From the Garden to the Glass House: An Undiplomatic Look at the United Nations (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781517500306)

Abdelkader Abbadi is a long-time participant in international affairs, working for the thirty years as a staff member at the United Nations Secretariat, and as a journalist for many publications, including Jeune Afrique. At five, he and the other fun-loving boys of his village were told by the French authorities that they must attend school. With an illiterate mother and a father who could barely read but not write, young Kader found school to be a strange activity. His parents supported him fully, and this was the beginning of his education, which culminated twenty-five years later with a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in 1958, Abbadi is a shining example of the program's mandate to foster international peace and cooperation through education. At the International House at Berkeley and at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, Abbadi has worked with others from many other countries, always with the goal of world peace. Married to a woman of Dutch descent, Abbadi today speaks four languages at home to his three children and eight grandchildren. At work, as a journalist, international staff and diplomat, he is fluent in French, Arabic, Spanish and English. He has learned how to greet the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in his native Korean. Today, Abbadi divides his time between New York City, where he reports on North African affairs and international matters, and Hillsdale, New York where he and his wife raise apples, pears, cherries and quinces in an orchard in the Berkshire Mountains that remind him of the Atlas range at home in Morocco.