Morocco
In the fall of 1976, I enrolled in a masters degree program at Arizona State University. My first day on campus, as I tried to orient myself around the English Department, I mistakenly walked into the office of Dr. Jim Ney.
“Are you the director of the Creative Writing Program?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Down the hall to the left.”
Curious, I asked, “So what do you do?”
“I’m over the TESL program.”
“TESL?”
“Teaching English as a Second Language,” he said and then gave me the old U.S. Army pitch: it’s not just a job; it’s an adventure. “Japan, Saudi Arabia, China, Spain, Turkey, Argentina—you can travel all over the world teaching English.”
That sounded a lot more interesting to me—and more marketable—than spending the next two years refining my ability to write stream of consciousness fiction. The moment I got home, I discussed this potential reversal of fortune with my wife, Rebecca.
“That would be so awesome!” she said. “All those countries! All that travel! We’d be international people!”
I switched programs the next day.
Two years later I had my TESL degree in hand and a job lined up in Mexico City. However, overseas adventures were not in the cards for us, at least not at that time. At the last minute, the job fell through, and I accepted a position teaching ESL on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona. Technically speaking, it wasn’t foreign travel but we were definitely strangers in a strange land. That would mark the beginning of a very fulfilling 34 year career in public education working with American Indians.
On the downside, our dreams of foreign travel would be delayed 24 years until June of 2002 when our friends, Roy and Robyn Calloway, invited us to join them for a week at their time-share condo on the coast of southern Spain. With three children in college, our budget was still very tight, but we decided to throw caution to the wind and booked a flight to Málaga. A highlight of that trip was a one-day excursion across the Straits of Gibraltar to the enchanting land of Morocco.