AC_1965_Web

64 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z G R E N E L L standing on a rise in Calcutta, that same friend phoned to ask if Peter wanted to work for UNICEF in New Delhi.The answer was an emphatic yes, and so the four months in Dallas became a lark rather than a curse,and the Raymond D. Nasher Company, that was developing Flower Mound NewTown with Eddie Marcus, hired me to be secretary to the consult- ing group. In New Delhi, 1972, we lived in the ground floor flat under good friends from Bhubaneswar and we bought aTriumph Spitfire from a de- parting foreigner. For Christmas we drove to the Himalayas with Peter’s sitar sticking out of the back of the very low convertible and passed people breaking rocks along the road—but one illustration of the daily and multiple juxtapositions one encounters in India that chal- lenge and twist one’s ideas about most everything.Once again in New Delhi I taught school, briefly, at the American Embassy School, 6th and 1st grades. India is an assault on the senses. It’s too hot and too crowded, but chuck full of history and daily les- sons in everything.We made lifelong friends and I came to both appreci- ate and abhor what I saw from both Indians and Americans, including myself.There is nothing like living in another culture, especially one that is more than 4000 years old, com- pared to our barely-400-year-old na- tion. My “professional life” was still nonexistent until I fell into manag- ing a new nonprofit organization that helped deaf people get employ- ment. I had read In This Sign in India and the takeaway for me was that deaf people who depend on sign language are like foreigners in their own country, a sentiment I some- times felt in India where most ev- eryone we socialized with spoke English, yet there were still so many differences between us. On return- ing to San Francisco I took up sign language and worked as a research assistant for a study of language ac- quisition of deaf children at U.C. San Francisco. I wrote up the research results for the parents of the chil- dren being studied, further devel- oping my expositive writing skills. After taking notes in a grant writing workshop for a deaf man, I wrote a grant proposal for his f ledgling agency which eventually led to Deaf Self-Help becoming incorporated and funded. Everything I had done previously was helpful in this new position. I became an administra- tor, bookkeeper and fundraiser for this small organization in the back of a Catholic church, serving as the “Vishnu” (the preserver) to the founder-director’s “Shiva,” (creator and destroyer).During that time, our sonAlex was born.After having man- aged the agency for eight years and developed successful legislation that replicated our service design of pro- viding services in state employment Boston, 1970. California, 1984.