A Time of Light and Shadow

<b>An inspiring travel adventure memoir that explores a young woman’s quest to live life on the front lines, chasing adventure, and confronting the harsh realities of crisis work in Asia and Africa.</b></p><p>In 1975, a time of new freedom for women, Ella Harvey lived in Paris, worked as a nurse in war-torn Lebanon, and fell in love in Istanbul. Jostled between cultures, between love and loss, she found her way home. A year later, restless once again, she set off alone for India, a land of unsettling contradictions. A solo trek in the Himalayas completed that Asian journey.</p><p>By 1980 Ella was working for the International Red Cross, immersed in the heart-wrenching tragedy of a Cambodian refugee camp, and later that same year with the nomadic Issa in the drought-ridden desert of Djibouti, Africa. Faced with the immensity of poverty and suffering, her commitment to service was shaken.</p><p>Four decades later, in 2019, Ella returned to India, asking herself as an older woman, “Would I dare do now what I readily did then?” <i>A Time of Light and Shadow</i> explores one woman’s complicity in privilege, a troubled past with her mother, and reflections on solitude and friendship, youth and aging, longing and belonging.</p>