Dedie King

As a child Dedie King loved stories about animals and people in different countries. She grew up wanting to travel and went into the Peace Corps right after college and taught school in Katmandu and in Bandipur. Living in Nepal affected her deeply. Food, music, rural activities, extended families, ease with time, all combined to produce a very different feeling tone of culture than that of the United States, but within that, she discovered that the human needs and desires, anguishes, and basic enjoyments were the same. Dedie’s interest in writing books about different cultures is to bring awareness to young children of both the sameness and the differences of cultures around the world. She has a Masters of Education degree and besides teaching in the Peace Corps, she has taught elementary school and children with learning disabilities. She helped start and administer a parent co-operative preschool and founded a newsletter for health and education resources for parents in Massachusetts. Dedie and her husband ran a small dairy farm in Massachusetts for ten years. Daily chores and activities were somewhat dependent on the weather and the season. Then for the last 28 years she has practiced Five Element acupuncture, a Taoist form of Chinese medicine. These life experiences made her interested and curious about how different natural environments and cultures were reflected in people's lives. She is a simple, straightforward writer, but just the simple story of a day, based on fact, can give a reflection of one facet of the human experience on this earth. Dedie travels to every country that she writes about, and in most cases has spent extended time in each one. She lives a moderate life-style and lives this way when she visits other countries so that she is able to get first-hand knowledge, as much as possible, of regular life there. Her husband's work involved traveling to Asia over a number of years. She therefore has a number of friends from these countries as well as American friends who work and live for extended amounts of time in many of the countries covered in the books. Dedie has two children and several grandchildren. She would like them, and all children, to feel at home in the world, to be curious and adventurous, and to have interest and compassion about the differences they see in people, rather than fear. Her hope is that by noticing differences in cultures, children might be able to reflect on their own experiences, choosing consciously what they think is important and what they might like to try to do differently.