Tamara Delapraz:
CLASS OF 1967
East High SchoolClass of 1967
Anchorage, AK
Tamara's Story
Life
We are now quite settled in Switzerland after our return 4 years ago. It is now home. I continue to teach English to 11-14 year olds at a bilingual (Eng-French) school. Life is in general good.
I had to laugh when I wrote our Christmas letter in December. During the 2 week fall holiday (we have shorter summer holidays), we flew to Cairo where we'd lived from 1997-2000 for the wedding of my (Swiss) husband's assistant in Damascus (2000-2003) to an Egyptian. Even at university, I never would I have dreamed that I would be flying off to a wedding with the pyramids very close and in silhouette behind the reception party. (It never rains in Cairo.)
Life has been a lot of surprises, most of them good!
In 10 days, I leave for a school-paid 2 day conference in, get this, Istanbul! I mean... Unlike many of you, we didn't even leave Alaska during summer holidays when I was a kid.
Our worries in Switzerland are growing violence. Need I say that the world is not well?
We have been through 3 years of our son not finding steady work, being refused work because he was over-qualified or lacking experience. He found steady work a year ago at age 31. It looks like he'll be staying with this international company for a while. This taught us, up close and personal, the tragedy of unemployment. We were very worried as to what he was going to do with his life...
Our daughter, Jeanne, 30, has been a joy. She has just finished her MA in Counseling but continues to teach English to adults while trying to build a practice.
Internationally, our big concern is the injustice of the situation of the Palestinians. I wonder what news you actually get in the US. Myth and propaganda are so difficult to defeat. A people has been "more sinned against than sinning" to quote King Lear. If you want to know more, ask me...! I was a volunteer working in a Palestinian refugee camp in 1971-72 and have done a lot of reading on the subject.
Returning to a personal level, I hope that anyone who reads me will at least leave their name. I recognize that we cannot re-connect with everyone but it would be nice to know who remembered me.
Speaking of friends and not writing to everyone, my best friend, an American health worker, was killed last Sept (2006) when the International Red Cross vehicle she was riding in hit a land mine in Senegal. We'd been friends for almost 20 years as her Swiss husband was the head of the sub-delegation of ICRC when we lived in Manila. Jeanie was a nurse and got a Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins on-line in 2005 while living in Beirut and then Senegal. She had only gone back to work for 9 months when the accident happened. We'd corresponded by email almost daily for 9 years. My life fell apart. Jeanie was part of my stability. She, another middle class American woman, 7 years younger, was also doing her best to fit in, help her ICRC husband, going to diplomatic cocktails, finding her way. Our sharing our impressions of new places, people and adjustments plus just the stresses of our world, our encouraging each other to "go for it," was very precious to me. Our laughter saved us --- We spent energy writing our impressions, often looking for the humor in it all. Jeanie described one town in Africa where she was visiting prisons as a "one camel town." I am on my own again to a certain degree with a large hole in my life, although, I am very grateful that my husband is a pretty steady guy.
School
Catholic Jr. High
East Anchorage High School
College
Trinity College, Washington, D.C. (2 years)
Geo. Washington University, B.A. International Affairs
Ateneo de Manila U., Philippines, M.A. in Education, English
Workplace
After following my husband with the International Committee of the Red Cross to 8 developing countries, teaching where ever there was a spot for me, 2 years of elementary school in Lausanne, 4 years in Middle School at the Am. Embassy School in New Delhi, a year of EFL to 5-10 year olds at the Korean School in Cairo, we returned to Switzerland in 2002. My husband retired and I am teaching middle school ESL at a private British school.
I practice pranic healing, an energy healing, and do some hypnotherapy as well. Amazing work. As my husband's cousin is a farmer, I do a good deal of work on... cows. The vet is incredulous. Have done some unbelievable work on humans too! Everyone should learn this technique.
JUNE 2020. Life doesn’t change much at our age… We remain in my husband’s village in Corseaux, Switzerland, on Lake Léman /Lake Geneva, above Vevey, between Montreux and Lausanne. I retired from teaching 6 years ago and my husband David and I do what most retirees do: try to maintain our bodies and minds! For me, physically this consists of my home exercise with small weights usually 3x weekly (while watching “Madam Secretary”), and some yoga, tai chi and chi gong—well, not so regularly outside of class. A few weeks ago, I got my 70th birthday present, 18 months late, ...Expand for more
an electric bike. If you saw our hills, you would see that this is not deluxe! We sing in a choir and hope rehearsals will re-start in September so our cancelled May show can be prepared for January 2021.
Mentally: the choir, book club, some literature and trying to keep up with foreign affairs.
Some of you might have known my brother Tim (Spernak). Tim passed away in 2012 a few months after a stem cell transplant for leukemia which he’d fought for a few years. As our little brother Jamie had died at age 43 in 1999, now it’s just my sister Judy Friar and I.
Our son Lucien did finally get a job, then a better job closer to home, and now expects that his job in Human Resources which had just been created late last year will not be continued. Covid-19 has changed the needs and finances of his company. With more experience now, finding a new job should be easier this time around. But what will be the job market be like now?
The very excellent news is: Lucien and his wife now live 60 yards from us (steeply uphill). Their house dates from the late 1700s when it housed the farmers and the cows and pigs of the wealthy family who lived in the elegant residence to which it is attached. The residence now serves as the seat of the village government. Besides the proximity of our son and his wife, there is even better news: they have made us grandparents! Finally! Adrien is now 19 months old. During confinement, we could picnic together in their yard with Adrien doing his little show at his picnic table in the middle. I sing him the American favorites… Patty Cake and Old MacDonald… Adrien understands English and French but is not talking yet. However he has learned to sign a bit, so when I stop singing, he signs, “Again” and off we go for more rounds…It is a blessing that we can now put Adrien in our lap again… Our daughter Jeanne lives 200 yards away and joins us as well.
In case anyone is wondering, my French is good but not always fluent and my accent is sadly, very anglophone. So don’t be jealous. I console myself with the fact that some people find my accent charming or amusing and when I say something too strong/inappropriate/ridiculous, people usually give me the benefit of the doubt. A word to the wise, be careful where and from whom you pick up expressions.
We are very grateful that Covid-19 did not strike last year. During 3.5 weeks in July 2019 in Vevey, the big town below our village held the Fête des Vignerons, a celebration organized every 20 to 25 years to honor the vineyard keepers of the region. Charlie Chaplin who lived on an estate in the next village (after fleeing McCarthyism), called it “The most beautiful fête in Europe.” It is now a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. Preparations were started 8 years before with the naming of the composers and artistic director, and in fall, 2019, almost 6000 volunteers began preparing their part of the 26 scene show. The story line which changes every Fête follows the work of the vigneron during the seasons of the year. Visually the show was colorful, poetic, surprising, beautiful as the scenes flowed one into the next. As with every fête, most of the music was original, and it was magnificent – at times solemn as the choir sang, “We bow before the vineyards, the smell of the earth, the taste of the earth… reminding us from where we come…” or fast and fun for the grape harvest with lady grape pickers dancing down the arena steps to the main stage showing off their colorful bloomers while the choir sang a rollicking song for the joy of the harvest. There were pieces from past Fêtes, and I heard people whisper, “Ah! That song is from the Fête of 1927. It was in our school songbook” (in the 1960s). Or, “I sang that song in the Red Choir in 1999.” My husband’s whole family participated in the Fête of 1955 where my father-in-law, a vigneron, carried the flag of the vignerons, my mother-in-law was in the choir, my husband David and his brother and sister were on the stage representing the vines. David’s father again carried the flag in 1977 and his sister and her son received special honors as vignerons in 1999. This was the first fête that we had the option of participating in. My husband joined the main choir and as I feared that I lacked the stamina for 21 shows, I was permitted to rehearse in a group of 80 until April when the full choir of 425 began to practice together. This will surely be our last Fête—next one after 2040! ( NB: It seems that I cannot give you the website for the Fête des Vignerons but you can look it up and see some scenes and English text.)
We continue to be grateful for what we have starting with good health with a few age appropriate bobos, family, friends and many other things… a safe country, the rule of law, clean running water, a good education system, a good social safety net and good health care. We hope that this latest explosion of dissent will lead to more justice around the world, starting with the US.
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