Deanna Van Lokeren:  

Life I have spend most of my professional life working in humanitarian work, from teaching English as a Second Language at a YWCA to working with the developmentally disabled. I taught swimming through college and I guess I will teach it off and on til I'm eighty! (Never mind I was the slowest on the Fohi team, but that's another story!) I dabbled in the legal field for a while, thinking I'd like to be a paralegal, but I discovered I'd much prefer to work directly with people on personal issues. I also taught adaptive aquatics to people with disabilities and from there I became an advocate to help people with disabilities live on their own in the community (I worked for United Cerebral Palsy in Santa Barbara). I am also now proficient in American Sign Language and though I'm only hearing-impaired, I am proud to be able to communicate with the deaf community and thus connected with another part of myself. I moved back to the Bay area where I had gone to college to marry a Dutch man I'd dated for many years, we did the deed last fall. We were married outside in the Santa Cruz forest in which me wearing a Renaissance style wedding dress and with my family and friends in full attendance. When the sun shone down on us during our vows it reaffirmed it was meant to be! I am happily married, in Nevada now where my husband works as an...Expand for more