Years ago, Thea Evensen was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru. She lived in a small Andean village and struggled with Spanish, never moving beyond the present tense. Years later, she was determined to finally learn the language and spent many summers traveling from California to San Miguel de Allende to study at the Academia Hispano Americana. She still talks with her Spanish teacher every Wednesday morning on Zoom.
A longtime ESL teacher, she is also a published writer. Her stories and poems have appeared in two anthologies, and in 2020 Peace Corps Worldwide published her story “Fifty Years On: Sicaya 1964 & 2016.” In May 2019, Thea and another Peace Corps friend spent two weeks in El Paso, Texas, working with Central American asylum-seekers crossing the border. Their article about that experience was published in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
In 2023 Thea completed a memoir, “Valley Girl: Stories of a Full and Fortunate Life,” a collection of stories and poems from the past 20 years. She continues to teach English as a Second Language, write, paint and play the piano… and also travel to Mexico every year.