Rick Blanchard:  

My name is Rick Blanchard and went to MDHS from '68 to 1971. I did not trust the Dean or any of the counsellors at that school. In my last year of high school I left MD and did everything I could to convince a high school in Walnut Creek to accept me as a student, they did and I eventually let those people down by leaving early. I just could not understand why I needed to have four years of physical education to receive a high school deploma, I was never asked if I had one by an employer, ever. My life has been wonderful and filled with interesting people. I have been lonely, heartbroken and loved. I know what it's like to feel real love. I've experienced life in other cultures and I've seen the horrors and the cruelty of humans. I've been happy and felt the pain of loss. Okay now back to my trouble in... We were being then taken deep into the jungle. We walked for hours and hours, the blindfolds on so tight it was hard to tell if it was day or night. They kept at us, their strong deep voices sounded African for sure, but I could hear a bit of what I thought could be British. At that point it was hard to think about anything other than getting away from them. I had no idea if any of our group were together or not, and I could not risk trying to make contact with them, yeah we were pretty screwed. When they grabbed us on the road they took everything we had, our cameras, cell phones all of our money, passports everything. I knew my beautiful wife, Lisa, kept a small Swiss Army knife on a chain around her neck but they took that. The leader held her chain with the knife in Lisa's face and asked her in his broken English what was she going to do with her pink dagger, kill a lion or mayb...Expand for more