About
Hi, I’m Colleen. I’m a writer, geography nerd, former expat, former refugee-resettlement worker, and the person responsible for turning international relations into a neighborhood association run by cats, tyrants, bureaucrats, and the occasional deeply confused superpower.
I studied geography, which is probably where this whole thing started. Geography is less about memorizing capitals than people think and much more about asking why countries, resources, borders, migration, trade, history, and human behavior keep colliding in extremely consequential ways. In other words: excellent training for watching the news and muttering, “Well, that was predictable.”
I later spent several years living abroad in India, Thailand, and Singapore. Living outside the United States changed the way I read world events. Countries stop feeling like abstract shapes on a map when you’ve bought groceries there, taken taxis there, sent your kid to school there, argued with bureaucracy there, gotten sick there, made friends there, and learned which food stall you’ll think about for the rest of your life.
I also worked in refugee resettlement, which gave me another perspective on geopolitics: the part where decisions made by governments, armies, and institutions eventually land in somebody’s actual living room. Foreign policy can sound very tidy from a podium. It is considerably less tidy when you meet the people who had to flee it.
Somewhere along the way, I also went to culinary school and massage school, because apparently I collect unrelated forms of education like other people collect refrigerator magnets.
The Global HOA grew out of all of that: geography, travel, lived experience, current events, pop culture, and a possibly unhealthy tendency to explain complicated systems through metaphors.
The comics are satire, not textbooks. I’m not pretending a six-panel comic can explain an entire war, alliance, sanctions regime, or regional power struggle. But sometimes a ridiculous analogy can make the underlying structure click.
If you leave understanding one thing a little better, or laughing while realizing that international diplomacy really does occasionally resemble an HOA meeting that has gone catastrophically off the rails, then the project is doing what I hoped it would do.
And if nothing else, there are cats.
