I went to Laos knowing I no longer wanted to work as an independent consultant in adult education and media. I saw the posting as a chance to begin to develop skills and a résumé as a writer, a role teachers had been encouraging since high school. Before leaving Virginia, I’d received assurance from the …

As we did everywhere, we shared our lives with other creatures in a garden that someone else had already started. Laos was a little different in that some of the creatures were not your basic pets, and the garden was already overflowing with abundance. 1991 March 16 Our family has been expanded by one. Exactly …

For years, I’d been operating with the philosophy that, as a consultant, I could focus on the beneficiaries of a project, working around the politics of bureaucracy and the challenge of team mates who were some combination of poorly prepared, racist and/or not focused on empowering participants to be effective in their own milieux. But …

Our final months in East Africa were as full as the first — safaris with guests, my ELCT film work, one last Little Theatre performance (as the leads in “Butterflies are Free”), plus the complicated and red-tape-full preparations for leaving any overseas post. All interspersed with the sadness of saying goodbye, in more ways than …

My work on the documentary film for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania proceeded throughout 1975. I travelled here and there, visiting sites where ELCT was engaged in health, support for women and youth, education and other projects. The plan was to write a script in English, from which the team could film and which …

While I was working on the ELCT film, I’d typically be away from home for 3-7 days, then back for days or even weeks, depending on the availability of hosts for my scouting visits, as well as an ELCT driver to take me to potential film sites if I couldn’t get there by rural bus. …

Let me turn, in this post, from our domestic to my professional life in East Africa. My participation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania film project entailed a lot of red tape with both ELCT and the Tanzanian government. One example of the latter was that any entity hiring a foreign national had to …

I was working for CBS in Los Angeles and sharing an apartment with WVU chum Bettina Altizer when the phone rang one day. Recent calls from men who wanted to inquire if I liked to “swing” had made us cautious. Bettina answered, listened for a few moments, put her hand over the receiver and said, …