PaulaAndra Aigner:  

I always wanted to be a missionary, artist, dancer, singer, writer and teacher when I grew up. My family thought that was a silly notion because it wasn't what they thought I would be. They stuck to their idea that I would be playing a supportive role to their dreams and ambitions. As it turns out, they were wrong because I ended up being what I dreamed of being. I grew up in California. I've lived in almost every area of that state. I was born in Oakland and spent a third of my year, in childhood, in the San Francisco bay area with my mother's family. I've lived in Chico, Ukiah, Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose, Modesto and Whittier. I went to school in Chico, Durham, Ukiah, Palo Alto, San Jose, Los Altos Hills, Fullerton and Tampa. I graduated from Rio Hondo with a degree in Fine Arts. I also went to Foothill, San Jose Bible College, Cal State Fullerton and USF. Like most of my family, I was born with wheels on my feet. When I married I moved to the Big Island of Hawaii where my husband and his family lived and were in business, then we later moved back to California. After our son was born we moved to Florida where my foster parents were living. It's where I still live. I love living in Florida. I go back every year to see family and friends and to do work in California. I'm not so sure that I ever did anything all that wild in school because even though I knew what I wanted to do I really didn't know who I was. I had to go out and do what I wanted to do and to grow up to see who I am. Now I do a lot of things that others would consider unexpected and a bit on the wild side because they're unexpected. I do them in the course of doing my job as a short term missionary. I also write articles about those experiences for reports for our partners and for my friends on Facebook. I also write teachings which I share when I'm an invited speaker both in this country and in Europe. My family lived on a farm north of Chico until I was in third grade. I attended Citrus School, which then accommodated K-12. My Kindergarten teacher was Mrs. Curtis. We then moved into town and I attended Linden and Parkview Elementary Schools and Chico Junior High before going to Chico Senior High. Because we moved around a bit, it seems that I was often the new kid in school. I do believe that my favorite teacher in Junior High, Homer Duer, was probably everyone's favorite because he brought learning alive so that we could see that classes didn't need to be a scary place to be and that everyone was capable of learning. Everyone got to be a hero in his class. One of my favorite teachers in high school was Mr. Long. I know that others in my class thought he was an unfair and unusually tough teacher. But I know another side to him. He saw a student who had promise and who had a family that actively tried to kill that. He stayed after school, while his wife was dying, to give me the opportunity to get the work done that I wouldn't be able to do at home. He was there encouraging me when he saw me giving up and getting me to continue anyway. I got to see him when we went to our ten year class reunion. He came to see us and we wrote to each other every year after that until he died. My foster mother was a huge influence in the direction my life took. She was always my cheerleader and supporter. She was a pastor's daughter and a pastor's wife and yet she managed to do what she wanted and needed to do despite all the naysayers. She succeeded very well and managed to win over many of her critics to help to be the bridge between the different sides that usually happen in a church or in any other group of people that's collected together for a certain purpose. Her example has helped me when I'm in a group of people where I need to find a common ground between the sides so that we can agree to disagree on our differences and to agree for a common cause. I often work with people who disagree with me. It's my job to help them to see what they are good at and not to get them to agree with me. I guess you could say that my early childhood was good training for this. We're often told that life won't come out the way we expect it to. On one level that is true for my life. But on another level it has been coming out the way I had dreamed it. I had dreamed the big picture and the generality of the things I would do and I have done it and am still doing it, the mission trips, my artwork and helping others through teaching and writing and my dance. But the smaller details have often come out not as I would have expected like the directions that all those things have gone in, the doors that they have opened to friends I have, the unexpected family members and the fact that I have my own family. I like to tell people that what we do now we arrived at on the way to where we thought we were going. I met my oldest friend in 1973 when I moved to Palo Alto. I really don't know why we clicked but we did the moment we met. I was the only one of her friends that her family included as one of their own. When she got yelled at by her mother so did I. But then we did come up with the projects together that made her hair grow grayer. We've been through a lot of things together, husbands, kids and moving. Through it all we're still friends. We never set out to do wild things. But some of our projects to help others did end up being the wild stories of memories past. Like the time I was asked to make a wedding cake for a former roommate and of course my best friend helped too. We put the cake, which was actually made up of four heart cakes surrounding a center round cake, on a piece of covered plywood which we never thought to measure until we couldn't get the finished cake through either the kitchen door or the front door. We thought we would have to dismantle the entire doorways. The cake started to slid when...Expand for more