Couple Takes A Rest Stop To Publish Newsletter

Even the publishers of The Caretaker Gazette are looking for that special place.

As former corporate climbers, Gary and Thea Dunn know simpler lives can be more fulfilling. They know living in remote areas can bring people closer. And they know informing relatives of that decision usually means having to say:

“No, we have not lost our minds.”

When the Dunns walked away from upscale jobs three years ago, Gary’s dad concluded Gary had joined a cult.

Why else would a marketing vice president with a home in Connecticut, an office on Park Avenue and a marriage to an IBM consultant leave to be a volunteer teacher in the Third World? Because, the Dunns say from their Pullman apartment, they knew too many people right out of “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

They shared few of the values of co-workers at Gary’s investment counseling firm. Teaching English to immigrants and launching an UTNE Reader salon in Stamford, Conn., added to their restlessness.

Among the salon members was a United Nations representative who spoke of the rich experience his school-age children had living in other cultures. The Dunns’ children, Kira and Trevor, were reaching that age.

The Dunns also had been happiest in the most remote reaches of the Third World. Since they’d met, they’d visited 40 countries, usually with backpacks and no reservations.

“On so many great trips we’d had so many great experiences that we asked, how can we extend this?” said Gary, 41.

The answer: move overseas.

With a for-sale sign on their house (which they hid when their parents visited, so they couldn’t be talked out of the decision), they began a private countdown.

On the day Gary became 100 percent vested in his retirement fund, he quit. They sold their house, told their parents, and within the month were volunteer teachers at an all-black school in Namibia.

Apartheid was just ending in the uranium mining town. Commuting 42 miles to the school because they could not live in the black township, they taught math and English, served as guidance counselors and ran the chess club. (The highlight of which was Thea teaching the book “To Kill A Mockingbird.”) But holding the unpaid positions cost them about $500 a month. When positions opened in India, a country Thea adored, they jumped.

At the Kodaikanal International School in the southernmost province of India, they taught students who were Christian, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu. They also, for the first time in their lives, became really sick.

Although longtime vegetarians with careful habits, the whole family developed dysentery. During a holiday backpacking trip to Singapore with their children, an emaciated Thea finally saw a doctor.

His diagnosis stunned them. She was almost six months pregnant. The doctor said she must return to the States immediately to have any hope of a healthy birth. Evidently the terrible dysentery had made her birth-control pills pass through her body with little effect. The next morning she and the children flew home, while Gary followed later.

Vanessa, born in New Jersey, was fine. But the prospect of bringing the infant back to such unsanitary conditions was unthinkable until she was older. While the couple pondered their next move, Gary began investigating newsletter publishing, drawn by the autonomy and creativity of the job. He found them in The Caretaker Gazette.

Since 1983, the Illinois-based newsletter had been a job-listing flier for caretakers. The Dunns bought the publication, doubled its size to eight pages, launched classified advertisements and began profiling caretakers.

Last year they moved to Pullman, where Thea is teaching and earning a doctorate in international education.

With children now 10, 8 and 2, they relish the small-town yet diverse atmosphere around Washington State University. But their travels are far from over.

They dream of a caretaking position near an American university overseas, where Thea, 39, could teach and Gary could continue his newsletter. Rent free.

Like subscribers, they find themselves lingering over job descriptions, imagining new worlds, finding that special place.

“We too,” Thea Dunn says, “are tempted.”

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