Gregory Mose, The Long Road to Provence

 

92-143. Gregory Mose

SPEAKERS

Gregory Mose, Will Bachman,

 

 

Will Bachman  00:51

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report, conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to welcome today. Greg Mose, Greg, welcome to the show.

 

Gregory Mose  01:05

Hi, Will thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate being here.

 

Will Bachman  01:09

So Greg, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Gregory Mose  01:15

All right. Well, I think maybe actually, let’s start with the present in the sense that where I am now, I’m talking to you from AIX en Provence in South of France, where I am the Director of International Relations and a professor of international law at a small American university program called the American College of the Mediterranean. And I lead with that because it’s, it’s a great place to be, and I’m happy to be here. But to rewind a little bit as to how I got here, because it’s not, it was not a straight path, as I don’t think it’s been for any of us since, since graduation, but I was an English major. I was in Cabot house. I had my freshman year in mass Hall, so I had a nice, tight group of people at Harvard. And when I graduated, I knew, I knew that my parents wanted me to go to law school, and I knew that I did not want to go to graduate school for English literature as much as I loved it, because I saw what that looked like, and I didn’t want any part of that. And I wanted to see the world and do international relations kind of stuff. And an opportunity came up right after college to be a teaching fellow at Athens College in Athens, Greece, not Georgia. And that came about because two of my well actually three of my friends, one of which was a freshman year roommate in mass Hall, were students of students from Athens College, and we’ve had quite a few folks from Harvard graduate from there, including the current great Prime Minister, but and they did a teaching fellow program. So I went and I did a gap year as a teaching assistant in Athens and fell in love, not with a person, but with the place, and with, I think, just being abroad. But that only lasted a year, so I came back and went to law school at Duke, and struggled a little bit as I think most sane people do in their first year of law school, I was rescued by the fact that there was a there was a cute Dutch woman there who I fell for and ended up marrying. And we are still married, and that kind of that transformed my, not just my law career, obviously, but, but the path of my life, so my interest was in international public international law. And this was, you know, we’re talking 1993 to 96 this was the time that Yugoslavia was tearing itself apart. And I got involved in some research projects for what was being discussed in terms of creating war crimes tribunal. And I was fascinated by this, and I wanted to get involved in something like that. And like many, like many people in law school or who study international relations, I said, I want to work for the UN. And it was a difficult time to find a job for the UN, but I actually managed to get a two year contract. And it was, you know, and I wanted to go to Yugoslavia, someplace like that. There was one post. Most available, and it was for earmarks for an American part of what they call a JPO Junior professional Officer Program. And there was a spot that had been open for a while that no one was taking. I thought, that’s crazy. Doesn’t everyone want this? They said, well, the only catch is, it’s in Conakry Guinea now I didn’t know anything about I had to go look at a map, to be honest. Guinea is West Africa. It’s just south of Senegal. More relevantly, to my future, is just north of Sierra Leone and Liberia, and it was with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which was right spot on for what I wanted to do. They needed a junior legal officer. So I said to my girlfriend, hold on tight. I’ll see you in two years. We communicated. Obviously she was brave enough to visit me there, but I went off and I did my two year stint in Conakry. Now, Conakry is not the most beautiful capital I’ve ever been to. It was essentially a shanty town. There was open sewage. I lived in an apartment in a building in the fancy part of town, but I was still on a dirt road. It was Guinea. Was the North Korea of West Africa. It had a on independence. They had a kind of a Maoist regime that rejected everybody and everything, and were very, very isolated. So it was a very paranoid place. For a long time, it had gotten better. When I was there, I loved it. The people were wonderful. The food was not necessarily to my taste. I’ll say that there’s a lot of kind of smoked fish. That was not really my thing, but fine. I grew to find what I liked, peanut peanuts, chicken and peanut sauce, amazing che Bucha and all the great West African dishes we could get there. And I worked with refugees there for two years. And was able to travel, which was fantastic. I was able to travel through Mali. I went to Timbuktu. I got to spend time in Dakar, Freetown, Abidjan, and up country in Guinea. I spent a fair amount of time as well doing reconnaissance missions in little villages and great stuff. The the downside of it was, about six months into this, my stint there, we were planning on repatriating the Sierra Leonean refugees. Their civil war had calmed down that had elections. If you’ve seen Blood Diamond, you know that it did not stay calm very long. In 19 spring of 1997 there was a coup d’etat and there was renewed violence, and so I spent the rest of my time through the end of 98 helping refugees fleeing from that conflict. So that was really a kind of a marking professional and personal experience for me. Obviously, it was, it was horrific, horrific to be honestly, to be honest. But this was a period of the war that was being fought with machetes, and so I spent much of my time dealing with people who had been victims of mutilation. So this wasn’t the law degree I imagined or that my parents had imagined for me, but it was it was powerful and it was passionate, and I think I did some good. I helped resettle some people to the United States who sadly, wouldn’t be able to be resettled today because of policy changes, obviously. But yeah, it was an amazing time, and it was a two year contract, at the end of which I came home with, you know, underweight having survived three bouts of malaria and bit of PTSD. Although I didn’t have the word then, I didn’t know what it was. I just knew that I couldn’t get warm. When I joined my fiance in London, where she had gotten a job. You know, I was showed up in November. November in London is cold after two years in the tropics. But anyway, so it took me a little while to recover, and I managed to get the job I could get, which was an amazing job. As well. It was in corporate law. There were international firms in London at that time, we’re talking now, 1999 who were building us practices within their firms. They were doing, they were doing IPOs that involved selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange, and they needed new US lawyers, and I was one of those, and they needed young people to hire in their securities practices. So I spent the next three years as a securities lawyer at Freshfields, Brookhouse, Deringer, big international firm based in London. And so that was that was a radical change, and I had some great cuff links and fancy ties, and ate a lot of really expensive lunches that other people paid for, and I did some securities law, which I didn’t have my heart in. So we got married, and we had our first child, Sebastian, in 2002

 

Gregory Mose  11:15

and that’s when we looked around us and we saw our our colleagues who had children and they had nannies, and they had evening nannies, and then they had weekend nannies and they and we thought, That’s not how we want to raise our kid. And I said to my wife, you know what? I hate my job more than you hate yours. I loved my colleagues. Incidentally, I don’t want my, you know, anyone to listen to this and think it was a terrible place. It was a wonderful place. I’m still in touch with some people from there, but I was just wrong for it, and I knew it. So I said, You know what? I want to I want to write my novel and raise our son, at least for a little while. And so that’s what we did. So I spent the next few years as a stay at home dad. I started my novel. It turns out to be really hard to finish a novel when you have a baby. Who knew, right? So, so I was a stay at home dad in London, and I pushed Sebastian and his little buggy around Queen’s Park, and got awkward looks from the from the moms pushing their babies around, because there weren’t a whole lot of dads doing it at the time. And we realized we’d solve half of our problem because my wife was still working. She was at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which was an amazing job. She was in the house counsel there. And she was also, you know, from Luke law. But she wasn’t seeing our kid or me, you know, she was working evening. She was working weekends. She was traveling for work, she was developing health problems. And we said, well, let’s we need to solve the other half. But what do we do? And so we thought of trying to downsize and move to the English countryside. Or what were we going to do, you know, get a little more remote. And brought that time we’d started, we’d gone on a couple of holidays in the SouthWest of France and the Dordogne region, fell in love with it, and at some point we said, You know what, we need to do something radical. Screw it. And so we we’d, We’d lived very frugally. We weren’t like big spenders, and we poured all our money into a house in northwest London, right around the corner from where Zadie Smith now lives, apparently. And we did it up. And so at the end of our time there, this was 2005 we sold the house pretty well. You know, it was a, it was a rough neighborhood when we moved in, and it was we had a couple of gastro pubs by the time we left. So we did all right, and we bought this was crazy and stupid and wrong. Don’t do this at home. But we bought a medieval farmhouse and some land in the SouthWest of France, about three kilometers from a little village called moncabria. You can look it up. It has a wonderful has a wonderful little church with a a triangular bell tower.

 

Will Bachman  14:37

Alright, wait, if we’re going to look it up, you gotta tell us how

 

Gregory Mose  14:40

to spell this, alright, M O, N, T, C, A, B, R, I, E, R, and it’s in a region called the lot, which is right next to the Dordogne. It’s in the southwest. It’s two hours from everything, all right, two hours from Toulouse, two hours from Bordeaux. So if you’re looking at wine regions, and some of our you know classmates have probably had a glass of wine or two in their lives, it’s the cow or wine region, very tannic. Lot of Malbec. So this village had about 30 full time residents in the village itself, but we lived in most people lived in farmhouses outside it, and they had a two room schoolhouse, a bakery and a mayor’s office, and that was it. And then there were nearby villages with some restaurants, and it’s a touristy area, so, you know, there were people coming through in summer, and we are on our property. It had used to be a country house hotel, and we so we had out buildings that we turned into holiday cottages. They had already been turned into that, but we kind of refurbished them, redid them. And so we had three holiday cottages that we rented out in summers to families with small children, just like us. So I built a playing playground. We had a swimming pool. We had a beautiful field. The place is still there. Another woman owns it now, but it’s called domain de la dolce, as in La Dolce Vita, and you can look it up, they’re still doing pretty much the same thing we did. Haven’t really changed much of anything since we were there. And we did that for seven years. So our son was three when we arrived there. I didn’t speak a word of French, so we threw him into the Ecole maternal and said, learn French. And he did, and became one of the village kids. And our, our nearest neighbor, about a kilometer up the road, was a, was a, you know, literally, a four foot tall widow with sheep and ducks and chickens, and the sheep would occasionally God. The sheep would occasionally escape and come into our field and graze a little bit. And so I learned how to drive a small herd of sheep back into their pen. You can’t lead them. It turns out, another thing I didn’t realize you are. You can’t, um, you can’t push them from behind, which is what I thought, you have to walk in front with a bucket and tap on the bucket. They think you’ve got food in it. So that’s a, you know, pro tip. So, and actually, I can, I can, I can email you the I’ve got a link. I kept a blog at the time that I think is still online for those years. But where are we now? We are having

 

Will Bachman  17:55

domain those the adults, and I think I found it here on on Google Maps, and looking at the Yeah, looks very nice. It’s

 

Gregory Mose  18:07

a, it’s a. This is one of the most beautiful corners of the world, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a lot of medieval hilltop villages, castles, forests. You know, we’d have deer in our backyard, cheap wine. We used to collect mushrooms in our you know, we had a little bit of woodland, and we, we’d go gathering mushrooms, and it was crazy. I learned how to use a chainsaw. They didn’t teach me that at Harvard. I certainly didn’t learn that growing up in the San Fernando Valley, but so chopped firewood and did this thing, and I finished my novel that’s called stunt road. It’s still, it’s out of print, I think, but it’s still available on on Kindle.

 

Will Bachman  18:56

I’m sorry, say the name again, slower stunt road. Stunt road. Okay,

 

Gregory Mose  19:03

it’s not terrible. That’s That’s all the endorsement I’m going to give for myself, but, but our son started getting older, and we started getting fed up with clean other people’s toilets, for a start, because that’s what you do if you rent out holiday cottages. But it was a little bit too rural. We we overdid it.

 

Will Bachman  19:30

Okay? Just a minute here. Just a minute. Yeah, all right. Greg is being a bit, you know, overly humble, right on this show, no humility. I just looked it up. And Amazon, by the way, the book is available for Prime delivery, and apparently it was a gold medal winner in the 2010 independent publisher Book Awards. So, yeah, it was, you

 

Gregory Mose  19:53

know, independently published. I mean, I don’t know how much the competition is there, but it was good. I mean, I think it’s a good book. I think people. Should read it. It’s, you know what? It’s. It feels dated now, and I’ll tell you why it was I, you know, I finally published it in 2009 and I’ve been these were the earlier days of the internet. And I imagined sinister. This makes it sound goofy, but I imagined how someone could, you know, cynically, put the Internet to sinister uses to brainwash people via a cult that would never which is crazy science fiction stuff, I know, I know, but, but what’s funny is what I thought sounded sinister back when I was writing, it all sounds a little bit quaint Now

 

Will Bachman  20:43

Frank Mundo from LA books examiner called it a whirlwind tour at once hilarious and chilling through a modern American landscape of spiritual yearning, intellectual laziness and corporate greed from the former securities attorney. So

 

Gregory Mose  20:59

yeah, and I think that that kind of captures it. It’s, I mean, above all, it’s meant to be a fun book. It’s, it’s not, it’s not a heavy book. It’s a It’s fun, but it was exploring some ideas that seemed important at the time, and I think turned out to be more important and darker than I even give him credit for.

 

Will Bachman  21:21

And it is available instantly on Kindle, so we will link in the show.

 

Gregory Mose  21:26

Thank you. I appreciate it. I always appreciate I I think they probably have physical copies out there as well somewhere. But

 

Will Bachman  21:34

yeah, it says a prime delivery on paper book. You can get it in two days. Maybe that’s the instant printing thing, but they, yeah, I think so it is available. Okay, so you are, you’re hanging out in, like a medieval playing, kind of a BNB host, it sounds like, yeah, incredible, you know, year in Provence, kind of a, you know, medieval village with your duck wife. And during these seven years, are you guys doing kind of legal stuff on the side to stay current or Absolutely not? Absolutely not. I totally forgot everything about the law cheap I would not even watch.

 

Gregory Mose  22:18

I think it was, I think it was, I think it was about that time that, or No, a little bit after that, maybe that the program, TV show, suits, came out. I would not watch

 

Will Bachman  22:26

it, not even doing your continuing legal education, nothing,

 

Gregory Mose  22:31

even the law. We were done just

 

Will Bachman  22:35

full time innkeepers. We’re

 

Gregory Mose  22:37

sheep herders. We had a great vegetable garden, but it was too remote, both for us and for our son when he was, you know, 567, years old, this was a dream come true. This was, you know, in many ways, this was wonderful. What a childhood we saw what that would look like when he became a teenager. And it’s not as idyllic, you know, you’re you’re one of a handful lost looking kids with their little motorcycles and cigarettes in the village square who are looking for trouble because they don’t know what else to do because they’re bored. And we figured he needed better. He needed more. We needed more. And we started looking around for what we could do now was we figured this out about 2000 you know, seven already. We thought we should maybe think, you know, this was great for a few years, but then the markets crashed. So we hung, hung on a bit longer than, maybe than we’d planned, but it when the end in 2012 we sold the place, and we had discovered AIX en Provence as a compromise, and Sophia, my wife had a opportunity to to become property finder. So a buyer’s agent, essentially, people who are looking for house to buy, you know, a real estate agents representing the seller, typically and but she would come in a buyer would hire and say, find me. Don’t just try and sell me a house. Find me the right house. And so she joined a network to do that, because we needed to do something to live. And we chose X because it was a beautiful town. It was near Marseille, so there’s a big city nearby, but it’s a, it’s, again, it’s absolutely stunning town. It’s the it’s the city of Cezanne. It’s the Year of Cezanne in X at the moment. And all those pictures of the Mont Savic toile that Cezanne painted, well, we look at it every day, so it’s a wonderful place to be. And there was an international school for our song. Hmm. So we said, okay, we can put him in an international school. So if he wants to go to college in the States or somewhere else, you know, he will be able to write essays in English, and he’ll have, he’ll have those skills and be prepared. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. So, when we were looking at the school, there was a vacancy for someone to teach a course called theory of knowledge, which is a critical thinking class for the International Baccalaureate program, great program. And I said, I could do that. I’m a lawyer. And I interviewed, and they said, Wait, we see that you were an English major. You were Harvard English major. You could teach English, right? English literature, sure. So, you know, I took Helen vendors, fresh, you know, freshman class. And, you know, I can do this. And so I became a high school teacher, and I did that for 10 years. And about halfway through that process, yeah, I realized pretty quickly that I loved teaching, absolutely loved being in a classroom. I had the privilege of teaching my own son, which we tried to avoid, but were not able to. It was a small school. He was okay with it. He survived. But I loved being in the classroom, but I kind of thought, you know, high school Okay. Wouldn’t it be cool to teach at university. And then a friend of mine led me in on the dirty little secret, which is that French universities are really, really affordable. I had gotten my French citizenship by this point, and I realized that with my JD, I had enough, you know, I had enough diplomas that I could apply straight to a PhD program. Now, in French universities, you have to have a PhD to become a professor to get a job. And so I said, Okay, I have to have a PhD. Then if I want to, if I would want to try to do this. And it turned out that the tuition, you know, high school teacher doesn’t make a lot of money, but the tuition for the PhD that I would do on the side while working was about 500 bucks a year. Welcome to socialism.

 

Speaker 1  27:46

All right,

 

Gregory Mose  27:47

I you know that the system here is great. I’ve got a I’ve got a PhD and a titanium hip, and paid almost nothing for either of them. So so once I realized that I enrolled, and every summer, I worked on my dissertation. So in 2021 I finally finished my dissertation, defended it, published the results, and what I guess is my second book with Routledge and got my got my PhD, and that opened me up to more possibilities. So I’d been adjuncting a little bit at science po X and University of ex Marseille. My PhD was in law. I did a I did a dissertation on religious freedom, comparing the US courts and the European Court of Human Rights. And then I suddenly discovered that there was a little American college program in X, mostly doing study abroad. So I said I could do, you know, maybe I could teach a course there. And I did. And then I taught two. And then I thought three and for the past two years now, I’ve been employed full time, and I run the master’s program in international relations, and teach a few classes and do some pretty annoying admin work on the side, and kind of love my job. And I think that I’m sure I’ve skipped something I didn’t talk about our dog, who passed away a couple of years ago. My son’s now at University of Rotterdam, getting his master’s in economics, and my wife is now a full time therapist slash coach, working with internal family systems. That catches you up. That’s it.

 

Will Bachman  29:43

I think, Wow. What a winding path you guys have taken and sort of bold, bold bets and bold moves.

 

Gregory Mose  29:52

There were, yeah, there were one or two moves that were maybe looking before leaping, but they’ve come out. All right, we were happy with where we’ve ended up. Let’s say that.

 

Will Bachman  30:06

So I imagine, you know, especially as the host of this Airbnb for a while, and not Airbnb, but this guest house, and what, what would you say is the reality of living in Southern France? How is that different from what people think it’s like?

 

Gregory Mose  30:37

Yeah, there are a couple of components to that. I would say. One is, you know, where we were living was very rural. So there’s, there’s the question of, you know, being a new level, as they call it, sort of a Neo, a NEO rural person, moving to the countryside. And then there’s the the southern France thing. Now, living in France, living, you know, doing the year in Provence, or whatever. I think one of the big things that’s hard to get used to is that France, it’s a radically different culture here, in ways that are not always obvious or expected, and it takes a while to get used to. It’s not an easy country to integrate in. I would say that. And I say that having lived now almost 13 years here in AIX and 20 in France, a lot of people come stay for a few years and go and have a very hard time integrating. And the fact is, it is hard, not because the French are unfriendly. They’re actually very warm, but they’re also very private. Their weekends are spent with family, especially if you’re here, not in Paris, but if you’re in a more rural environment, you know, weekends are spent with with grandma and the cousins, and they not that easy about inviting you into that so and you run across little things that make it hard. Very often down here, you know you’ll meet someone at a party or in a work thing or whatever, and you’ll say, hi, you know what my name is, Greg. I mean, that’s that’s normal for us. And you’ll get Hi, and you think, are you just being a jerk? They’re not there. It’s just not in their socialization. To just give you their name. You got to kind of earn that name, which seems crazy. But by the same token, there’s a warmth here that we lack, and I think you see that most in the Bonjour, right? That’s saying, Hello, bonjour, good day. If you walk into a shop here, we’re talking a small shop. I’m not talking supermarket, but you walk into, you walk into a pharmacy. When you make eye contact or see someone who works there, you say Bonjour, and they say Bonjour. If you go up to a counter to ask for something or to pay, you come to the cash register to pay, you don’t just plunk things down. You say, Bucha, and they say, bonjour. And if you don’t, you’re a jerk, and they’re gonna, you know, they’re gonna be cold. So this is true with a when a waiter comes to you at a restaurant, right? Bucha, Bucha, if you just say, Hey, can I have a coke? I mean, that’s, I’m not saying they’re going to spit in it, but you are being anti social, and it’s a very hard thing to get used to, but once you’re used to it, it’s wonderful. And it’s wonderful, because you realize that this reinforces a tradition among people of treating each other as equals and treating each other with respect. There’s a dignity to it that have really grown to love. You know, before I click into my role as you know, I am the customer, and you are the the server, which you know we do in America, it’s we are both equal human beings, and my vote counts as much as you do, and my ancestors fought in the revolution just like yours, and and we are equals above all. And then we can get into Okay, yeah, but I’ve got this job and I’m supposed to go bring you your martini. I think that’s cool. And I think there’s something in that that we’ve lost in the US, so that takes some adjusting. And I watch my students every semester we get a drop of Study Abroad. Students, and I watch them all adjust to it, and it takes a little while, but, but it’s cool. We also say thank you and goodbye. In addition to Hello, we say thank you and goodbye. Like to the bus driver, which, which, which gives me the giggles every time. I will not stop finding it funny. But again, I like it, you know. So every time the bus opens at another stop, I’m lucky enough to live in a little village slash suburb of x, about to 10 minute bus ride to drops me at work. And so I get to I get to be smug and take public transport and feel virtuous about it, which I having grown up in. LA, I love but every time someone says, off the bus, merci, over

 

Will Bachman  35:49

every time. So there’s so many parts of your story that I’d love to explore. One of them that just stood out to me was you mentioned that when you you had some you called it after the fact, you know, PTSD, after you left the the job helping with with refugees. And you said something when you got to London, you had trouble getting warm. Could you just talk a little bit about that and about what it was like to kind of process that experience you had?

 

Gregory Mose  36:19

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was, you know, I arrived end of November, mid November, somewhere, end of November, 1998 and my well then fiance had taken an apartment in North London, and I didn’t have a job yet. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I just knew I want, we wanted to be together, and I’d find a way. And you know, the the pay at UNHCR was decent. I had some money, and she was making good money. So we had this luxury, of course, and I was just literally, physically cold. You know, it’s, I mean, London, you know, wasn’t snowing, but it was, it was chilly, but I had been at, you know, an an ambient, whatever. It’s always the same temperature in Conakry. What is it now? In it’s like, you know, 28 degrees or something Celsius, and, you know, upper 80s, I guess, Fahrenheit, and humid, you know, it’s a womb like place. So when I got off the airport in Conakry, you know, you have to gasp for breath because the air is about five times as thick as you’re used to just from the tropical it’s a tropical thing, you know, and you get sort of used to it, but your body gets used to that. And so just being in the cold and the damp and the wind of London, I thought it was that, but I also was, was massively underweight. I’d, I had, yeah, three times come down with malaria. It’s not the kind that sticks with you, like, once it’s done, it’s done, but it’s terrible. It’s like, bad COVID. No, and I had been, I was exhausted from the work, obviously, because we’d had various, you know, influxes of refugees at various points when there was renewed violence in Freetown, people would either hop on, you know, trucks to try to get over the border, or they get in fishing canoes, and they show up at the little fishing ports in Conakry. And as the low man on the protection totem pole, I’m the one who had to kind of quickly show up there to make sure the police didn’t push them back into the water and say, go home. So there was a, there was an ambient stress level there. So I just came back rake thin. I was just really skinny. I’d been sick, been traveling. I’d been, you know, not always had adequate access to food. One of my bouts of malaria was up in the in the the forest region. We were doing a census, a refugee census, which was great fun until I got sick, and I spent three days in a little in a room full of bugs with not much to eat, except we picked up a bunch of mangoes and avocados. It was, it was heaven for mangoes. Incidentally, go to Guinea for mangoes. I had mangoes and avocados, um, French baguette bread, and you know that, that little processed cheese, laughing cow, I had some of that. And every once in a while, someone would come and bring me some food. There was a little hotel, and they cooked a chicken at some point. But. Yeah, like, I just, I was skinny, so when we got to London, I just, I literally would, would stay under the, you know, the covers a bed, because I just couldn’t get warm. And that really, for the first couple months, you know, I’d venture out, but I was wearing like, three sweaters, and would crawl then under the duvet again and drink lots of tea. And I just somehow thought, yeah, that was a pretty that was a pretty awful experience. It’s, it’s good to be home. And then at some point I remember, and it still affects me to remember it, but we had a dispute. We were moving out of one apartment into another, and this was before we got in our house. But we had a dispute with the with the landlord, and she was, you know, really difficult about something. And that evening, I sat down on the sofa, and I lost it. I lost it. I just started sobbing and and I just started out pouring all the the hideous things I’d seen that I hadn’t talked about. And so that was really cathartic. It was, it was, it was a good moment. And I was able, then to kind of collect some of my thoughts. But there are, you know, there are stories from that. There are moments of that, that I teach a course now on armed conflict, and I bring in a lot of my experiences from that. That’s what makes it a, I won’t say a fun course. It’s, you know, I teach all the depressing stuff, genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, refugees, and I link it all to armed conflict. And I often bring up anecdotes from my time there. But I still know there are, there are a few anecdotes that I sometimes try to tell, and I have a hard time. I have a hard time getting through it. You know, you’re sometimes stuff that’s not even that obvious. We were chasing a group of orphans around at one point. There was a when, when Freetown fell to the rebels, people fled any way they could. And there were all sorts of people up to all sorts of things in Freetown, including there was a young American woman who showed up with about 20 something little black children and said, I’m bringing these to the states, please. Can you give me travel documents? And I, you know, I said, Are you on crack? No, I what I but what I said was okay. She said, Look, I’m an orphanage. We have an NGO. We’ve lost all our papers. These people have these kids, have families ready to adopt them in the US. We just need un travel documents so we can travel. And I said, Well, okay, we can work with you on this. But I mean, we need to know who these kids are, right? So you need to kind of hang around and keep in touch, and we have to find a way to get some papers or talk to the embassy. Let’s see what we can do. And she saw I wasn’t going to help her, and so she vanished with the kids. And so a colleague and I had to kind of drive around all over Conakry, literally in the neighborhoods where Sierra Leoneans were living, and say, have you seen a you seen a white lady with dreads follow, followed by a whole bunch of early onion children, you know, stuff like and then the the US Embassy intervened, because I guess somebody knew somebody, and they said, back off. And I don’t know what happened to those children, but the story was that a prominent politician was going to adopt one of them and cleared the way. So we were told from we were told to back off. That story gets to me every time I tell it.

 

Will Bachman  44:15

Man, that’s like your second novel, right there. Yes, seriously,

 

Gregory Mose  44:20

I tried to write a second novel about it, actually, um, and in the end, I stalled 50 or 60 pages in, there was something not quite right about it. Instead of time, I was like, Do we really need a another white guy writing a book about what he did in Africa during a civil war? Probably not, you know, the movie Blood Diamond came out, and that was really that place and time, you know, and it told a lot of that story. And so I put it in a drawer, and maybe I’ll pull it out again one of these days, but when I’m more clear headed about it. But I. Um, but yeah, dealing with these, sorry, go ahead,

 

Will Bachman  45:05

let’s turn back the clock. Tell me about any courses or professors or activities that you were involved in at Harvard that continue to resonate with you.

 

Gregory Mose  45:15

God, yeah, well, first year English, with Helen Vendler was a wonderful, beautiful, moving experience, and she was a wonderful, kind woman. I asked her out to lunch once, because I heard you could do that. And you know what she said, Yes, and I had lunch with her. I remember it to this day because it was just, it was a big name professors, act of kindness to a really awkward freshman, and especially as a professor. Now I think of that often Burris Young, who was he was the, what was the Associate Dean of freshmen at the time, and he lived in mass Hall. And he was the proctor of mass hall when we lived there that first year. And he was an art he’d been an archeologist, right? And Burris, you know, was, was legendary on campus at the time, if you if you were lucky enough to cross paths with him, and so he would invite us to tea sometimes in his in his little apartment downstairs on just above what was Derek box office, and his whole apartment was was full of archeological artifacts, which probably isn’t okay, but it was amazing. You know, I’d say, pull out something. Say, Hey, you know what this is? Guess, if you can guess what it is, and it turned out to be a medieval stirrup of from a horse that that made my first year at Harvard a kind of magic that you could you’d have a hard time inventing. And, you know, I was coming from LA, I was I, I completely idealized Harvard. Neither of my parents graduated from college. You know, they were self made people my, you know, both sides of my family were, you know, my mom’s parents, or my mom’s father was a day laborer in Kentucky, and you know this, this whole college thing was new to our family, and to get to that place, and then to be in that building, mass Hall, and to be having tea with this archeologist, to me, was was unbelievable, just unbelievable. And, yeah, I had a wonderful next few years in Cabot house. But the thing that really, I think that that first year and Burris and our group in mass Hall, you’ve already interviewed Andreas stavropoulos, who was part of that gang, but don’t know if you’ve interviewed Beth Novak yet, but you should. She’s amazing. They’re all amazing people. But that’s what sticks with me, and that’s what I’ll still carry with me.

 

Will Bachman  48:12

Greg, where can listeners find you online, any kind of faculty bio or I’m

 

Gregory Mose  48:18

easiest to find on LinkedIn. Honestly, I don’t have, like, a fancy website or anything anymore. I don’t really do Facebook anymore, because it just seems kind of silly. But Gregory Mose, I’m on LinkedIn. I’d love to link with anyone out there, classmates or not,

 

Will Bachman  48:39

all right, so we will include that link in the show notes. And you didn’t offer, but I’ll offer on your behalf. You’re going to Southern France. We have a classmate there.

 

Gregory Mose  48:49

There is a there is a glass of rose, a waiting for you. And you know, a tour of the the very small ACM campus, such as it is. We’re right across from the cathedral. It’s golden. Come, have a Come, have a coffee. Come, have a rose. I’d love to talk.

 

Will Bachman  49:02

Thank you, Greg, thank you for joining today. Thanks so much. Will this is a pleasure. You.