As a child, I remember being very interested in one of my mother's books, For the Love of France. Rather than send me to France, she sent my brother and me to Concordia Language Villages French camp. Later in high school I studied French and returned to Lac Du Bois as a villager and later as a counselor. My family hosted a Spanish boy for a summer, and later a German girl for a year. I received the Congress-Bundestag Scholarship to be an exchange student during my junior year of high school in 1985, and lived with the Schutz family in Nuremberg through Youth For Understanding. I studied German in at the University of Iowa, lived in the Foreign Language House the whole four years I was there, and studied at the University of Stuttgart my junior year, 1989 - 1990.  After university I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Hungary. Then I taught English to students from all over the world for two years at Language Pacifica and later at ELS Language Centers, where as International Student Advisor I worked on a daily basis with multiple world cultures. We have also hosted many foreign students in our house for varying lengths of time, from a few weeks up to several months. In Mountain View, California, we lived in a very diverse neighborhood and enjoyed the neighbors, restaurants, and grocery stores. All of the students in my initial clinical experience at Ames Elementary were from other countries and I enjoyed working with them. In addition, my wife is French, and we visit her large family at least once a year in France. All of these experiences make me a true global citizen and a student of crosscultural human relations.
 
 

Jose Rubio-Bianca, 2nd from right, Spanish exchange student with my family, summer 1981.	Les Invalides-Napoleon's Tomb Paris, Spring 1986
Doing the "Troika" at  UI Russian Festival.	International Work Camp - East Germany, July 1990 Frank-East Germany, Brigitte-Holland, Scot, Antonio-Italy.
Ekaterina, Valentina, Samka, Russian students at UI Foreign Language House, 1990 - 1991.	Scot in Kanji-made at UI Japanese Festival 1991.
Ekaterina-Russia, Scot, Michi-Japan, at UI Mardi Gras 1990.	Xiao, People's Republic of China, my "Armchair Traveler Partner" UI 1990 - 1991.
The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California 1994.