The Times of My Life

About the Book

This book is more or less a rambling account of some of the events in the author’s twenty-five years, more or less, in the Foreign Service of the United States State Department, Agency for International Development. They are mostly personal notes on her life in many foreign places. It is not meant to be a critique of the Foreign Service or the Agency. They were just the backdrop in which the events described occurred. It is merely personal reflections of her life during twenty-five years living and working in a variety of remote places around the world. Some are amusing, some tragic, but all give the reader an idea of what it’s like to cope with life in foreign, and for the most part, isolated lands.

About the Author

Lois Gibson was born in Minnesota but was raised and went all through school in San Francisco, California. She was married there and moved to Redwood City on the peninsula. The marriage ended in divorce after ten years, so she moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, to be near her older brother. She joined the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State, Agency for International Development at the ripe old age of thirty-eight, after both of her daughters had married and left home. She continued in that endeavor, except for a four-year period when she was out of foreign service, for the next twenty-five years. Her career began in South Vietnam, in 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War, where she met and married a fellow AID employee, Guy Gibson. They then moved on and eventually traveled to twenty-two foreign countries, either working in or traveling through en route to a new post. Thirteen of those years were spent in central and southern Africa, in the Congo, Burundi, Botswana, and South Africa. They later returned to the Far East to Laos and Thailand. She is now retired, and since her husband’s untimely death in 1997, she moved to Pensacola, Florida, to live with one of her two daughters, Fern Pearson, and her husband, Arnold, where she now resides.