Destination Destiny

New Country, New Culture, New Family, New Life

Gerad and I are always happy to return to Penang, Malaysia to visit and attend Mass at the church where we were married 49 years ago.

I left Iowa in 1973 to travel to Malaysia. I was part of a group of Peace Corps Trainees who would teach at a university after our language and culture training was completed.

Our language and culture training was in Port Dickson (P.D.), a small seaside town south of Kuala Lumpur on the Straits of Malacca. A young Port Dickson girl, Anne Carrier, was hired as the secretary for the group. I met Anne’s parents, Felix and Rachel Carrier at a reception during that first week. They were very kind and gracious in helping to welcome this new group of Peace Corps Trainees to Malaysia.

During the weekend at the end of our first week of training, I got a call from Anne asking if I would like to go to a dance at the Port Dickson Yacht Club with her brother. I learned later that Anne was not allowed to go to the dance unless one of her brothers went. Gerad was working in Kuala Lumpur but had returned to P.D. for the weekend. He nicely agreed to go to the dance with a stranger to help out his sister. I was happy to get a chance to go out into the community to meet some new people, so I agreed to go to the dance with him.

He picked me up at our training center and took me to the dance. I was blown away by the evening. This was all before computers or the Internet, so I had very little information about Malaysia before I went there. I knew where Malaysia was but not much else.

I had come to Malaysia to work in a backward country to try to help improve education. That is what Peace Corps Volunteers did. That was our purpose. But, here I was at a dance with a band, at a yacht club. The people at the dance were a mix of Eurasians, like Gerad and Anne, plus Chinese and Indians, and there were loads of English men and women in the crowd. English was the language of the evening, so I had no difficulty communicating. I just enjoyed the fun.

Gerad came to P.D. on weekends off and on during my 3 months of training and would call to ask if I wanted to go to the Club.

Three months later, after our training was completed, our group of Peace Corps Trainees were sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers and we moved into the dorm apartments at University Pertanian to begin teaching at the university.

When Gerad arrived to pick me up for a date on the following Friday evening, I remember showing him around our tiny apartment with its bare gray cement walls. It was basic but it was going to be my home for the next two years.

The next weekend when he came to pick me up from the dorm, he brought a large painting that he had made for me. He remembered that I had said that I wished we had something to hang on the dark gray walls of the apartment. The painting was of three Chinese people playing cards. It was painted on a large wooden board. What a kind thing to do.

That painting is hanging over the table where I am writing now and has hung on the walls of many of our apartments and houses over the years in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Jordan, Japan, and now in Florida … but that is getting ahead of my story.

We dated over the next few months but it was a time of confusion for me. I enjoyed getting to know Gerad and his friends. Still, I was a long way from home and had arrived in Malaysia with the idea of a 2-year commitment to the Peace Corps and to teaching in Malaysia before returning home. I did not come to Malaysia with the idea of finding a husband.

A few months later when Gerad’s dad retired from his job at the Shell Oil Refinery in Port Dickson, the family moved back to Penang which was where the family had originally lived. Gerad invited me to go to Penang to visit them.

When we were on the beach in Penang, we each bought a watercolor sketch of the beach area. A few weeks later, after the sketches had been framed, Gerad asked if we shouldn’t hang them together on the same wall. At that point, we began talking about a long-term commitment and getting married.

We were married on September 21, 1974, just one year and one week after I arrived in Malaysia. It was a lovely wedding in the Catholic Church in the Palau Tikus section of Penang with Gerad’s immediate and extended family attending as well as my mother and father, and the group of Peace Corps Volunteers that had been in training with me.

That was 49 years ago. How could that many years have passed so quickly?