Peter O'Neil 

Peter O'Neil arrived in Bangem an engineer who had never stood at the front of a classroom, sent to teach

in a room with no glass in the windows. He expected to be useful for two years and go home.

Instead, three boys turned up at his door with a broom. A widow named Mami Elizabeth set a place for himat her fire, called him her child, and fed him five nights a week. A village decided the young American

teacher had been alone long enough, and quietly took him in.

On the day he left, O'Neil wrote home that there was no one in Bangem he would be dying to see again.

This is the story of how wrong he was.

Seabrook Press, 2026. Available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook.

https://www.amazon.com/Place-Set-Me-Cameroon-Unexpected/dp/B0H6NK3FFD/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

A warm, funny, deeply human memoir about the friendships that turn a foreign country into a home.

Peter O'Neil had lived and taught on four continents, and when people asked whether he would ever go to India, his answer was always the same: next lifetime. Then a job came open at an international school in New Delhi, and he went.

Chai & Chapati is the story of the two years that followed, and of the people who carried him through them. There are the five Kasana cousins, Punjabi men who fold a solitary American into their family without a second thought. There is the driver who reads the city for him, and another who dreams of a wedding he is still saving for. There is Krishan, reserved, brilliant, unforgettable, the deepest friendship of O'Neil's years abroad and the one he never learned to name. And there are the students, more than a classroom's worth of reasons to have come at all.

Across two years, O'Neil is taken to a village wedding in the Punjab, to temples high and humble, to the fire-lit banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, and into kitchens where he learns to make the two things he will carry home in his hands: masala chai and chapati. He writes about caste and inequality, about faith held lightly and held close, and about loving and being befriended as a gay man far from home, with the immersive warmth and clear eye of Peter Hessler's River Town and Kris Holloway's Monique and the Mango Rains. It is a travel-and-friendship memoir that happens to be told by a gay man: no coming-out arc, no agenda, only a life fully received in a place not his own.

Available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook..

https://www.amazon.com/Chai-Chapati-Years-Friendships-Carried/dp/B0H8H8SJ9X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pnMRdkS_q5EPgor-zcIZvCb8k0ZxIryHUxKw2S-kbC_qn01c4NcHMVrMQPeB7s9ieOX4qdwwHBcN_mqWyQ0BtPJuu2IH0Nkd2E36jPvMBfYt5rkyITPmnZjIZ_bRIhKe9FrH7jwmPr2Qdhj06zyTUll9926OdMCxBhrdywnXw7WReBbumUKqkzC5W1N1qboPT_x_V1CwIxMsAWu6eTD_7eGD6wshtYLCDga0r7bahVE.rKUOzxnOpMNocPKfxp1MGcqoMVBv0bfUjjcSarXxuxU&qid=1783887528&sr=1-1

Peter O'Neil grew up in Wilmette, Illinois. After college he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Bangem, a mountain village in Cameroon, where he found two things he had not expected: a vocation for teaching math, and the deep pleasure of befriending people whose lives looked nothing like his own. His teaching career has since taken him to international schools in Venezuela, Cairo, Paris, New Delhi, and Moscow. He now lives in Evanston, Illinois, the next town south of where he grew up.