Writing Friends: Nancy Bo Flood

by Karen Williams in her blog, Williams Writes · January 24, 2013

The internet was new (to me anyway). It was 1993…or 4. We had just returned from Haiti. I was working on a quilt to auction off to raise money for Hospital Albert Schweitzer where we had lived and worked for 2 years. I sent out a letter to the hospital email list asking for quilters to design a square for the quilt.

One of the responses came from Nancy Bo Flood. Turns out she is a quilter …and she lived for while in Haiti at HAS. She writes children’s books. Like me! She has four children and her husband is a doctor.

We emailed back and forth. They lived in Malawi. One of their sons was born there…a lot like me. Is this internet connection thing getting creepy yet? I had shivers.

At the time Nancy and her husband and some of her children were in American Samoa…I told my husband I knew where we would be going next.

Turns out we went back to Haiti for a year instead of American Samoa. And Nancy and I lost touch. Fast forward to 2009. We applied to work with the Indian Health Service. I heard Steve on the phone talking to a recruiter. It was evident from the one sided conversation that I has listening too that there was a children’s book author living in the Navajo community, at the very site where we would visit and apply to work.

More shivers…”Steve I know who it is,” I said. And it was. Nancy Bo Flood lives around the corner from me. We critiques each other’s work and it turns out we have a lot more in common. But she is not me and I am not her…quite.