Jake Mondt:  

From a letter sent to Joanna Grant: I feel sad your (our) mother died March 2004. She was a very charming woman with a capability of making me feel at home in her house. I assume that dad died earlier. I came to appreciate you all more and more through the years as I started appreciating your courage to take a stranger in the family for a year. Let me start by telling you the main events in my life. After I returned to the Netherlands I started to study geology at the University of Leiden. Going into the field and looking at rocks still gives me a great feeling. As you probably remember I fell ill the second year at university and had to stay in a sanatorium for a year to be treated for tuberculosis. My fellow students were a great help to me, allowing me to continue my study, at least the theoretical part. Once recuperated, I visited geological sites in Belgium, England, Germany and France. Then I did some fieldwork in the North of Spain. In the mean time I decided to switch over to geophysics. Although this was possible in Leiden I found that Utrecht was a better place for geophysics. The first year I had to catch up with my (lack of) knowledge of physics and mathematics. This didn't go too well. In the mean time I had met Martine who studied law, but had lost interest. Still we decided to go for it and thus continue. (The physical education teacher (Mr Pearson) in Lakeview used to say : "When the going gets tough, the tough gets going". And so it was. I remember one summer Martine and I were sitting in a student room working for exams with our feet in a basin with ice water, because it was bloody hot. Eventually we both finished university. I in Utrecht with an PhD and Martine with a judicial degree. She started working as a legal secretary in a court which went so well that she decided to try to apply for judge. After an additional education, lasting 4 year...Expand for more