I was encouraged by several foreign service colleagues and my children, as well as my older grandchildren. They all prodded me to write a memoir.
I entered the foreign service by pure luck. It was only because I was at the right place at the right time and was the right age to fill a need discovered by Robert Kennedy shortly after his brother was elected president in 1961. The problem was that no one in the state department was doing anything about reaching out to the youth of the word. Under a new program the Kennedys created, I was invited to enter the foreign service of the US information Agency (USIA) as a student affairs grantee because I could be shipped overseas immediately to help fill this gap. I was selected because I had an advanced degree in sociology, I was athletically inclined, and most importantly, I was bilingual in Spanish.
