A Place to Be

This is a wonderful collection of stories and accounts that make up the author’s life: of her early days in India/Pakistan and later experiences as a US citizen, culminating in her life as a USAID officer: at first designing and managing projects in health and humanitarian assistance and later as a USAID Senior Foreign Service Officer, where she had a complex range of programs to oversee in a broad range of countries, from Africa to Central Asia. With senior management comes involvement in policy dialog with host country counterparts, in effect, diplomacy at its most basic. To her account, she brings the flavor of living and working in countries very different from the US, but whose people often are looking for the same things. To succeed, as she obviously did, she stuck to the principles that made USAID an effective instrument of foreign policy, an instrument that is no longer available. Her dedication to USAID and her note on its demise bring home the sense of a loss that cannot be undone.

—DianneT, review on Amazon

Virginia Woolf once said: ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.’ The issue of belonging and home resonate through Jatinder Cheema’s fascinating memoir A Place to Be. From a young girl witnessing the violence of partition in her native India, to eventually becoming a senior foreign service officer with USAID…

—Rita Mae Reese, author of The Book of Hulga