1993

After five months of hitching through Chile and then public transportation across Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru, culminating at Machu Picchu, Laura Howse returned home to Washington for "weddings and art classes and the excellent summer job of gardening. The pay's good, and I get to get both tan and dirty." Now she is working as a lithographer's assistant and has probably already found other work since writing to me. Kristy Collins has become an adopted child of Laura's family, working for a start-up software company as a product manager. Laura also reports that Kate Cudney is teaching art in D.C. and living within a stone's throw of Andrew vonMeyerhauser, but she doesn't say what Avon has been up to. Probably still trying to teach that German Shepherd to catch frisbees and bring them back, in one piece, without slobbering all over them too much. Also from Laura comes the news that Halley Moore is working for Simon and Schuster in children's book publishing.

Musetta Leung was awarded a master's degree in bilingual education from Boston University last May, and after teaching a summer preschool program has entrenched herself in a three-year project to "redesign the philosophy and curriculum of a Chinese bilingual child-care center and kindergarten in Boston's Chinatown. Musetta abandoned the idea of teaching last summer when she "felt the urge to hang every one of [her] four-year-olds upside down from the ceiling." Also on the education scene, Sara Leach has become more or less a fulltime substitute teacher in and around Whistler, B.C. Coupled with her substitute teaching, Sara has also been hired to teach Kids Kamp at the base of Whistler Mountain and garnered a free season's pass. "The only problem is, I'm getting so much teaching work, I may not have any time to ski!"

As she put it, this next letter is to make "all the toiling working people extremely jealous": "While studying and working in England last year I ran into a '79, Joe Asch, in my boss's office in London...several weeks later I bumped into Aaron Sack, who was on Via Corso in Florence on a Christmas trip from Paris with a girlfriend (sorry to let the cat out of the bag). In February, a good friend from Hong Kong, Pete Clinton '81, stopped by. After that I ran into Meredith Katz on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv in March. As though this were not enough, the day I returned to Asia in June, I bumped into Tori Martens '92 in the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok, and we traveled together. Then, once in Hanoi, finishing my M.A. paper and taking more Vietnamese classes, I hung out with Jeff Swiatek '9O. My whirlwind year around the world seems to be winding down—I ended it with my sister's wedding celebration on a settlement in Samaria. Never say you don't get exciting mail." OK, I won't.

Some quickies: "To paraphrase Clemens, rumors of my demise are crap." CarlMcGowan has finally moved off of his mom's couch and is working for Anderson Consulting, currendy in Nashville, but he returns to Summit, N.J., to chill with his cat Shabba. JayStachowitz wrote to me from port in the Bahamas, where he's been living the student's life aboard a research ship sailing the Caribbean studying marine ecology while diving on remote tropical islands. Mainland, he has been going long with the UNC Ultimate Team. And Alicia Walker is in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne, prepping for graduate school in French studies.

That's it for now.

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