I became a member of First Unitarian of St. Louis on February 19, 2023.
I was born in Detroit, Michigan, and spent my first 18 years in Dearborn. I graduated from Northern Michigan University with a degree in English and got an MS and Ph.D at Michigan State University.
After college, I served in the Peace Corps for five years in Senegal and Mali at the end of the Sahel drought. I lived in small villages, usually as a fictive family member of the village mayor, and was always given a local name. Adapting to village life was difficult at first, particularly the remoteness, extreme poverty, and the human consequences that were so different from my previous life in Michigan. Not surprisingly, understanding those experiences—people, drought, famine, and place—became the focus of my career.
Although I had studied it in school, I learned to really speak French in West Africa and learned to speak three African languages over my years there, Bambara, Fulfulde, and Wolof. In graduate school I studied Arabic and Africa Area Studies until the last semester of my doctorate in Geography, the subject of which was, not surprisingly, the impact of drought and climate change on villagers in Central Mali.
Mary and I met in graduate school (see Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/03/how-we-met-marry-broke-jaw-mary-roy-michigan-st-louis-married) and were married in 1987.
After we were married, we worked for a couple of years in Sudan as researchers. I worked for Oxfam investigating drought and famine in Red Sea Province. During our first year the now infamous Islamo-military coup occurred and, although our lives became much more difficult, it was the best research experience of my life.
I taught Cultural Geography for 28 years at Grand Valley State University in the Department of Geography and Sustainable Planning. I also taught at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana for a semester, and led study groups to London, Edinburgh, and Paris to study urbanization.
Mary and I moved to O’Fallon, Illinois in 2020 to live close to our children. We enjoy the energy of St. Louis and the proximity to parks, trails, and the great outdoors. Now that I’m retired, I like to ride my road bike, grow vegetables, and entertain my Jack Russell, Pip. I take Spanish classes at SWIC and will transfer to SIUE this fall. Conservation and preservation of the environment are important to me—maybe an obsession. We converted our house to solar in 2020 and had the gas line removed last year.
I’m a lifelong atheist and probably never would have set foot in any sort of temple except to study it, but we wanted our young children to have experiences and connections to larger traditions in the US and England to give them a greater sense of cultural roots. I was drawn to Unitarianism in Michigan because I liked the critical approach to belief and, most importantly, I felt that I could be myself. At FUStL, I’ve found friendly faces, fun, and intellectual, social, cultural, and emotional connections.