This week, we will feature non-profits and organizations based in Montana with international engagement or operations. Guests will share their international perspectives, discussing the international dimensions of their work and its impact on our state.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86071487711
Meeting ID: 860 7148 7711

David Cates and his wife, Rosalie live in Missoula, and have three grown daughters, and a couple of grandchildren. As of June first, 2020, he is again the executive director of Missoula Medical Aid, a non-profit organization that provides public health and surgery services, and supports agricultural and economic development projects, in Honduras. He began with Missoula Medical Aid in 1998, and was an interpreter and team leader on more than 40 brigades to Honduras, until he stepped down from the director position in 2017. David has worked as a laborer, commercial fisherman, a para-legal, and a teacher of English, a sports reporter, a concessionaire at a classical repertory theater, a fishing guide, a taxi driver. He played professional basketball in Costa Rica and crewed on a banana ship in the Caribbean, taught writing in a Mexico City prison, lectured at the University of Guanajuato, and volunteered at a shelter for migrants in Oaxaca. David has completed travel assignments for the NY Times in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Spain.

He is also a fiction writer and poet, including five novels, and a chapbook of poetry. His novels are Hunger In America, a New York Times Notable Book, X Out Of Wonderland and Freeman Walker, both Montana Book Award Honor Books, and Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home and Tom Connor’s Gift, both of which won a Gold Medals for Best Fiction in the independent Book Publishers Book awards. His chapbook is “The Mysterious Location of Kyrgyzstan.” He's the winner of the 2010 Montana Arts Council’s Innovative Artist Award and his short story, “Rubber Boy,” (Glimmer Train 70) was a distinguished story in the 2010 Best American Short Stories. He’s published dozens of short stories and poems in literary magazines such as The New England Review, Willow Springs, Slice, and Glimmer Train, and his non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Outside Magazine, and other places.