand parents in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and who later finds himself on a path of exciting discovery and learning. Traveling from New York to the mid western city of Lawrence, Kansas, then Fresno and Berkeley in California, he actually witnesses the turbulence on this campus and offers his reflections on the significance of the free speech movement. After he completes his higher education, he travels back east to begin an extraordinary professional career at the United Nations. In the course of his long journey, the young man learns about the values that make America great, and about the inner working of the international organization. Looking at the latter from an intimate angle and refreshing point of view, he reveals what many others have never revealed about the internal life of the world organization. Thanks to his rich international and diplomatic experience of almost fifty years under the roof of the United Nations, Abbadi is able to formulate bold and concrete suggestions on how the world can better be served by this important institution. He lives a purpose, and offers an inspiring message.
About the Author: Abdelkader Abbadi is a long-time participant in international affairs, working for the thirty years as a staff member at the United Nations Secretariat, and as a journalist for many publications, including Jeune Afrique. At five, he and the other fun-loving boys of his village were told by the French authorities that they must attend school. With an illiterate mother and a father who could barely read but not write, young Kader found school to be a strange activity. His parents supported him fully, and this was the beginning of his education, which culminated twenty-five years later with a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in 1958, Abbadi is a shining example of the program's mandate to foster international peace and cooperation through education. At the International House at Berkeley and at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, Abbadi has worked with others from many other countries, always with the goal of world peace. Married to a woman of Dutch descent, Abbadi today speaks four languages at home to his three children and eight grandchildren. At work, as a journalist, international staff and diplomat, he is fluent in French, Arabic, Spanish and English. He has learned how to greet the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in his native Korean. Today, Abbadi divides his time between New York City, where he reports on North African affairs and international matters, and Hillsdale, New York where he and his wife raise apples, pears, cherries and quinces in an orchard in the Berkshire Mountains that remind him of the Atlas range at home in Morocco.