Finding Myself on the River Amazon with Baggage

Mary Candace Mize's search for identify led her to eighty-two countries, mostly in the developing world. She has written about her solo travels around Africa and Yemen, then another half year of travel down the coast of South America and island hopping in the Pacific before accepting a teaching position in Australia. Two years later she moved to Pakistan to teach at the International School in Islamabad. After a year at the Consular School in Genoa, Italy, she returned to her hometown in Albuquerque, where she met her future husband two days later. She spent 27 years in elementary schools, teaching library, and gifted curricula while acquainting her students with literature, music, and art of world cultures.

Combined with the unexpected job on the Amazon River, working for the man who wrestled Anacondas, are reflections on her adventures worldwide. Some highlights of her travels were shopping at gunpoint in Axum, Ethiopia, while pursued by a mob, who were angry with the people she was with, traveling from Pakistan to Greece by local buses, being robbed at knifepoint in Ivory Coast by a local who, after taking her money, asked if she had any ball point pens.