In 1993 I
was living and working in Lubbock,
Texas, a Great Plains city of 200,000. Suddenly,
in the spring of that year, at the conclusion of a very strange series of
events, I found myself without a job and on the dole.
Lubbock is
the home of Texas Tech University which has a large, attractive campus. When I wasn’t out and about, pounding the
pavement to look for work, I would spend a lot of time at the school, often
holed up in its library. It was a great
place to read and daydream and wile away the hours.
One day,
while I was sitting there and thumbing through a Time or Newsweek (or some
such magazine), I came across an ad for the
Peace Corps, an organization I’d certainly heard of and had always been
intrigued by. I read the thing all the
way through and saw that the feds were looking to send people far and wide to
do “the toughest job” they’d “ever love.”
I recall looking up from the page and staring off into the middle
distance. Shortly thereafter, my vision
blurred and I could see myself (quite vividly, in my mind’s eye) living and doing
charitable work in some exotic locale.
Five
minutes later I left the library and drove home at a high rate of speed. I unlocked my apartment door, raced to my
bedroom, and dialed the 1-800 number listed in the advert. Before you could say “get out of Dodge,” I
was knee deep in the PC application process.
To make a
long story short, the American government ended up deploying me to Poland. My first stop was a place called Płock, not far from Warsaw. I spent the next three months in that
picturesque city on the Vistula River, completing something “Pre-Service
Training” with my fellow Volunteers-to-be.
By the way, I’ve included a photo of our group. It was taken not long before we graduated
from PST and were shipped off to the various towns and cities where we’d
serve. I can be seen in the lower,
right-hand corner. I’m standing behind the
blond and smiling Bradley Jarvis, a Californian who had recently graduated from
Cal-Berkeley.
After PST,
I was sent to Tarnów,
down near Krakow, to teach at a small teacher-trainer college. Two wonderful years ensued. I can say, without any hesitation, that that experience
transformed me in more ways than I can enumerate here, in this short blog. As a matter of fact, to this very day, I
think of Poland as my second birthplace.
Just before
completing my two years, I was given a certificate of appreciation which I recently
ran across when I was going through a box of keepsakes.
