Chapter 9: Managua to Ashgabat

CHAPTER 9: MANAGUA TO ASHGABAT

On Sept. 11, 2001, we were with my mother in Henleyfield, Mississippi, while she recovered from hip surgery. We were having breakfast and watching the morning news shows when the first plane went into one of the Twin Towers. An expert was trying to explain how this could happen accidentally when he quickly disappeared to never be heard from again when the next plane hit. We were scheduled to return to London in October for a gifted and talented program Gary had set up for us to run for the borough of Southwark. Carolyn was going to do substitute teaching. It looked like we might be crossing the Atlantic and borders often. It would be easier if we were married. As my mother recovered, we looked for the best option for getting married quickly with little planning. 

On September 30th we were married by Elvis in Vegas. A week later we were back in London. Gary and I were running a gifted and talented program for primary science students, and Carolyn easily found supply work. While in London we put the finishing thought into our educational consulting business, Science Education Enthusiasts. 

We stayed with my former boss, Leslie Jones, from Goldsmiths. She lived about a thirty minute train ride south of London. Every morning for six weeks Carolyn and I were leaving early to avoid the worst of the the mad commuter rush.  Often we were looking for  a school we had never been to before. I ran at least one class a week for six weeks in eight schools preparing the students for an internal and then intra-schools science fair. 

The schools selected sixteen students from the equivalent grades of nine, ten, and eleven year olds - key stage 2. There was a lot of latitude in how they selected the kids. In one of the schools they let the classroom teachers select whom they would like to not have in their class for an hour every week for five or six weeks. We had a rating scale for factors related to being scientifically gifted related to the child’s science fair project. We gave this to the borough at the end of the two months. Gary and I were hoping this would be something they would want to use as baseline and track these children.  This might be something I could sink my little failed attempt at educational research fangs into. And it was very good money for two months work. But it was hard,  especially for someone approaching fifty. In the end it didn’t matter because the money disappeared into security in the next year’s budget. 

By February we were enjoying the sun on the deck of what we hoped would one day be our retirement home in Ft Myers Beach and realizing the educational consultant business wasn’t going anywhere. Money was headed to security in schools and not programs to identify scientifically gifted children. It didn’t help that we didn’t know what we were doing.

We started looking for overseas jobs.  Being a married couple with lots of experience there was interest. Within a couple weeks we were approached by one of the founders of Quality Schools International about jobs for the coming school year as head of a school in Yekaterinburg which is right on the edge of Siberia.  We said, “Yeah, why not?”

If you can’t do educational research or inspire teachers to want to teach children to think scientifically, maybe we should go teach children in Siberia how to learn through QSI’s mastery learning system. The system allowed for science fairs.

Before we had an opportunity to shop LL Bean for winter clothes, QSI contacted us about a consulting job on the possibility of opening a school in Nicaragua. After flying to Managua and settling in for two weeks at a Holiday Inn like place with a business center, we made contact with the US Embassy. We met with our contact there. QSI had been contacted about opening a school by a State Department employee who wanted another school choice in Managua. The official told us that the parents could choose whichever school they wanted their children to attend and the government support dollars would follow.

QSI had contacted a real estate agent to show us potential properties. We made a tentative agreement on a lovely wooded estate on five acres. The hacienda had been set up with large rooms around an inner courtyard. It was perfect. We made flyers and went around to all the embassies and non-governmental organizations in Managua giving them information about QSI schools, the teachers, and location of the school. We arranged for a showing of the property with more literature about QSI schools and how their mastery learning system worked. The people attending would meet other people interested. There were commitments from about twenty parents. We bought balloons and made signs to mark the way to the property. 

A day before the event our contact at the US Embassy asked us to come back. He had researched the property where we were potentially locating the school. It had been seized by the Butcher of Managua. He was head of the Sandinista secret service and there was a story about his girlfriend being the daughter of a minister in Somoza’s government. She let the Sandinistas into a Christmas party her father was having. The guests were slaughtered including her father and several other ministers in the government. This was who we were planning to rent from. The US government wouldn’t pay for children to go to a school there.

The next day we told the people who showed up that the school would be at a location very similar to the one where they were presently standing.

QSI had another problem. I met with the Minister for Elementary Education and the paperwork that QSI had to operate a school was a letter from the Minister of Finance in Yemen. I kid you not. The Nicaraguan minister said QSI could operate a school, but they would have to first become some sort of US entity like a non-profit or non-governmental organization.

QSI was still not entirely daunted. They wanted us to start an illegal preK to second grade school in a large house. We would live in one half and have a couple classrooms where Carolyn and I would take turns teaching the one or two groups we could attract as we ran the illegal school. We were considering this; although, we advised there was a lot of competition for that younger child education dollar in Managua. QSI called another consultant and asked him to confirm our opinion. His reply was, “If these people are choosing between Managua or Siberia for where they will be working next, and they are telling you Siberia, believe them.” So, we started buying winter clothes. 

It turned out that they couldn’t get a license to open a school in Russia with a letter from a minister in Yemen. Go figure. Sadly, but conveniently, the director of the QSI school in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, had some kind of emergency and couldn’t return, so in five months we had bounced between going to Siberia, Managua, back to Siberia, and now we were on our way to Ashgabat. At least we had the right clothes.

We arrived in Ashgabat at night. Ivan, the school driver, met us at the airport. The bizarre mixture of towering white marble apartment buildings scattered among the ramshackle wooden buildings were lit with strings of colored lights. Ivan’s English was very limited and my Russian did not include the words for, “Is it a holiday?” I would soon find out it wasn’t a holiday. The lights were up year round.

My career trajectory seemed to have taken a step back. I was directing a small school again, but I was happy. QSI’s philosophy was not drastically different from mine. A small school meant we had multi-age class groupings. I was able to teach every child. I taught science to one group, PE to another, and language arts to another.  I knew every student as their teacher, not just as the school head. 

QSI arranged for our housing in a hotel. The hotel apartment included a kitchen with a kitchen table that overlooked the hotel pool and across the hotel fence were the cluttered backyards of neighbors who would often have camels grazing along the dirt backroads. There was a large living room and a television that got a few channels in languages I did not understand and the BBC.  Our bedroom had the largest bed I have ever seen anywhere. To this day if we get a hotel room with a bed bigger than a normal king, we will comment,”The bed in Ashgabat was bigger.”

Our accommodation came with breakfast buffet at the hotel next door. The buffet was a interesting mix. There were scrambled eggs, cold meat,  fried potatoes, bread and cheese. Usually there was a canned or dried fruit choice  and some kind of fish in various states of preparedness from raw to smoked. Occasionally there was caviar. It was always a surprise to see who would show up for breakfast  and wonder why these people were visiting Turkmenistan. 

We would then walk a half mile up into the foothills of the Kopet Dag mountains that separated Turkmenistan from Iran.  QSI had been granted a 5 hectares parcel from the eccentric president for life of Turkmenistan, Turkmenbashi. He renamed the months of the year, naming one after his mother. He wrote a book, The Ruhnama, which spent sixty pages tracing his lineage to the ancient kings and rulers of Turkmenistan. Turkmen students had to memorize this. We had a state approved teacher of this book at school to teach our Turkmen students. I was never sure if he was a government spy or just a relative who needed a job. It was a point of contention between the school and government about whether all students should have to study the Ruhnama.

I was months away from turning fifty and life was good. I liked the QSI system. There wasn’t a lot of oversight from QSI headquarters in Yemen. We sent them their cut of tuition and the rest was up to me to spend on the school with recommendations from a local advisory board. I found their philosophy acceptable. Teaching for mastery of concepts was preferable to teaching to a test. My objections were more along the selection of what should be mastered and systems for maintenance of mastery of important concepts and skills. Was that too much jargon? I thought I was happy and ready to climb through the QSI ranks from small school to ever bigger schools. My career trajectory was back on track.

On my fiftieth birthday QSI had its annual meeting for the heads of its schools from around the world in Bratislava. After the meetings I wandered the lovely and historic streets of the beautiful capital of Bratislava. I had never heard of it before joining QSI and now I was celebrating my half century mark within the walls of its old city.

I stopped in a bar and told the bartender it was my birthday and I wanted to buy everyone a drink. This was a big mistake. There were about twenty people in the bar. Drinks were cheap. The bill came to about $30, but now everybody in the bar felt a certain obligation to buy me a birthday drink. Somebody kindly made sure I got back to the hotel. I spent the next day’s meetings watching the surely broken clock click it’s way to 5 p.m. I probably didn’t do my chances of success at QSI much good with my performance at the my first annual meeting.

Recovered from my mid-century Slovakian hangover I launched myself into my new career goal of climbing through the QSI ranks to being head of ever larger schools. With Carolyn by my side we could not fail. We were quite the team. 

For my birthday she bought me a piano. The piano teacher at school knew of several around the city. No one would dare play them as they were a symbol of Russian oppression. For $150 delivered to our hotel suite we bought the first one we saw. It was a fabulous upright with a tremendous sound and wonderful action on all the keys. It was made by some Russian piano maker I had never heard of. To see it the piano teacher drove us deep into this large cement apartment block. There were thousands of apartments in this six story complex. Surrounding this block were many twelve story and higher white marble buildings with nobody in them. We walked up three flights of stairs lit by an exposed bulb on the gray barren landings. There wasn’t even graffiti. We rang the doorbell outside the thick metal grating. An eye appeared at the peep hole. A thick door opened and we were welcomed into the warmest homiest apartment one could imagine. Turkmen carpets covered the floor.  Family pictures were scattered around dark red walls We were offered tea or vodka. I played a few songs. There was no need to look elsewhere.

Carolyn enjoyed the tedious detail of counting the stacks to Turkmen manat that some parents and companies used to pay tuition and what we used to pay local bills. The highest denomination fluctuated around the equivalent of $2.50 while we were there. Money was organized and folded in certain ways to make it easy to count. Tuition was around $14,000. Teacher salaries were split between US and local pay, but several teachers were getting over $2000 in local currency. That was a big stack of manat. Local staff was paid well especially considering $50 a month was average income in Turkmenistan.

Several parents paid in dollars. If we were short on manat, Ivan would drive me to the shopping center where the black market money dealers operated. He would casually chat with the money merchants. When he had the best deal, he would come and get me out of the car, and we would make the transaction. I would hand over a small stack of hundreds and get a shopping bag full of manat.

The year before we arrived the school safe had been stolen. QSI bought a much bigger safe with a very large key. We were told to carry the key wherever we went. We had to carry it through security checks for airports because we couldn’t take the chance that luggage might be lost. Since we lived in a hotel there was a concern about just hiding it in the room when we left. This was the former Soviet Union, so we weren’t 100% sure there weren’t cameras. 

It was the fall of 2002. The UN had weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq. Turkmenistan had Iran on its western border and Afghanistan on its eastern border. The world was on the verge of a tragic mistake.

I love to tell the story about the Sunday pancake breakfast the US Marine guard had at their house in Ashgabat. They sold a pancake breakfast to expats. They used the money for a charity project they were involved with in the town. I knew some of the Marines because they played ultimate frisbee on the the school field some afternoons. I tried to play once. It was a version of ultimate that allowed the person catching the frisbee to run until tagged and his teammates could block for him. As I write this I am wondering what fifty year old man in his right mind would want to play that game with the US Marine guard. Anyway the result was inevitable. The injuries and aches were not serious, and I would live to play ultimate frisbee in faculty matches in Honduras at the age of fifty eight. 

 Everyone in country knew there was a “secret” air station for planes going to Afghanistan from Germany, but it was a secret because Turkmenistan didn’t want to publicly announce they were allowing a US military base within their borders. On a few Sundays there would be people who were working at the “secret” air base at the breakfast. As you do, we would say hello and introduce ourselves. Ever on the hunt for new students, I would ask what they were doing in Turkmenistan. Without fail they would say, “I can’t tell you.”

There has to be somebody in the US Government who has the time and imagination to think up cover stories for people put in those situations. The CIA guy who does it for the AID employees could possibly lend a hand. It might be hard to pass an airplane mechanic off as a research ornithologist, but they could be doing some sort of NGO water project. See! That wasn’t hard.

Anyway, back to the narrative about life in Turkmenistan as the US invasion of Iraq rapidly approached; although,  the little pancake breakfast anecdote was about life in Turkmenistan.

As Christmas approached the invasion seemed imminent, and a mostly muslim Turkmen population that at first seemed welcoming was now turning suspicious. The strongly felt opinion was that the US intended to attack regardless of what the UN inspectors would or would not find. This is the Christmas that is mentioned in Chapter One of this memoir. The Christmas vacation where the first possibility of the job as head of a school in New Orleans would even be mentioned.

Life in Turkmenistan was comfortable. I’ve mentioned the hotel’s breakfast buffet, but it also had indoor and outdoor pools and a masseuse. I went once. She was a large muscular Russian woman who made you feel good that the massage had finally ended.

One entire school day a month we took the whole school and split it into K-9th grade groups named after the four Turkmen nomadic tribes. The faculty embraced planning and executing this monthly multi-grade level learning experience. Enrollment was growing. As the winter wet turned the desert from ice to mud, outside play was difficult. We had enough extra revenue to pave an area for a full size basketball court. All the kids put a hand print and wrote their name in the concrete. Life was good in Ashgabat. Caviar was plentiful and unbelievably cheap. It was sold like potato salad at the deli stall in the market.

And then the visit from the government minister came. A few years before I became the director in Ashgabat, QSI had been granted this large parcel of land where the little rectangular metal box of a school building and the newly paved basketball court now sat.  In exchange for the land QSI promised to build a multi-building facility with faculty housing, classrooms, gymnasium, auditorium, and all in Turkmenbashi’s favorite facade, white marble. The government minister wanted to know where was all the white marble.

When the promise had been made, a pipeline was being planned across Turkmenistan. This was supposed to greatly increase the number of foreigners with children who might want another option to homeschooling or Turkmen public schools which were rumored to require students to pick cotton at harvest season. At the last minute Turkmenbashi demanded a billion dollar additional private advance. I’m not sure why I am avoiding the word bribe. The deal fell apart. Natural gas was found in Azerbaijan and all the pipeline participants went elsewhere, except QSI who now had this little metal box of a school and about seventy students.

It took me a couple days to sort out what was going on. Much of the original promise was before Guncha, the school secretary, was hired. Tensions mounted as we were pressured to start construction of the white marble plan or get out. Carolyn and I formulated plans for grabbing the QSI cash out the safe and sneaking into the US embassy or making a run for the Kazakh border. The ambassador arranged for a meeting between me and the head of the Turkmen parliament, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov. I spent a good bit of time practicing how to say his name. He would go on to become president of Turkmenistan when Turkmenbashi died.

The day of the meeting the ambassador came with me. She told me not to say anything. All my name practicing was for nothing. The decision was made that I should meet with the minister of education to work out a range of issues that had now sprung up including how often all students would be taught Turkmenbashi’s book, The Ruhnama.

Starting soon after this meeting Guncha and I began our monthly visit to the bizarrely drab ministry of education. The harsh stone facade of the building opened to a cold wood interior. Unsmiling silent people moved about inside. There was not a sign anywhere of one student’s success or achievement. At our first meeting we sat with the minister for two hours. Guncha would translate the demands. I would then reply with what we were not prepared to sacrifice. Foreign students were not going to study The Ruhnama and there was no money to build the white marble campus planned before Turkmenbashi scuppered the pipeline deal. At that meeting we spent the two hours discovering that neither one of us had the authority to move at all in our positions. 

The next month the minister showed us to the small, windowless meeting room which contained an old rectangular wooden table and four chairs. He sat with us for five minutes asking if our position had changed and then asked if we would like a cup of tea. 

We said, “Da, ” to the tea and, “Nyet “ to any change in position. Turkmenistan had this weird language mix. Most people spoke Russian, but since the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian language and many things considered Russian, like pianos, fell into political disfavor. Guncha spoke Russian, Turkmen, and English, but we were speaking in Russian. Our conversation every month became so routine, that even my high school Russian was able to follow most of it.

The minister left to get the tea. His assistant would bring the tea back with a remark that the minister would return in a little while. The minister would return in two hours to ask if our positions had changed. We would say, “No. Thanks for the tea. Good to see you again.” The assistant would show us to the wide stairway that led down to the bare entrance foyer.

After the second visit we started bringing school work to do when the minister left. I recently checked the website for the QSI school in Ashgabat. It looks like the government finally got their white marble facade facility. I wonder if everyone is studying The Ruhnama.

Guncha got married while we were there and the entire school faculty was invited to the reception. Her husband worked for the Turkmen secret service. I suspected Guncha might be a Turkmen spy, but her thoughtful clear approach to the many things that came our way made me confident she would pass on that we were sincerely interested in one thing after the students’ safety, the children’s educational success. Guncha and her husband were Muslim. The wedding guests were divided with Muslims on one side of the band and dance floor and non-Muslims on the other. The separation seemed based on how the caterer set up the room. Tables on one side of the room had vodka among the bottles of juice and soda in the middle. I liked to describe Turkmenistan as a Muslim country with a Russian love of vodka. When the music started, we all met on the dance floor. For some songs everyone danced. For some songs each table had its own folk dance. The teacher group which was a mixture of US, Irish, and British danced some version of “The Hokey Pokey”.

After Christmas the emails started coming about the job in New Orleans. Here was the opportunity to jump several years growing through the QSI ranks. The possibility to return to New Orleans, the place of my birth, and try to make a difference in public education. It was very tempting.The job hadn’t been offered, though. 

QSI was looking for a commitment for the coming year. The original agreement was a one year contract with the expectation you would stay two years if they wanted to offer you a contract in the second year. Towards the end of February QSI drew a line in the sand. Either I commit to return to Ashgabat for the 2003-04 school year right then, or I would never have a job in a QSI school again. 

I replied that I was having an interview with the International School of Louisiana Board in New Orleans during spring break. I planned to go to the interview. If he had to hire someone to replace me, I understood. After his first round of hiring fairs he let me know that if things didn’t work out with New Orleans, I could stay in Ashgabat. 

On March 3rd as the USA was invading Iraq we flew out of Ashgabat on a strange Indian airline  that flew from New Delhi to Manchester, UK, with a stop in Ashgabat. We did not suspect how drastically the Turkmen public opinion would change toward the USA in the two weeks we would be gone. The school board in New Orleans flew me from Manchester to New Orleans where ... well, that is where the peak of my career awaited, and that was Chapter 1. 

Back in Turkmenistan we found a cold shoulder wherever we went in public. Claiming to be Canadian didn’t help much. In the market where vendors would pursue us down the aisles before the Iraq invasion, no one would sell me a pair of shoes. Our social lives were mostly involved with the school and expat community, but the feelings of the people of Turkmenistan towards the US had changed with the invasion.

Carolyn had joined an ex-pat women’s group. The group planned a day’s outing to a wooded area in the Kopet Dag mountains. It was a warm spring day when the bus picked us up. I was wearing shorts. The day was a pleasant excursion and picnic to a remote area along a stream. We were right on the Iranian border, and possibly strolled over the imaginary line on occasion as we hiked around the hills. On the ride home a military check pulled the bus over. They wanted to see everyone’s passport. One of the women on the trip was the wife of  someone who worked at the US Embassy, and she didn’t have her passport. She was taken off the bus. I was taken off the bus for wearing shorts. It was and possibly still is against the law in Turkmenistan for anyone to wear shorts in public. 

My argument, that I was not in public but on a privately chartered bus, fell on ears that were possibly interested more in a bribe than logic. Their reply was that the bus could break down and then I would be forced to get off and be in public. I was now off the bus and standing along a busy road with cars passing all the time. I pointed out that by being arrested and taken off the bus they had actually forced me to be in public with my shorts. To which they proudly nodded and replied, “Yes, we have.”  

The US Embassy wife’s husband had to be located. It took him a couple of hours before he arrived. For two hours my bare hairy US legs were exposed to the Turkmen public. I was actually a little surprised that a crowd didn’t form to look at them. They were at the time one of my best features. The husband quickly had the soldiers at the military check point worried. It became apparent that they had been hoping for some financial consideration to help them look the other way about the missing passport and my illegally exposed legs. The husband assured them he would pay no bribe and asked for who was in charge, so he could have his contact in the Turkmen military get in touch. He dropped the name of his contact and within seconds we were in his car and on our way.

By April I had accepted the job in New Orleans. The ex-pat community was not large, so we knew most of the US employees at the embassy. During a social event in the early days of our stay in Turkmenistan we talked to someone who was involved with visas. Since we were now married we wanted to get a green card for Carolyn, so she could travel in the US more easily. We were told to start the paperwork the year before we planned to move back to the USA. Now we were moving back in three months. There was the possibility that Carolyn could be seen as illegally entering the country and permanently denied entry. 

During our last months at the school an Iranian family moved to Ashgabat and enrolled two children. The older daughter spoke a little English, but the son spoke only Farsi. The family became friends as we tried to tailor our instruction to meet the special challenges we faced with a student who no one, except his sister, could understand.  They invited us to their apartment in one of the high rise white marble buildings. The Iranian father was an irrigation engineer and had a contract with the Turkmen government to irrigate a large forest. The multi-story apartment building was completely empty except for our Iranian friend. He said the rent was not expensive, but middle class Turkmen people were afraid to rent in the government buildings because the government would start investigating where their money came from.

We spent one very lovely and bizarre evening at one of the Iranian’s work camps. He said Iran was a kilometer up the road. It was a Muslim holiday. There was a barbecue with the traditional separation of men and women for the meal. I had eaten at Guncha’s house where the men and women ate in separate rooms. At the work camp we were in a trailer, so we just sat at different tables. After a delicious meal of roast lamb and salads we participated in the traditional jumping over the fire.

In the yard they had a fairly good sized campfire. People, and especially the kids, were getting a good running start and jumping over the fire. Our host explained the significance. As best I understood it involved leaving your sins behind to be burned up. Carolyn and I had a go at burning a few sins. It is strange to think of the horrors of the shockingly awful decision to invade Iraq that were taking place just a country away as we laughed and leapt through the flames. A war that burns as I write this two decades later.

As the end of the school year approached, our dreams of spending some of our summer break traveling in Central Asia disappeared in the need to get to New Orleans . ISL had encountered some parental distress that spilled over into the press about a teacher who was disciplining by locking a child in a closet. We would need to design a discipline system and a pre-school staff training for the discipline system . We should have also figured a way to make it easily understood in three languages. A few years after we left the International School of Louisiana, I ran into someone who had been a recently arrived French teacher when we introduced the new discipline system. We laughed as he told of smiling and nodding and not understanding a word I was saying as I spent a morning going through the new system.

Anyway, with not much time left in Turkmenistan we decided to fly to the town of Turkmenbashi on the Caspian Sea. We could leave Friday afternoon and take the Monday morning flight back. If we missed the Monday flight, there wasn’t another until Wednesday. The luxury resort where we stayed was a favorite of Turkmenbashi, the President, and was right on the Caspian Sea. It was empty. We wandered the mostly dirt roads of the village and had a very good curry at a little restaurant with no other customers. We hung out at the empty indoor pool at the hotel and strolled the banks of the Caspian Sea searching for sturgeon. By Monday morning we had done most of what there was to do in Turkmenbashi at least twice. 

We got to the airport for the early morning flight in plenty of time. It was only weeks since the US had invaded Iraq. Tensions in most of the region were getting more tense each passing day. We lined up to go through the ancient metal detector as luggage was opened and inspected. The guard on the metal detector was called over to the luggage inspection area a few feet away. A striking blonde woman in front of us in a large fur coat set the metal detector buzzing as she walked through. The guard looked at her. She stared back, smiled, and said, “Neechayvo,” which means “nothing” in Russian.

The guard waved her on. Carolyn and I looked at each other. We quickly considered the options. Get hijacked or worse or miss possibly a week of school and have to explain that we missed the flight because we were paranoid about being blown-up. We got on the plane. 

As our days were finishing in Ashgabat our life was already beginning in New Orleans. We were professionally moving from a school of seventy students precariously perched in the foothills of the Kopet Dag mountains to a three  year old public charter school with a language immersion mission in mid-city New Orleans. The situation we were in was easy and comfortable; even though, it was occasionally extremely bizarre. The tensions over the US invasion of Iraq had reached a plateau that we could live with. The career challenge of returning to the place of my birth to try to make a difference in a pubic education system that had failed so many was too alluring. The bridge to return to QSI had been calmly disassembled as we left the school in a better place than when we came. It had a basketball court! The safe wasn’t stolen. We never had to employ our frightening scenario of me playing the Russian speaking janitor as terrorists stormed the school and Carolyn led the students through the hills to the back of the US embassy’s housing compound. 

Two of my favorite memories from Turkmenistan, the guards having sex on my office couch and Murat and Dovlet pursuing us to the departure lounge to give us gifts, I told in Chapter 1. The memoir evolved early on from being twelve chapters with each being about a particular person, place, thing, or concept I loved to a chronological reflection on my life through my interpretation of Erickson’s theory of human development. The International School of Louisiana would be the ultimate professional challenge of my career and especially the challenges it faced after Hurricane Katrina. I can imagine today that I might have had a career that ended with the last fifteen years rising through the QSI ranks; except for, a student I taught in fifth grade who kept in touch long before Facebook. Twenty-five years after Catherine was in my fifth grade class she arranged a party to show films we made in fifth grade. Shelly, another student at the party who had founded a language immersion school, found out I was head of an international school, and ISL would soon be looking for a new head. Do we make our own fate or just deal with what fate hands us or do we put ourselves in a place to, hopefully, embrace the challenges we are destined to choose? There are probably other possibilities.