Welcome to Globe Trot
This is a weekly newsletter devoted to news from around the world, written by Mindy Belz. It’s an exploration of global news from her perspective as a journalist for more than 25 years, and from a reporter who is also a Christian. It’s designed to bring readers and writer together around a broader understanding of global events while not forgetting the people who live their lives amidst them. And importantly, it acknowledges God as the king at the center of all things despite the toll of famine, danger, persecution, and war.
This by no means is an exhaustive roundup. You might think of it as a snapshot from global hotspots and not-spots, the places most of us seldom hear about. I first launched this newsletter 10 years ago while working as an editor at World Magazine. It began almost selfishly as an exercise in sorting the wealth of story ideas crossing my desk. In return, I’ve met news sources and gained valuable tips from its community of readers. So let’s continue to help one another explore the vast world God gives us on and beyond the shores of North America.
Community
Globe Trot is read by students and families, government officials, diplomats, heads of nonprofits, aid organizers, missionaries, teachers, lawyers, and more. Its subscribers are doctors who sometimes work by headlamp, medics in Syria, people who care for orphans in Moldova, fighter pilots, and sometimes a first mate aboard a freighter in the Indian Ocean.
About me
I was born in the mountains of eastern Tennessee and grew up in Richmond, Va. My family came from stock that stayed put. Crossing the Ohio River to Cincinnati at age 14 to compete in a swim meet was a thrill. It was the farthest I’d ever traveled from home.
The world out there I learned about from Robert Louis Stevenson and a set of pictorial encyclopedias my mother bought on installment. I studied writing and international relations at George Washington University before my brother-in-law Joel Belz, the founder of World Magazine, took a chance on me as a journalist because he was desperate for writers. Thus began for me adventures in overseas reporting interwoven with our family life.
As a reporter I visited areas near the Chernobyl nuclear site and bounced in a sedan over the war-cratered roads of Bosnia while pregnant with our fourth-born. I made a memorable trip by night to meet Sudanese rebel leader John Garang, eating cornflakes with him and his wife Rebecca by day. I covered not so much wars as the families surviving wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. I’ve witnessed children starve and babies sleeping on bare ground in a Syrian winter. I’ve watched up close the world in the grip of Cold War, post-Soviet breakups, 9/11 terrorism, ISIS hegemony and a pandemic.
Two themes from so much globetrotting stand out—that the hidden lives and daily labors of redeemed people change the course of world affairs, progress undimmed by evil. And that the world, for its mayhem, remains every day a fun and astonishing planet to live on.
In naming this operation, I’m not afraid of kitschy comparisons to the Harlem Globetrotters, favorites from my childhood. In their heyday they traveled millions of miles and averaged hundreds of games a year, hard labors all performed with top-notch skill, clownishness, and soul. When someone asked Meadowlark Lemon, “Teach me to do that hook shot,” he replied, “You saw it from the outside. That shot came from the inside out—from my spirit.” That’s how we want to tackle the world, inside out, every day.
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