50 years – The Second Decade: 74-86 [Basic education - or what I learned in school in between moves]

So I am turning fifty this month. And that of course gives one pause to think about his life. Who am I? Where have I been along this journey? This is the second blog post and it treats my second decade (minus 2 years).

Places lived: Ethiopia, Yemen, Oklahoma, India

• Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Good Shepherd School – 74-75 school year: 5^th grade)
• Yemen (American International School - fall semester 1975)
• Oklahoma City (Spring semester 1976, and 76-77 school year: 7^th grade)
• Sanaa, Yemen (77-78 school year: 8^th grade)
• Mussoorie, India (Woodstock School – 78-79 school year: 9^th grade)
• Edmond, Oklahoma (1979-1982: 10^th-12^th grade in the same school system)

  

  Woodstock school, Mussoorie, India (foothills of the Himalayas

Life Shaping events:

Two years of boarding school. 5^th Grade in Ethiopia and 9^th grade in India. It was hard being so far away from home, and this before the age of email and skype and cellphones. Letters routinely took 3 weeks each way!

The frequent moves across cultures – 11 schools in total before I graduated from high school – had several effects on me:

• Like many Third-Culture kids, I becamse leery of forming deeper relationships for fear of the eventual separation. But that also made me into someone who works hard at keeping up old friendships.
• It made me very flexible and adaptable to different contexts and understanding of other cultures.

Senior Picture (High school 1982)

Returning to the US in 10^th grade was a big adjustment after being overseas off and on for 7 years. Going from a small boarding school to Edmond where each class was 600+ students was a big change.  The Youth Group at First Baptist Church Edmond was a safe and accepting place during this time. Thanks to Roger Hagan, our youth minister, and to the kids in the youth group.

Spiritual Growth:

After growing up in a Christian home and hearing about God all my life, I realized that I needed to make it personal sometime in the fall of 1974 while in Ethiopia. So one night after the dorm devotions, I prayed to ask Jesus to come into my heart. I don’t think I knew all that that meant then, and am still learning today.

In India, I was involved in a small group Bible study that met in one of the staff’s home and really began to grow in my walk. 

Roommates:

Boarding school begin a very long phase of having roommates. At last count there have been 60+ guys with whom I shared a living space for at least a month. In these 8 years, I had seven roommates – all before I started university. In keeping with the cross-cultural mix in my life, I had roommates from the US, UK, Afghanistan, Iran, and India

Roomies that stand out in this period

Judd Threlkeld (5^th grade),

Taizoon Shakir, Zaphar Al-Talib (9^th grade)

Languages I spoke then and have more or less forgotten today:

• Arabic – I only remember the odd word here and there, especially loan words that have made their way into African languages via Islam.
• Hindi – an interesting language related to European languages.
• German – 3 years in high school, 1 year in college. Mostly forgotten over the past 30 years but I was very surprised last year in Germany how much was flooding back into my mind.

Rides:

• On our 1976 furlough, I got a Raleigh 10-speed bike from Wheeler Dealer in Oklahoma City. At this stage in life, I was not riding anywhere for transportation, just around the neighborhood for fun and occasionally to the swimming pool.
• Skateboard: I had a few nice skateboard and actually still have my nicer one in storage somewhere. Back in 1976, my brother and I both got cool plastic skateboards “by GT”. We had a game that involved chasing each other all over the apartment complex sidewalks on skateboard and trying to crash into the other. In retrospect, it was very similar to our “passport” bicycle game.
• My first car was a Fiat 124 special. Nothing very special about it as it was always needing repairs. I drove it on one of my first jobs as a spotter for the “Edmond Evening Sun” newspaper, delivering newspaper bundles to the delivery boys. 

Activities:

• Boarding school: Once you get over the initial home-sickness, you can have a lot of fun. In Ethiopia, I was on the baseball team, and was in a production of Mary Poppins and a youth musical called “Come Together”. We made our own darts out of matchsticks and paper and pins. And rigged up strings all around our room to turn off the lights and close the curtains from the bed.
• In India, there were Saturday trips into the Bazaar, and buying gelabees, throwing chapatis like Frisbees off the balcony to the monkeys. And a rainy season that never ended, and towels that never dried out. I was happy to never get a leech. The school organized a lot of dances and this was the era of Saturday Night Fever. My mom always said I learned to dance at boarding school.
• Piano lessons: practicing in the freezing cold in India, learning jazz with Fran Young in Edmond.
• Drums: I did snare drum in 7^th -10^th grade. Marching band in 10^th grade. I wasn’t that good and dropped out.  That hasn’t stopped me from tapping on things since then. I now have a Djembe drum that I really enjoy playing.
• Studying – Looking back, it seems I was pretty nerdy.
• Work: In the summers, I would work with my granddad, George Gaidaroff, who was a small-town pastor and worked in the week as a painter and wallpaper. I learned to paint and paper working with him and have always enjoyed painting. (but not so much wall-papering). 

Reading:

The Bible. I transitioned from the Living Bible to the NASB.

Chronicles of Narnia. I won a boxed set in some sort of Sunday school context in 6^th grade.

The Lord of the Rings. (I mistakenly started with the Simarillon and quickly abandoned that).

Tunes:

I got my first Toshiba cassette tape recorder before I went to boarding school in 5^th grade. It was red and I remember that these were really cutting edge at the time. My folks and grandparents sent me audio cassettes when I was in boarding school.

• I recall listening to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass – my parents had this.
• We picked up Evie and BJ Thomas cassettes on furlough in 1976
• Then in high school I got a record player and listened to Amy Grant, The Imperials, Leon Patillo, Ken Medema, Truth.