[image-51][image-78]Instrument manager Todd King is a man of many cultures. His parents escaped Communist China’s Cultural Revolution, arriving to the United States by way of Taiwan. King was born in the United States, but he spoke Chinese as his first language.

Inspired by the personal strength and growth his parents experienced from adapting to a different culture, King joined the Peace Corps to be a science teacher in Nepal for two years in the 1990s. “I decided to immerse myself in a different culture to learn to adapt,” said King, who works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “I also wanted to explore what it would be like to be a front-line teacher, day in and day out, in a cross-cultural setting.”

He chose Nepal as a way to return to his Asian roots. During his initial three months training and traveling throughout Nepal, he absorbed enough written and spoken Nepali to be a “beghan sichuk,” or science teacher, in an elementary school in a village consisting of a loose collection of homes spread over several mountains just south of Mt. Kanchenjunga.

The village did not have plumbing or electricity. The school and homes were built out of mud and stone, with wooden doors and windows. King lived in a converted storage shed, sleeping next to a stockpile of rice. “I always had a nighttime visitor, a mouse, who would sit on top of the mound of rice and have a midnight snack,” King said. “I lived pretty well by village standards.”

He overcame his limited Nepali through creative teaching techniques. “Instead of the standard rote memorization method, I emphasized demonstration and experiential learning independent of language,” King said. “I wanted to teach the children how to make observations, the basis for any science.”

For example, King would hold up an object, such as a cup, in front of the class and ask them to draw what they saw. Initially most of the children drew the same cup. To be accurate, however, each drawing should have differed slightly depending on the perspective of the viewer, which, in turn, depended on the viewer’s location in the classroom. A child sitting in the front should have drawn a slightly different cup from that drawn by a child sitting in the rear of the classroom. In time, they did.

“Observing and drawing an object according to true perspective goes against the prototypical cup in your head,” King said. “I built on this lesson to teach the children to make more and more complex observations of their environment independent of any preconceived notions.”

Some things about teaching are universal, even in remote mountain regions. King was addressed by the deferential “Todd Sir.” Polite children deferred to him and sometimes even sent small gifts. “At the end of one lesson, a little girl gave me a guava she picked off a tree on the way to school, which she knew I liked, and then shyly ran away,” King said. “I thought, ‘Maybe something is sticking here.’”

The families of many of his students invited King to dinner. Neighboring Limbu tribe members knew that King’s Brahmin host family was vegetarian. After King’s host family had gone to bed, his Limbu neighbors would routinely send their eldest son over to sneak him a plate of roasted meat from a pig or chicken they had just butchered that day.

Because of his prior experience volunteering as a zoo educator in the United States, King spent his second year at the Central Zoo in Kathmandu establishing a student volunteer program. The student volunteers were responsible for educating zoo visitors on the behaviors and natural adaptations of the different animals in the zoo, with an emphasis on the importance of conserving Nepali wildlife.

In order to safely care for some of the larger animals in the zoo, the Nepali zookeepers had to develop very close relationships with their animals. “The rhinos were my favorites,” King said. “They were trained to come when called and trotted up to the keepers like little puppies.”

Zoo animals have to eat and they eat a lot. Instead of using a truck, the keepers rode an elephant out of the zoo onto the streets of Kathmandu every morning, returning loaded with leaves, fruit and other food for the animals. King once got a lift to work on the elephant which, when not hauling food, was on exhibit.

Returning stateside in January 1999 with a fellow Peace Corps volunteer who later became his wife, King embraced his other love: engineering. King earned a doctorate in materials science and engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in September 1996. He joined Goddard within months. He always intended to resume volunteer teaching, but for now is focused on educating his three young children.

“People, no matter where they live, have similar dreams and aspirations,” King said “We all want to do the best we can for our kids and family and to improve our lives.”

Scientists and engineers must be methodical, but it is hard to be methodical on a timeline. “Often too many things are going on all at once,” King said. “Another thing I learned during my time in the Peace Corps was to slow down and take a peaceful moment to think quietly. Life doesn’t always have to be fast, fast, fast, go, go, go.”

“I also learned to be a better listener, to be more accepting of different points of view and to take the best of everyone’s viewpoints,” said King.