Tell Them My Name

Book excerpt: Tell Them My Name is an inspiring true story that explores how even the most impossible dreams can come true when unlikely friendships are built across cultures. In this offbeat travel memoir, four strangers from three countries, with barely a common language between them, decide to adopt each other as family and take on the world. Dar Kumari is an indigenous Gurung woman living in the Nepali Himalayas with her elderly husband, Nar Bahadur. Their mud-brick house is in a remote farming village that has no electricity and can only be reached on foot. Their lives are turned upside down when a local NGO sends the Australian author, Laura, and her French husband, David, to live with their family while they help build the mountain's first library. Dar Kumari adopts the newcomers as if they were her children, but she's baffled this married couple show no interest in having a baby and can't even cook rice over a fire or clean a mud floor. Eventually, Laura and David invite their Nepali 'parents' to travel with them back to Europe-maybe if they experience the other side of their cultural differences, it might help them understand each other better? For one month this quirky international family travel together through six countries exploring the differences between their cultures and the places they call home. Tell Them My Name takes you on a journey, sharing often hilarious observations about 'normal' life in different cultures and shining a much needed light on why so many of us are feeling stressed, overwhelmed and exhausted all the time.