Post date: Nov 10, 2017 11:17:57 PM
I was in a graduate chemistry program at University of Washington. My research involved poisonous explosives in a lab of evacuated glass tubing along one wall of my office/laboratory in the basement of the chemistry building in Seattle. It was Spring and I kept the windows open at night to cool the room.
One morning I came to work and started tasting metal in my mouth. A thief had entered the lab, dismantled the glassware in the fume hood, and dribbled organic lead compounds across the floor. I was inhaling this and tasted the heavy metal compounds. Not healthy.
About this time a cohort was dismantling a five-liter flask half full of ether, which mildly exploded and caught fire just across the hall. Without thinking, I ran out, grabbed a large wheeled carbon dioxide extinguisher and put out the flames.
Meanwhile I was getting too heavily involved with a girlfriend that I clearly did not want to marry and had no idea how to break it off.
Walking through the quad on the way to the student union one day during all this, I encountered a couple of students at a card table. Curious, I asked what they were selling. They talked up the Peace Corps and said that an application test was starting upstairs in only a few minutes.
Being a long-time sucker for surveys and tests, I went up and filled out the forms. Having forgotten all about it, I was mildly surprised to get a phone call two weeks later. I had been selected for Nigeria (I didn’t even know where that was at the time) and training would start at Columbia Teacher’s College in two weeks!
So I bailed out of graduate school, drove my car and belongings to my parents house in California and started on an adventure!
Decades later I wrote a "book review" for Friends of Nigeria newsletter that reflects on part of this experience. In that same issue is an article about our Peace Corps training at Columbia Teachers College in New York City.