Chapter 1: Teaching

CHAPTER ONE: A MEMOIR

For a New Year's resolution in 2019 I vowed to write two hundred words a day. By June 1st I hadn’t written word one.

I have a certain reverence for New Year’s resolutions. I think they have saved me pain and helped my influence on the world. When I was younger (20s and 30s), I vowed to be completely sober one week every month. I would start the first week of each month and most months I could squeeze in a  whole week without alcohol by the end of months with thirty one days. For several years since retirement I have vowed to work on my core every day. I'm pretty sure that has helped me cut down on back pain. A couple years ago I resolved to fertilize the plants I care about every month. They all seem much happier since I started this; even if, I don't get to them all every month.

I think part of my writer's block was because I was not sure what to write. Then I thought, write what you know ... a memoir. Or something that approximates what I think happened in my life. Someday I might want someone to show me these symbols that hopefully I'll be able to remember as letters and how they relate to words and understand this is what I did in my life.

That was my first two hundred words. I'm on my way.

Writing is not something I enjoy. Over the course of my career I wrote a lot. As a teacher there were letters to parents, reports, evaluations, comments on student work, ... As a school administrator there were all those things at least doubled except the comments on student work. You gave oral feedback, but nothing compared to what good teachers do. I knew administrators who wrote comments on every students' report cards. When I ran a small school in Africa, I tried, but by the end of my administrative career I had four hundred twenty five students on two campuses and technology was close to making the hand-written comment on a report card obsolete.

I loved teaching. The process of leading and watching a young mind engage with a question and search for a logical way to answer it was invigorating. It was a job that I always claimed was as interesting as you wanted to make it. I wish I could say I was successful everyday, but I tried.

 While working as a science teacher in Caracas my classroom was shut down for a day while I searched for a snake that had escaped from a student made cage. The cage contest had been a project put together with their homeroom teacher and the math teacher. I think the art teacher also let them work on the cages. Water and food had to be  delivered and removed from the cage without danger of being bitten. The cage had a system to move the snake from side to side, so the cage could be cleaned. Unfortunately we did not consider that a python could simply lift a 20 lb lid off the top of a cage. I found the snake later in the week when I took the cover off the Apple IIE computer in the room. I didn't need any coffee that morning.

School administration was never a love. It was a career challenge. Within weeks of choosing to be a teacher, my career goal was to run a school. After being the on-site head of 3 schools, that was enough. Hurricane Katrina flooded the facilities of the last school I directed. The bloom was off the administrative rose long before the levees broke. 

The administrative reality of near-constant consideration of the financial well-being of the school almost overwhelms your primary concerns for the safety, health, and education of the student. 

I had the pleasure to be head of school for Ashgabat International School in 2002-03. Ashgabat is in Turkmenistan. It borders Iran and Afghanistan to its south. This was during the USA invasion of Iraq. The school had a few years prior been granted by the Turkmen government five hectares to use as a campus. One hectare is roughly two and a half acres. During my tenure concerns over possible attacks against the school and children increased. We had some children of US embassy personnel. We were not a big school, about seventy students. Several parents were asking what we were doing to keep the children safe from extremists’s attacks. We had plans to evacuate for fire and earthquake. We developed a plan for an evacuation to the US Embassy compound in case of attack. It involved sneaking the students out the back while I played like I was a school security guard and in my bad Russian explain to attackers that it was a school holiday.

The plan did not settle parents' concerns. To put a secure fence around a hectare of hilly terrain was not economically viable and would not have really stopped a determined extremist. I needed something visible. I hired a guard to watch the school entrance during school hours. The guard was the twenty one year old son of Ivan, the school driver/messenger/black market money changer/ procurer. Ivan's son spent a lot of his day asleep in the school's car by the entrance. Often we would hear a parent honking their horn from the gate. We would look down the drive to see Ivan's son rubbing his sleepy eyes as he stretched on his way to open the gate. But it was visible "security" and everyone was relatively happy.

Two weeks before I was to leave Turkmenistan one of the night guards asked for a private meeting in my office. I called my secretary to help translate. The recently married Guncha came in and listened to the guard's complaint, smiled slightly, and then translated that the guard was reporting that another guard was bringing prostitutes into the school at night and having sex on the sofa in my office. We called the offending guard to come to the school. When he arrived we had him and his accuser come into the office. The offending guard, a 60 year-old former university professor from Russia who lost his job when the post-Soviet leader of the country demanded all university professors speak only Turkmen, pleaded his defense to Guncha. She smiled and turned to me, "He said the other guard is doing it, too."

After getting a promise from both guards that it would never happen again, I pondered if I could justify the expense of a new sofa.

The names of students taught in a variety of jobs over thirty four years jumble in my head like bingo balls that don't start with B, I, N, G, or O. I recognize the number, but I don't know where it goes on the card. Two students from Ashgabat, Dovlet & Murat, achieved immortality in my mind when we left Turkmenistan.

Flying out of Ashgabat could be a struggle. The soldiers on duty were intent on finding people trying to smuggle out Turkmen carpets. When we were leaving Ashgabat for the last time we had carpets. They were all duly stamped and registered, but everything had to be unpacked and inspected a couple of times as we moved through the airport. We had almost passed the last inspection when we were stopped and told to wait. 

We nervously waited expecting some official to come and at best take our carpets away and at worst put one or both of us in Turkmen prison for some transgression against Turkmen carpet laws. We stood bewildered watching the time of our flight departure rapidly approach. Then Ivan, the school driver, was led into the room with Dovlet and Murat behind him. The two young men were 16 years old and the oldest students in the school. They both came to the school speaking very little English and both soared in our small multi-grade classrooms becoming positive student leaders. They were led over to us and sheepishly handed us presents, gave us hugs, and wished us well. The presents were two necklaces that had a metal beaded container designed for holding choice readings from the Koran.

My wife, Carolyn, and I left Ashgabat for jobs as the directors of a charter school in New Orleans, the International School of Louisiana. The job happened because of one of my first students. In 1976 I started my teaching career as a fifth grade teacher at a private school, Isidore Newman, in New Orleans. During the school year we would write a movie script and the last week of school we filmed the movie on a super 8 camera. Over the summer I would splice and edit the film and when school started again I would have my old class come to my classroom one afternoon after school for popcorn and to watch the movie. One of these fifth graders, Catherine, went on to a career in film and television among other things.

Catherine kept in touch and in pre-email days this was not so easy. She tracked me down where I was teaching in Ecuador to send me an invitation to her high school graduation. I got an invitation to her college graduation and as email embraced the world keeping in touch became easier. During the Christmas vacation the year I was in Turkmenistan, Catherine arranged with other former students to have a party in New Orleans and show the movies we made during my years at Newman. 

At the party was Shelley, a former fifth grade student who among other things had gone on to be a founder of a language immersion charter school, the International School of Louisiana (ISL). The school was about to start a search for a director and Shelly asked if I would be interested. The opportunity to return to my birthplace and attempt to make a positive difference in the public education system that had gained infamy for its failings was irresistible. Fate had waved her wand and our bizarrely comfortable life in Turkmenistan would soon vanish, and we started the hardest job we would ever love.

ISL was kindergarten through third grade with French and Spanish sections when we began. About eighty students entered each year, forty into a Spanish and forty into a French program. These were for the most part native English speaking children from predominantly Orleans Parish,  sixty percent or more had to qualify for free or reduced lunch. Their parents were electing to have their children's primary language of instruction be in either French or Spanish. We were growing a grade a year. By our third year we had four hundred twenty five students, at least eighty full and part time employees, two facilities, and had just bought property to construct a middle school. Two weeks into our third school year Hurricane Katrina flooded both facilities and displaced just about everyone.

Carolyn and I had months earlier attended a charity silent auction for juvenile diabetes hosted by an old friend. At the event we bought a voucher for a night in a small boutique hotel in the French Quarter. We intended to use it over the summer, but we were so busy with everything from launching a capital campaign for construction of the middle school to cleaning the carpets in the classrooms we didn't have a chance and the deadline was Sept. 1st. We were determined to have our night at Le Chateaux de la Louisiane or something like that, so we booked it for Saturday night, August 27th. 

On Saturday we went into work in the morning with a bag packed for our night in The Quarter. Our house was only a 10 minute drive from The Quarter. ISL had the policy that we closed when the Orleans Parish schools closed. All morning we were listening to the news waiting for Orleans Parish to cancel. We were poised to start our phone tree notification of school closure, but the hours rolled by and nothing. Finally as the massive Katrina moved closer, we started our phone calls to cancel school on Monday.

One of the calls I made was to a mother who worked for the Lieutenant Governor, Mitch Landrieu. She told me it was good we were canceling. She had just been in a meeting, and Mayor Nagin was supposedly about to order mandatory evacuation. 

We finished our phone calls, picked up our overnight bags, and went to The Quarter. It was an eery Saturday evening. The Quarter was calm. There was the sound of music creeping onto Bourbon Street, but nothing like the usual Saturday night cacophony. Many restaurants were closed. We went into Irene's for dinner, and as we were finishing our main course at about 8 pm, the owner came out and said there was free bread pudding dessert and then they were closing.

The next morning we were up at 6 a.m. I turned on the news and the announcer said the mayor would be making an announcement at 7 a.m. We thought this was it. He was going to declare mandatory evacuation, and we would be trapped in crazy traffic. Within 30 minutes we had checked out of the hotel and returned home. Carolyn grabbed a bag she had packed for a trip to England she had planned for her son's 21st birthday. I just had the overnight bag from the hotel. We listened to the mayor's 7 am announcement as we drove out of New Orleans headed to my mother's house sixty miles away in Mississippi. Mayor Nagin did not declare the mandatory evacuation.

 The first ever mandatory evacuation of New Orleans would not be ordered until 10 am. By that time we were sixty miles north of New Orleans at my mother's house. Two of my sisters had already arrived with their kids, dogs, cats, hamsters. My widowed mother had remarried the week before. My new step-father stood dazed as barely known people invaded his new life.

As we watched the massive storm move closer on television, my mind flash backed to 1969. In the summer of 1969 I was about to start my senior year in high school when Hurricane Camille roared ashore very close to where Katrina was headed. In 1969 I was living very close to where I was waiting for Katrina to ram its way into the coast. In the aftermath of Camille we spent 2 days  cutting ourselves out the driveway and several weeks without electricity. I turned to Carolyn and said lets go to Florida.

For a little over five years we had owned a beach cottage on Ft Myers Beach in southwest Florida. It was the home we were thinking we would retire to when the time came. In the winter months we rented it out, but in the summer it usually sat vacant. The typical New Orleans to Ft Myers Beach trip took us 12 hours. We left my mother's at 1 p.m. and arrived at our cottage at 5 a.m.

On the trip across the the Florida panhandle and down the peninsula we talked about the previous year when we had evacuated for Hurricane Ivan only to rush back to New Orleans the next morning when the city escaped damage.

We dragged our bleary, exhausted selves into the cottage prepared to take a nap and drive back.  The television news was celebrating how New Orleans had dodged the bullet. We went to bed planning to get a few hours sleep before heading back.

At two in the afternoon we woke up and turned on the television. We ready to return to New Orleans when failure of the levees changed our world forever. One of the levee break pictures featured on the news was six blocks from our house. Over the next few weeks we came to terms with the disaster which was New Orleans after Katrina. 

With no students we had no income. I struggled to communicate with ISL Board members, but they were scattered and cell phones with New Orleans area codes were useless. Teachers and staff were all over the country, and I had no authorization to pay them. The bank systems were down. Some staff we couldn’t locate a week after the storm. We played with all sorts of ideas. We looked at setting up virtual online school. I made regular calls to the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Schools (BESE) to see what had happened to our per pupil allocation. As much as every politician was pleading with the public to come back and for schools to reopen, no one could tell me if we were still authorized to exist since our charter was specific to the flooded locations.

It was chaos. Out of the chaos came almost magical events that ebbed and flowed through the lives of many until we reopened on October 31st, just a little over two months after Katrina shredded New Orleans’s levees. Because we had evacuated to Florida, we had a landline and internet. My brother evacuated to Baton Rouge and was living in a 3 bedroom apartment with two other families from his law firm. I crashed on their couch during the BESE hearing which authorized our charter for other unspecified locations. Stacie Retzlaff, a parent who lived in LaPlace and was not displaced, volunteered with the town of Kenner helping to feed first responders. After we were reauthorized the mayor of Kenner drove me and Stacie around to see places where we could possibly reopen in Kenner. We met with the pastor of a Hispanic church located a block away from one of the New Orleans airport runways and agreed to rent his Sunday school classrooms and a vacant lot. 

Carolyn and I now began to think about where we would live. Our home had 8 feet of water in it for 3 weeks and our FEMA trailer was months away from delivery. The morning after agreeing to where ISL would reopen, Carolyn and I stopped at Dot's Diner for breakfast. There were not many places open. Dot's was packed. The friendly, yet harried, waitress/hostess was community seating people wherever there was an open place. 

We were in a booth with a contractor and a friend of his. Everyone was telling their hurricane story. When we finished ours, we added that we were now looking for where we could live. The contractor told us that he had reserved an apartment in River Ridge, not too far from Kenner, for an employee who was now not coming. He was about to release it, but if we wanted it he would call and change the reservation. He called. We left money for our breakfast and theirs and were on our way to River Ridge within 5 minutes. The rental office was packed. The few seats were filled, people were sitting on the floor, and others were smoking outside. When we reached the desk and gave the lady our name, she asked for the deposit. Carolyn asked if we could see the apartment.

The lady said, "Look around you. If you don't want it, any one of these people will take it, site unseen."

We wrote the check and began what became the most frustrating, draining, and exhilarating work experience of our lives.

We opened on Oct.31st and by the beginning of December our school of about 75 students was looking to grow to 150 students in January.

Gisele Shexnider, a teaching assistant who had started with ISL in August right before Katrina, had taken a job with Alliance Francais after the storm. A French film crew was doing a piece on climate change and Hurricane Katrina. Giselle directed them to us. She told us the program was the French version of "60 Minutes". The reporter, Edouard Perron, and cameraman followed us around for a few days. We later heard from a French teacher who had evacuated and returned to France that she saw the piece and particularly liked the part of Carolyn and I dancing at Rock-N-Bowl. 

During their visit FEMA called us to plan a meeting to finalize what we were eligible for and how to apply for help. The French crew asked if they could film the meeting.

I said, "I'll check with FEMA".

Edouard replied, "No, it is o.k. We like it when they put their hand up in front of the camera."

FEMA was o.k. with the meeting being filmed, and the FEMA team of eight people representing every interest from historical impact to educational liaison with the "government" sat down with us for a couple of hours to tell us we were eligible for complete funding. The two people involved with our school's interaction with "government", who did not seem to understand our relationship with the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education for per pupil funding, explained how we would get reimbursed.

 We had to get three bids on every project and then submit the bids to another person at the meeting. I had met this person before. He was the one I had been communicating with about the meeting and what we should be expecting. For the extra students I needed two classroom trailers, a toilet trailer, an office trailer. They all had to be handicap accessible even though we had no handicapped students or staff.. We were also renting a vacant lot next to the church parking lot and having that fenced. For the entire French television viewing public to see on a Sunday evening, we were assured by FEMA this would all be covered.

Plumbers were charging a hundred dollars for a bid while telling you they couldn't do the job until April. We paid the money and got the useless bids and ultimately decided on the one who could hook up the toilet trailer within a month. It was the same with electricians. While we were getting the bids for handicap access to all the trailers, we had a night out to hear the Radiators at Southport Hall. During a break we were sitting outside when a rather inebriated and friendly fellow started up a conversation. In these post-Katrina days these types of conversations about where did you evacuate and how much damage did you have were very common. If you wanted to hear stories you could stand in a grocery store line. Everyone was telling their story. Our story turned to our current struggle to get bids for the handicap access. Our new inebriated friend was an architect. He explained that the main expense for the access was going to be the ramp for each trailer. He drew out on a napkin a system of connecting decks with one ramp. We already had two bids with separate entrance ramps. We got one more bid with the connecting decks plan and it was much less. I called our FEMA contact. All systems were go. We ordered the work and were ready for 150 students when we re-opened after Christmas break.

By mid-January I had all the bids, forms, and reports on why we chose a particular provider together and sent them off to my FEMA contact. I emailed asking when we could expect reimbursement. No response. I called and left messages. Nothing! In mid-March I received a phone call from someone I had never seen or spoken to before. He informed me that after review of our situation we were not eligible for any reimbursement for anything.

The proverbial nine most frightening words in the English language crushed down on me, 'We're with the government, and we're here to help.'

The strain of the situation had already worn Carolyn and me down. We were emotionally and physically struggling. Every morning we were up at four and rarely left the school before eight in the evening. Weekends we escaped our apartment to spend a couple nights in a FEMA trailer on the site of our flooded house in a mostly deserted neighborhood in Lakeview. There we would spend part of our time ripping out moldy sheetrock and insulation, but most of our time was spent preparing for the next week. We notified the Board that we needed to resign at the end of the year.

A search for a new director was started. This became another task added to the continuing stream of duties that filled every available minute and another strain on the budget. Several applicants applied. The Board and I sorted and ranked them. One applicant was flown into New Orleans. After a couple days of showing him around and interviews, the Board made an offer. The applicant agreed to the terms except he demanded a force majeure clause. This clause basically guaranteed that in the case of emergencies which included hurricanes he would be paid and receive all benefits of his contract. As the school was dependent on BESE to decide if and when it got money, this would have possibly put the ISL Board on the hook for his salary and benefits. The visit ended up being a waste of time and money except we knew now to clarify all acceptable terms of the contract before bringing someone else to town.  

The second place applicant was flown in. He had agreed to the terms. He was acceptable to the Board. There had been some discussion about the applicant being homosexual with a partner, but the school community was for the most part very open-minded. He was offered the position, and he accepted. The sigh of relief lasted for about two weeks before he notified us that he would not be accepting the position. The vague reason seemed to hint at his partner didn't want to move. 

It was now May and options were shrinking. ISL had negotiated to take over a vacated school building in New Orleans. Carolyn and I made a deal to work three days a week. The summer would be a busy time moving from our temporary location  back into a real school building that needed some work. As June approached we realized we weren't the type of people to only do three-fifths of a job. Opinions on the ISL Board about where the school should go had been varied since before Katrina. Conflict over different opinions had become festering convictions.

Then the drop of water that broke the levee. The State of Louisiana published its grading of all public schools which included charter schools. This grading is based on scores that students make on a standardized test in English. The grades were from tests they had taken a year before. We got a B+ and an uptown immersion school, Audubon, got an A. There seemed to be some discontent among the parents. Carolyn and I took this personally. In our ragged emotional states we took this as parents wanting us to do more. One parent in particular seemed to be leading the charge.

 A meeting was called at a parent's home in Gentilly. Carolyn and I agreed with each other that we would just say something to the effect that we don't believe in grading schools or student achievement by standardized test scores and that is not what this school is about, and then drive home and go to sleep. 

Carolyn went first and delivered our message. There was a brief silence and then hands went up. 

Carolyn is tugging my arm, "Let's go."

A parent who had been a staunch supporter of us and the school since our arrival said something like she agreed, but came to just better understand where the grading came from.

Carolyn glared at me as I walked to the front and explained the system which compared and graded our students, who only had 45 minutes of English specific instruction each day, with all the other students in Louisiana who for the most part only learned in English. I spoke about the many other things we tried to add to the students' lives beyond standardized test-prep. We had physical education in French and music in Spanish. We offered circus arts, co-ed rugby, and an incredible variety of after-school options. 

I took a few more questions. Most were supportive and just trying to understand how the grading system worked.

The parent who had caused the uproar called out , "So what do we have to do to get a better grade?"

I feared I might have to physically hold Carolyn back, but she was walking out the door. It looked like I was possibly walking home, so I figured I'd answer the question.

I looked at the crowd and explained that the most highly correlated factor with student achievement, often measured by standardized test scores, is the level of academic achievement of the mother. I gave examples within our own school of students who have been in the same grade since kindergarten. They had the same teacher every day for every class. One was in the 99 percentile. Her mother was a doctor. The other, although a wonderful child, scored in the lowest quartile. Her mother worked at McDonald's and was not attending any sort of classes for a higher level of certification. I asked the mother if she was currently enrolled in an educational path that led to a terminal degree in her field because if she was that would help us raise our test scores. I went on to say helping other mothers in our school pursue educational options would help our test scores. Schools have children thirteen percent of their waking hours and most of that time they are primarily influenced by their peers. I'm saying this sadly as a father, but in the early years most of the other eighty seven percent is strongly influenced by the mother. 

With that I excused myself. Carolyn was angry. She felt I had betrayed her. Soon after that we told the Board the three days a week wasn't going to work. We would stay as long as it took for them to find a new head, but they needed to renew the search for a director. The Board chose to appoint the business manager we hired after Katrina.

The year ended with several wonderful events. The circus arts put on a circus. The rugby players had a co-ed tackle rugby match complete with cheerleaders. In the final week of school we had a music and auction fundraiser, "Boogie Back to New Orleans."  All of this happened on a couple vacant lots that ran parallel to an airport runway. By the end of the year we had become very good at pausing mid-sentence when a plane was landing and resuming when the roar of the engines subsided. 

There was a very moving farewell with plenty of hugs and tears. We had moved out of our apartment and were living in the FEMA trailer behind our gutted house. After watching the last of the classroom trailers hauled away, the fence taken down, and the handicap ramp and deck removed, we locked our FEMA trailer and drove the 12 hours to Ft. Myers Beach. After a bottle of champagne and a long sigh of relief, we pondered what to do next.

For the next year and a half we flirted with sanity, substitute taught, and worked on our gutted house. We applied for a "Road Home" grant from the US government to repair our house and became less optimistic about getting money or even wanting to rebuild as each month passed. We decided to return to what we loved. In early December of 2007 we went to a hiring fair in Atlanta for teaching jobs in Latin America. 

Our first interview was with a small school in Honduras, Escuela Internacional La Lima (EILL), and the potential jobs were our favorites, third grade for Carolyn and middle school science for me. The school principal spent most of the interview telling us about the school and town, and then offered us the jobs. He scheduled another interview at the end of the following day for us to give him our decision.

We were ecstatic. This was our first choice for location, type of school, and jobs. We just partially participated in the other interviews. There were jobs in Brazil that were interesting. We really liked the director, but he was leaving and we didn't want to be more than a three hour flight from Miami. We skipped into our interview for the jobs at EILL the next day ready to sign contracts. 

The principal greeted us at the door, and after a couple pleasantries he said he gave one of the jobs to someone else. We were stunned. He shuffled around our confusion that we were under the impression the jobs had been promised and showed our dumbfounded bodies out the door. Fortunately the director of the larger parent school had been present the day before when the offer had been made, and I had specifically clarified that the jobs were being offered and held for us. 

Our first thought was that one of our references had given us a bad oral report when the principal checked, but that was hard to imagine as we considered these people good friends as well as former bosses. We went to the person running the hiring fair. He was someone we knew from when we worked in Africa. We explained the situation. He said to leave it with him. Two hours later he called us to say the principal wanted to talk to us again. When we went back, we had the jobs. I struggled a bit with could I work for a principal who seemed either very unorganized or unprincipled.

Carolyn said, "This is our first choice. You'll get over it." 

The plan was to spend 3 years in Honduras just being teachers again, and things were going well. I had indeed gotten over it. After a TGIF party for the faculty of our little school and the larger mothership school in San Pedro in the spring of our first year, the principal was shot. He was carjacked and then accidentally shot when a rival gang started firing at the carjackers. The bullet hit his shoulder and sent bone into his brain. It was very close for several weeks. The Honduran medical team saved his life and started him on recovery, but he returned to Canada for further treatment and rehabilitation. He had to learn to read all over again, but was determined to come back. The school was holding his job, but they were looking for someone to fill in for a year. In the final week of school they approached me about being principal for possibly only a year.

Carolyn and I spent the weekend considering the implications: less free time, lose at least a month of summer vacation, a much less pleasant job. We were coming up with a lot of cons. The next week I drove into San Pedro for an  afternoon meeting with the administrative team.  At the end of the meeting, which was largely about who was bringing what to the after-school party, the director asked me to stay.

 Over the weekend he had sent me an email with the salary offer, but we lost electricity and didn't have internet, I hadn't seen the email. He asked me how much I wanted. I gave him what Carolyn and I had decided was the bottom number we would accept. If I was principal, her life would change, too. When I told him, he showed me the email. Our bottom line was $20,000 more than what was being offered. There was a little talk about the school offered the use of a nice car as a perk, but it was driving a nice car that got the former principal shot. I declined the job.

The year teaching had been great. One of the five classes I taught had a 'Too Cool for School'  peer group vibe going, but four motivated middle school classes out of five was almost more than a teacher could hope for, and it was like that for the three years. 

A week after accepting the jobs in Honduras we received notice that our "Road Home" grant had come through. During the months between accepting the job in Honduras and moving we had done a little work on our house. It was livable with one air conditioned room. My daughter lived there for a year after graduating from college helping with Katrina recovery. The Road Home grant prohibited selling the house for 3 years, so after our three years in Honduras we took a few months off for a trip to New Zealand and then returned to New Orleans, sold the house, and started looking for another overseas teaching job.

Everywhere we wanted to go had age restrictions. We were too old. The thought of returning to teaching in test driven USA forced us after 34 years in education to try retirement. I had tried it before.