About BGL

Born to a neurosurgeon and the first woman city commissioner in a medium-sized city in the Midwest, the middle girl of three girls, I was raised in a conservative Dutch community. I began college at a small private school, but blasted out of there when my dad was injured, had to quit his medical practice and went off to earn a PhD in marine biology at the University of Hawaii. I spent six years there, goofing off, being my dad’s diving partner and volunteering at a free health clinic in Chinatown.

I graduated from UH with a degree in Anthropology, which was useless, so my mom sent me to secretarial school. That was dreadfully dull, and I somehow fell into teaching, and earned a Secondary Diploma in Education from UH, through VISTA, which simply threw students into the worst schools in Hawaii and handed them their diploma at the end of the school year without one hour of lesson planning or curriculum development.

That experience pretty much set the pattern for the rest of my life: jump in and figure it out. After substitute teaching for a year, I returned to the Midwest and was hired to teach ESL, not because I had any training, but I was the most persistent in bugging the personnel director. I was assigned to eight schools, nine grades, given a stack of books twenty years out of print, and no budget. I figured it out, and taught at that level for three years.

Subsequently, I went on to earn a PhD in Applied Linguistics at Michigan State. i was hired as an assistant professor of English at Cal State, Chico, teaching, among others, Grammar for Teachers and History of the English Language, which I not only had never taught before, but had not even taken. I figured it out. I also taught Methods of ESL, and introductory Linguistics. From there I proceeded to the University of Wisconsin, where I taught Linguistics, supervised student teachers, and ran the ESL Credentialing program.

After the death of my children’s father, I left academia and returned home to care for my aging parents, teaching ESL and Remedial Writing. I spent a year with the English Language Fellow program training teachers in Syria at the height of the war with Iraq, and then two years in Nepal. In both cases, I was simply trusted to do whatever job was needed, and told to simply have at it. I figured it out. Finally retiring in 2018, I failed miserably at trying to find ways to be useful, and returned to the university to earn a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan. I now work at a psychiatric hospital, which is challenging in ways teaching never was.

I have three kids, two step-kids, five grandkids and seven great- grandkids, one cat and two formidable but very nice dogs.

I speak Arabic badly, Nepali stumblingly, am proficient in French grammar rules, but very bad at understanding spoken French, can swear in a bunch of languages, and have taught English grammar so many times I can probably tell you the eight + two rules for using “the” by heart.

I am the author of four books,  The More Than Just Surviving Handbook: ELL for Every Classroom Teacher, with 3 editions, and Assessment and ESL, with 3 editions from Portage and Main Press, and two, written specifically for teachers in Nepal, for the Office of English Language Programs. I have also written articles and white papers in the field of ESL.

After I returned from Syria, I wrote a memoir of that remarkable year. But with the secret police so vicious, the paranoia so pervasive, I hesitated in trying to publish something about people I cared for and was worried about. War broke out, and I watched as the death toll mounted: 65,000, 100,000, 500,000. I lost touch with most of my friends: I am only certain as to the whereabouts of five. Now that the brutal Assad regime has fallen, and the millions of refugees are beginning to return, it’s time to tell the tale of life before the failed Arab Spring, and the seeds of a second spring.

^{Chapter One– Tuesday Morning}

^{Problems with my computer may have saved my life.}

^{It was Tuesday, September 12, 2006, a beautiful clear morning in Damascus. My two boys and I had been in Syria for exactly ten days, exhausting, disorienting days filled with jet lag, culture shock, the stress of trying to find a place to live and a school for the boys, and the struggle to get my feet on the ground before I had to start work as an English Language Fellow. Now at last, as the sunlight filtered in through the long row of windows in our new apartment, I  could finally draw breath and try to achieve some semblance of normalcy. I had sent the boys off to their new school earlier, the apartment was peaceful, and the noise from the street oddly serene. I set up my “desk,” a folding table in front of one of the velour chairs, and sat down to tackle what seemed like my last big hurdle: getting the Internet up and running} 

^{I tried for an hour. The English Help section was in Arabic, the only English words being: English Instructions. When I filled in the boxes as best I could and pressed Enter, I was immediately returned to my page, with all the boxes empty. When I called the Help Desk, no one answered.}        

^{As I wrestled with it, five blocks away, a small white car drove uphill through the traffic that rushed along the main thoroughfare in front of the American Embassy. It passed the guards posted in front of the Chinese embassy, and at the uppermost end of the embassy, turned onto the narrow one-way street that ran along the consular side of the compound.  Traffic was generally light along that leafy, shady, road. It was quiet, pleasant, far removed from the hubbub a block away. A place you could talk casually to the next person in line as you waited to renew your passport.}

^{The car cruised slowly past the main embassy gate then the entrance to the consulate.  Three men in the sedan stared hard at the building as they eased by.} 

^{At the end of the block, the car turned right and disappeared.} 

^{A few minutes later it reappeared. Again, it drove slowly past.} 

^{The driver tried to park across from the consulate entrance, but soldiers on guard waved him on. It turned the corner again.} 

^{A third time, it returned.} 

^{This time, people noticed.  Soldiers stiffened. The line of people stirred restlessly.}

^{But the car turned at the corner and disappeared once more.} 

^{At ten a.m., it returned one final time.} 

^{A pedestrian walked up the sidewalk carrying a briefcase. The car screeched to a halt. Gunfire exploded. The pedestrian gave a grotesque little tango hop and collapsed. As he rocked back and forth, twitched, straightened and died, three men erupted from the car and opened fire, armed with assault rifles and grenades. One hurled a grenade over the wall, then ducked for cover. It exploded with tremendous force. Huddling behind the car, the three fired at the Syrian guards across the street, killing one instantly. The guards returned fire. Amid the smoke and gunfire, the attackers heaved another grenade over the Embassy wall.}

^{Meanwhile, a minivan had turned down the back street and rammed the main gate. Guards opened fire. Bloody and dazed, the injured driver left the van, staggered around the corner down the front of the Embassy, and collapsed on the sidewalk in the lee of the car, ten feet from the body of the pedestrian. As the battle raged outside, the consulate closed, consulate personnel shoved all the civilians out onto the street, leaving them to fend for themselves.}

^{Five blocks away, I was cursing the Internet.}

^{Blissfully unaware, I finally gave up. Annoyed and frustrated, I decided to walk over to the Cultural Center where I knew I could get online. Knowing what was going on in the outside world and with my family a million miles away might make me feel like I had control over something.} 

^{I pulled the apartment door shut behind me.} 

^{My cell phone rang.} 

^{Brian, the Public Affairs Officer, said tersely, without preamble, “There’s shooting going on at the embassy. Don’t leave your apartment until you’re told it’s safe.”}

^{He hung up.}

^{I ran back inside straight onto the balcony. No sound of gunfire. No smoke. I rushed to turn on the television and switched on BBC.}

^{Endless speculation and maddeningly uninformative chatter for hours. BBC played and replayed the same footage. Smoke. Fire trucks seen from a distance. A burning car in front of the embassy. No names. No numbers. No answers to the questions I wanted desperately to know: Who was attacking? How many terrorists were there? Had the embassy wall been breached? Had anyone been killed?} 

^{My eyes locked on the screen. On the sidewalk. That sidewalk. The one I walked up every day. If I had not been fiddling with my damn computer, I might have been that pedestrian. Dead.}

^{My children, orphaned. Trapped in a foreign country where they didn’t know the language, no family or friends nearby.}

 ^{I hovered in front of the television, waiting in an agony of worry until the boys got off their bus safely. Fortunately, they had heard nothing. I nearly collapsed with relief.}

^{I could barely focus to make dinner, so that evening we walked down the hill to meet with my three English Language Fellow colleagues. We sat tensely, trying to make sense of what had happened, wondering what was going to happen next, whether more violence would follow, whether we were in more danger.}

                    ^{The next morning, the four of us were told that an “Embassy Town Hall” would be held at the Cultural Center. After I sent the boys off to school, keeping up the pretence of normalcy, I headed warily out.} 

^{I veered from my usual route. The city seemed normal. Mothers walked with their children, taxis roared up the hill and down, horns blared, people shopped. Yesterday’s incident seemed unreal, like a sequence in a violent video game. But the Embassy showed signs of war. A gigantic black splotch stained the road where the car had exploded and burned. Shattered glass littered the sidewalk. Bullets had created giant spider webs of cracks in the window of the visitor’s entrance.}

                    ^{When I arrived at the meeting, it was already packed with Foreign Service Nationals and Embassy personnel. I joined my three colleagues in a row near the back.}

^{The RSO, the Regional Safety Officer, explained what he knew of the attack. The minivan which rammed the gate had been filled with explosives; miraculously, it did not explode. Footage from the security surveillance camera outside the main gate filled in the gaps. The camera picked up images of the car stopping, the killing of the pedestrian, the four men throwing grenades and shooting. In the ensuing battle the attackers were pinned down behind the car and two were killed. A huge explosion erupted as the soldiers across the street blew up the car. In the rear, where there were no security cameras, the minivan driver dazedly stumbled back around the corner where he was captured.}

^{“I’m not altogether sure how much damage they could have done by blowing up their truck,” he told us. “We’ll learn that later. There are armed guards at the gate and across the street. The men didn’t get far.”}

^{Then he told what he called the “Embassy family” that everything possible would be done to assure their safety. If the danger increased, all non-necessary personnel would be evacuated.} 

^{I raised my hand. “Does that include us?”}

^{“No,” he answered, “You’re not government employees.”} 

^{My colleagues and I looked at each other in disbelief. No diplomatic passport. No protection. No plan. The US would take no responsibility for us at all.} 

^{“You can register on the official website Travel.State.gov,” he informed us quite cheerfully.}

^{If the violence escalated or there were other incidents they would send an email…}

^{An email.}

^{That’s what would stand between my family and chaos.}

^{Welcome to Syria, the third safest country in the world.}

^{Welcome to foreign service as an independent contractor.}

^{“What,” I wondered, “have I gotten my family into?”}