Cheryl Sim

Cheryl Sim is a retired American diplomat originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She spent most of her thirty-year plus career in Africa and South Asia. She studied French, Hindi and Thai, and picked up a smattering of Somali and Malagasy along the way. She loves storytelling and her writing focuses on cross-cultural engagement, miscommunication and misplaced expectations. She met her husband, a retired U.S. military officer, in Mogadishu, Somalia. They live in the greater Washington, D.C. area.

Confections

“Madam?”
The voice belongs to the counter person in one of Kolkata’s trendy sweet shops. With its chic white subway-tiled walls, and its offerings handwritten on blackboards decorated with pastel swirls and paisleys, we could be in any pastry shop in any hipster neighborhood anywhere in the world. Only when a man sporting a basket of dried fish on his head scurries past the glass storefront does Kolkata – Calcutta – come back into view.
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