RT @bread4theworld: Bread for the World’s President and CEO, @EugeneCho spoke with @NPR @MorningEdition and @UpFirst host @AMartinezLA abou…

RT @RickStevesEur: Pursue your passions on our Best of Munich, Salzburg & Vienna tour, an 8-day adventure that welcomes you to the gemütlic…

RT @SuptCheng_CIOB: AP Art History students from Humanities Prep had an unforgettable experience meeting @RickSteves at Union Square’s @bnb…

RT @Now_WhatPodcast: Travel writer @RickSteves once took a memorable trip from Istanbul to Kathmandu. He jumped off a moving train, got los…

RT @cbcradio: Rick Steves credits his transformative experience on the Hippie Trail for shaping his approach to travel. Now, the well-known…

RT @WaPoTravel: 4 big travel lessons from Rick Steves’s new book

RT @NatBCo: @washingtonpost For more lessons, here's our full story:

RT @NatBCo: In 1978, a 23 y.o. Rick Steves embarked on a 10-country journey from Europe to Nepal. He took meticulous notes of the trip in h…

RT @HachetteUS: 📚Hippie Trail by @RickSteves is out NOW! Be sure to grab a copy & check him out on his Hippie Trail Tour in a city near you…

RT @RickStevesEur: Join Francophile Steve Smith tonight on Monday Night Travel for a sun-soaked tour of the French Riviera! Explore Nice, M…

RT @RickStevesEur: Rick's upcoming book, "On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer," is almost here! Pr…

Dump Thy Neighbor? As our new president and his favorite broligarch move to dismantle US foreign aid in the name of making America “great again,” consider this: There are 8 billion people on this planet. About half of them live on less than $7 a day. Around 10% are in what the UN calls “extreme poverty” — trying to live on less than $2 a day. And 4% are Americans who live on an average of about $220 per day. Before January 21, when Trump froze virtually all foreign aid, the US allocated slightly less than 1% of its wealth to help the world’s poorest people. And for more than 60 years, that work has been done by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), whose goal is both self-serving and compassionate: to “further America's interests while improving lives in the developing world.” This weekend, Trump declared USAID is run by “liberals and lunatics” — and Elon Musk tweeted it was “time for it to die” as his crew took over the agency’s offices and demanded access to classified material. And today, with Musk crowing, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper,” we are learning that Marco Rubio is now in control of the agency. Trump was elected by the most conservative Christians in the USA. But all Christians, whether liberal or conservative, follow the teachings of Jesus Christ — and if you distill Jesus’s message into three words, it’s “love thy neighbor.” As a traveler, I’ve come to understand that if there is a God, then all people are children of their heavenly creator. Therefore, we are all brothers and sisters. And logically, proximity (what country you happen to live in) has nothing to do with “love thy neighbor.” But let’s just say the typical MAGA American Christian is more of a nationalist than a Christian (a.k.a. a “Christian Nationalist,”) and they care more about being rich and safe than actually loving thy neighbor. The president those Christian Nationalists helped elect, whose slogan is “Make America Great Again,” is in the process of dismantling humanitarian aid in the interest of saving tax dollars. But ironically, pulling out of this work will actually make America less safe and less great. Forgetting about any ethical or Christian-compassion dimension of foreign aid, ending these programs will make the Global South both more desperate and less stable — leaving a huge vacuum for China (which seems to understand the concept of “soft power” much better than MAGA Americans) to fill in these weakened countries. And to top it off, millions of people will no longer be providing a market for us to trade with — and will instead become refugees. As a traveler who has spent about three months a year overseas for 40 years, who has researched and produced a one-hour TV special called “Hunger and Hope: Lessons from Ethiopia and Guatemala,” and whose primary teaching and philanthropic goals have been to fight poverty at home and abroad, I’ve learned something very fundamental: Even if you’re only motivated by greed, if you know what’s good for you and your loved ones, you don’t want to be filthy rich in a desperately poor world. It’s just not a pretty picture. And if you really want to make America great, the best possible use of US tax dollars is to continue to dedicate less than 1% of the total federal budget to fighting global poverty — not in the name of Jesus, but in the name of a more stable and prosperous world where the USA is a strong leader. (And talk about a twofer…you get to love thy neighbor as well!) Concerned? Raise your voice!

RT @MyDesert: Rick Steves will be presenting two talks at the upcoming Rancho Mirage Writers Festival.

@EricArapRono Thanks for asking, Erick! Amazon and both ship to Kenya.

RT @KQEDForum: 🎧 Listen to the podcast! Travel writer and TV host Rick Steves spoke with Mina Kim about how foreign travel has changed ove…

@wesleycombs Not this year, sorry!

RT @tvsantabarbara: Would you like to have a private dinner with Rick Steves? Opal Restaurant is our latest community sponsor for An Evenin…

See you soon, Ohio!

RT @cancerhealthmag: Writer and TV host Rick Steves deals with a prostate cancer diagnosis at UW Medicine and offers hope to others. #Pros…