ISKL Karin Christiansen

When I left KL in the summer of 1974 I had no idea what I wanted to do, as a matter of fact I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up and I will be 50 this year! I always loved languages, so I did focus on that, however, I got side tracked many times along the way. I worked as a tour guide for Scandinavian, German and English tourists in Mallorca and Tenerife. That life was one big party, so I decided to do something more serious and got a job at the US Embassy in Oslo in the personnel section. I got so jealous of people moving around that I got a job at the Norwegian State Department, but while waiting to be posted overseas I met my husband – who was working at the US Embassy! John was in the Navy and we moved quite a bit, South Carolina, Virginia Beach, Germany, Spain, Texas and then ended up in Belgium. At that point I was tired of being a Navy Wife and our son was tired of changing schools every 2-3 years. We decided to stay in Belgium at least until Kris graduated.

For Kris to be able to attend the SHAPE International School here at least one of us had to have a “proper job” that covered school costs, so I got a job at NATO which was supposed to be temporary, and my husband got a job with Lockheed Martin – and here we are, still in the “temporary” apartment we moved into Dec 1998! Our son graduated from the SHAPE High School last year. His passion is music and he hopes to get into Berklee School of Music in Boston. At the moment he is taking classes at University of Maryland here on the NATO base. We have no idea how long we will be here; we were never any good at making plans.