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TEA - A Life-defining Experience!

Page history last edited by Henry Hamburger 10 years, 7 months ago

 

    

Then - Kay Strain (Wave I - Group B) and her mother in Florida, June, 1961.  Kay was leaving for orientation at Columbia University.

Now - Kay Borkowski and Angeles, thirteen, Ajijic, Mexico, August, 2011.  Angeles was used as a drug runner by her parents and now lives at La Ola, a home for girls, and has  been in school just 18 months!

  

TEA – A Life-defining Experience!

Kay Strain King Borkowski

kaybork@yahoo.com

 

It’s August 11, 2011, and here in our little Mexican village on the north shore of Lake Chapala, I’m finally searching for words to describe how TEA affected my life.  I - who claimed as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, “I will not teach!” -  have spent most of my life teaching, because of TEA.  From Uganda and Kenya, to Western Australia, to the US, back to Kenya (evaluating math skills for a technical college established by the Danes), back to the US, to Malaysia (establishing a new university), back to the US, and finally to the United Arab Emirates (establishing a new university for women in Dubai) where I married Danny Borkowski, “retired” from teaching and joined him in Saudi Arabia.  TEA was a life-defining experience for me.  From the way I teach to how I have handled and continue to handle the difficulties life is sure to bring to us all, I’ve been positively influenced by TEA.  TEA provided the opportunity for life-long friendships, people I join with to celebrate and to commiserate.

 

TEA also influenced the life of the countries where we taught.  When I was in Kenya (1980-83), my then nine-year-old daughter and I were shopping in Nakuru.  I heard a voice say, “Miss Strain, MISS STRAIN!”  Now that was a voice from the past!  It was a former student from Machakos Girls’ School shopping with one of her children.  She had completed at least one university degree and was married to the equivalent of the governor of the province.  She shared news of students from Machakos, many of who had received PhDs.

 

Also, the grandson of one of “my” Machakos girls danced at our wedding in Ras al Khamiah, U.A.E. in June of 1999 when I married Danny Borkowski.  His father was a pilot for Kenya Airways. How’s that for a “small world” story?

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