Citizenship: USA and Canada
Education: MBA (Finance), University of British Columbia, 1971; BSc (Agriculture), McGill University, 1967
Professions: International Economic Development, Professor, Writer
Status: Not as smart as I used to be.
I grew up close enough to Canada’s capital to remember its first shopping center and its first Chinese restaurant, but far enough into the country that being ‘outdoors’ meant open fields, a river or the bush. I’m the oldest of five in a family where the love was rock solid, but the shows of affection left plenty of room for insecurities that morph with age but never quite disappear.
Curiosity and a jack-of-all-trades approach to life came with my genes, and I cultivated them enthusiastically. I drove trucks, broke horses, felled trees and did journeyman framing and wiring in support of my father’s various enterprises, I camped in the off season a hundred miles from home, and I spent my last two summers as a teenager working a thousand miles north of Montreal in a village comprised mostly of Inuit people and their sled dogs.
It wasn’t a small world geographically, but the conservative fundamentalism that Dad preached from his lay pulpit every Sunday was also our way of life during the rest of the week. By my senior year in high school, the social and intellectual restrictions that went with that had begun to chafe. I decided that education would be my means of escape, my way to find a place in mainstream society. I grabbed science and English with both hands.
Over the next eight years - with two degrees, a marriage, and a government job - my love of the outdoors became agriculture and natural resource management, and my evangelical upbringing became economic development assistance.
Since moving to Washington in 1971 to join the World Bank, I have had the exceptional privilege of working in more than fifty developing countries. I have worked with development agencies, governments and private clients on all occupied continents. On the home front, a small farm in the shadow of the Blue Ridge was my base of operations for twenty of those years. That life, steeped in the rich traditions of rural Virginia, has been an important counterpoint to my hectic world of head offices, air travel and crowded marketplaces.
I grew up close enough to Canada’s capital to remember its first shopping center and its first Chinese restaurant, but far enough into the country that being ‘outdoors’ meant open fields, a river or the bush. I’m the oldest of five in a family where the love was rock solid, but the shows of affection left plenty of room for insecurities that morph with age but never quite disappear.
Curiosity and a jack-of-all-trades approach to life came with my genes, and I cultivated them enthusiastically. I drove trucks, broke horses, felled trees and did journeyman framing and wiring in support of my father’s various enterprises, I camped in the off season a hundred miles from home, and I spent my last two summers as a teenager working a thousand miles north of Montreal in a village comprised mostly of Inuit people and their sled dogs.
It wasn’t a small world geographically, but the conservative fundamentalism that Dad preached from his lay pulpit every Sunday was also our way of life during the rest of the week. By my senior year in high school, the social and intellectual restrictions that went with that had begun to chafe. I decided that education would be my means of escape, my way to find a place in mainstream society. I grabbed science and English with both hands.
Over the next eight years - with two degrees, a marriage, and a government job - my love of the outdoors became agriculture and natural resource management, and my evangelical upbringing became economic development assistance.
Since moving to Washington in 1971 to join the World Bank, I have had the exceptional privilege of working in more than fifty developing countries. I have worked with development agencies, governments and private clients on all occupied continents. On the home front, a small farm in the shadow of the Blue Ridge was my base of operations for twenty of those years. That life, steeped in the rich traditions of rural Virginia, has been an important counterpoint to my hectic world of head offices, air travel and crowded marketplaces.
Parenting and partnering still baffle me sometimes, but my loving wife, two wonderful children and six grandchildren would be the best sources on that subject.
To cap off my professional experience, it has been a pleasure to work with graduate students as an adjunct professor of international development policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University.
Writing has always been a part of me, both how I earned a living and how I explored and tried to capture the world around me. I authored and co-authored several professional books as far back as the 80s and 90s, and, more recently, articles about life in rural Virginia. My labor of love has been the Two Roads Home series, but over the years my desk drawers and hard drives have harbored essays, short stories and poems that are as much a record of my life as the stamps in my passport.
To cap off my professional experience, it has been a pleasure to work with graduate students as an adjunct professor of international development policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University.
Writing has always been a part of me, both how I earned a living and how I explored and tried to capture the world around me. I authored and co-authored several professional books as far back as the 80s and 90s, and, more recently, articles about life in rural Virginia. My labor of love has been the Two Roads Home series, but over the years my desk drawers and hard drives have harbored essays, short stories and poems that are as much a record of my life as the stamps in my passport.
