About Sandy

I want answers.

A few years ago, bored at work, I was Googling around for people I used to know—a West Coast friend from grad school, an old work colleague—when I idly decided to look up a boy I'd had a crush on in third grade. I still carry his full name in my head, largely because that had been my last year at the American-Nicaraguan School in Managua: I left the summer of 1979 expecting to go on a brief vacation to the United States, and, because of the war, became a refugee instead. My life—and my family’s—continued in another country, another language, another path. But that unexpected rent in my history—with its sharp before and after—served to seal my memories. I remember everything about that time. When I returned to Managua again for the first time, in the early 90s, I was still knew the way from my old house to my old school.

So that day at my computer, I started typing in different versions of my old classmate’s name and eventually got a match: name, era, country–but wrong age. This person had been an adult, presumably a Sr. to the Jr. that I knew. And this Sr., the online document said, had been in Nicaragua working for the CIA, selling the government of Anastasio Somoza arms to guard against the coming revolution.

I have no idea if any of that was true. (I didn’t save the page, and haven’t been able to find it again.) And I have to admit that even into adulthood, I’ve been amazingly incurious about my past. For years, possibly until I went to college, I didn’t know the barest outlines of Nicaraguan history. This may be partly because my parents were the kind of immigrants who focused on moving forward, and bristled at too many (or any) questions. But that may have been my choice as well: Out with the old. Let’s survive the new.

This little hint of online intrigue, though, came at a particularly fertile moment: I’d become a Mom, and my son was approaching the age I’d been when I left my country. I couldn't believe, looking at him, that the moment that had most defined me had happened to a little body still stocky with baby fat, a mind that hadn't yet quite mastered chapter books. And suddenly, I wanted to know more. So I started thinking: What if I looked up every classmate I'd left behind, to find out what happened to them, who they were? I thought it might not only tell me the hidden history of the time and place I came from, but also more about myself. And that's how this project came to be.

You got questions? (Or comments? Or ...?) 

Send me an email directly via the form on this page. I'm always happy to talk.