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“Where’s your office, amai (mother)?” the phone card vendor asks as I stride toward a shopping mall in eastern Zimbabwe, my laptop slung over my shoulder.[1] I stop to think for a second. Office? I don’t have one. The last time I worked in a real office was nearly 10 years ago at the headquarters of a news agency in Paris. Computers were sprinkled over desks like ungainly confetti, colleagues ordered “recasts” and “wraps” as coolly as if they were milkshakes, and the graceful Place de la Bourse was several floors below.[2] Before that, my office was the dark newsroom of the International Herald Tribune in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where, fresh out of university, I distributed photocopies of that day’s paper layout and dreamed of a swashbuckling future.[3] When in 2000 I met the man I’d marry just six months later, my life—and my subsequent offices—changed beyond recognition. As freelancers in Southern Africa, we learned to set up makeshift workrooms, my beau and I, in many places.[4] Like that dingy cafe on the Mozambican border.[5] It had lurid flowery lampshades and greasy toast but—joy of joys!—a large flat-screen TV showing CNN.[6] Or the living room of a flat we rented once. It had posters of dolphins on the walls, which were cardboard-thin: When I washed our linen in the bathtub, I could hear the answering slap-slap of my neighbor doing her own laundry a few inches from my nose.[7] We hung duvets round the stairwell to create a soundproof booth for my husband’s radio recordings.[8] | 
